From death do Us Bull S#!%

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Ohio Would Like to Put Your Future on a Worksheet

The Ohio Senate has advanced a bill that would require public schools to teach students a state-approved path to adulthood: graduate high school, get a full-time job, get married, then have children. That framework is known as the “success sequence,” and Senate Bill 156 would require the Department of Education and Workforce to create standards and a model curriculum around it for students in grades 6 through 12. A related House bill, HB 269, also ties the sequence to character education.

On paper, the whole thing sounds harmless enough. Graduate. Work. Build stability. Nobody is arguing that chaos is the better life plan. The problem is that this takes one statistical pattern and tries to turn it into a moral roadmap, as if poverty is mostly the result of poor sequencing and not wages, housing costs, childcare, medical debt, layoffs, or the many other ways life tends to ignore neat little charts. The bill analysis itself frames the sequence as research-based and intended to reduce poverty in adulthood.

And once you drag that out of a policy memo and into a real classroom, the message gets uglier. Because the kids hearing it are not abstract case studies. They are being raised by single moms, divorced parents, grandparents, foster families, blended families, and every other version of a family that exists in the real world. A lesson like this does not just promote stability. It quietly tells a lot of students that the family they came from is something to overcome.

That is what makes this feel so distinctly Ohio right now. Faced with structural problems, the state keeps reaching for behavioral lectures. Less “how do we make life more affordable?” and more “have you considered arranging your adulthood in the approved order?”

What Ohio is really teaching here is not how life works. It is which lives the state finds easiest to approve of.

Scarlet Letter Trivia

Question: What is the average household size in Ohio (household size is how many people live in the house)?

A. 2.37
B. 3.76
C. 4.18
D. 2.95

Ohio Just Found Another Hole in the System

The Ohio House has passed House Bill 217, also known as Andy Chapman’s Act, which would require law enforcement agencies to enter missing-person cases into NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, within 30 days of a report being filed. The bill passed unanimously and now heads to the Senate.

NamUs is a national database built to help law enforcement, coroners, and investigators connect missing-person reports with unidentified remains and other case information across jurisdictions. The Ohio House says the bill is meant to strengthen investigations and support families, and the legislation itself explicitly requires agencies to enter information relating to missing-person reports into NamUs.

The unsettling part is not the reform. It is learning this was not already required.

The bill’s analysis notes that agencies would take on some additional administrative work to enter and remove information from the database. That is true. Paperwork exists. But it is hard to read that and not immediately think about the families on the other end of those delays, waiting while critical case information sits outside a system specifically designed to connect the dots.

Sometimes the most revealing laws are not the sweeping ones. They are the ones that expose a lapse so obvious, so basic, that the real shock is not what lawmakers are doing now. It is what they were not doing before.

The Cost of Existing in Columbus Is Back on Its Bullshit

For a brief moment, Columbus drivers got a little breathing room. As of April 6, AAA put Ohio’s average gas price at $3.751 a gallon. But if that felt like relief, it was the flimsy kind. The recent dip came after a run-up, and seasonal pressure is still there as fuel markets shift into their more expensive spring and summer pattern.

At the same time, AEP Ohio customers are also looking at higher electric costs after the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved changes in the utility’s distribution rate case. PUCO said its order increases AEP Ohio’s base distribution revenues by $11 million, a much smaller number than the $97 million the company originally sought.

That matters because AEP had floated a very different version of this story earlier in the year. In January, the company said a proposed settlement would decrease distribution rates overall and cut the average residential electric distribution bill by about $1.22 per month for a customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours. That was the optimistic version. PUCO’s final order was less generous.

The exact monthly impact is still fuzzier than it should be, but the broad message is not: customers should expect more pressure, not less. And that is kind of the whole mood of living here now. Nothing is ever framed as one huge blow. It is always a string of manageable little nudges. Gas ticks up. Utilities shift up. Groceries remain disrespectful. Insurance continues whatever dark ritual insurance uses to generate new numbers.

No grand collapse. No emergency sirens. Just another month in Columbus where living here costs a little harder than it did before.

Ohio Has Entered the Clipboard Phase of Democracy

Election season is back in Ohio, but not the loud part yet. Not the attack ads, the fake concern, or the candidates suddenly acting like they have always cared deeply about your county. This is the quieter phase, where democracy mostly looks like forms, deadlines, county offices, and the slow reappearance of campaign signs at every busy intersection.

The May 5 primary is the first real checkpoint. Ohio’s official voting calendar set April 6 as the voter registration deadline and April 7 as the start of early in-person and absentee-by-mail voting for the 2026 primary. The Secretary of State’s office has also been pushing reminders that the window is open and the machinery is already moving.

And this primary is not filler. Statewide races are on deck, and by the time most people feel surrounded by mailers, texts, and signs zip-tied to every plausible patch of public attention, the funnel is already doing its work. This is where the ballot starts taking shape. Not in November, when everyone is suddenly awake, but now, while the process still looks boring enough to ignore.

That is always the trick. Democracy in Ohio rarely arrives with fanfare. It arrives through a county website. Through a deadline. Through some candidate named Mike texting you like you served together in a minor war.

Soon enough the ads will start yelling. For now, the state is still in its quieter form: deadlines, lists, and the slow construction of a ballot that will pretend to surprise you later.

A) 2.37

Ohio's average family size is determined by the U.S. Census Bureau through the American Community Survey (ACS), which divides the total number of people living in family households by the total number of family households. A family is defined as a householder and related persons (by birth, marriage, or adoption).