Oh the places you will go!
Ed Reports edition
I get tips and tidbits several times a week. I get them from teachers. I get them from building staff. I get them from inside 1111 Superior. I get them from people deep inside departments I didn’t even know existed. I get them from contractors. I get them from consultants. I have so many tips and tidbits that I would have to start hiring staff just to investigate them all. I have tidbits that I cannot do anything with, specific special education law breaking that also break my heart to read them. By far, though, the most informative tips I get are about wasteful conference travel. While I have been able to get some public records about travel from CMSD, I’ve mostly been thwarted.
I got tip last summer to ask for CMSD spending records for some conference called Model Schools. I made the request on August 8th. I added in a few other conferences.
The response I received was lacking. They said some of it was duplicative to a previously unanswered request. Additionally, there were no responsive documents for my requests. The end.
I’ve been told to ask for travel records from Uniglobe Travel, the agency that 1111 Superior prefers to use (and soon I’ll have things to tell you about that racket). Public Records said, No. I asked individually about conferences such as the Ron Clark Academy conference in Atlanta, any of the Council of Great City Schools travel, the Building Excellent Schools conferences, Executive Leadership retreats… I got nothing.
Enter my new super hero, Ed Gallek of Fox 8 news. This week he did aired a report on the $850,000 worth of CMSD travel that occurred in the lead up to the levy vote in November. You know, the levy we had to pass so that we didn’t have to lay off 700 teachers. The levy that was passed and then we were informed that we were still going to have to layoff teachers and close schools because the levy just funds one more year of good times. A legitimate reporter with the backing of a news department was able to get the public records that a mom with a blog could not. Thank you, Ed.
When Ed asked the school district about the spending, the brain trust at 1111 Superior put their best people on it. Obviously, they would have Lisa Farmer-Cole, Chief of External Affairs, run the communication side of this. Because this was a pretty serious event concerning big money, they sent out Chief of Financial Operations, Kevin Stockdale, to explain these numbers. CMSD had one full week to prepare to talk about $850,000 in conference travel for our very poor school district. Here’s how that went:
“Um, do you want to speak to that?”
“Uh, nope, I really can’t, just sitting here answer that.”
Well done CMSD! There are answers, of course. There are grant funds to be used for PD and many of these trips are paid with those grant funds, so the little old lady in Cleveland on a fixed income isn’t paying for the trips out of her property taxes. Heck no, she is paying for them through all sorts of other taxes that end up funding these grants.
Fun fact: on the day Ed’s conference spending story ran, a member of the CMSD CTE department had an away message on her work email account that read:
Lisa Farmer-Cole likes to attend that conference, too. Wonder if she went?
A very kind soul taught me how to use the publicly available information on the Ohio Department of Education website to see the various grants for each school district and how much money is in them. Thank you friend!
You should also know that the defense of these conferences is that they are very hard work and that the people chosen to attend them return to their buildings and share the knowledge of what they have learned. Some also share boozy daytime photos in front of palm trees and should maybe lock down their social media accounts.
Another local reporter, Michael Indriolo of Signal, wrote a story about how much money CMSD is having to spend to transport children to schools outside of the district. Some of this is because of vouchers and sometimes it’s the district choosing to send children to specialized settings for education that they cannot receive through CMSD.
Meanwhile, Ed Gallek of Fox 8, hit upon another tragic aspect of CMSD’s transportation issues. It’s a terrible story that popped up on social media last November. The administration at Almira Elementary gave out talking points to their staff to tell people that they story was absolutely false and did not happen. This was a job that, again, required a real reporter to ask questions and not a mom with a blog making public records request. Here’s is what Ed and Peggy Gallek found out. The rumors were true. A member of the CMSD communications team (not Candice Grose, I checked) asked FOX 8 to “decline to report about this story,” which maybe is a worse screw up than Farmer-Cole and Stockdale combined.
I was driving around Cleveland the other day, choosing to get from Beachwood to Campus International using Chagrin and Kinsman to avoid a backup on I480, when I spotted a levy sign at the corner of Kinsman and Depression. Reading the word Hope on that sign now, in that space, knowing all the things that I know about this school district made my stomach lurch. All that Hope is still going to end up in laid off teachers, loss of instructional minutes for students, closed schools, and more Cleveland citizens losing their homes to the Land bank when they can’t pay these increased property taxes. But oh, there is yet another new administration hire just this past January. Let’s welcome Mr. Neilson to Cleveland, the land of Hope for administrators and desperation for students.
Thank you for reading this blog. Please consider reading the Facebook group, Publicly Cleveland Conversations which now has 631 members. You can read and post anonymously. You can also read the post I wrote there about the kinds of travel accommodations members of the Executive Leadership Team use when hitting all of those conferences around the country.
Please continue to share these blog posts when you find them worthwhile. I am both surprised and tickled when I get notice of a new subscriber.
And please keep sending tips and tidbits. I’m not going to hire staff, but I will continue to try to get answers from Public Records. It’s the very least I can do.
Questions I have for you: should I use any of the Substack features to enhance this blog? Any interest in a Publicly Cleveland chat area? A podcast? A read aloud version?