Virtually Transparent

Unelected, unopposed, and unstoppable

I can’t write when it’s hot. We don’t have air conditioning. I tried to sit down at our dining room table to write about the June 24th school board meeting and I just could not. My apologies. I also did not attend that school board meeting in person, but attending in person may become a relic of the past now that the Mayoral appointed school board has passed a resolution allowing them to hold these meetings virtually.

It passed unanimously, as all resolutions pass with this unelected school board. There is no drama when everyone just does what the board chair and the mayor’s education chief tell them to do.. Of course, they have every intention of continuing to hold in person meetings. But should an emergency come up, and with 72 hours notice, the meetings can be held virtually. I would absolutely be willing to give this school board the benefit of the doubt if we weren’t heading into a discussion of which east side schools (just being honest) Dr. Morgan intends to close for 2026-2027. Sara Elaqad probably won’t push the emergency button when a bunch of upset Ward One families want to show up to advocate for keeping their schools.

There was public comment during the June 24th meeting. I want to state for the record how lucky CMSD students are to have an educator like Danelle Chappell working with them. He has a real passion for going above and beyond to bring STEM projects to the students. CMSD is also fortunate to have concerned parents like Chris Schwab, speaking out about the continued wasted opportunities at Campus International High School. Parents spoke out. Dr. Morgan installed a new principal. The new principal sold a really nice story about how she was going to do real International Baccalaureate education this time. Sadly, it was all talk. She has not had the budget from the district, nor the support from the district to make any of her words matter. CMSD has failed IB students again. Students who had the choice to go anywhere else for their high school education chose IB in CMSD.

And International Baccalaureate school is not an easy program to run. There are hoops to jump through for IB. It costs a lot of money. Not every student enrolling as freshman is going to end up pursuing an IB diploma. Cleveland Heights is putting an end to their IB program. They found that it wasn’t worth it for their school district with just the one high school. Here is a look at what it was costing them:

If Dr. Morgan and his team were truly putting efforts into CMSD’s one IB high school, they could be recruiting families from Cleveland Heights who still want to pursue the IB Diploma. Shaker Heights also spends a lot of money on a failing IB program. They also don’t have many students pursuing the IB diploma.

There is an opportunity there to pick off those families and bring them to a good IB high school in Cleveland. But the current administration, both in the high school and at 1111 Superior, lack the vision required to make this happen. We could have an IB high school that would draw students to the district, like the Campus International lower school does. A true, worthy IB option in a city like Cleveland is important. Apparently there is just one more year on the lease for the Campus International High School. Kind of curious to see if we even have an IB high school in 2026.

Another interesting item from the June 24th school board meeting was the preliminary OST data. Last year the presentation of the OST data was elaborate, with several slides and Dr. Morgan bringing Dr. D’Amico up to the front of the room for questions. There was also the whole SPED thing, which was avoided this year. Last year’s presentation felt like a warm up for the 3 Star victory lap they were about to take. For example, here are a few of the slides presented at the final board meeting for 2024:

We were treated to many graphs and subgroups. There was boasting but with a faux humbleness. Contrast that with the presentation of the preliminary data for 2025:

No subgroups. Some bragging about the math score increases, but hey, 1111 Superior is going to take those improvements and douse them with a new math curriculum for all next year. The cookies must all look alike to complete Dr. Morgan’s vision for his LinkedIn posts. We’re still paying the data guy, right? And he has a team that makes slides? And we got the data from Ohio Department of Education? But we are slacking on the presentation? Also of note, no soaring improvement in ELA scores with that new HMH curriculum? Weird.

Consultants

In my last blog piece about administrative pay raises I posted screen shots from emails I obtained through public records. In the emails, Nicole Tompkins was trying to get payments for the consulting services of Equity Matters, but mentioned that the PO used for Equity Matters was now being used for the consulting services of Meme Styles. I checked board doc minutes for Meme Styles and didn’t find anything, so I submitted another public record request for that contracts and invoices.

Equity is important, but 1111 Superior tends to only think of it as a buzz word and a cudgel. Dr. Morgan created a whole new division for equity when he took over the district, and he placed Dr. Trent Mosley, a man who has bumbled around CMSD administration for a decade with zero accomplishments, in charge of the division. Dr. Mosley has no special background in equity though he is now the chief of the division, making $210,390. He then staffed his department with Deputy Chief Sonja Clark making $157,00 even though she also has no specific experience in equity. Under Mosley and Clark is Carrie Cunningham, Officer of Equity, making $69,352 now, but set to get a sweet pay bump under the new raised pay bands made possible by cutting instructional minutes from school children and raising the property taxes of poor Cleveland residents.

Cunningham and Clark’s names were often on the furniture invoices and orders for Trent Mosley. I have asked for documents about the creation of the Equity Division, including lists of all of the other people who applied for and were interviewed for these very comfy administrative jobs. Never received anything. It really does seem like the division was created to give Mosley a job and for Mosley to reward loyalty. Last fall I received an invoice from eCornell University online classes for equity. We spent $15,000 (out of the IDEA reimbursement fund) so Carrie Cunningham could add that certificate to her LinkedIn account. At the time, I wondered why CMSD didn’t just use the online equity courses from our local Cleveland State University, but I suppose that wouldn’t be fancy enough for our administrators.

Anyhoo, lacking a background in equity education means that of course Dr. Mosley and his team have to hire equity consultants to run equity programs. That is why we hired Equity Matters and paid them over $500,000 (I assume we paid them but only Stockdale really knows, I suppose) to educate the administrators. Now we are paying or at least contracting with Meme Styles to run an Equity Audit for the school district. It’s only $157,000 dollars, but the things we have tasked her to do are almost all things our administrators in the equity division should be doing.

Creating equity surveys? Creating social media posts about the equity surveys? Collecting and interpreting the data from the surveys? Really? We need to pay a consultant from Texas to do this for us? We have $400,000 worth of salaries with equity in their title and we need a consultant for this? I did speak to someone in communications who suggested that having Meme Styles run the focus groups made sense, but they scoffed at all of the other items in the scope of her work.

Circling back to board meetings, how often are Trent Mosley and his equity team going before the school board and reporting about their division? They are spending a lot of money on consultants, but I don’t see them reporting to the public. Trent and Sonja are often in attendance, sitting together as you might have seen on Fox8 News when Ed Gallek tried to get Trent to talk about his expensive chairs.

If equity is a serious concern for Dr. Morgan, then he should have been more serious in his staffing of the Equity Division. The employment of Trent Mosley was the fault of Eric Gordon. The continued employment of Trent Mosley is the fault of Warren Morgan.

Publicly Cleveland Conversations

Rather than just telling you that we now have 894 participants in the Facebook group dedicated to this blog, I want to show you some of the conversations we are having.

The staff and families from Newton D Baker School are engaged in a lawsuit against CMSD now. They talk about it in the Facebook group and the discussions are worthwhile. I try to highlight them as much as I can. Additionally, I have heard about other issues facing the NDB families:

So, no, it’s not just a few instances. It’s amazing the information we can learn when we all have a place to talk to one another, whether we are east side or west side school users. Mayor Bibb’s education chief, Michele Pomerantz was insultingly indifferent during the virtual meetings about that school’s closure. She and the district made it seem like there were plenty of seats for all of the NDB students in two specific schools and heck, there are also other schools in the area.

It turns out that even though parents dotted all of the Is and crossed the Ts for schools, they didn’t end up getting the seats. I started hearing from staff at the two specific schools that they knew there weren’t going to be enough seats way back in April. Pomerantz and Morgan seem to have misled the NDB families. As a CMSD parent during the upcoming Building Brighter Futures school closures, you have to ask yourself just how honest Dr. Morgan and his team are going to be.

Gratitude

Thank you for your continued readership and sharing of these blog posts. Thank you for stopping to say hello if you see me out and about in Cleveland. It’s honestly wonderful to meet you. Thank you for the phone calls full of tidbits and leads. I’m trying to follow up on everything. Thank you for meeting me for coffee and giving me what I like to call CMSD Boot Camp. I have so much to learn and I am a willing student. Send me an email pollykarr@gmail.com if you want to meet up for coffee and continue my education. There is so much more to talk about.

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