Ohio student association timeline
This is our shared history, and it is made from the stories of students just like you. The Ohio Student Association is 13 years old and the #1 voice for students and young people in the state: This is how we got here.
2007
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative, our parent org, is founded. It is the largest community organizing organization in the state of Ohio and is dedicated to building transformative relational power with everyday Ohioans for statewide social, racial, and economic justice. We organize alongside our sister organizations:
2012
In the wake of Occupy Wall Street, a group of students at the Ohio State University dreamt of universal access to higher education without the burden of debt; of equal access to quality K-12 education for all of Ohio’s children; and of an end to the criminalization of black and brown youth.
These students founded OSA.
Our founders hit the ground running and prevented Stand Your Ground laws from being enacted in Ohio.
2013
OSA prevented a school board takeover of Columbus City Public Schools.
This takeover was an attempt by corporate interests to take away people’s democratic control of the public schools in order to “charterize” the state and profit off of public education
Read more at Columbus Underground | School Issues: Student Perspectives
2014
We protected early voting access for all Ohioans, and organized the 11-mile march named “Journey for John Crawford.”
This walk hosted 100 young people as they marched from the Walmart store in Beavercreek, OH to the Xenia, OH Courthouse where a special grand jury convened to determine whether or not to charge Sean Williams, the police officer who shot and killed John Crawford while he was on the phone with his girlfriend leaving that Walmart.
We were also banned from Walmart this year.
2015
When out-of-state student voting rights were under attack, we organized to save them. Not only did we prevent not having an Ohio Driver’s license being a criminal offense, we successfully blocked a budget amendment that would’ve essentially instituted a poll tax on out-of-state students.
We also fought for Justice for Tamir Rice and the defeat of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty. 12-year-old Tamir Rice was murdered by police in Cleveland while playing at the park. OSA was part of the campaign to get justice for Tamir, and when county prosecutor Tim McGinty refused to charge the police officer who killed him, we helped to successfully oust McGinty in his 2016 bid for reelection. The story is chronicled in the 2017 film Dispatches from Cleveland.
Finally, we secured an increase for the Ohio College Opportunity Grant: the only need-based source of financial aid in Ohio. Our Drowning in Debt campaign won a $10 million budget increase to OCOG, the largest increase in a decade.
2016
Since 2016 we have run the largest youth Get Out The Vote program in the state.
2018
We fought for Issue 1: The Neighborhood Safety, Drug Treatment, and Rehabilitation Amendment. This statewide ballot initiative would have reduced 4th and 5th degree drug possession felonies to misdemeanors, making it possible for tens of thousands of people to apply for release or to have their record cleared; ended mandatory prison sentences for probation violations that are not new criminal offenses; offered earned time off for completing substance abuse treatment or educational programming; and invested the savings into a fund for community-controlled addiction treatment and support programs. We didn’t win, but we did collect the second highest number of petition signatures in Ohio’s history in order to get it on the ballot, and more importantly, we completely changed the conversation around addiction and incarceration in Ohio.