Trina Prufer comments on Aaron Hood's version of a recent Town Hall in Cleveland Heights

How NOT to Run a Town Hall 

[As conducted by Aaron Hood, interim director of STRS]

By Trina Prufer

May 29, 2025

1. Assume your audience is simpleminded and naive, and that teachers are unaware that an STRS retirement benefit costs too much and delivers too little. 

2. Lose your temper.

3. Cut off all discussion that gets close to addressing issue #1. Redirect by talking too fast and changing the subject. Take up as much time as you can with PowerPoint pages that DO NOT ADDRESS stakeholders' concerns. 

5. Structure the town hall so questions from the audience will last only 30 minutes. Be defensive.

4. Heap accolades on YOUR staff, making it clear that they are YOUR people. As to the survival needs of 500K educators, they do not exist in your world, which is the modus operandi of STRS. 

5. Accept the unacceptable. Assume it is perfectly normal for a public pension system to NOT keep its promise of financial security to retirees. Ignore the fact that STRS provides the worst benefit as compared to the four others in Ohio. Ignore the State of Ohio’s betrayal to educators. Ignore the fact that Ohio’s educators have no guarantee whatsoever as to the “defined-benefit” they will eventually receive. 

A public pension system with a defined-benefit contribution rate, but no protections for the benefit received, is by definition a scam. A sham town hall cannot mitigate this simple truth.