Catching Our Eye News Roundup, Sept. 16, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Ohio Gerrymandering. Cleveland.com’s Sabrina Eaton reports, “New book argues Ohio’s redistricting fights are a warning for the rest of the country.”

A journalist who covered Ohio’s redistricting wars from the Statehouse press gallery and an attorney who kept telling him someone needed to write it all down have turned that reporting into a book, arguing the state’s fight over fair district maps previewed a nationwide battle.

“Draw the Line in Ohio: How One State’s Fight for Fair Maps Explains Gerrymandering in America,” by Rory Riley Topping and Josh Rultenberg, comes out September 15 from Prometheus Books.

• Stake ‘n Shake politicizes itself. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Sarah Donaldson reports, “Steak ’n Shake is dishing out candidate endorsements in Ohio. Why?”

(W)hile corporate executives donate to political parties and candidates frequently, it’s rare for corporate companies to wade into the arena. Generally, corporations “don’t want to alienate their customers,” said Christopher Devine, associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton.

“Strategically, it just seems like a bad idea,” Devine said in an interview Monday. “No matter how much a CEO or company leadership wants to see a certain candidate win, maybe they think it’s better for their bottom line, they typically avoid that.”

But Steak ‘n Shake has recently been advertising its fries, which it began cooking in beef tallow rather than seed oils in 2025, by embracing the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. The burger chain filmed a segment with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. last year.

• No rules for private schools. The Hechinger Report’s Pepper Stetler reports, “Parents of students with disabilities find private school vouchers come with a catch.”

The meeting with staff members of Cincinnati Christian Schools began with a prayer. Then they told Mike Grimmer and Linda Kelly that their granddaughter could no longer attend the private school.

Annabelle Kelly had enrolled there three months earlier, in August 2025, in a program specifically for students who struggle in mainstream classrooms. Annabelle, 15, has Rett syndrome, a genetic condition accompanied by significant cognitive and developmental delays. Her grandparents, who took legal custody of Annabelle when she was 5, believed that the small, faith-based setting of CCS would be a better fit than the local public school. She received a voucher from the state through a school choice program specifically for students with disabilities, which authorized paying CCS up to $29,750 for Annabelle to attend tuition-free.

But at the meeting in November, Kelly said, the school’s director of academic support services told her and Grimmer that Annabelle’s physical and educational needs were too extensive for her to continue at CCS. If they wanted her to stay, Annabelle would need an aide to work with her one-on-one, and her grandparents would need to pay the additional cost, roughly $25,000 per year.

Disability advocates warn that as private school voucher programs spread, more parents will find themselves in similar straits. Federal protections for students with disabilities don’t apply to private schools, and neither the schools nor voucher programs like the one Annabelle qualified for are required to inform parents that they waive certain rights when they leave the public school system. When Congress passed legislation last year establishing the nation’s first federal voucher program, it did not include language that disability rights groups had lobbied for that would have required private schools receiving federal funds to follow the law known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act.

• AI versus the library. Cleveland Magazine’s Abbey Weitzenkamp reports, “Willoughby Bookstore Confronts Google AI Error Claiming It Was Permanently Closed.”

Through the hand-painted door of The Viridian Bookshop in Downtown Willoughby, readers, Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts, and anyone looking for somewhere to belong will find a home. The fiction-focused shop is built for getting lost in a story, but this summer, some customers never made it through the door.

Chanel Bush, who opened Viridian in October 2025, says the shop’s first year has come with the usual challenges. Google’s generative AI wasn’t one she saw coming.

In mid-July, a customer walked in and told Bush something strange: Google’s AI Overview stated that the shop had permanently closed. This customer was searching for bookstores in the area a few weeks prior and chose not to visit Viridian due to this misinformation. Bush searched for her own store and got the same result: her shop, at the top of the search page, labeled as closed for good. Google’s summary also listed an address a few doors down from her actual storefront.