Academic Distress Commission — the department's commission page

Source. Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Office of School and District Improvement, Academic Distress Commission. Type. Primary source — the administering office’s own record of which districts are subject to a commission and what they have filed. Location. education.ohio.gov/Topics/School-and-District-Improvement/Identification-and-Requirements/Academic-Distress-Commission. Last modified 10 February 2026 at the time of reading.

Status. Read, not retrieved. No connector fetches it and no fixture is built from it. The ohio-laws HTML reader keys on landmarks that only codes.ohio.gov prints, so this page needs a reader of its own or a different approach. What is taken from it is a small number of dated facts, transcribed into Academic Distress Commission.

What it contains. The trigger, stated as the department states it — “Districts are subject to an academic distress commission after receiving an overall rating of less than two stars on the Ohio School Report Cards for three consecutive years” — and then, per district, the approval letters, approved academic improvement plans, modification proposals and annual reports.

The three districts. East Cleveland City Schools, Lorain City School District, and Youngstown City Schools. These are the districts that were under commission oversight when the 2021 change in state law required an academic improvement plan, and revised plans were approved for all three on 3 December 2021.

• East Cleveland carries a Notice of Release from Academic Distress Commission, and it has now been opened — see below.
• Lorain’s commission was dissolved by H.B. 33, signed 4 July 2023.
• Youngstown remains, with annual reports through 2024-2025 and an approved extension of its plan, both now opened — see below. By January 2026 the department was describing it as the sole district in Ohio under academic distress, and said removal “would have to be the result of state legislation”.

The Youngstown extension, opened #

YCS-Approval-of-Extension-1_26.pdf at the same getattachment/ path, two pages, read 2 October 2026, SHA-256 70b89736…a447c. It is a scanned image with no text layer, so it was read by eye, not extracted. A letter from the director, dated 22 January 2026, to the superintendent and board president. It says:

• the district asked for release under R.C. 3302.103, and the department found it “did not meet the majority” of the overall benchmarks in its three-year plan, so release is declined;
• on the superintendent’s emailed request of 14 January 2026, the director has “approved an extension … in accordance with R.C. 3302.103”, and “During the extension year (2025-2026 school year)” the district continues implementing the plan;
• the district’s request to amend its benchmarks is refused, because R.C. 3302.103(D)(2)‘s revision window ran from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2025.

So this is the first of the two extensions division (F)(1)(a) allows. The approval post-dates half the year it covers. It does not mention a second extension or say what follows the 2025-26 year.

Youngstown-City-School-District-AIP-Annual-Report-2025.pdf, 33 pages, read the same day, SHA-256 e9f3af32…2689c. The district’s own report: 6 of 24 benchmarks met in 2024-25, after 9 in 2023-24 and 16 in 2022-23. It notes that it would have met 15 had the targets not risen in the final year.

The page itself was still “Last Modified 2/10/2026” on 2 October 2026. It lists no second extension application or approval. Whether Youngstown’s plan route ended on 30 June 2026 or runs into a second extension year is not on it. open

The release notice, opened #

East-Cleveland-message-12_25.pdf at getattachment/Topics/School-and-District-Improvement/Identification-and-Requirements/Academic-Distress-Commission/, one page, read 15 September 2026. It is a letter from the director of education and workforce to Dr. Henry Pettiegrew II, superintendent of East Cleveland City School District, and it says the district “has been released from Academic Distress Commission oversight”, having met 16 of 20 benchmarks under its Revitalization Plan — a Performance Index up more than 12 points, a 4-star Progress rating, an overall rating of 3 stars.

It carries no date on its face. That is the answer to the [open] mark this entry used to hold for the release date, and it is an unfillable-as-asked answer rather than a retrieved value: the letter has no date line. What dates it is everything around it —

• the department’s own filename, message-12_25;
• the letter’s closing promise to “visit the district in January”;
• the PDF’s creation timestamp, 9 February 2026, which dates the web publication and not the letter, the page having been last modified 10 February 2026;
• press reporting of 2 January 2026 that the letter was “sent in late December” 2025.

So: late December 2025, bounded by the letter’s own contents rather than stated in it. Recorded at that precision and no finer. The district had been under state control since 2018.

Release is dissolution, not a lesser status, and the section is R.C. 3302.103. The letter’s “16 of 20 benchmarks” is the test in R.C. 3302.103(F)(2), the section H.B. 110 enacted for the three districts on this page: a district that meets “at least a majority of the academic improvement benchmarks” in its plan has its commission “dissolved”. While the plan runs, 3302.103(E)(1) says the district “shall not be subject to section 3302.10”, so division (N) was not available to East Cleveland from July 2022. This entry used to read the release as 3302.10(N)(1). It was not, and a first three-star year could not have completed (N)(1) anyway. Either way the commission no longer exists, so this page’s “released” is still R.C. 3310.03(E)(2)‘s “ceases to exist”.

Three commissions, three different ends, and none of them under division (N). East Cleveland met its plan benchmarks. Lorain exited by legislation. Youngstown is in an approved extension of its plan, and a district on that route leaves early only by statute, which is what the department told reporters. It is not held by the two-to-three star band Academic Distress Commission describes, because R.C. 3302.10 does not apply to it while the plan runs.

Cleveland is not on this list, and the omission is informative rather than an oversight. The former R.C. 3302.10 is the pre-2015 regime that the current section refers to when it speaks of a commission “still in existence on October 15, 2015”. R.C. 3302.103(A) lists the two former-section commissions that survived into the current one: Youngstown’s, established in 2010, is division (A)(2), and Lorain’s, established in 2013, is (A)(1). So if Cleveland was ever under a commission, it had left by then. The corpus recorded Cleveland as “subject to state academic distress intervention for part of the period” without distinguishing the two regimes.

Caveats.

• It is a current-status page, not a history. It lists the districts that were under commissions from 2021 and what has happened to them since. Anything before the 2015 rewrite — including Cleveland’s — is not here.
• No dates for establishment. The page gives the 2021 plan requirement, the 2023 Lorain dissolution and East Cleveland’s release, and does not say when any commission was established. R.C. 3302.103(A) supplies the years, 2010, 2013 and 2018, without naming districts. East Cleveland’s is the 2018 one, from the reporting around its release. This entry used to say that which of Youngstown and Lorain held the 2010 commission was in no held source. The department’s archived pages settle it, and they are listed below.
• The linked documents are not held. Approval letters, improvement plans and annual reports are separate PDFs. Three have been read: East Cleveland’s release notice, Youngstown’s extension approval and its 2024-25 annual report. None is committed. They would carry the benchmarks each district was held to, which is the only place the corpus could learn what a commission actually required. open
• A page, not a dataset. Any figure taken from it is a transcription, and there is no digest behind it. Treat claims sourced here as weaker than claims sourced from a pinned fixture.

The archived pages that date the commissions. The department’s commission pages from before its 2016 site move survive in the Internet Archive, and they date what the current page does not. All were read on 2 October 2026, and none is committed.

• Youngstown’s recovery plan page, Wayback 20150425032807, at education.ohio.gov/Topics/School-Improvement/Academic-Distress-Commission/Youngstown-City-Schools-Academic-Recovery-Plan (HTML SHA-256 95ec0eb8…46). It says the commission “was established by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in January of 2010, pursuant to Section 3302.10”. The commission adopted its Academic Recovery Plan on 28 June 2010, and the superintendent approved it on 27 July 2010. The 2014-15 Youngstown plan (Wayback 20160508151637, SHA-256 ab10c493…eb38) also dates the commission to 2010.
• Lorain’s Academic Recovery Plan, Wayback 20151228090442, at …/Lorain/Lorain-City-Schools-Academic-Recovery-Plan.pdf.aspx (16 pages, SHA-256 a89eb00f…2af859). It says the commission “was established by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in April of 2013”, and the commission adopted the plan on 19 August 2013. Its first minutes are dated 22 April 2013 (Wayback 20151228084202, SHA-256 33cc58d6…6c56).

So R.C. 3302.103(A)(2), the 2010 commission, is Youngstown’s, and (A)(1), the 2013 one, is Lorain’s.