In recent years, Ohio has made career and technical education a priority funding item.
During his 2023 State of the State Address, Gov. Mike DeWine talked about the benefits of young people learning trades like welding, carpentry and construction. The state invested $300 million in the expansion of these career technical education programs in Ohio high schools in its biennial budget.
When Chuck Klein gets his mail, he doesn't walk. He drives down a long gravel driveway onto a narrow one-lane drive, which eventually widens into a rural road surrounded by rolling farm fields.
"The property is 130 acres, of which 100 is woods," he said. "It's at the end of a dead-end road, very, very private. The only man-made lights visible at night are ours."
At Painesville's Cinco de Mayo festival in northeast Ohio, a troupe of folkloric dancers prepared to take the floor.
They held up full, brightly colored skirts decorated with ribbons of red, green, blue and purple and waited for the music to start. Then, they spun and swooshed their skirts, creating swirls of color through the air.
Inside of the Young's Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs, shelves of cheese curds dripped excess moisture onto the floor.
The CEO of Young's Jersey Dairy, Dan Young, pointed to a massive silver vat imported from the Netherlands filled with the uncut curds, ready to be converted into a variety of cheeses.
In the throes of the pandemic, people started noticing something odd: an uptick of negative reviews of scented candles, claiming they had no fragrance.
The trend line of the bad reviews coincided with spikes in COVID-19 cases. That's because one of the symptoms of COVID is smell loss.
President Donald Trump's trade war has led to higher costs for certain goods in the U.S. Products like aluminum, steel and barley have all faced tariffs in recent months – three key components in producing a can of beer.
Accessing health care in rural Ohio can be difficult. A shortage of providers, worsened by recent hospital closures, means some people have to go long distances to get care. With an older population and inconsistent access to broadband, telehealth is an imperfect solution.
On an early spring day, lkids lined up outside the Cincinnati's Zoo's giraffe habitat, waiting for an opportunity to feed the animals over a fence.
One of the giraffes, Zoey, ambled over, sticking her purple tongue out, swiping a leaf and biting down with a crunch.
Her afternoon snack wasn't grown on a farm thousands of miles away.
Thousands of people are descending in northeast Ohio this weekend for a sweet annual tradition: the Geauga County Maple Festival.
Founded nearly a hundred years ago in 1926, it claims to be the oldest maple festival in the country and the largest in Ohio.
Noble County Commissioner Allen Fraley says the opioid epidemic threatened the fabric of his rural eastern Ohio community.
"You couldn't go to a football game. You just couldn't go to church. You couldn't go to an ice cream social without knowing somebody's whole family was hurting," Fraley said.
