COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Retirement Study Council leaders are evaluating whether or not to remove the voting rights of teachers on their retirement pension fund board.
This comes after a year of controversy in which elected educators are accused of participating in a $65 billion corruption scheme. The board chair denies all allegations, and some retired educators are accusing the Statehouse Republicans of trying to stop transparency.
"It's not a radical idea to think about how other retirement teacher retirement boards are comprised," state Rep. Adam Bird (R-New Richmond).
Bird, the chair of the Ohio Retirement Study Council, is considering all options when it comes to changing the makeup of the State Teachers Retirement System board.
But for him, the timing of the change isn’t due to the recent spending of $2 billion to restore a 1.5% cost-of-living adjustment.
"I'm concerned that the STRS current composition of 7 teachers and 4 appointed investment experts appears to be imbalanced, which can lead to a perception of lack of fiduciary responsibility," Bird said, answering my question about whether he is considering removing the educators from the board.
For the past year, we have dug into — and exposed — the controversy swirling inside the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS), a roughly $100 billion pension fund for the more than 500,000 active and retired public educators in Ohio.
In summary, there has been constant fighting, two board resignations, and allegations of both a public corruption scheme and mishandling of funds. There has been a senior staff dismissal and at least two senior staff resignations.
The scandal centers around former board member Wade Steen, board chair Rudy Fichtenbaum, and their relationship with investment firm QED Technologies, run by former Ohio Deputy Treasurer Metcalf and Jonathan (JD) Tremmel.
RELATED: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine stunned by teachers' pension fund behavior with firm accused of corruption
How we got here
In May 2024, the governor received a 14-page anonymous whistleblower memo alleging a massive public corruption scheme brewing and moving quickly within STRS. In 2020, Metcalf and Tremmel set their eyes on STRS, according to the document.
The documents claim that they — despite having no clients and no track record — tried to convince STRS members to partner with them.
They couldn’t impress the board members, mainly because of their lack of experience and because QED was not registered as a broker-dealer or investment adviser. The men also didn't own the technology to "facilitate the strategy," the documents said.
So what exactly are Steen and Fichtenbaum trying to change, and what would QED allegedly attempt to do? Revise the investment structure. The men are seen as the leaders of the "reform movement." This fight began from a debate on how STRS should invest money, through the current system of actively managed funds versus an index fund. Active funds try to outperform the stock market, have more advisors, and typically cost more. Index funds perform with the stock market, are seen as more passive, and typically cost less.
In short, "reformers" want to switch to index funding, while "status quo" individuals want to keep actively managing the funds. Recent elections have allowed the "reform-minded" members to have a majority of the board.
Steen and Fichtenbaum had allegedly been bidding continuously, pitching QED's direct documents to board members and proclaiming the company's talking points to other staff.
Soon after, Attorney General Dave Yost filed a lawsuit to remove Steen and Fichtenbaum from the board, stating they were participating in a contract-steering "scheme" that could directly benefit them. Yost started the investigation after the memo, now known as being prepared by STRS employees, alleged that Steen and Fichtenbaum had been doing the bidding of QED.
Our reporting has included the first time Yost and QED spoke about it. As we have continued the dozens of reports on the topic, our investigation in September revealed that STRS was, once again, moving to hire a firm that allegedly lacked experience and personal ties to the board leaders, according to senior staff. After our report, the board chose not to move forward with the firm that has been the subject of my investigations.
Restructuring
Bird’s move is the first step in changing state law. Other Republican leaders are arguing that, due to the scandal, the elected teachers on the board should be removed or they should be nonvoting members.
"There's been an attempt to circumvent the long-standing evaluation process that STRS has for evaluating investment strategies," the chair continued.
Retired teacher Robin Rayfield is appalled by the idea of removing the elected members from the board.
"We're not in favor of them changing the board, except if they were eliminating appointed positions," Rayfield said. "As retired educators, we believe in democracy."
The educator runs the Ohio Retirement for Teachers Association, ORTA, an organization currently under investigation along with Rayfield.
Due to his close relationships with both Steen, Fichtenbaum and QED, his conversations have been subpoenaed by the attorney general. He was also reported to the Ohio Ethics Commission due to his financial donations to board members. He put together a fund in 2023 to pay Steen's legal fees, with additional funds being added now to help both Steen and Fichtenbaum's litigation against Yost. ORTA has donated more than $163,000, according to financial forms filed.
The STRS memo claims QED and ORTA, the Ohio Retirement for Teachers Association, had worked together, specifically when it comes to elections, to get a more sympathetic — or willing — board.
Rayfield said that the investigation is a sham and a way for the state to stop transparency.
"It's clear that the folks in Ohio in power — they want more power," Rayfield said. "They don't want people having the opportunity to represent themselves."
He said it isn’t fair to use the argument that they don't trust the board to follow their fiduciary duty due to the board's alleged continued interest in QED.
"That's a straw man," Rayfield said. "The QED thing has been dead since '21."
That isn't entirely accurate, according to my conversations with Fichtenbaum.
"Are you still considering QED?" I asked the STRS chair in August.
"I don't know at this point," Fichtenbaum responded. "I think that the idea that they had about earning fees is not a bad idea."
Also, Rayfield allegedly called interim STRS Executive Director Aaron Hood in April to discuss QED, I found out in a records request I filed.
In an email to the board, Hood wrote:
"Yesterday afternoon I received a telephone call from Robin Rayfield at ORTA. Robin offered to set up a meeting for me with representatives of QED (including Seth Metcalf) since there is so much “controversy”. I was so taken aback that I stepped out of my office and asked him to acknowledge his request again on speaker phone so that other staff could hear his confirmation of the request. I informed him that I will not meet with anyone related to QED and encouraged him to read the AG’s filings (including exhibits) involving communications from QED to a former board member. To be clear, no STRS staff will be meeting with representatives of QED and I would advise you all as board members to avoid any such meetings as well, especially in light of the pending outside litigation."
Despite all of this, Rayfield and the reformers argue that there is nothing wrong with questioning the status quo — and that this is clearly a targeted attack at public education.
"It's more political talk; When they've spent a billion dollars on private education and ignored public education, reduced the budget for public education, attacked our pension — all of the forces of everything — the governor, the attorney general, all of the high ranking elected officials, it has been to diminish what our public service has been through — decades of neglect and abuse," Rayfield said.
The Ohio House Republicans passed a budget that dramatically slashed school funding. To be fully funded based on statistics from the Fair School Funding Plan from 2021, schools would need $666 million. The proposed budget only gives them about $226 million.
Based on 2025 numbers and inflation, the amount of money to fund K-12 would be closer to $800 million, new data from public school advocates like former lawmaker John Patterson explained.
RELATED: Ohio House GOP budget proposal slashes public school funding
Retired educator Mary Binegar, who doesn’t trust the “reform” faction of the board, still says that removing the teachers’ voices is a bad move.
"Whether we like the board members are there or not, we do have the opportunity to vote for them," Binegar. "I think it's important for educators to have that sense that there are other educators watching out for them."
RELATED: Ohio lawmakers may remove teachers' pension board voting powers as chaos continues
When I asked Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Lima) about his interest in pension reform, he said he aims to pass some changes to the pension board by the end of June.
"I wanna see what those recommendations are going to be," Huffman said. "The problem, conceptually, with pensions... it's trying to solve a problem now that looms many years in the future, it's difficult for people to understand."
Senate President Rob McColley (R-Napoleon) shared similar sentiments when I asked him about pension reform. He said he has had a few conversations with the RSC leaders.
"I do think it's worth reminding folks, whenever you're on a pension board, you are acting with fiduciary duties to the pensioners in that pension system," McColley said. "It's important that they remember that the decisions they make shouldn't just be based on a particular policy that they want to move forward or a particular message that they want to send, but rather it should be based on getting the best return at the appropriate profile for that pension system."
House Minority Leader Allison Russo slammed the Republicans when I asked her thoughts.
"You've got a pension system that represents retired workers, but you don't want to have workers represented on the board?" she asked rhetorically. "I think [that] speaks to, again, lack of accountability in how individual retirement systems are run, the long-term stability of them. And if you don't want voices of those retired workers — I think that's wrong and that's hugely problematic."
No matter the scandal, and no matter the side, each educator we spoke to said that removing their perspective from the board will hurt the fund and cause teachers to feel isolated and unheard.
