SPecial EDition

We've got to talk about that school board meeting

When I am not in attendance, I watch every school board meeting live and sometimes I rewatch them a few times. Last night I was working on a project in Berkman Hall at Cleveland State, but I made sure to turn on the CMSD livestream to catch the last school board meeting of the 2023-2024 school year. My ears always perk up when Dr. Morgan or anyone from his ELT says they are going to present us with data and last night was remarkable.

Before he began talking data, Dr. Morgan made sure that his trusty ELT member, Dr. Florence moved up closer to the microphone in case she was needed to help explain things. He also beckoned forth his education data wunderkind, Dr. Nick D’Amico (salary $120,969.35) Dr. D’Amico is the person who gets the data from the state and then makes in into, I believe he said “digestible”, graphs to present to Dr. Morgan and the school board. It was interesting last night that board member, Dr. Sridhar, had to ask Dr. Morgan for access to the school data D’Amico has, and suggested a dashboard of sorts. It was an epiphany for me, and I muttered out loud, well that explains so many things.

There’s good news

The numbers are in and CMSD students made gains in both English Language Arts and Math. In ELA, our students have made a modest increase of 3%, but as Dr. Morgan said, we still have far to go. Dr. Morgan attributed these gains to his ELT and their use of data. Apparently, data walks into classrooms five days a week and does phonics, reading comprehension, and text analysis with the students. Data is also going into the classrooms and giving up its planning period to bring about modest gains in Math, too. Well done, Data! Not mentioned at all last night in the discussion of student gains - teachers. Which is fine because it was the ELT getting the pats on the back for their hard work this school year. Resumes were probably updated with these achievements already.

Another interesting thing Data was able to do with an assist from Dr. Florence - bring down student suspensions. You see, at the start of the school year, building principals were handing out suspensions willy-nilly. But in January, Dr. Florence met with them and explained something called interventions, a concept that had been previously unknown to the CMSD principals. After that meeting and a good hard smack in the face from Data, suspensions went way down. This is exactly why we spent so much money having the Alma Group recruit Dr. Florence from Atlanta.

There’s bad news

It turns out that the people who run the charter schools affiliated with CMSD do not know what Data is and how it creates student achievement. Their scores were way down for the 2023-2024 school year. So much so, that Dr. Morgan made sure to prepare us that the charter school statistics are going to be a drag on our overall district achievement. Hardest hit by this news was Mayor Bibb, who (it would seem) put polling in the field in April about whether or not voters would vote for him again if he added more charter schools. I mean, it’s not about the actual students, that’s for sure.

In other bad news… well, I don’t know how to be the one to tell you this, so I’ll just let Dr. Morgan do it for me.

As a mom of two sons with IEPs, one for dyslexia and one for Autism, I can’t tell you the last time I heard anyone refer to students receiving special education services, as speds, but I think it was when I was in junior high. The first time Dr. Morgan referred to students as “speds” last night, I was all, dude about it. By the third time he said it, I tweeted to his crack team at CleveMetroSchools (their social media handle) that someone should slip him a note and tell him to stop saying “speds” which dehumanizes the children in his school district. The fifth time he said it, in a six minute time frame, I was livid. No educator of any decent quality would refer to students in that way.

Later on, as I was viewing the school board meeting for a second time, it hit me that not only was Dr. Morgan calling students the derogatory and highly offensive term speds, all of the slides in the data presentation used SPED as a category. The slides were created by Dr. D’Amico, the data wunderkind.

The thing is, when Dr. D’Amico gets his data from the state of Ohio, it does not label students with a derogatory term. Ohio uses SWD or students with disabilities.

It was a choice to use the word SPED rather than SWD on the CMSD slides. Everyone involved with this are paid a lot of taxpayer money and they should know better. The CMSD student handbook says that “verbal conduct that denigrates… based on disability,” is prohibited. Have Drs. Morgan and D’Amico read the student handbook?

It should also be noted that when Dr. Morgan was pointing out that “the speds” did not make any gains, that was not due to him, his ELT, or the magic of Data, so we can infer that this one is the sole responsibility of the teachers.

Sacrifices were made

In a stunning production that must have been rehearsed ahead of time (4 out of 5 stars), Dr. Morgan announced that he would not be accepting the typical raise given to the CEO at this time of year. In fact, not one member of the ELT would be accepting raises at this time. Note the weaselly words. These people all got big raises already for 2024, but they didn’t mention that. Ms. Elaqad, made sure that we all understood that this was a big financial sacrifice and not a reflection of the board’s confidence in Dr. Morgan.

I’m choosing not to talk about the beautiful and touching words that were spoken about Arnold Pinkney. He seems like he was a wonderful man and good public servant. It would make me physically ill to discuss him in the same post with the offensive words of Dr. Morgan and his team last night.