As Public Enemy Sang
911 is a joke in your (district)
I love and respect the security guards at Campus International School. I trust them. I know that the head of our security takes is his job seriously, not just because he is a good man, but also because his child attends our school. I know that our principal takes the security of the students seriously, not just because it is her job, but also because several of her nieces attend our school. Our vice principal’s child attends our school. Our Network Leader sends his children to our school. Some of our teachers have children enrolled in our school. Administrators and teachers from other CMSD schools enroll their children in our school.
When parents in our school get together to complain about our security, it’s because there is, sometimes, too much law and order. Nobody wants their sweet baby to miss five minutes of lunch because Officer Flo is making them enter the building quietly from the playground. Flo will make the whole class wait and while I despise collective punishment, I will not take the order and security for granted. Not after the things I have read lately.
The screen shot at the top of the page came to me from a teacher. It was afterschool hours and she had a very bad day. Several teachers and dozens of students had a very bad day that day. One student destroyed a classroom and made threats. It went on for a long time and the calls for security went unanswered. It got so dangerous that teachers started calling 911. I have corroborated the following messages because I got them from a few teachers who work in Halle The School of Inquiry. They each think they are the only one sending me messages but that is almost never the case. As you read these, understand that this is a K to 8 school. The children who attend range in age from 5 to 14.
Message One
Another
Another
Another from a teacher when I asked them to corroborate the public records I had received. There were eight “incident” reports from January 2025 to March 31, 2025.
And one more…
The first time the Halle teachers started messaging me it was about an incident in which a student cut off his ankle monitor and left the building, I made a public record request for the incident report. What I received was a report about a regular fist fight in the cafeteria. Bad enough to call the CMSD Police to file a report, but not what the teachers described. I thought maybe the staff was overwrought in their descriptions. Then I realized that the document wasn’t for the date I had requested. That’s when I made a new request for student violence incident reports from January 1, 2025 up through the date my response was processed.
I then received 8 major violence CMSD Police reports for the time period (teacher say I didn’t get everything). For this time period, we were on winter break, President’s Day break and then Spring break, but there was still plenty of time for violence. I’m going to post all of the reports I received. Read them all. Read them knowing that this is a school with five year children in it. Read every description of events as if your child attends this school.
As one teacher put it, not a lot of HMH is getting taught on days like these. One student has been suspended three times for ten days each. Two students were transferred to other schools to be their problem. You know the teachers at the new schools get these students as blank slates, right?
Case 250566, though, that one chills me to the bone. Three people wearing masks were able to get inside of the school during a Black History Month Assembly. I’m told security didn’t check for ID even though Officer Kidd (always the hero of the reports) claims to have looked at an ID, but didn’t run it through Raptor, so we’ll never know. After the assembly they found their Halle student victim outside of the building and beat him so badly that an ambulance had to be called.
Show Me The Money
CMSD boasts that it is the only school district in the state of Ohio with it’s own police force. I don’t know whether or not that is a good thing. The chief of security is Lamont Dodson and he makes $138,000 per year even though his only interaction with Cleveland school children is in photo ops at the East Professional Center. We also have seven mobile patrol police officers and I don’t know what they are paid, yet. However, I can math and seven police officers covering calls from 98 schools in a school district that covers 79 square miles is pretty laughable. There are security guards assigned to all of the schools though six of them are just part time. Our security guard at Campus International School makes $36,000 which is similar to what we pay paraprofessionals in CMSD. He interacts with every student in our school, every day.
When we were planning out our afterschool program last summer, CMSD told us that we would be charged $50 per hour for our security guard. Wondering what they do with the rest of the money after giving Officer Palmer his cut of $18?
If you attend a school board meeting, you will encounter at least two security guards at the entrance, and then another four security guards/CMSD police officers inside the meetings. At the Goals & Guardrails meeting I attended on a Saturday afternoon at JFKennedy High School, there was about a half an hour when there were more security officers than meeting guests. The school board and Dr. Morgan prioritize their own safety.
The schools and their surrounding neighborhoods were not safe when Frank Jackson was Cleveland’s Mayor and Eric Gordon was the district CEO. The schools and their surrounding neighborhoods remain unsafe under Mayor Bibb and Dr. Morgan.
During the Listen & Learn tour that Dr. Morgan pursued when he started this job, the number one thing people told him is that they wanted safe schools. They also told him that they wanted better academics and more opportunities to train for work. In response, Dr. Morgan has provided a terrible curriculum imposed across the entire district. He continues to believe that all students should pursue the college path and fill out a FAFSA. And our schools are so dangerous that all of the bathrooms are locked with gates in our high schools. We have not gotten anything that we asked for during the leadership transition. Now Dr. Morgan is undertaking a new Build Brighter Futures tour. You aren’t going to like how that turns out either. Dr. Morgan wants all schools to be the same.
This has been bleak and I am now deeply depressed. Please share!
One thing: I teach in an Eastside HS. Our bathrooms are open, no gates. I guess we’re lucky.
This is factual information. I tried last year to file with CPD because admin didn't do anything about multiple assaults by a special education student, & CPD referred me to safety & security. Nothing ever came out of that but more assaults. Admin was too scared of the possibility of the parent suing, to care about me the staff member or the other students. The parent blamed us and they are at another school now.