Ohio retired teachers' pension fund hires new executive director

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a day ago

STRS Ohio meeting room. (Photo by Morgan Trau, WEWS.)
The Ohio retired teachers' pension fund has hired a former pensions expert from North Carolina as its new executive director.
Steven Toole, the previous head of the North Carolina Retirement Systems, will take over starting in mid-July.
He grew up outside Columbus and went to Ohio State University, according to his candidate material records.
'My experience extends to working closely with boards and stakeholders to ensure transparency, accountability, and integrity — values central to State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) Ohio's guiding principles,' Toole wrote in a letter to a recruiter.
Currently, he works as a senior product manager at Principal, a retirement and investment company. He also gets some income from Home Depot, according to an ethics filing.
While working at the North Carolina retirement system, he managed a $100 billion pension system and $11.8 billion in defined contribution assets, serving approximately 1 million public employees, according to his candidate documents.
He worked as the executive director of the North Carolina system from 2011 to 2019, when he was fired, the records request shows.
According to Toole, in an email he sent to recruiter Dan Cummings, he stated that there were 'no performance issues at all,' and he didn't receive an explanation from the state treasurer as to why he was being removed.
Cummings told a board member that the former North Carolina Treasurer Dale Folwell replaced Toole when he came into office, emails show. The candidate document shows that he was replaced with Folwell's 'hand-chosen successor.'
However, Toole was replaced two years into the treasurer's term. Once this was brought up by a board member, according to emails, the new STRS head suggested that the reason may be related to the treasurer's 'cost-cutting platform.'
More records are pending from the North Carolina Treasurer's Office.
Following being let go from the North Carolina system, Toole then worked for Prudential Retirement. This was later bought out by another company, and his job was 'eliminated,' according to the documents.
He worked in retirement benefits for nearly three decades at Nationwide Insurance before joining the North Carolina team, the documents show.
His hiring comes after a year of controversy, during which the STRS board chair and one of the former board members were accused of participating in a $65 billion corruption scheme. The chair, Rudy Fichtenbaum, denies all allegations, and some retired educators are accusing Ohio Statehouse Republicans of trying to stop transparency.
'The high scrutiny and media attention surrounding STRS Ohio over the past eighteen months do not give me pause — rather, I see it as an opportunity to step into a leadership role, bring clarity, and strengthen trust among members, legislators, and stakeholders,' Toole wrote in his candidate document.
There are mainly two defined factions of the STRS population: 'reformers' and those who want to keep the 'status quo.'
In short, reformers want to switch to index funding, while 'status quo' individuals want to keep actively managing the funds. Recent elections have allowed the reform-minded members to have a majority of the board.
Fichtenbaum and all of the reformers on the board voted in support of Toole, while each of the status quo members, including appointees, voted against him.
The vote ended up being 6-5.
The current acting executive director, Aaron Hood, was also given his notice at the meeting.
Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on X and Facebook.
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