So Many Seats At The Table

But none that I can afford

The future of Cleveland Metropolitan Schools has been made very clear and it is dystopian. The new curriculum will be imposed on all of the schools, regardless of the Cleveland Plan’s building autonomy. The lessons are scripted, and the teachers are not allowed to veer off of the culturally destructive path that Dr. Selena Florence and HMH have charted for them. The have been told that they will be monitored by 1111 Superior and if they are caught using supplemental materials, they will face consequences. The only silver lining here is that now the students won’t be reading any novels and are unlikely to know what the word dystopian means or ever identify with Guy, Winston, John, Offred, Julia, or Katniss.

I could write a pretty dystopian novel just using all of the anonymous messages I received after the ELA training at the IX Center this week. My phone was lit up and nearly caught fire. I now answer the phone from unknown numbers because these school district employees need to vent. The saddest one, I won’t print because they asked me not to, involved the recognition that the teachers were being instructed to focus on the students they could identify had a chance to make even the slightest gain for the proficiency data. The children who cannot already read are not going to get the focus. The children who can already read well are also not going to get the focus. The children on the cusp of proficiency are going to get all the focus so that Dr. Morgan can announce a 2% increase in ELA scores for himself and his team. None of this is about the children.

The Legal Department Responds to Stimuli

A few months ago, I lamented publicly on Twitter(X) that CMSD still hadn’t remitted payment to Scholastic for our Campus Internation School book fair receipts after several months. I give the receipts and cash to CMSD after the book fair. They are supposed to process it and send the payment to Scholastic. When they don’t, Scholastic sends me, the book fair chair, collections notices for thousands of dollars, I freak out, then it eventually gets paid and the cycle repeats, twice a year. This wasn’t an issue for the previous book fair chair because her husband was the district CFO.

Anyhoo, I made a tweet on June 12th and holy moly, Scholastic received their payment on June 12th (the book fair was in April). Earlier this week I tweeted out that I had looked into the filing cost of making a complaint against CMSD public records because so many of my requests (easy records to produce) were taking months to get. Holy moly, two days later my email inbox runneth over with fulfilled public records requests.

I got stuff from personnel files. I got travel expenses. I got organizational charts. I got the names of the people creating the revamp of the Get More Opportunities grant program. I got lists of grants that CMSD still gets, and none can replace the loss of the Gund Foundation, for sure. I got the interview rubrics for the Commnications Officer position. I got a response to what permit fees schools were charged for after school programs before Covid ($0.00). I received responses, unsatisfactory responses, to some questions about External Affairs/Communications questions. They should really stop letting Candice Grose do the responding, she has a tone. I got more furniture purchase invoices, and I got invoices for the ticket purchases CMSD made for Dr. Morgan’s State of the Schools speech.

Cooling, vibrating asses

Dr. Morgan once spent a day in Collinwood High School where there is no air conditioning and that must have prompted him to order his own cooling massage chair. Do you know who else has a cooling, vibrating massage chair? Dr. Trent Mosely. I found this out because I had a handful of tips telling me to look into his furniture expenses (that means he is not well liked). I thought I would have received Moseley’s furniture records when I requested all the furniture records for Dr. Morgan's ELT but apparently, I need other magic words to access the profligate furniture spending of Dr. Mosley.

Dr. Trent Mosley has spent his entire time in CMSD at 1111 Superior, in various departments. People tell me that he has been put in at least three different CMSD departments, as the head, duties for which he is ill equipped. One person remarked that Dr. Mosley changes positions but never raises above, up to superintendent. When I researched him, Dr. Mosley does seem to be one of the few CMSD employees who doesn’t apply for the top job in other districts. Dr. Morgan saw something special in Dr. Mosely and put him in charge of the Equity & Culture division. Much like his 1111 Superior colleague, Lisa Farmer, Dr. Mosley likes to treat himself to new office furniture when his job title changes. I don’t know if he actually changes physical office space or not.

In February of 2020, when my twins were in kindergarten on i-Pads on my dining room table from Rent-A-Center (I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but we’re poor) Dr. Mosely ordered himself a new, fancy desk. It’s a pretty sweet desk in that it can be a regular sitting desk and also be raised up to be a standing desk. It’s cherry wood and looks like this:

The invoice for Dr. Mosley’s desk says that it cost $2,888, with an additional $99 freight fee. One month later, Dr. Mosley ordered a storage cabinet, credenza for his office from Home Despot, which cost $459. Now, it would be unreasonable to expect a person who bought a standing desk to actually stand at the desk. Or even to use the built in function of lowering the desk if the person wanted to sit while working. The most practical thing to do is to order a standing desk chair for $209, which is a great price because it isn’t fancy. He also picked up a dual monitor system for $899, on the same invoice.

In 2019, Dr. Mosely had also purchased an Ergonomic Big & Tall office chair for the low, low price of $186.99. But then in January of 2022, Dr. Mosely needed to purchase an X-4 Elemax wide seat chair with black foam for $1290. A month later he recognized the need for the matching $30 footrest. In February of 2023, Dr. Mosley purchased a charging doc for his Apple watch for $27.99, which I’m sure he would only buy with school district money if the Apple watch was a school district issued device, integral to his ability to perform his duties to the school district. In December of 2023, Dr. Mosely ordered a $500 glass dry erase board for his office and also a $298 standing dry erase board for his office, which are expenses I would not look askance at if he were a college football coach drawing up plays. In February of 2024, Dr. Mosely’s aching body required the purchase of yet another chair. This one cools and vibrates the glutes for $1,399.

To be fair, Dr. Mosley spent lavishly on office furniture during the Gordon years as well as the Morgan years. I think most of these purchases are a firing offense. I want this man gone from CMSD. He should not be in a position to spend public dollars like this. But it was Dr. Morgan’s decision to move Trent from his $187,514 job as Strategic Implementation Officer into the position of Chief of Equity & Culture with a salary of $210,390, giving him a $22,875 pay raise between September to November of 2023, when the emergency budget deficit was being revealed.

CMSD students won’t learn the Guy Fawkes poem

Do you know what else happened in November 2023? Dr. Morgan gave his first State of the Schools speech, hosted by the City Club. The reason I made a public records request asking how much the school district spent on tickets for the event is because a few people told me that under Eric Gordon, the district didn’t buy tickets for employees, they only provided tickets for CMSD school students [one person also suggested that Gordon might have provided tickets to school board members]. You will not be surprised to learn that policy has changed under the Morgan administration. This is absolutely understandable, as I would have to be paid to listen to a Dr. Morgan speech at this point. Actually, that’s not true, I watched that CMSD Convocation speech the other day, for free, but kind of like Alex in A Clockwork Orange with my eyes pried open. I blame the anonymous tipster who sent me the link and said I just had to watch it. But they were right, I had to see it for myself.

Anyhoo, about those receipts… I received seven invoices from the City Club.

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District, in the second poorest city in the country, with plummeting enrollment, having just ”discovered” a huge budget deficit requiring drastic measures to close the hole, found it prudent to spend $11,580 on tickets for Dr. Morgan’s speech.

Remember, remember on the 5th of November.

Disgusted and deflated

None of these purchases are illegal. They are merely immoral. Public dollars should go toward educating the students in a public school system. I don’t care what the head of school at Hawken makes because people choose to pay that tuition. The residents of Cleveland with an average income of $38,000, are taxed a lot for the schools and are being asked to tax themselves even more when Dr. Morgan and Mayor Bibb haven’t shown why a district in decent financial shape in July 2023, needs this levy now instead of 2026.

Dr. Morgan and his ELT are proving themselves to be really good recruiters for the schools. The problem is that the schools benefitting from this recruitment are Lakewood Catholic Academy and Birchwood. They have murdered the Cleveland Plan and are parading around in its bloody carcass and laughing at the pitiful parents who remain. Damn, that was bleak, but I can’t see it any other way now. This once radically innovative school district is dead.

It’s even worse for the teachers, what with the spirit breaking PD for the new curriculum and the loss of students to other schools while having to fundraise through Donor’s Chose to get organizational materials for their classrooms… The OST scores in 2025 are going to be a bloodbath because large percentages of students scoring proficient have left the district. When the 5th grade teachers get berated next August because the projected scores from last year’s 4th graders evaporated, the teachers probably aren’t going to mention that 10% of those kids are now at LCA and Birchwood, because they didn’t mention it this year either. Some teachers were admonished that the number of students who scored proficient in say, grade 8, was lower than the number that had scored proficient last year when they were in grade 7. Admin conveniently left out the part where roughly 10% of that cohort had left for private schools, taking their proficient scores with them. Such a dispiriting way to begin a new school year.

The story didn’t have to turn out this way, but the authors, Mayor Bibb, Michelle Pomerantz, Dr. Morgan and the entire ELT, wrote it this way.

I found it difficult to have conversations through the comments on Substack, so I took some advice and started a Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook. it attracted 164 members in 30 hours, so it’s clear that people want to talk about stuff. It is a public group, though I believe you can be anonymous on it, but keep that in mind before joining and posting. I have found it is a good place to post interesting items that don’t warrant a full blog post, but that people should know. Content from this blog will be posted there, but posts from the group may not make it over here into the blog.

Again, I am providing a link to the raw material from my public records requests, mentioned in this post. I have not learned how to post pdfs, so if some of the things in Google Doc form are hard to read, let me know at pollykarr@gmail.com and I will forward you the actual documents I received.

PUBLIC RECORDS USED FOR THIS BLOG POST