The Legal Ledger

One of the bills that was passed by the Ohio General Assembly at the end of 2024 was House Bill (HB) 257. The bill, which is effective on April 9, 2025, enacted Ohio Revised Code (RC) 121.221, which allows some public bodies to hold meetings by video conference or similar electronic technology. (For purposes of this blog post, I’ll refer to these meetings as “virtual meetings.”) However, as discussed below, this provision does not allow boards of education to conduct virtual meetings and may actually make virtual attendance at meetings more restrictive.

Last Friday, the U.S.

The General Assembly passed a number of key new laws impacting school districts in its lame-duck session to round out 2024. OSBA will continue to push out information on these provisions and changes districts will need to make in the coming weeks and months. Two of these bills impact the administration of medication to students in schools and may require your district to update its policies and educate staff on the new language.

On Nov.

This past week, the Ohio General Assembly passed House Bill (HB) 432, a bill containing key changes to the student data privacy provisions enacted earlier this year in Senate Bill (SB) 29.

One perennial favorite topic on OSBA’s legal hotline is executive sessions. Lately, we’ve been getting questions about whether the information discussed in executive session is legally confidential. It seems like it should be – after all, the board is going behind closed doors to have private discussions on sensitive matters. But is it?

Here at the OSBA legal division, we've gotten some recent questions about required training on fraud reporting. The training requirement became effective this year and, for school district officials and employees, the deadline for training is Nov. 29, 2024. Let's dig a little deeper! 

Districts are now required to have a policy in place that reasonably accommodates the sincerely held religious beliefs and practices of individual students with regard to all examinations or other academic requirements and absences for reasons of faith or religious or spiritual belief system.

On Thursday, Oct. 24, new requirements regarding student data privacy are set to go into effect. These changes are the result of Senate Bill (SB) 29, which was passed by the General Assembly this past July.

In this legal ledger Sidebar, John Price and Jennifer Hardin discuss some of the legal considerations for boards when issuing contracts for coaches, which was one of the highlights from this year’s OSBA Sports Law Workshop Webinar Series.