Vibe check: How are we doing out there? Me? Not great, Bob. I had developed what I believed to be a decent relationship with CMSD public records request e-mail people. In the beginning, I’d request stuff, not really well defined, and they would give me records in days, sometimes a week and then I would write about the things I was learning. As our relationship progressed, the requests got more specific and sometimes the responses would take longer. The day they sent me all of the Get More funded grant applications was kind of epic. It took thirteen emails. They put a lot of time and effort to get that to me. I would read between the lines sometimes and feel like they really wanted to give me a piece of information but could not because I just hadn’t said the magic combination of words. I thought we had a thing.
This week I found out that no, me and Public Records never had a thing at all. Way back in May, when I was still just a newbie, I asked them for a specific piece of information, and they told me that the information did not exist. But I have come to discover that I had been given false information. A lie.
The thing is, yes, at least one person from the "over 10% cuts from central office" did receive a severance package. I have confirmed this. This person was the only big salary from central office to get cut, which is why I even asked about severance pay. I have suspected that I haven’t gotten all of the responsive documents before, and I know that I get a lot of half-truths if my responses come from Kamal Chatman or Candice Grose, but this outright lie has me shaken. I’m now further along in the Kubler-Ross Grief Cycle than I was before.
So many related notes that it’s almost a song
So, it turns out that the 3 Star rating for CMSD that Dr. Morgan touted last week required a little explaining when everyone went to the Ohio Department of Education webpage and found a watermark on the CMSD main page.
This watermark prompted questions from Ideastream (thank you Ideastream), which Dr. Morgan answered as elegantly as we have come to expect.
Oh, but the direct quote of what Dr. Morgan said about the watermark is a thing of beauty. In fact, this is textbook crisis communications, probably given to him by his highly paid communications expert.
Slow clap for Mayor Bibb’s choice to lead the school district. Oh, but here is the most delicious part of this testing clusterfudge… the severance package they lied about giving went to the lead data guy they shoved out the door last year because older people give Dr. Morgan the ick, or because twenty-one years of competency is no longer a core value of CMSD under Bibb-Pomerantz-Morgan and the ELT. Young Dr. D’Amico runs everything now because Dr. Morgan like the way his numbers look.
Anyhoo, the school with the bad numbers is Garfield Elementary, the only school in the CMSD portfolio to share the ODE watermark.
While we are talking about Garfield’s dirty testing numbers, let’s all speculate how much money Cleveland taxpayers spent to send their ten-member team to Disney last year during the Model Schools conference. I’m awaiting a public record for that, but who knows if it will be accurate or truthful.
Speaking of spending as a core value
Based on yet another juicy tip, I requested the consulting contract and related invoices for a firm called Attuned. Even though we spent $255,488 for the Alma Group to scour the United States to help assemble Dr. Morgan’s Executive Leadership Team and then we paid Dr. Morgan and those ten uniquely qualified people collectively over $2 million dollars per year (which is more than it costs for each full staff of the three CMSD schools that received the district’s only 5 star ratings), we still needed to spend more. You see, the brain trust at 1111 Superior couldn’t identify a core value if they saw it written on an expensive black glass dry erase board.
That’s why they had to contract with a Denver consulting company named Attuned. Attuned helped the district identify core values and is teaching the ELT how to live those core values while also communicating those core values so that teachers, students, and families know that things are biggly different now that CMSD has core values. Even with the fat contract, Attuned somehow missed that CMSD always had core values under The Cleveland Plan. Nobody’s perfect, I suppose.
Taxpayers are paying Dr. Morgan and his ELT a lot of money so that they can pay consultants a lot of money and I’m still having to chip in $25 to every Donor’s Choose project that pops up so that teachers and students can have things in their classrooms. Wouldn’t be nice if Dr. Morgan had to fund his pointless projects through a Donor’s Choose request and teachers got to have the billion-dollar school district budget to let them do their jobs?
About those teaching jobs
Stephen Christin, everyone’s favorite guy from HR, purely on the up and up I’m sure, sent all of CMSD’s teachers their special seniority list numbers so they can figure out where they would be if the district had to cut 700 teachers if the levy fails. Get out there and provide free campaign door knocking for Dr. Morgan and Mayor Bibb!
Don’t worry, we’ll only cut they teachers if the levy fails. Your beloved layers of administrators will be safe from the consequences of their actions.
Mazel tov!
We have so much to celebrate in CMSD. The 3 Stars, which may or may not be real, are just one thing. It turns out that Kevin Stockdale and his team won an award for their 2023 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. Since it predates Dr. Morgan, it doesn’t meet his Year Zero efforts to blot out the accomplishments of Eric Gordon and The Cleveland Plan, Dr. Morgan merely offered congratulations on Kevin’s LinkedIn post, and did not have Candice brag about the award on official CMSD social media.
Thank you for continuing to share this Substack and the information I’m collecting and sharing. There are now 284 subscribers with a 70.85% open rate for those receiving it through email. I looked it up and those are pretty good numbers. We now have 479 members of the Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook. I love it now that there are active members starting their own conversations in the group and it’s not just me putting information out there. We also have a couple of readers signed up for public comment at this week’s school board meeting.
I will keep asking questions and writing about them here, even as I move on to the next stage of my CMSD grief and explore other schooling options for my twins. I’ve been reliably told that even if the levy passes, Dr. Morgan is determined to slash the instructional minutes at his 4 and 5 star schools, which will change them for the worse and I cannot accept that. I am also putting it out there that I will help other families navigate the voucher world, private schooling options, the John Peterson and Autism scholarships. You don’t have to accept less for your child just because Dr. Morgan thinks that is all your child is worth.