Ravenna City Board approves broad policy revisions tied to House Bill 96

The Ravenna City Board of Education on Monday approved a large package of revised policies to align district rules with changes enacted in House Bill 96 and recent state regulatory updates.

The board voted to place multiple updated policies on the record and to rescind older, overlapping policies that were folded into the revisions. Administrators told the board the changes cover nondiscrimination and pronoun usage across employee classifications; new attendance and truancy rules; limitations on in-school personal device use during the instructional day; drug and alcohol testing requirements for employees who transport students in non-commercial vehicles; digital content accessibility obligations under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act; and updates to transportation rules tied to Ohio Department of Education workforce and driver-certification requirements.

District staff said the nondiscrimination updates replace gendered pronouns with neutral language (for example, replacing "he/she" with "the individual" or "they") across administrator, certified and classified policy sections to ensure consistency. Attendance and truancy provisions were revised to reflect the elimination of the "excused vs. unexcused" distinction and the board ecision to set notification thresholds tied to 5% of minimum hours of instruction as permitted by the new statute. Administrators confirmed that retention rules previously tied to attendance have been decoupled from truancy requirements.

Several policy changes directly cite procedural shifts required by the state. For example, the board approved a policy extending drug-and-alcohol testing to non-CDL drivers who transport students in alternate vehicles and clarified pre-employment and post-accident testing procedures. A new policy on release time for religious instruction was updated to permit excused absence for up to two periods per week for elementary and middle-school students and a credit-equivalent limit for high school students, consistent with the amended statute.

Other items adopted include policies on digital accessibility and cybersecurity required by recent federal and state guidance, and transportation rules that allow limited eating or drinking on buses for nonroutine trips when a chaperone is present. Board members said the policies had been reviewed by the policy committee prior to the meeting.

The board also approved rescission of legacy policy numbers that had been superseded by the revised set. Administrators said the revised policies will be posted and that second readings will occur where the policy-code process requires multiple readings.

School officials characterized the changes as largely technical and regulatory compliance; where the law required substantive shifts, administrators said the district revised board practice to match state law rather than to create new local requirements.