Save Our ELT, pass the levy!

This time it's not about the kids or the teachers

Times are tough in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. At Campus International School we have these wonderful opportunities the last Friday of each month to drink Coffee With The Admins. We always used to have delicious, Jack Frost Donuts (a locally owned business) but this year, Dr. Morgan told the schools that belts were going to be tightened and the only treats that could be purchased with building money were tasteless, preservative laden corporate snack cakes. But enough about my sorrow…

We have huge deficits that appeared out of nowhere and took everyone by surprise. We were going to have to abandon parts of the Cleveland Plan and turn to a unified calendar. Then suddenly the immediate deficits disappeared after Dr. Morgan and the school board made miniscule 4.7% cuts to the Central Office (they say it was 12.6% but you should also see the plumped up numbers they use on their resumes…) and we went back to the projected future deficits we all were aware of, except for Mayor Bibb, Chief Pomerantz, Dr. Morgan, and oddly enough, the chief financial officer. Go figure. It’s been a roller coaster in Cleveland and the end of the ride is a November combined levy and bond issue.

I’ve been doing a little reading about past Cleveland school levies and the story starts off dark with a failed levy in 2005. And let’s be honest, the people running the schools back then were later proven by a court of law to not have been trustworthy with taxpayer money meant for schoolchildren. So that failed levy was nothing to weep over. Can you believe that we used to have 70,000 public school students? Amazing to think about. The passing of the Cleveland Plan in 2012 set the school district on a better course and we started passing levies because people believed in the leadership. There was belt tightening before each ask. The State of the Schools messages would detail how levy money was being used and the promises that were being kept. I think there also used to be some levy spending record keeping on the school district website.

I’ve mentioned before that I had no qualms passing the 2020 “save our teachers” levy even though all of CMSD was stuck in remote learning. I trusted Eric Gordon’s stewardship of the district and I loved our teachers. That levy not only helped save our teachers jobs, but it also permanently funded the technology that provided every CMSD student with either a laptop or iPad.

While there are always levies on the horizon, this one is coming up sooner than expected and being rushed to the ballot by a young mayor who hasn’t provided steady leadership over the schools and a brand-new CEO who hasn’t even been on the job for a year, during which time he has made some wild miscalculations for which he takes zero responsibility. Not even in that disingenuous, “the buck stops with me,” sort of way.

One glaring example is how, under Dr. Morgan’s deficit, we have to cut Wi-Fi hot spots and limit laptops and iPads, which were supposed to have been funded by Issue 68. Where did that money go? And while Dr. Morgan is cutting the technology for our students, he’s collecting another resumé enhancing award, this time from Google. Did he apply for the award using the technology cache that Eric Gordon and the taxpayers gave the school system? How else could he have been recognized for the Google GSV Education Innovation Fellowship, which “brings together district leaders committed to transforming education through technology.” It’s not like he could just buy the awards and recognitions, right?

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Speaking of only being here for a few months, I find the job hopping in Dr. Morgan’s resumé concerning. Sure, I know all the young people do it these days, but I have no faith that he has stayed in any job long enough to actually gain experience, just long enough to puff up the resumé with numbers that seem too good to be true. Based on his job-hopping pattern, I will be shocked if Dr. Morgan is still with our district in two years. That goes for several of his new hires on the Executive Leadership Team that he announced to great fanfare. If you look at some of their resumés, they are as light as his. They don’t stay in place long. And they don’t really have impressive stops along the way. None of these candidates are “wow” candidates in any way. Which makes me wonder why we, the taxpayers, paid the Alma Group so much money to go hunt down their talent.

The Alma Group is a Chicago firm that CMSD pays to perform “nationwide” talent searches. I’m kind of a homer and wonder why we aren’t spending Cleveland taxpayer money here in Cleveland with one of our K-12 talent search firms. There was a big payout to Alma Group, which I presume was for bringing us the talents of Dr. Morgan. But the payments between September and December 2023 were for building Dr. Morgan’s dream team and that cost us $255,488. Even though a number of very impressive candidates for the Communications job were from right here in Cleveland (some right here in CMSD already doing communications) we ended up with Candice Grose, who has no education experience and has never done communications in a job this big. It’s also glaringly obvious. For this hire alone, the Alma Group should be relegated to the dustbin.

Even if Candice were competent (she is not) her compensation of $159,500 does not match her experience. She is over paid, by a lot. Candice is an obvious person on which to heap salary ridicule, but once you start looking at her compensation, you can’t help but look at the others. The Chief Executive Officer is making a base salary of $294,000. The Chief of Facilities and Operations makes $216,176. The Chief of Equity and Culture makes $210,390. The Chief Academic Officer makes $202,000. The Chief of Staff makes $193,500. The Chief of External Affairs also makes $193,500. Also making $193,500 is the Chief Financial Officer (he comes to us from a background in prison financing, and nobody has made a school to prison pipeline joke yet?). The Chief Information Tech Officer makes $191,264. The Chief Counsel makes $189,500. The Interim Chief of Talent and Equity makes $175,000. And then there is Candice with her $159,500.

[I overheard whispers that a portion of these high salaries are due to big raises that some members of the Executive Leadership Team received right before the deficit announcement in February. I submitted a public records request about the salaries/raises so that I can confirm or quiet the whispers.]

Our Executive Leadership Team, combined, costs the district $2,218,330 per year. That is pretty much the equivalent to the whole entire staff running Bard Early College who cost us $2,609,480.54 per year. Bard’s salaries include the head of school, counselors, and teachers. The whole damn staff is actually teaching and guiding students on a daily basis. Bard spends just $331,000 more salary dollars for 37 staff members than Dr. Morgan’s ELT, comprised of 11 people.

We can also toss in a John Hay comparison. In the whole John Hay building of three different high schools, there are 82 staff members making a combined $5,862,325. Divide that between the three schools and each one costs us less ($1,954,108) than the 11 member board that Dr. Morgan spent $255,000 to amass. Arguably, a nationally ranked high school with a Presidential scholar and legitimately honored teachers provides much more benefit to our school district than Dr. Morgan or any of the well-paid ELT.

If Cleveland residents pass the levy in November, they are going to be rewarding a spend thrifty leadership team that has chosen cutting instructional minutes and technology for Cleveland students. The ELT chose to gut the Get More philanthropic program. The ELT has already taken away the technology that the last levy promised. They are choosing to start charging after school enrichment programs permit fees, which is a change from the pre-Covid years. The ELT is not hiring new teachers to fill empty positions. The ELT will make cuts that lower the quality of our schools while lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars and fluffing up those resumés so they can hop on to the next job before the testing numbers and enrollment plummet.

A vote for the levy is a vote for the ELT.