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Ted C. Hill (Wooster City School District, At large, Ohio, candidate 2025)
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Ted C. Hill is running for election to the Wooster City School District, At large in Ohio. He is on the ballot in the general election on November 4, 2025.[source]
Hill completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. Click here to read the survey answers.
[1]Biography
Ted C. Hill provided the following biographical information via Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey on September 13, 2025:
- Birth date: November 18, 1980
- Birth place: Oxford, Ohio
- High school: Wooster High School
- Gender: Male
- Religion: Christian
- Profession: Homemaker
- Incumbent officeholder: No
- Campaign slogan: Stronger Schools Together
- Campaign Facebook
Elections
General election
The general election will occur on November 4, 2025.
General election for Wooster City School District, At large (3 seats)
Clayton Deighan, Gail Guzzo, Ted C. Hill, Bonnie Nair, and Jody Starcher are running in the general election for Wooster City School District, At large on November 4, 2025.
Candidate | ||
| Clayton Deighan (Nonpartisan) | ||
| Gail Guzzo (Nonpartisan) | ||
Ted C. Hill (Nonpartisan)  | ||
| Bonnie Nair (Nonpartisan) | ||
| Jody Starcher (Nonpartisan) | ||
| ||||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Endorsements
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Campaign themes
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Ted C. Hill completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Hill's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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I have a college background of 3 years in AI and psychology when AI was in its infancy. I never did finish my degree though, preferring to start a family with my high school sweetheart. I have experience teaching martial arts and discovered a deep love for teaching. I have expertise in top level management programs that consultants teach to senior executives to help them better understand how to run large systems. In the past I have taught free management fundamentals training programs at the Wayne county public library.
Connection - I have lived in Wooster since Kindergarten and grew up with Beall Avenue as my neighborhood school home. My wife and daughters have always lived in Wooster. I have a daughter in 4th grade this year and will be involved in the school system for the next 8 years. My older daughter graduated in 2025. I have been involved in the district community more broadly since 2022. In that time I have written occasional longform community articles detailing district events, levies, and the complications of school funding.
Service - I have been involved in Cornerstone's PTO and volunteered as my time has allowed. I have always enjoyed seeing the children succeed and grow during these activities. I have done my best to share those experiences with the greater community through my occasional writing.
I want to continue broadcasting those celebrations as a member of the board.- Community Trust -
I want the district to build trust with the taxpayers and the greater community. To do this I propose the board offers a commitment to only engage voters in November. No more spring election levies. Regardless of a board policy, I will not vote to support a spring election levy.
Additionally, I want the board to offer a plan to reduce property tax burden by exchanging some of the property tax for an earned income tax that will not hit fixed income community members.
This can only be offered by the board, the plan would have to go to voters for approval. - Whole Educational Homes - I want the district to fix our schools rather than patch them. For too long schools like Cornerstone have been maintained by patches but not fixes. By my count this has gone on for 8 years. My older daughter that just graduated dealt with leaking roofs above her classrooms, an aged HVAC system, windows that don't work, aged plumbing that backs up, and an accessibility elevator that is too small and only mostly reliable. My daughter there in 4th grade this year deals with all of the same. The community has said solidly that we are not building new right now. So we must fix what we have. The district has the money to fix most of these problems on hand. We must make all of our schools whole homes for our students.
- Neighborhood Elementary Schools - The currently voted plan of the district is to change the elementary experience during redistricting next year. This would make Parkview, Melrose, and Keen schools that only house K-2nd grades. Cornerstone would house only 3rd-4th grades. The community wants neighborhood schools. So, I want this policy reversed before it takes effect. We must still redistrict to even out student loads. But, to break up the elementary experience will harm our students. Schools will be unwalkable and create transportation problems for parents. The PTOs will collapse and have few funds. Most importantly, students will lose a journey of mentorship, going from little kids to big kids. This must be preserved for our children.
I have written community articles trying to explain this complicated topic to the greater community.
This is one of the most pressing policy problems in the district.
Other policy areas I have interest in are curricula assessment and purchasing, administrative time and money efficiencies, and district communications with the community at large.
Both risked their livelihoods to stand on principles.
Both were dedicated teachers, and students of life.
Any representative of the public must have the community's trust.
That is everything.
As for my personal thoughts on trust:
I have never been an elected official, never run for office before.
But as a community member that has been writing long form articles about the district for a few years I have learned that trust is critical.
I never set out to be a public figure.
I was just someone who couldn't keep my mouth shut and decided to start writing on local social media.
People slowly started following me.
I do not think they would have done that if I hadn't earned their trust with open and balanced writing.
But I believe trust is a fragile thing.
It must be carefully handled and maintained.
The work of maintaining trust is something I have taken very seriously with my writing.
It is the responsibility of a board member to represent the will of the community as elected representatives entrusted with the care and education of the community children.
A board member researches, hears public comments, openly questions and discusses during public meetings, and finally casts a vote on board business.
With these as guiding principles, a board member works to guide the board in:
Setting board policy.
The hiring and reviewing of the superintendent and treasurer.
Even if only by a little bit, that is my personal principle.
If I can do that I'll be happy.
I remember barely understanding but being sad that a teacher had died.
It wasn't full time and I did it off and on for years.
Eventually I got a building master key to do tours and answer fire alarms at night when the system had problems.
I always loved that building, maybe even as much as Gault did.
It was, after all, an elementary school to both of us over its long life.
I miss spending time in that building, though I still like just across the street from it.
It is both grand and grounded.
It studies power and corruption, identity and destiny, fellowship and tradition.
I have never really understood what is normal.
Everything always seems exceptional to me.
Everyone I meet has their own interesting story.
My mood can vary greatly from one day to the next.
I have been told my mood is strangely inconsistent for a man.
This has sometimes made it difficult to fit in.
Five identically skilled people on a board that will all come to the same conclusions and all vote the same way is pointless.
It is good for each board member to have a specialty they focus on.
For me, that specialty will be to act as a translator and mediator.
My strength is in understanding different sides of situations.
With that I plan to serve the community and the board as an active translator between their increasingly different worlds.
The education world and the community world has grown so far apart that they often literally speak different languages.
I have been learning both these languages and I intend to build trust and understanding between them by serving as an active translator.
I worry that the different worlds in the district have grown very far apart.
Parents, educators, administration, and taxpayers all live in increasingly disconnected worlds.
I am unsure that just understanding and translation will be enough.
This is where mediation becomes important.
The district and the community may need to renegotiate how we serve our children.
That is not an easy process and it can't happen without translation.
But it also needs mediation at the level of policy.
The school system, and the taxes it collects for funding, touches everyone in the district in some way.
The children can only be correctly supported by 4 critical groups working together:
The parents
The educators and staff
The taxpayers
The district administration
In order to build schools strong enough to support the needs of all involved, these groups need to work together.
I work to actively go out and listen to the many groups of the community.
I believe transparency is no longer enough, it is my job to go and seek points of view.
With these points of view I will seek to spread understanding between each group, each neighborhood, and each disconnected world.
I will strive to reach new people outside of established organizations, organizations already have loud voices.
Good teachers inspire their students for life.
However, this is impossible to measure.
Why?
Different students are inspired by different teachers.
We all have a story of one great teacher that had a huge impact on our life.
None of us has the same story because we all needed something different.
We can't measure what works for everyone.
Instead what I want to do is clear away things that keep teachers from making that difference.
That means more time, more resource support, and more freedom from bureaucratic blockers.
Property tax has become too high a burden on the community.
The schools can only be legally funded with 2 kinds of taxes: Property or Income.
I would like to see the district offer an earned income tax in return for reducing the currently collected property tax.
I suggest an earned income tax because it would not tax fixed incomes like social security.
I would still want any building levy to be funded by property tax since loan repayment on such a levy needs to be a constant stream of income.
I want to lower property tax, not eliminate it.
The board cannot implement this by itself but it can do the research and put this change on the ballot for voters to choose if they want.
I also want to ensure that the district is spending money wisely and efficiently.
The district is a steward of other people's money.
Bullying is part of school safety.
Mental health is part of school safety.
Outside security is part of school safety.
Facility upkeep is part of school safety.
All those are important.
But in my mind the greatest tool for school safety is to cultivate positive role models.
For the district, that means ensuring that positive role models are hired and enabled to be the best they can be for the children.
That is true for educators, for administrators, for coaches, for janitors, for bus drivers.
It is true for anyone a student sees.
For the students, guided outlets.
Our students have different interests.
Some of them are well served by the schools.
Some are not.
One of the best aids to mental health is to have a positive outlet.
The district should work to provide one to every kind of student interest.
For the faculty, more time.
Stress is a detriment to mental health.
Not having enough time is a major source of stress.
The faculty have been buried in extra responsibilities over the past few decades.
The district should be working to clear away time sinks and path blockers to help reduce stress for the faculty.
For the staff, grounded understanding.
The school is about education.
But it cannot function without the support of staff, many of whom are not doing what we think of as education.
Sometimes the district can be so focused on the world of education that it forgets the grounded world the staff lives in.
The district should keep an understanding of the staff point of view.
I would like a policy committing the board to only going to the voters in November.
The November vote is for citizenship, the spring votes are for partisanship.
This is how the community sees these voting seasons.
I would like to see the board decision to separate elementary schools into either K-2nd or 3-4th grade revoked and instead do a redistricting to level school populations.
I would like the board to commit to fixing the schools buildings we have.
I think the community has spoken very clearly that we are not building new buildings right now.
What is ideal and what is practical are two very different things.
Ideally I want students to love what they are learning.
That means freedom to explore, often hands on activities outside a desk, and personal instruction.
That isn't practical at our scale.
But keeping as close to that idea as practically possible is important.
That means doing mass instruction without turning our schools into impersonal factories.
I have a young daughter in the school system and this will naturally bring me into contact with some parents.
Beyond that I will actively look to find other parents that can help inform me about the view from different schools and grades.
We cannot compete on money.
We should not compete on money.
We should be going to each possible recruit with a brochure about how welcoming our community is.
We should be bending over backwards to forge a community bond with each and every faculty, staff, and administration member that comes to live with us.
And, yes, they should live with us.
Those are my preferences.
Almost none of that is board business.
In full honestly, the community needs to lead that charge.
I have studied AI in some fair depth.
I could go on for hours on the topic so I will try to be brief.
Our AIs will not, can not, replace teachers right now.
It may never replace them.
That said, the district must absolutely keep itself well educated on this developing tech.
It shows a lot of potential as an educational tool.
It shows a lot opportunity for teaching our children how to properly use them in the same way we teach critical thinking.
It also shows a lot of potential to be extremely detrimental to our children in terms of skills development, integrity, and social development.
Policy will need to be written very carefully in order to accommodate the new world AI brings.
But that new world must be accommodated one way or another.
District implementation will touch curriculum, student privacy, technology accessibility, teacher qualifications, and probably half a dozen other things.
This is not impossible.
And for a lot of different reasons, many of them having nothing to do with the district.
Some overlap so I will tell one from Lincolnway.
In years past, when the district had more elementary schools, there was Lincolnway elementary.
It served kids from K-6th in the south of Wooster, below the railroad tracks.
It was one of the poorest neighborhood schools by family income.
But it was one of the strongest neighborhoods and it did something extraordinary.
You didn't just leave Lincolnway.
As you wnt up the grades the school tracked how you did.
If you made the honor roll the first quarter, the school thah was your home didn't forget you.
After honor rolls were out Lincolnway had a school assembly.
The honored older students were bought back to be honored in front of the younger kids.
The younger kids got to see role models, people that were once like they were, people that were probably still in the neighborhood.
This happened all the way through a student's high school years and even if they wnt to the career center, as I understand it.
I heard this story from many different people.
They remember.
Lincolnway is gone now.
The assembly is gone.
This practice is gone.
The neighborhood remains.
The people touched by this remain.
The stories remain.
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See also
2025 Elections
External links
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Candidate Wooster City School District, At large |
Footnotes
