In a 98-0 vote Wednesday, the House adopted revised teacher eligibility guidelines and other changes to the program, which requires that students be proficient in reading before leaving third grade.

House Education Chairman Gerald Stebelton said school districts and educators raised concerns about having adequate staff to help meet the guarantee. Only 4,200 of Ohio’s 34,000 licensed preschool-through-3rd grade teachers would have qualified as program instructors under initial guidelines.

Stebelton said lawmakers weren’t given enough time last year to anticipate all the problems with the program before it was approved as part of Gov. John Kasich’s (KAY’-siks) midterm budget.

House changes now return to the Senate.

Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor said Thursday that nonpartisan primaries, more cameras in courtrooms and other policy and election changes can strengthen public engagement and trust in the judiciary. She made her remarks during the Ohio State Bar Association’s annual convention.

Polls show people believe judges are susceptible to political influence but oppose doing away with judicial elections altogether.

O’Connor wants to see Ohio join 14 other states with nonpartisan judicial races.

Ohio is the only state that identifies the party of prospective judges in its primaries and then sends winners into a general election in which party labels aren’t used. O’Connor said party affiliation has no place in judicial races.

Now, he’s top lawyer to Auditor Dave Yost, who subpoenaed private financial documents from JobsOhio in a high-profile faceoff.

Records obtained by The Associated Press show Cupp attended meetings with JobsOhio and Kasich’s office only days before JobsOhio responded to Yost’s subpoena and returned all its public start-up money. The reimbursement potentially affected the lawsuit.

An Ohio State Bar Association ethics columnist says Cupp’s participation raises a red flag. Cupp says he’s on the lookout for conflicts and none arose during the meetings.

State and federal authorities are investigating the school district, Ohio’s largest, over allegations employees improperly altered the grades or attendance records of struggling students to improve performance ratings in a process called “scrubbing.”

Ohio Auditor Dave Yost’s office issued the warrants and the district confirmed the searches were under way. At midday, investigators had executed search warrants at Marion-Franklin, Whetstone, Mifflin, Independence, Linden-McKinley and Northland high schools.

“The district and our schools are fully cooperating with authorities seeking these records,” district spokesman Jeff Warner said.

The probe was prompted by a 2011 request by Superintendent Gene Harris, which Yost initially declined to pursue, and eventually has grown to involve several top district employees.

In June, Yost launched the investigation after a renewed request from Harris. In the ensuing 10 months, Warner said the district has provided “hundreds, if not thousands” of student records of the same type sought by the search warrants.

Based on early findings in Columbus and districts in Toledo and suburban Cincinnati, Yost launched a separate statewide review of school district attendance and enrollment tracking changes.

Yost’s auditors spread out across the state to investigate a sampling of districts identified through a statistical analysis, not direct indications of wrongdoing.

That separate probe found nine Ohio districts that intentionally removed poor performing students from their rolls and discovered that more than 70 schools or districts had attendance reporting errors that didn’t appear to be purposeful.

Federal authorities joined the Columbus investigation in November and Yost separated the district from the rest of the state probe due to the likelihood of criminal referrals.

The temptations of scrubbing can include rosier district report cards, added state or federal funding and employee bonuses.

The practice has drawn attention across the country amid greater scrutiny of the increasingly data-driven world of public education. A former superintendent went to prison in Texas for conspiring to remove low-performing students from classrooms to boost average test scores. Principals in Oklahoma and Missouri also are out of their jobs after attendance-related scandals.

Gov. John Kasich has reserved judgment on the proposals being prepared by state Reps. Kristina Roegner and Ron Maag, his fellow Republicans. GOP House Speaker William Batchelder has also been cautiously noncommittal.

Even before Roegner and Maag had held a scheduled event Wednesday to explain their companion “Workplace Freedom” proposals, union-organized protests were taking place in the capital.

Roegner’s bill would affect private-sector unions. Maag’s would apply to public-sector unions, the same entities targeted in a sweeping collective bargaining overhaul rejected by more than 60 percent of Ohio voters in 2011.

Twenty-four states, including neighboring Indiana and Michigan, have such right-to-work provisions in place.

State Rep. Kristina Roegner said in a co-sponsorship request circulating Tuesday that she wants Ohio to become the 25th Right to Work state in the nation.

Her “Workplace Freedom” bill would apply to public-sector unions, and a companion measure from state Rep. Ron Maag would apply to private-sector unions.

Democrats and labor leaders leaped on the proposals as a slap to the strong majority of Ohio voters who repealed a proposed collective bargaining overhaul in November 2011 that limited the bargaining rights of public-sector workers.

At a news conference Wednesday, Senate President Keith Faber said a majority of his caucus now agrees the sweepstakes parlors are illegal and should be banned. The announcement follows pleas by Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine for legislative action.

DeWine, a fellow Republican, led a raid on six of the facilities in the Cleveland area last week after an appellate court ruled the cafes constituted illegal gambling.

The Ohio House approved a bill late last year intended to regulate the cafes. It failed to gain traction in the Senate, but the House passed a new proposal in March that is pending in a Senate committee.

Logan County Prosecutor William T. Goslee said Tuesday in an email that he plans to submit writing samples to a state crime lab from the teen, James McCoy III, and a witness who recently invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in an ongoing wrongful death suit.

Goslee said he doesn’t see the witness’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment as evidence McCoy fell victim to an asphyxiation prank resembling a lynching, as the teen’s mother has alleged.

Her lawyer Cliff Arnebeck asked the U.S. Justice Department to review the case Monday, based on the county’s reconsideration.

JobsOhio attorney Aneca Lasley said in an Ohio Supreme Court filing this week that arguments made by a lawyer ousted from the case by ProgressOhio show “a pattern of disregard for settled law and procedure.”

Lasley refers to a complaint filed by former ProgressOhio lawyer Victoria Ullmann seeking a restored lead role in the case.

Ullmann questioned the liberal group’s decision to align with the conservative 1851 Center for Constitutional Law and to make its director the lead lawyer.

She has alleged that the two politically opposed think tanks have formed a suspicious alliance that may be designed to undermine the lawsuit’s chances.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Richard McMonagle’s Wednesday ruling involving the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation affects about 270,000 mostly small-business owners. Many are unaware they’re covered by the class action.

An employers’ organization Pay Us Back Ohio BWC has set up an informational web site, www.PayNowBWC.com, with an employer search feature.

McMonagle ruled in favor of the business owners in December, agreeing they had paid unfair premiums from July 2001 to June 2009, when a new fee structure was put in place. The amount to be returned has been argued since then.

The bureau plans to appeal.