The billionaire giveth,

Dr. Morgan taketh away

Can you imagine being in a school district that is so poor that a billionaire will make a huge philanthropic donation to your district without you even having to ask for it? Apparently, Mackenzie Scott was sitting around with her team, trying to come up with worthy places for donations and someone (probably) said, “You know, Cleveland is a very poor school district, and their situation is unlikely to ever change.” And then (probably) Mackenzie Scott pulled out her checkbook and gave Cleveland Schools CEO Eric Gordon the surprise of a lifetime.

Can you imagine being a CEO of a very poor school district getting notified that you would soon be able to steer $20 million dollars however you saw fit, no strings attached, to help improve the lives of the district students? And then (probably) you said something to your team like, “let’s create a panel of students and have them decide how the money should be spent!” Everyone in the room (probably) looked at you like you were insane but went along with it because you usually aren’t insane.

Can you imagine the feeling of everyone around you, your team, your teacher advisors and your students when the Get More Opportunities panel actually started to work? The grant applications poured in and they were worthwhile. They were thoughtful. They were all the things that the students, their families and their teachers saw missing from this poor district and thought how amazing it would be to fund the needs. Sometimes to plug holes in our ship but other times to, literally, take flight.

It was a radical idea.

Dr. Morgan made me really mad

I was shocked when Dr. Morgan and the school board ended the Get More Opportunities panel. But I was furious when I read Dr. Morgan’s quote in Singal Cleveland. When he claimed that the panel wasn’t really working and then implied that Campus International School had gotten "many of the grants” it was a conscious decision to pit Campus International School against all of the other schools. The implication was that Campus was greedy or taking too much or perhaps gaming the grant system in some way. He didn’t elaborate, of course, because he is just a surface level thinker.

I was happy to hear that people on city council were upset and wanting to question Dr. Morgan about the Get More funds. But I also had questions and they were not being asked by the local media with access to Dr. Morgan. It used to be that any family in the district could get on the phone with Eric Gordon but we have a new caste system now, one in which Candice Grose can keep targeted families from even responding to CMSD Facebook posts. I’m just a mom but I do have the power of public records requests.

I requested information about how many students served on the Get More panels and which schools they attended. I asked which teachers served as advisors and the names of their schools. I asked how many grants had been submitted in the year that the program was operational. I asked how many grants were requested by category: educators, scholars, families. I also requested a complete list of all grants that were funded, along with a copy of each winning grant proposal.

I assumed the response would be somewhat quick because surely all of this information had been complied for Dr. Morgan so that he could make an informed decision when choosing to end the Get More program. Instead, I waited quite a long time, well over a month, for a response.

Get More really worked

There were 93 students on the Get More panel. The sign in sheet, pictured above, shows which schools they represented. There were teachers on the panel representing Orchard, William Rainey Harper, MC2STEM, Anton Grdina, Lincoln West Global, and Joesph M Gallagher. A total of 741 grant applications were submitted. There were 658 submitted by educators, 72 by scholars, and 11 by families. Over a series of 15 more emails, I received 112 grant applications that had been funded. Some of them have a stamp at the top saying that they were funded, while others did not, but I only received copies of funded grants, so it took some time to sort out.

More than 40 schools had grants funded by the Get More panel. The district has a total of 100 schools. The schools that received grant money are varied: a pre-K school, several k-8 schools, and several high schools, including the Remote School and Schools of One. The schools span the entire district and I tried to log them onto a rudimentary map.

As for Dr. Morgan’s flippant remark that “Campus International has won many of the grants so far,” well, that’s just not true. Campus International School had four grants funded, two requested by educators and two requested by students, for a total of $26,500. Compare that with grants submitted by 1111 Superior (the district’s Central office in that expensive rental downtown) who had at least four grants funded for a total of $75,000. And get this - at least one, possibly two, of their grants were funded after Dr. Morgan’s decision to shut it all down on November 8th, 2023.

The other folly with Dr. Morgan’s assertion that Campus had won most of the grants is that Bard High School Early College only had three grants funded, but their total was $284,300. Garrett Morgan only had two funded but received $64,741. Louisa May Alcott only had one grant funded but it was for $91,000 to buy Legos, which the press reported as construction materials. (It was a well-researched and well written grant proposal and if I were sitting on $20 million philanthropic dollars, I would have voted to fund it, as well.) Campus International School had one student request $700 to help pay for their $3000+ trip to Costa Rica, while other schools had their entire Costa Rica trips funded by the grants, including their passports. A Campus International School teacher requested $5,000 for our 8th grade trip to Washington DC, while other schools asked for and received entirely funded DC trips. I’m going to say here, that Campus wasn’t bold enough in their asking. Mackenzie Scott allowed us to dream and Campus kind of went Oliver Twist in their grant proposals.

What do Cleveland students need?

All sorts of schools in our district were able to get grants funded in the first round and just over $2 million dollars were spent. Now that I have seen the grant proposals, Dr. Morgan killing the program hurts even more than it did back in February. It’s enraging. So many CMSD students asked for the $500 fee it takes to get a driver’s license in Ohio, just so they could reliably get to school and possibly get jobs to help their families. One school has students who take a specialized program on Saturdays and requested grant money for reliable transportation, because missing one of the classes can cause a student to be removed from the program.

Our CMSD intervention specialists wrote grants to make sensory spaces and maker spaces for their students. They also wrote a grant to get eight weeks of therapeutic horse riding for their students. This is something the students in Shaker Heights City Schools get every year through building funding and grants from the Shaker Schools Foundation. Cleveland students with disabilities had to wait for a once in a lifetime opportunity from a billionaire, which will just be for this one year now that Dr. Morgan has, in the words of Cleveland media, “squandered” this gift. One parent wrote a grant asking for money to make her son’s classroom an Autism classroom so that she wouldn’t have to take him to a different district the following year. One of my favorite grant proposals was for an MH classroom to be able to take 13 to 15 students to DC, with one parent/care giver. It would be a trip of a lifetime for these students. It would be what Mackenzie Scott intended.

Amongst the grants are schools that need funding for the PBIS programs, and a few of them state plainly that their building budgets were cut and there is no longer money for toys, chips, and trips used for behavior rewards. One school asked for $4,000 to throw a big morale building taco party for the staff, students and families. Some schools got funds to start photography clubs, bowling teams, and ski clubs. These are little extras that our poor district cannot afford, and our low-income families cannot subsidize. School gardens were started with the grants and some existing gardens got to grow with these grants. John Marshall got money for chickens! 3D printers, VR sets, and coding materials were purchased along with lots of classroom printers and laminating machines. One school got money to build bicycles that they will then pay forward by donating to people who need bicycles.

So much travel was funded. The trips to Costa Rica and Washington DC, that I already mentioned, but also the kids at Wilson got $20,000 to go visit a National Park. The bowling clubs got trips to Las Vegas to go to a bowling tournament. They also got to see Hoover Dam while they were out there. Bard Early College got money to take students on a multiple college visit tour. There was a Black History focused trip to DC, too. Garfield got $20,000 to take students to Spain. Natividad got money to do several Cleveland field trips since many of their students are new to this area. If all Mackenzie Scott had done had been to fund travel, it would have been dayenu.

There were also great grants written by teachers that should be instructional material for the district in what teachers need. They need tuition for licensure programs, credit hours to learn new teaching methods, exam courses for our RNs. I had done another public record request back in April about professional development. The district, up to that point in the year, had spent $17,000,000 on professional development and most of it was uninspiring. Our district could spend so much less and get so much more just partnering with local universities to buy credit hours for their staff. I tried to sit through one of the Brain Pop PD programs that CMSD has paid for and I wanted to gouge out my own eyes after twenty minutes. Our teachers and staff are not stupid so let’s not continue to professionally develop them like they are.

There were also several grants requesting money to pay for gift cards (food and gas) for families experiencing hardships. Care closet funding for clothing, toiletries, basic hygiene needs for students and families. That’s what our district is. We are poor. We sometimes need to help families get by, but our leaders are paid royal wages, work in their expensive office rental, have no-show jobs, have car allowances, and live in a very different manner than they families and students they serve. That has been made so starkly clear by Mackenzie Scott and her gift to our students that Dr. Morgan has appropriated for the administration.

I got madder

Looking over the grant applications and putting everything together for this piece, made me even madder than I was before. Seeing that 1111 Superior made grant requests when they already control a $1 billion dollar budget made me mad. Finding out that Dr. Morgan straight up lied to the media about Campus International’s grants to cover his own sneaky behavior made me livid. Although I should mention that every time I call Dr. Moran an expletive deleted liar, my wife points out that he is possibly just misinformed by the people around him. Then I try to temper myself and just call him woefully misinformed Dr. Morgan.

The remaining funds from the Mackenzie Scott gift should be returned to the reconstituted Get More Opportunities panel. If not, Dr. Morgan should just give Makenzie Scott back the remaining funds and apologize to her for being unworthy. Seeing what CMSD students were able to do in their first year of philanthropy makes it all the more devastating to have the program end. There is no justification for allowing Dr. Morgan and his well-paid office of misfit toys to squander this gift.