You'll Do As You're Told
The appointed aren't the decision makers
If you didn’t get a chance to be at the CMSD school board meeting this past Tuesday, it’s really worth watching it on You Tube. During the CEO Message section to start off the meeting, Dr. Warren Morgan grew more and more defensive as he spoke. He was in a room full of teachers and a handful of parents and while he knows he doesn’t have to answer to them, he clearly finds it offensive that they oppose him. He came here to do the hard work, he said, and he was indignant when he demanded that any criticism of the district’s plans should come with solutions.
The hard work, as defined by Dr. Morgan, is gutting the extended year schools and cutting out 150 weekly instructional minutes from 21 Cleveland schools. Doing both would save around $9 million dollars per year, Morgan claimed. He reiterated the “findings” of Dr. Nick D’Amico’s “research” in saying that more time spent in the Cleveland schools wasn’t worth the money spent. He claims that in addition to making these cuts, the board is also considering taking a look at curbing spending elsewhere, like the lease at 1111 Superior, curbing the excessive district travel, and leaning in hard on the 12.6% cuts he claims to have made in administrative staff last May. I have found Dr. Morgan to be disingenuous in his previous decisions, from taking away the Get More Opportunities fund to his administrative layoffs. I do not trust him. I do not take him at his word. I do not think he has strong character. So no, I don’t anticipate him truly changing anything at the administrative level.
But don’t watch this school board meeting to watch Dr. Morgan, watch it for the public comment. Some of the best parts of CMSD were well represented, the teachers, parents, and school partners of our extended year and extended day schools spoke, with an extra 13 slots afforded to just discussion of the school calendar proposal, followed by the usual 13 slots devoted to agenda items.
We got to hear from Drew Ferguson, CEO of Argonaut, a community partner with CMSD for Davis Aerospace & Maritime High School. Davis is an extended year school and Ferguson told the board what the students do with all of that extra time. He also told him about the amazing test scores and writing awards Davis students get, due to the rigor of their school, which is made possible through the extended time in school. The take away quote was when Ferguson said, “our students want more, not less.”
Not going to lie, I swooned. Davis is pretty much the only CMSD high school I’m considering for my sons. When I talk about the kind of education they need, Davis is it. But they aren’t headed to high school for three more years and if the school board votes to change the calendar of Davis, they are essentially ending Davis. As much as Dr. Morgan likes to drone on about having high quality schools in every neighborhood, he fails to understand that there are young men who come all the way from Medina, every extended day, just to fly drones at Davis.
After lots of applause for Ferguson, Benjamin Chronister got up to speak. Chronister is an English teacher at Cleveland School For Digital Arts and he used his time to address the issue of what a reduction of school days and school minutes would look like on paychecks. Not only will some teachers lose up to 18% of their pay with the calendar change, but these teachers will miss an August paycheck, too. It’s been well over a year since the district received an email for the union asking what will happen to the paychecks and in that time, the administrators and the board have given it zero thought.
Killing off the Cleveland Plan through curriculum changes got much more thought, it seems, than the part of the murder that involves taking away the individuality of the various school calendars. Which makes sense, really. Dr. Selena Florence made the curriculum changes. The mayor’s education chief is the one who demanded the unified calendar.
At first, the district administration tried to do the right thing by putting together data to show that ending the extended day and extended year of some schools made sense, but not for all the schools. But that is not what Bibb and Pomerantz want, so the whole administration had to get on board with a fully unified calendar. But the appointed school board is so disengaged from the actual oversight of the administration, that last year on February 27, 2024, hours before the contentious board meeting to propose the unified calendar to the community, Board Chair Elaqad sent an email asking if she could have information about the schools to be changed. This also helps me understand why Dr. Shridhar had to ask to see the data as it is, rather than what is curated by Dr. D’Amico.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, this school district hates teachers. They don’t respect what teachers do every day in the schools. They criticize teachers when the test scores are down and steal the credit from them when the test scores improve. To not even have a passing concern for the loss of pay and the loss of a full paycheck is despicable. Our teachers deserve better.
Following Chronister was Liz Pangrace, a parent with children in the district and a teacher in the district. She doesn’t agree with the unified calendar cuts and brought up the recent levy passage, saying that she didn’t think the voters were expecting these kinds of cuts based on the support the levy got. She properly put this decision on Mayor Bibb and suggested that it would become a problem for him in his upcoming election. And that’s the thing… Justin Bibb won a resounding race against Kevin Kelly. However, the election was still just 14.7% support for Bibb, 8.7% support for Kelly and 76.54% of Cleveland not even bothering to vote for either of them. It won’t take much to remove Bibb if the voters are agitated enough to turn out. I know I’m motivated.
Jimmy Musser, a 2024 Excellence In Teaching Award winner, got up to speak abut all of the extra things his students get to do because they have more time in school. He didn’t want it to be taken away from them.
Andrea Dockery Murray, John Adams teacher and frequent public commenter, suggested that the extra time for the students was important.
The union leader, Sheri Obrenski also spoke. She started off by saying she wouldn’t be as fiery as she had been in February 2024, and she surely wasn’t. I think a union head should be fired up for her teachers losing pay and a paycheck, but Obrenski went with docile instead. I don’t know why.
Another teacher from Davis High School spoke. Again, I swooned. Later, after public comment, I got to meet some Davis staff out in the parking lot and I did the fan girl thing. They are like celebrities to me.
When my wife, Stacey Steggert, got up to speak, she was doing so from a Google Doc that she had been writing while the others spoke. Which now that I think about it, makes me wonder what she was going to do if she has been called up first. **She has informed me that she was editing to address Dr. Morgan’s comments. Anyhoo, here is what she said about the Dr. D’Amico study the board will use to inform their vote.
I am a Collinwood resident and parent of 2 CMSD students. I want to offer a word of caution about relying on the presentation Nick D’Amico made regarding the findings of the CAER study. In his presentation, Dr. D’Amico withheld some significant information that was included in the CAER study.
Full disclosure: Adam Voight at CAER was the methodologist for my dissertation. I greatly admire and respect his work. And as always, his research design is impeccable. However, there are some substantial problems with what was presented to the board and how the findings were framed.
I’m going to talk about slide 11, which compares the attendance rates for different points in the extended school year because this is the easiest issue to unpack in under 3 minutes. There is no mention of attendance in relation to extended school day. The table only shows fluctuations in attendance rates for extended year schools. The chart serves the running narrative that there is such a dramatic decline in attendance outside the traditional school year that there is no point to extending the school year. The findings demonstrate that this is not true, and CAER concluded that the calendar doesn’t impact attendance, so the perceived problems with sudden declines in student attendance really are just perceptions. In fact, the average attendance rate for HS on traditional calendars during the 2023-2024 school year was 71.2%. For K8 it was 83%. Though attendance rates do fluctuate during different parts of the school year, at no time does the attendance rate for extended year schools drop below that of the traditional calendar. But Dr. D’Amico reported the findings without reference to a traditional calendar on the slide, which is misleading. He gets to report that oh, look, it’s true that attendance is lower outside the traditional school year. It’s not exactly false information, but you have to really go looking for other information to get the full picture. In all cases, the attendance rates shown on slide 11 are at least equal to, and in some cases greater than, the attendance rate for traditional schools; and the average attendance rate for extended year schools is higher during the regular school year in comparison with schools on a traditional calendar. But Dr. D’Amico’s slide doesn’t tell you this.
There is quite a lot that is not made explicit in a similar fashion, including information about demographics, per pupil cost, use of instructional time, and academic outcomes.
Perhaps most problematic is what is left unexplained about the research strategy of propensity matching using NWEA scores to identify similar students. NWEA scores are strong predictors of student performance on state assessments. One of the findings produced by this study, that students with similar NWEA scores score similarly on state assessments, is something you could find by looking at the NWEA website. But what is really interesting is that students attending schools with extended instructional hours do actually score better on state tests, according to the CAER study, but the differences in outcomes are muted due to the inclusion of NWEA scores in propensity matching and dismissed by Dr. D’Amico as unimportant. Despite what seem to be Dr. D’Amico’s best efforts to minimize the differences in outcomes, those differences still show up but you would have to have some fairly specialized background knowledge to know this.
I’d love to talk more about the issues and solutions that I don’t have time to address in 3 minutes. I would attend any meeting that the board or administration would like to invite me to, especially if I could be afforded more time. But in the interim, I urge the board to take extreme caution in relying on this presentation to guide your decision making process.
Rounding out the speakers for the first half of public comment was the principal of John Adams and the principal of Lincoln West. Both spoke in support of shortening their school year and the hardships their students face by having to spend so much time in school. The John Adams principal said something about their schedule not leaving him much time for self care and then I rolled my own eyes up inside my head with such great force that I may never recover.
The school board will vote on the unified calendar at the April 29th meeting. I hope that by then, more parents will have heard about this, learned about this, and come out to protest this. If you don’t get public comment slots, come with signs. Follow the example of the Cudell Park protestors. Make sure the board, and more importantly, Mayor Bibb, know that you do have an opinion on this issue.
When I got to speak during the second part of public comment, I spoke about the layoffs that never were really laid off last May. I feel certain that the six board members who bothered to attend the meeting had no idea what I was talking about.
In the end, I know that the board will vote how they are told to vote. Dr. Morgan is an empty suit CEO and while we pay a lot of money for his Executive Leadership Team, there is just not a lot that they do that isn’t directed from the office of the Mayor under the direction of Michele Pomerantz. We are going to lose the extended days and the extended year and many students because of the foolishness of Pomerantz.
In the days after the meeting, I found myself wondering if Dr. Morgan has ever been back to see what the students at Davis do. He visited once when he got the CEO job and did the Listen & Learn tour. But has he ever gone back? I submitted a public records request for his school visitations. While he is often busy with travel, surely he has some time to pop into these schools for a visit.
The Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook now has 709 members and a lot more conversation this week with all the new members. Check it out to see a letter written by a first grade student who watched the school board meeting with her family and wanted to send a letter to Dr. Morgan. She is thoughtful and has great handwriting.
This blog has also had some growth. There are now 455 subscribers and several are new this week. It’s fun to see the analytics where I’m getting 255 daily reads when I haven’t put out anything new for two weeks. My apologies, but I was using my time to be the stage manager for the Campus International School third grade production of Finding Nemo. Just one more enriching thing our students get to do because we have a longer school day.
If you are so inclined, please share this blog with others, especially CMSD families. I think the school board hopes to take this vote without much parental pushback. Thus far, they have been successful. Families need to know. I have stepped out of my comfort zone and started to actually talk to people about what is happening and what they can do to raise awareness. I made fliers with contact information and printed out that Michele Pomerantz email to hand out to families. I will be handing more of them out on March 26th at the Cleveland Children’s Museum during the CMSD families FREE event. Feel free to share the text of this call to action with others.
This information and call to action has been prepared by Campus International School parent, Polly Karr, who has been writing about CMSD spending issues for the past year on the Publicly Cleveland Substack which can be found here: https://publiclycleveland.substack.com/
She is also the sole administrator of a Facebook group called Publicly Cleveland Conversations
https://www.facebook.com/groups/805480378410077/
The $4 million savings that comes from cutting 30 minutes from each school day comes from a $1.9 billion budget. That’s 0.2% of the budget. It’s a savings of less than 1 CENT per dollar of the budget. Put another way, they save $1 ONE DOLLAR for every $500 they spend by cutting instructional time.
If you would like to have your voice heard by the CMSD school board, please consider sending an email to school board attorney, Kevin Burtzlaff, and in the text of the email, ask him to forward it to all members of the school board.
Kevin.Burtzlaff@ClevelandMetroSchools.org
Board of Education
Administration Building
1111 Superior Ave E, Suite 1800
Cleveland, Ohio 44114
Phone: (216) 838-0000
Send emails or actual letters, as they are subject to public records requests.
You can also sign up for public comment the morning after the April 15th board work session.
You will go to this page https://www.clevelandmetroschools.org/Board-of-Education and there will be a link for sign up. If the link is present and you fill out the form, you are officially signed up for public comment. There will be no other notification.
There are only 13 slots, so if you get one, please use it. The meeting with public comment and the vote on the calendar recommendation will be April 29th. Even if you don’t get a speaking slot, show up with signs showing your message.
Send an email to Mayor Bibb’s Education Chief, Michele Pomerantz: MPomerantz@Clevelandohio.org
Pomerantz is the one who pushed this calendar change last year, and to their temporary credit, members of CMSD administration pushed back about changing the calendar for the successful schools. I found this out through public record request of email communications.
You can also send an email about your thoughts to Mayor Bibb, as he chose Dr. Morgan and the majority of the current school board members. Mayor@clevelandohio.org
The 150 weekly instructional minutes are the most important thing to me as a current Campus International School parent. As a hopeful future Davis parents, the extended year is crucial.
The board could make compromises and make the cuts on a school by school basis. The board could make a stand for Cleveland school children. The board could do the right thing even if it means upsetting the Mayor.