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Ohio businesses have experienced a welcomed boost to their bottom lines with the construction of a pipeline that began earlier this year.

The Rover Pipeline crosses farmlands and passes near small towns as it cuts through the state. It will cover 713 miles starting in West Virginia before it connects to a line in Michigan. Some businesses along its path saw a considerable boost to revenue with construction bringing in a surge of workers from out of state.

Businesses like hotels and restaurants saw the direct impact of pipeline workers needing places to eat and sleep. The Best Western in Wooster, Ohio, even provided space so the workers could conduct meetings and safety training. Other businesses like laundromats and convenience stores saw a boost in sales as well.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved construction of the pipeline in early 2017. While the pipeline raises regulatory questions and protests from environmentalists, for others it will continue to bring a welcomed boost to business.

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Youngstown, Ohio–Youngstown seems like the heart of the rust belt, a former steel town with a strong union presence that saw massive job losses after changing economic conditions forced the closure of manufacturing plants in the 1970s.  Industry is returning to Youngstown, however–it just looks a little different. Instead of the steel pipes and raw materials the area produced before, manufacturers are instead looking at the area as a perfect location for chemical manufacturing. This, in turn, is boosting hiring in the area.

Royal Dutch Shell is building a $6 billion cracker plant 40 miles south of Youngstown in Monaca, Pa. In addition, PTT Global, a Thai company, is considering a similar scale project in Belmont County. Plants of this scale will create thousands of construction jobs for a two to three year period, and hire a 600 person staff once completed.

These figures don’t include the thousands of jobs necessary to bring the various new plants on line. The Shell cracker plant alone is predicted to provide temporary work for more than 6,000 tradesmen and take 18 months to construct.

“This plant will have serious ramifications for our supply chain companies, especially in plastics and petrochemicals,” says Guy Coviello, vice president of governmental affairs at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Chamber of Commerce.

“The new cracking plants will provide lots of opportunities to attract plastics, petrochemicals, and anybody who wants to be somewhere where the energy to operate a factory is abundant and low-cost, and in a place where there is lots of water for industrial use and great transportation infrastructure, close to major population centers,” he continued.

Already this has caused the employment market to pick up. The Area Chamber of Commerce has partnered with local television stations to highlight different career opportunities that do not require a bachelor’s degree. The same hiring growth has been seen in union jobs.

“All of our local unions are growing and adding members to keep up with the demand that oil and gas has brought to the region,” says Dorsey Hager, executive secretary-treasurer of the Columbus/Central Ohio Building & Construction Trades Council, who is enthusiastic about the benefit the new plants will have for the local economy.

Hager, who represents 18,000 workers in several different construction trades including pipefitting, welding, and general laborers, says that the abundance of natural gas in the area has sparked a burst of construction on both pipeline support systems and manufacturing plants. These projects, which employ hundreds of union workers “would not be being built without the access to the natural gas,” he says.

Cracker plants process ethane, a chemical found in natural gas, into polyethylene, which is used to make plastics and other products. Previously, these plants had largely been centered around the Gulf Coast region, but the explosive growth of fracking means that other areas are now economically feasible. A recent study suggests that Pennsylvania shale could support as many as five such plants, while still producing enough gas to export.

This is encouraging for the area economy. Since the growth has been driven by shale exploration, its growth is not dependent on any specific government policies. In fact, when asked if anything could prevent the predicted job growth from arriving, Hagar struggles to think of anything.

Ohio is attractive to manufacturers for a number of reasons. For one thing, energy is cheap. Years of low oil prices have left the state with a glut of fracked natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shales. As a result, the state has some of the lowest gas prices in the nation. Several companies are pouring billions of dollars into constructing new natural gas power plants. At the beginning of 2017, ten different natural gas power plants were in development in the state.

“Ohio ‘deregulated’ and became an open market system in 1999, allowing customer choice in electricity generation while saving consumers an estimated $3 billion per year, according to a recent Ohio State University report,” writes Jackie Stewart, state energy director for Energy In Depth-Ohio. “Today, through this free-market based system, Ohio has become very attractive for private investment of natural gas-fired power plants due to the fact that an environment has been created in the Appalachian region that has led to the lowest natural gas prices in the developed world.”

According to one study, while Ohio lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs more than a decade ago, in the next ten years it will need another 50,000 production workers.

Still, area employers are struggling to fill positions because of a shortage of properly trained workers. Several groups in the area are working to address this skills mismatch. The Cleveland Foundation, a community charity organization funded by area donors, published a report highlighting how education was not necessarily matching employer needs.

“Jobs in growing, high-potential industries offering family-sustaining wages often sit vacant due to the limited number of qualified, credentialed candidates,” the report found.  It also predicted high growth among construction, metal and plastics, and installation and repair jobs paying these “family supporting” wages. Despite good job prospects, these fields do not seem to be attracting students. As a result, demand for installation, maintenance, and repair workers, as well as skilled production workers, outpaced supply by several thousand workers in 2015.

The report admits that it focused on two and four year institutions, an approach that “does not capture every pathway to employment.” At the same time, it shows a picture of the demand for workers in skilled trades that do not require a four-year degree.

The investments in and around Youngstown are part of an international shift in chemical manufacturing brought about by the fracking revolution. In essence, natural gas in the United States is so cheap, European observers are afraid it will sink their chemical production industry altogether.

“The Marcellus field, which spreads over several states and is just one of many in the U.S., produces 15 billion cubic feet of gas a day which is almost twice the U.K.’s entire consumption,” writes Anthony Hilton, a British economist and business writer.

“But the result is that U.S. prices have disconnected from the rest of the world and the subsequent feedstock prices have given American chemical plants so vast a price advantage that, on paper at least, there’s no way Europe can compete,” he continues. “It is staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, not now, but in a few short years, unless it can find some way to get its raw­ material costs down to American levels.”

That’s good news for the Youngstown area. Although the days of steel plants and metal sheeting factories have passed, fracking and energy development is giving the area a renaissance. Chemical plants offer steady, middle-class manufacturing jobs that do not necessarily require a college degree. Youngstown isn’t out of the game, it’s just warming up for round two.

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Amid over-testing and teacher evaluation concerns, Ohio’s department of education announced that it would heed calls from educators to delay the submission of the state’s federal accountability plan until September.

As recently as late last month, officials at the state education department had told InsideSources that they were continuing to target an April 3rd submission of their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) compliance plan. At the time, local media reports suggested that educators in the state were dissatisfied with Ohio’s draft plan and were calling for a delay. In addition to their concerns over testing requirements and teacher evaluation procedures, the local stakeholders were arguing that state officials were not taking their feedback into serious consideration.

Under ESSA, states can submit their accountability compliance plans on either April 3rd or September 18th of this year. The law requires states to get input from local educators when crafting their proposals. Ohio, had recently conducted a months-long multi-phased process of stakeholder feedback-gathering before issuing the draft proposal that then came under fire.

In the statement announcing the plan’s delay, top state education official Paolo DeMaria indicated that many of the changes requested by the angry stakeholders would be best made “outside the narrow focus of the ESSA specifications.”

In other words, much of the testing requirements that local educators objected to are actually mandated by state law or required at the district level, and therefore cannot be unilaterally reversed in the ESSA plan. In his statement, DeMaria announced the formation of an “Advisory Council on Assessments” to study a plan of action that would reduce testing in the state’s schools.

Ohio’s decision to delay the submission of its ESSA plan is potentially significant to the debate among federal policymakers in Washington. Recently, Congress used the Congressional Review Act to dismantle Obama-era education accountability regulations, over Democratic objections.

In addition to concerns over a diminished federal role in civil rights protections, Democrats had cautioned that a repeal of the regulations could throw the state ESSA planning process into disarray. Republicans, groups like the School Superintendents Association, and outside observers, shrugged off those objections, arguing that the planning process was already well underway in most states and changes to the federal guidance would not affect state timelines.

Since Congress, voted for repeal, however, The School Superintendents Association jointly issued a statement with The National School Boards Association criticizing the new guidance issued by the education department. The groups questioning why states are no longer required to submit evidence of stakeholder input in their plans under the guidance—which is ironically what the local educators in Ohio were saying state officials had not done enough of to begin with.

Ostensibly, state officials could use delay and the new federal guidance to incorporate less stakeholder feedback than they did the first time around, though this appears unlikely, given DeMaria’s promise to educators to initiate state and district level reforms that reflect their comments.

Separately, the simple news that Ohio’s ESSA plan is being held back, could supply ammunition to Democrats who predicted the repeal of the Obama-era accountability regulations would inject confusion into the implementation process.

On the other hand, a spokesperson for the Ohio department of education refuted this potential narrative in an email. When asked whether the developments in Washington affected the state’s decision to delay its ESSA plan, the spokesperson answered: “No, it did not.”

Delaying the submission of their plan until September could give Ohio policymakers the time to amend testing procedures and reflect those changes in their proposal to Washington. Louisiana recently made a similar calculus, though the Pelican State’s decision was made before formal news came out of the national education department that even more deference would be given to state-level decision-makers in ESSA implementation.

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Amid backlash from some local superintendents and mixed signals from Washington, a senior official in the Ohio Department of Education indicated that his team would stay the course in the finalization of the state’s draft ESSA plan.

Chris Woolard is the senior executive director for accountability in the state’s education department. In a telephone interview with InsideSources, Woolard said that he has been deeply involved throughout Ohio’s multi-phased community outreach process and the subsequent drafting of the state’s plan for how it will comply with federal accountability reporting requirements.

Since Ohio released its draft proposal, Woolard’s work has been complicated by two news stories—one local and one national.

On a national level, Congressional Republicans, emboldened by new leadership at the federal education department, have moved to use the Congressional Review Act to repeal a set of accountability regulations finalized under the previous administration. Those regulations explained what kind of reporting was expected from states under the new K-12 law of the land, the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Some Democrats, most of whom have opposed the repeal of the regulations, argued that repeal efforts would inject chaos into state efforts to craft ESSA accountability plans. The education department had previously announced that state ESSA plans would be accepted for review on April 3rd or September 18th of this year.

Despite the possibility for a repeal of the accountability regulations, which Woolard said Ohio’s state officials are following “with great interest,” the state is already months into the formulation of its ESSA plan, and the officials “can only go by the information we have.”

Woolard pointed to a “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the new U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, that said that developments in Washington “should not adversely affect or delay the progress that States have already made in developing their State plans and transitioning to the ESSA.” In other words, the federal education department plans to stick to the April 3rd or September 18th deadlines for submitting ESSA plans.

On a local level, the release of the state’s draft ESSA plan met some blowback from Ohio school superintendents. A group of district leaders voiced concerns with local media outlets that its opposition to over-testing was not reflected in the state’s draft ESSA plan.

Woolard said he hears the superintendents’ concerns on over-testing, but the state accountability plan “isn’t a vehicle” for addressing those concerns. In other words, if Ohio’s educators want to reduce testing, that goal cannot be unilaterally accomplished through the state education department’s ESSA plan.

In addition to federally required tests, some assessments are mandated by Ohio state law or are instituted by the districts themselves, he said. Reducing total test time would require some combination of changes to state legislation and a more comprehensive reform effort from the local level.

One area where the Ohio’s education department did have considerable leeway in deciding how to craft its draft ESSA plan was the nonacademic “school quality” indicator it would pick to compare schools. Like a number of other states, Ohio announced its intention to measure, report, and slash rates of chronic absenteeism in its school districts.

Woolard said the increasing attention on data pointing to a correlation between chronic absences and student achievement factored heavily in the state’s decision to choose the measure as its nonacademic accountability indicator.

In addition, attendance numbers are “data we already collect,” he said. So incorporating chronic absenteeism numbers into the state’s reporting system would minimize additional regulatory burdens on local districts, said Woolard.

The Ohio accountability director also framed the chronic absenteeism study as “an improvement measure.” There are big gaps in the chronic absenteeism numbers across districts in the state, some of the most economically disadvantaged districts report over 30 percent of their students as chronically absent. Rather than punish districts that are furthest from the state’s goal of slashing chronic absenteeism rates to below five percent, Woolard said the proposed accountability framework is designed to reward school districts that show continuous improvement in the measure.

As part of ensuring that districts aren’t artificially tweaking their attendance numbers, Woolard said the state would also track student discipline incidents in schools. For example, he said the state does not want to see a spike in expulsions among districts trying to wash their hands of their most troublesome students.

Other states have decided to institute statewide “school climate surveys” to satisfy ESSA’s nonacademic indicator requirement. Woolard said there is interest in Ohio for such a survey system, but if the agency decides to adopt a school climate survey, it would be incorporated into the state’s accountability regime at a later date.

The opportunity to comment on Ohio’s draft ESSA plan remains open to the public until Monday of next week. Ohio is still targeting the April 3rd deadline for submission of its ESSA plan.

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Educators in the Buckeye State are proposing to take advantage of Washington deregulation to pare down on testing, set their own long term goals, and combat chronic absenteeism.

Thursday, Ohio publicly submitted its draft plan that details how the state will handle its newfound regulatory freedom. Officials say they engaged the input of over 15,000 parents, educators, and community members while putting together the proposal.

After a public comment period, state officials are aiming to submit their final plan for U.S. Department of Education approval in April.

Under a new educational law, the Department of Education still ties the receipt of federal dollars to the condition that states test their students, identify struggling schools, and measure achievement gaps.

However, Washington will no longer be issuing detailed directives on how school performance information is collected and acted upon—a shift from the pre-Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) regime.

While Ohio officials are considering changes to the state’s Common Core aligned standards that were adopted in 2010, the proposed changes are more tweaks and refinements than wholesale changes.

The pro-standards movement took high profile political beatings in the closing years of the Obama administration and during the presidential campaign. Many states, like Ohio, however, now have the more rigorous standards on the books and are not expected to go in for major repeals. While Common Core has faced extensive criticism on social media, local educators and stakeholders tend to be protective of their own state’s standards.

In their draft ESSA plan, Ohio officials reaffirmed their commitment to “a seamless set of rigorous standards from birth to grade 12.” The state also said it plans to bring its career and technical training programs into alignment with the state standards.

In unveiling the testing portion of the new plan, officials trumpeted the fact that testing time was cut in half between the 2014-2015 school year and the 2015-2016 school year. The state has two testing priorities under the draft plan: continuing to reduce test time while still complying with federal requirements and bringing stability to the types of tests the state uses.

While ESSA permits states to use the SAT or ACT to measure high school performance and career readiness, the state is electing to not go that route. Ohio is proposing to institute a “report card” for accountability. Officials would give schools and districts cumulative A-F letter grades.

A variety of categories will go into determining what schools get which grades, many of which are explicitly mandated by ESSA. The mandatory accountability categories including student achievement, graduation rates, and performance by at-risk subgroups, such as minority students or those from low-income households.

Under ESSA, each state is also required to pick at least one additional statewide measure of school quality. In their draft plan, Ohio educators are proposing to keep track of chronic absenteeism and student discipline incidents. In the draft proposal, the state set some ambitious goals for itself. By 2017, the state hopes to cut chronic absenteeism to below 5 percent, to graduate at least 93 percent of high school students in four years, and get 80 percent of all students proficient in English, math, and science.

A historically-contentious area of education policy revolves around how federal and state officials handle intervention in chronically low-performing schools.

Under Ohio’s draft plan, struggling schools—euphemistically labeled “Priority,” “Focus,” or “Watch”—are plotted along a tiered scale from those that require the most to least state intervention.

For the most problematic schools, particularly those that grade in the bottom 5 percent statewide, those that fail to graduate a third of their students in four years, or those that have serious difficulties with one or more at risk “subgroups,” the state’s Academic Distress Commission would take over supervision.

In less severe cases, the state proposes providing districts with “intensive” or “moderate” supports.

The state plans to reevaluate school and district performance statuses every three years.

Another interesting tidbit from the Ohio draft plan is that the state is reducing the number of students of one type enrolled in a school that triggers special “subgroup” status for those students from 30 to 15. Therefore, under the proposed plan, if a school enrolls 20 homeless students, or children from military families, or young people in the juvenile system, that school will have to start disaggregating data on that group of students and report their performance in comparison to the general student body.

In the proposal, Ohio officials also described new efforts designed to address credit recovery and dropout prevention, to better engage rural districts, and to build a task force to review the state’s teacher evaluation system.

The ESSA draft proposal comes heels of Republican Gov. John Kasich’s budget proposal to lawmakers. In a speech, Kasich said tough state finances would force a slowing in the growth of the state education department’s $10.6 billion budget.

The public is invited to review and comment on the state’s proposed ESSA plan through March 6.

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As Americans click to Cyber Monday sales across the web, more of them will be subject to online sales tax than ever before this holiday season, as websites, states and presidential candidates all push for sales tax in the digital domain.

That’s in large part due to efforts over the last year by Amazon.com — the No. 1 online retailer in the Internet Retailer 2014 Top 500 Guide, and the ninth-largest retailer in the U.S. overall according to the National Retail Federation, with $49 billion in sales last year.

In February Amazon added Illinois to its then-list of 24 states where the site collects and remits state sales tax — leaving only Ohio and Michigan of the U.S.’s 10 most-populous states off the list. Ohio followed Illinois in May, and Michigan in October, wrapping the largest state populations into the online sales tax fold in time for the biggest online shopping day of the year Monday.

As a result of Amazon’s sales tax collection in Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, West Virginia, California, Kansas, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee, Florida, Maryland, New York, Texas, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois, Michigan, North Dakota and Washington, more than 80 percent of Americans are now subject to their state’s sales tax when they buy online from Amazon.

A number of the above-named states and more have or are considering laws mandating online retailers without a physical presence in their states collect and remit sales tax to state governments — an attempt to collect revenue state legislators claim they’re entitled to, while leveling the playing field between brick-and-mortar and online retailers.

Though the Supreme Court sought to settle the issue in 1992 by ruling in Quill v. North Dakota that retailers without a physical presence in a given state weren’t required to collect sales tax, states like Colorado have since adopted legislative loopholes around Quill. In the Centennial State, online retailers must report their sales and send the results to the state and consumers, after which the state taxed buyers directly (the law has since been suspended pending a court challenge).

Much of the uncertainty stems from years-long stagnation on the issue in Congress, where lawmakers disagree on whether to apply sales tax to online transactions, and how to do so. In one camp, lawmakers led by Virginia Republican and House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte want to tax consumers based on the location of the seller, the revenue from which would be divided up by a multi-state clearinghouse.

Legislators lining up behind Utah Republican and House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz want taxes to be based on where the buyer lives via the Remote Transactions Parity Act — the method adopted by the Senate in 2013 via the Marketplace Fairness Act, passed under then pro-online sales tax Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other anti-tax conservatives oppose any online sales tax, as did former Speaker of the House John Boehner, whose home state of Ohio is pushing to use revenue collected from online sales tax to offset other tax cuts — a measure 2016 Republican presidential contender and current Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed off on as part of the state’s two-year budget in 2013.

The University of Cincinnati’s Economics Center said Ohio lost $200 million in tax revenue from online sales in 2011, while the California Board of Equalization found the Golden State collected $96.4 million in tax revenue during its first quarter of collections in 2011.

Newly-elected Speaker Paul Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin will do the same, according to former 2016 Republican presidential candidate and current Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who said the tax would bring in an additional $95 million in revenue to offset Wisconsinites’ income taxes. While chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in 2013, Ryan himself said he supported the “concept” of online sales tax, but not the Senate’s take on it.

Two other Republican White House contenders, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, have endorsed some form of online sales tax, with the latter bringing it to the national stage during a conference call with the National Federation of Independent Business members last week.

“A solution that recognizes that the Internet is here to stay and that there is an increasing disparity, and so long as its not used to raise revenue for governments that parity would make sense,” Bush said. “I think there’s just a compelling argument to be made. It may not have been as compelling 10 years ago when Internet sales were significantly lower, but now it’s an increasing part of the sales mix and brick-and-mortar companies, businesses do have significant role in our communities.”

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