ELECTION 2014
Vote early
Early voting at all boards of election started Oct. 7. Here’s the schedule of when you can vote in-person:
Oct. 20-24: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Oct. 25: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Oct. 27-31: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Nov. 1: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Nov. 2: 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Nov. 3: 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Voting by mail
If you want to vote by mail, you can get an absentee ballot by contacting your county board of elections for more information, or by downloading an absentee ballot request form at MyOhioVote.com. Vote by mail applications need to be submitted to your county board of elections office by noon on Nov. 1.
Online election guide
Learn more about the candidates and issues on your ballot in our interactive voter guide. You can compare candidates on the issues that matter to you at vote.journal-news.com.
Two Democrats looking to win in heavy Republican districts on Nov. 4 said while educational standards are needed, the implementation of Common Core needs to be rethought.
Four candidates seeking office — Democratic Party candidates Tom Poetter, Nancy Powell and Rick Smith and Republican incumbent Butler County Commissioner Cindy Carpenter — discussed jobs, the economy and education at the inaugural Meet the Candidates night sponsored by Miami University Hamilton’s Center for Civic Engagement and the Student Association for Law and Politics. It was held Friday at Miami Hamilton’s Downtown on High Street.
Common Core, which are a set of state standards for what students should know and be able to do in math and English at each grade level, was a point brought up on multiple occasions Friday night.
Smith, who’s running in the 54th Ohio House District, and Poetter, who’s seeking to unseat Speaker of the House John Boehner for the 8th Ohio Congressional District seat, both spoke to Common Core, and both said while educational standards are good, the implementation of Common Core has been poor.
“The thing that worries me most about the Common Core as an academic is the corporatization of the curriculum,” Poetter said, adding that textbook companies and conglomerates are making decisions on what’s being taught. “This is really a serious matter that what’s being control are the ends of education from the outside in, and insiders — teachers and students — have no control over that.”
Smith said the standards that are needed can be “boiled down” to two points: you want students to be able to get the right answer and you need them to be able to interpret and analyze the assignment.
“The reason I’ve been successful in my career is primarily because of that. I’m able to interpret and analyze,” said Smith, a Democrat looking to win election to the 54th Ohio House District in November over Republican challenger Paul Zeltwanger. “If you look at any job opening, and you look at what is required – a lot of job openings are high-skilled but don’t require a college degree – they want you to be able to interpret and analyze what you see.”
Poetter said “there’s nothing wrong” with having standards but “if you don’t have a more open system of negotiating curriculum, then the standards become very narrow and very tight.”
“Western civilization depends upon people being educated in schools to be leaders,” he said.
One of the last questions of the 90-minute forum was about filling available jobs that cannot be filled because the workforce is unqualified.
“We reach out to employers and our position in Butler is to try to determine the needs of the employers,” said Carpenter, who is facing Democrat Brenda Williams. “We have to gear up to get our workforce and our job seekers trained to fit those positions. As you know with closing down our paper mills and some of the blue collar jobs in Butler county have displaced workers I don’t feel like we haven’t been able to ramp up that training in education fast enough to fill the advance manufacturing positions.”
Smith said there are both short-term and long-term fixes.
“(We need) to put more money into the community colleges and technical high schools that are doing this training today, and it’s probably going to have to come from the state,” he said. “There are good, smart people here in Ohio, they just need the training.”
Long-term, he said, there is a need to look at the other end of education: pre-school and kindergarten.
“I’d be in favor of universal voluntary pre-k, preschool and full-day kindergarten. (Studies show) that is an investment that returns back to the state 3-to-1,” Smith said. “Someone who is ready to start the first grade, they’re less likely to fall behind, less likely to get in trouble with the law, more likely to graduate …. This is where we need to make the investment.”
Powell, who is challenging incumbent Republican Butler County Roger Reynolds, said doing some of the things needed to train workers and investing in the youth “is going to be very hard to do” because of Gov. John Kasich’s tax policies. She said with slashed local government funds, property tax roll backs taken away and elimination of the estate tax “everybody sees a 10 percent increase in their property taxes and our local governments are going to have to put levies on the ballot which we’re all going to have to pay for. If you want to do anything to solve any of these problems locally, now we’re going to have to pay for it out of our pocket.”
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