COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio educators are speaking out after Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill into law that would remove their voices from the retired teachers' pension fund, calling the move "undemocratic."
Lawmakers say that the current board can't be trusted, as there is an ongoing lawsuit accusing the board chair of corruption.
After four decades of service, public school teacher Barry Alcock retired with his pension benefits, which he relies on.
"I'm a retired, single teacher," Alcock said. "My income, everything I get, is from me and it's from my pension and whatever else I have. I can't imagine losing it."
He keeps up with what the State Teachers Retirement System board does, trusting that the teachers on the board are looking out for educators.
However, a last-minute change to the state budget eliminates a majority of voices like his on the board.
A provision in the bill would change the makeup of the board from seven elected teachers—five contributing and two retired—to three elected after seats are phased out over several years. Two of the educator seats will be for active educators, and only one retiree seat will be available.
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"That's our pension system," Alcock said. "That is absurd."
Each elected member will be able to finish their term, but once they term out, four of the seven seats will not be refilled.
Those four removed educator seats will be filled with newly appointed members. Right now, the governor gets to appoint one investment expert. The Speaker of the House and the Senate President jointly appoint an expert. The treasurer gets an appointee, and so does the director of the Department of Education and Workforce.
Under the budget, the treasurer would get two appointees, the legislative leaders get one each and one combined — equalling three, the chancellor of the Department of Higher Education gets one, and the governor and DEW get one each.
This provision was proposed by state Rep. Adam Bird (R-New Richmond), the chair of the Ohio Retirement Study Council. For months now, he has been evaluating the board makeup due to the controversy inside the fund.
"The state legislature established these pension systems and has an ongoing responsibility to ensure the long-term health of the fund for retired and active teachers," Bird told me. "The ongoing turmoil has clarified the need for the General Assembly to rebalance the Board composition."
House Finance Chair Brian Stewart (R-Ashville) was among those unhappy with how the pension fund has been run.
"I think there's been pretty widespread concern about some of the management of the state teachers' retirement system," Stewart said.
He is referencing Attorney General Dave Yost's civil suit to remove Rudy Fichtenbaum, the STRS board chair.
How we got here
In summary, there have been constant fighting, two board resignations, and allegations of both public corruption schemes and the mishandling of funds. There has been a senior staff dismissal and at least two senior staff resignations.
A 14-page whistleblower memo given to DeWine in May alleged a massive public corruption scandal brewing and moving quickly within STRS.
Attorney General Dave Yost soon after filed a lawsuit to remove former members Wade Steen and Fichtenbaum from the board, stating they were participating in a contract-steering "scheme" that could directly benefit them.
The lawsuit accuses the pair of "colluding" with investment startup QED Technologies, run by former Ohio Deputy Treasurer Seth Metcalf and Jonathan (JD) Tremmel, to secure a contract giving them 70% of the STRS assets — about $65 billion at the time. The memo accuses QED of helping to elect board members who may be more sympathetic to their proposal.
We have continued investigating the alleged scheme throughout the past year, resulting in an exclusive one-on-one interview with DeWine. He expressed his deep concerns following our April 2025 report, in which we revealed hundreds of text messages about the relationship between Steen and members of QED.
RELATED: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine stunned by teachers' pension fund behavior with firm accused of corruption
Steen and Fichtenbaum have continued to defend their innocence, arguing that Yost and DeWine are part of a "political scheme" to prevent educators who want more transparency and to change 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 Metcalf, the men with the relationship at the center of the conversation, also spoke with me in response to the governor’s comments in their own Q&A that can be found here.
Removal
Lawmakers had been discussing changes for months, primarily in private.
"It's not good policy to have investment decisions for a public pension being made by people who are directly benefited by those decisions," Stewart said.
Pensioners tell me they reached out in droves to DeWine’s office, but in early July, he signed the provision into law.
During an exclusive one-on-one back in April, I asked DeWine what he thought about this proposal.
"Some lawmakers have suggested that due to the controversy that is happening right now with the board, some of the voting power should be taken away from the educators — making them members of the board but just not voting members or taking down how many people. The teachers say that that would be undemocratic. Where do you stand?"
"Well, I'm not advocating any kind of change," DeWine responded. "The board members are not experts, their job is to hire experts... There's no reason that every member of that board has to be an expert in investment, but they have to hire the right people."
But on Tuesday, the governor's team told me that he was having conversations with lawmakers about changing the makeup of the board to better safeguard the funds.
"The legislators have been discussing budget provisions with [DeWine] for several months, and usually they come sometime before the actual amendments are dropped," the governor's spokesperson, Dan Tierney, said. "He certainly gets appropriate courtesy and heads up on where things are coming... They would try to work collaboratively."
Through text, Fichtenbaum said that the lawmakers' action was "a disservice" to educators.
"I believe the legislative change to the make-up of the STRS Board is totally undemocratic, a disservice to members, and will erode confidence in the system," Fichtenbaum texted me. "It was done in the middle of the night as part of the budget reconciliation process, although neither the House nor the Senate budgets had any proposals on changing the make-up of the Board. There were no hearings, no opportunities for members or the public to weigh-in on this legislation before it was passed."
I brought the timing up to Tierney, as the provision was broken by our reporting at 1 a.m. the day of the full chamber votes.
"The idea that we have direct democracy on every issue is just factually inaccurate," Tierney said, noting that voters participate in the democratic process by electing lawmakers to introduce legislation like this provision.
Current STRS Acting Executive Director Aaron Hood seemingly took the news better than Fichtenbaum.
“STRS Ohio respects the legislature’s decision to restructure the Board," Hood said in a statement. "We remain committed to collaborating with state lawmakers to ensure the smooth implementation of these governance changes, while steadfastly upholding our mission to provide a secure financial future for our members.”
Hood, who was meant to be interim, is being replaced shortly by Steven Toole, the previous head of the North Carolina Retirement Systems.
Alcock said he feels stuck. He doesn't agree with the decisions that Fichtenbaum and the reformers on the board are making.
"I want the investments to be sound. I want them to be legitimate. I don't want any of my money being used for an investment experiment," he said, referencing QED.
On the other hand, he doesn't trust the legislators.
"Teachers don't need to be taken care of by legislators. We know what our best interests are," Alcock said. "[Lawmakers] don't have a really good record of protecting our best interests in the first place."
The law is set to go into effect in late September, but the changes won't be made until the first of the educators' term off in 2026.
