Dublin Intensely Divided Due to Superintendent John Marschausen’s Dumb Decision to Pump Up Enrollment at Scioto High School to Make It a Division I Sports School

Marschausen needs to resign immediately or the DCS Board needs to fire him for cause. No one trusts him and he's divided Dublin irreparably.

He will claim otherwise citing the need for more students so Scioto High School could have more course offerings (i.e., not enough current kids signed up for certain classes), but that is a smokescreen. The real and primary reason Dublin City School (DCS) Superintendent John Marschausen moved to add space at Scioto was to up its enrollment to 2,000 students, thereby pushing its sports teams from Division II to Division I. That decision was made knowing full well that it would require DCS to redistrict high schools by forcing Coffman High School kids to Scioto, which everyone involved in the decision had to know wouldn’t be popular.

Dubliners didn’t vote for this expansion. In 2023, Dubliners very narrowly (by 0.7%) approved a bond aimed at building a new elementary school, expanding the preschool building, and other “district wide improvements.” Expanding Scioto High School and moving Coffman students into the expansion was never mentioned or discussed. Given the razor slim majority, had Marschausen made known his Scioto expansion/Coffman backfill plans, the bond would have failed.

If Dubliners would have been asked if they preferred what DCS is doing OR an expansion at Coffman that would have more easily moved kids from Jerome High School to Coffman, a majority, I believe, would have voted for the latter. Why? Because no one wants to be moved to Scioto, whereas moving some Jerome neighborhoods to Coffman would have been far more palatable. The action that made no sense to anyone is adding on to the least desirable high school that would force kids going to a far better high school to be reassigned to it.

Marschausen has caused enormous and intense division within Dublin that won’t subside for years, especially once the sacrificial lamb Coffman neighborhoods are selected for the move to Scioto. When I learned about the decision focused on sports, I was shocked—though not too shocked given the zealous addiction far too many people have to sports and delusional beliefs too many parents have that their kids will get D1 athletic scholarships. I also realized that the “die was cast” on moving Coffman neighborhoods to Scioto the moment DCS and Marschausen moved to expand Scioto. We’ve all spent a year fighting the inevitable because Scioto now has empty space that must be used in order to move them to D1. The only fight that remains is between Coffman neighborhoods south of I270 and north of I270 who will serve as the scapegoats to Marschausen’s ill-advised Scioto expansion.

Watch the video below for more of my thoughts on this maddening decision including my call for Marschausen to resign immediately or for the DCS Board to terminate him for cause.