Monday, June 1st, 2026

Welcome to Monday’s edition of The Pennant. To listen to this newsletter, click the “Listen Online” link in the top right corner of this email.

This Day in History: On June 1, 1980, Ted Turner launched CNN as the first 24-hour cable news network, forever changing how Americans get their news.

The Midwest’s population is growing. Find out why in the Top of The Fold.

Also, classical education is making a comeback in Ohio. You can read what this means in our Education Section.

The Midwest gained roughly 16,000 net new residents last year, reversing losses that topped 175,000 in 2022. 

Redevelopment projects like Akron's former B.F. Goodrich factory, now a tech hub, are helping drive that growth, echoing a trend seen across Ohio communities like Mansfield.

Read more about the Midwest's comeback here.

Five people tied to an alleged criminal enterprise run by Derrick Soto, 36, face felony charges for forcing women into prostitution in north Columbus, Attorney General Dave Yost announced last week. 

The case stems from a survivor discovered during "Operation Next Door," a sting conducted last September.

Find more on said sting here.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol issued 2,832 seatbelt citations and 98 child safety seat citations during an eight-day, six-state enforcement campaign that wrapped up at the end of May.

Ohio law allows police to cite drivers if a front-seat passenger is not wearing a seatbelt or if any passenger under 15 rides unbelted.

To find a complete breakdown of Ohio’s seatbelt laws, click here.

Walk into a classical school in Ohio. Second graders are reciting Latin. Older students are working through Aristotle. iPads are nowhere in sight.

This is classical education, a model that traces back to medieval universities, and it's catching on fast.

The approach has a name: the trivium. It runs in three stages. Kids learn facts and grammar in the early grades. They pick up logic and reasoning around middle school. By high school, the focus shifts to rhetoric, writing, and how to argue well. Character formation runs through the whole thing. So does phonics.

Ohio's surge tracks closely with the state's broader push on school choice. EdChoice went universal in 2023, dropping income limits so any family could apply for a voucher. Voucher use more than tripled in one year, from 23,272 students to 88,095. Nonpublic school enrollment climbed 4.6% in fiscal 2025. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute counted more than two dozen new private schools opening between 2022 and 2024. Several were classical.

Charter growth has added to the wave. Ohio now has eight classical charter schools. Five are tied to Hillsdale College's K-12 program. Cincinnati Classical Academy opened in 2022 and now serves 960 students drawn from 63 ZIP codes. Heart of Ohio Classical Academy opened last fall in a converted Dublin office building. Northeast Ohio Classical Academy is on track for a fall 2026 opening in Copley.

There's a national story behind it, too. Research firm Arcadia Education expects classical enrollment to grow 5% a year, hitting 1.4 million students nationwide by 2035. Parents who switch tend to cite the same complaints. Reading instruction at their old school wasn't working. Screens were everywhere. Discipline was slipping.

Not everyone is sold. The Hillsdale-aligned "1776 Curriculum" has been faulted for soft-pedaling slavery and the civil rights movement. Some classical charters have pushed back on Ohio's science of reading mandate, prompting an amendment to Senate Bill 19 that would let them off the hook. That proposal is still sitting in the House Education Committee.

Gov. Mike DeWine pressed pause last week on new tax breaks for data centers in Ohio. He says it isn't a ban, just time for the state to study the issue. We hope that's how it ends up. Because if Ohio gets this wrong, we will pay for it for a long time to come.

The Pennant has supported data center development from the start. Not blindly, and not because tech companies asked us to. We support it because the facts add up. Ohio data centers already support about 95,000 jobs and pump roughly $12 billion into the state economy. For every dollar Ohio spends on incentives, the state gets back about $2.10. Local police, fire, and schools get a slice of that, too. Communities like Van Wert and Piketon are seeing real money, good jobs, and steady growth.

Totum Research, LLC has tracked the numbers and news coverage on this issue carefully. The story you usually hear in the media leaves out the wins. It leaves out the supporting jobs. It leaves out the property taxes that pay for cops and teachers. And it rarely mentions who is paying for the loud opposition.

Some of that opposition is local and sincere. A lot of it is not. National groups, funded in part by foreign donors, are pushing a state constitutional amendment to ban most large data centers in Ohio. It's the same playbook used in other Ohio ballot fights in recent years.

Ohio leaders should listen to their neighbors, not a national campaign with a political agenda. Pause and study, fine. Surrender our future to outside money, no. The Pennant will keep tracking this story closely. Ohio deserves honest answers, not slogans.

Questions, comments, and letters to the editor are welcome. Email [email protected].

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