by Chuck Hoven

   (Plain Press December 2025) The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) Board of Education and the citizens of Cleveland are tasked with reviewing a plan for the future of the school district that will have a profound impact on the future of the City of Cleveland. The plan is titled Building Brighter Futures: A Pathway to Sustainable Student Success. The task in reviewing the plan over the next few weeks is to determine if the theory behind the plan is sound and if the CMSD has the personnel and resources to implement the plan and sustain it over time.

   In addition to the long-term facilities planning involved in the Building Brighter Futures plan submitted to the Board of Education by Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Doctor Warren Morgan promises “a pathway to sustainable student success.”

NEWS ANALYSIS

   The CMSD’s most recent five-year financial plan projected a $150 negative fund balance in the fifth year – calling for finding a way to reduce expenditures or increase income by $30 million per year. The Building Brighter Futures plan to merge schools and close buildings estimates that it will reach that goal and reduce expenditures by $30 million per year.

   CEO Warren Morgan’s Building Brighter Futures plan says it will also provide students with more academic, career development, and extracurricular choices. The larger school populations projected for next school year, will allow schools to not only offer a more diverse curriculum, but also to have more support staff available in each building. The plan calls for a full-time nurse in every building and a full-time counselor in each high school.

   The merged high schools, with larger student bodies and more teaching staff, will allow for more choices for high school students in terms of career pathways, college credit courses, electives, honors courses and sports. Each school will have more choices available for students than the individual schools that merged to form the new high school.

   The plan promises that all K-8 schools will offer options for students beyond art, music, and physical education. The plan calls for all students to be in upgraded buildings. This includes the eventual opening of three new school buildings – Marion Seltzer K-8, a new east side high school to house the combined Glenville and Collinwood high schools, and a new building for Lincoln West High School.

Implementation Questions

   The theory behind the consolidations appears to be sound. Larger student populations allow for more faculty and more curriculum, services, and extracurricular activities. However, a number of assumptions in the design and implementation of the plan deserve careful examination by the Board of Education and the public.

   The plan projects a declining birthrate in Cleveland and says the student body has declined from 70,000 students in 2004 to 34,000 students today. While the district has lost 36,000 students in the past 20 years – all that decline in the number of students is not due to population decline. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says that in 2002, Cleveland had 16 charter schools with approximately 3,000 students. Today, according to the Thomas Fordham Institute, Cleveland now has 66 charter schools with 17,984 students. In addition to students choosing to go to charter schools, some families choose voucher or private schools and others leave the City of Cleveland when their children reach school age.

   How will school closings impact the choices that families make as to where to send their children? Will families choose to go to a closer charter or voucher school? Will families move to be closer to the CMSD school building that their children’s school is now housed? Will the greater offerings of curriculum and extracurricular activities help CMSD schools attract students now attending charter or voucher schools?

   What will happen to neighborhoods where schools have closed? Will they see an exodus of families with children? How does the closing of K-8 schools jive with Mayor Justin Bibb’s promise of a 15-minute city? How will parents of young children react when the K-8 CMSD school is moved farther than a 15-minute walk from their home?

   Another concern revolves around the size of the schools. Some teachers in smaller schools say the size of their school isn’t related to the level of student achievement. There are also benefits of smaller student bodies in terms of faculty, students, parents and administrators having a better chance of developing a community where “everyone knows your name.”

   Another concern involves the transition from small student bodies to larger student bodies. Will high school principals that now administer a school with three hundred to five hundred students, be able to handle the transition to administering a school with over a one thousand students? 

   How will CMSD handle the mergers of existing high schools that have uniquely different curriculum offerings? Will the principals of each high school involved in the merger be retained as an assistant principal? Or will one principal of the merged schools be expected to take on the responsibility for maintaining the quality of all the curriculum offerings? It is especially concerning when the curriculum of each of the merged schools involves cultivating and maintaining relationships with the community outside of the school. For example, how will CMSD assure the continuation of the quality of its exceptional schools such as the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine in a post-merger world when one principal will be charged with four merged schools in the John Hay building?

Sustainable Future

   In recent decades Cleveland residents have voted for property tax levies to support the school system. However, the City of Cleveland’s Mayors and City Councils have continued a policy of 15-year tax abatements for all new construction of housing in the community. Instead of compensating the CMSD for the revenue that registered voters in the community decided it should receive from all property in the city, the City has decided it should keep the additional revenue from payroll taxes generated by new residents. When those 15 years of property tax abatement are up, experience shows that the pattern has been that the new revenue from the houses coming off tax abatement does not equal the loss of property tax from abandoned, foreclosed, and depreciated housing that has occurred over the 15 years of abatement. Thus, the CMSD has no significant local growth in its revenue. In a time when state and federal dollars cannot be counted upon for revenue growth, the school system is stuck in a continuing cycle where it is forced to make budget cuts every few years or ask for a new levy to pay for increase in expenditures that are not matched by any increase in revenue.

   Schools are labor intensive. Teachers and school staff expect periodic raises to keep up with inflation. While cutting the number of buildings and the maintenance costs may temporarily balance the budget, the balanced budget will not be sustainable without a source of revenue growth.

   Under the current taxation system, this revenue growth must come from property tax revenue growth. If the City of Cleveland continues to abate the property taxes on new development without compensating the school system for the lost revenue, there will be no growth in the budget for the school district. The promise of sustainable increases in curriculum offerings, staffing, and extracurricular activities will not be sustainable.

   City Council members looking for someone to blame for school closings in their neighborhoods, should look in the mirror. Giving away property tax that is due to the schools without compensating the school system for that loss of revenue will make the Building Brighter Futures: Pathway to Sustainable Student Success a temporary solution that is unsustainable over the long run.

   The City of Cleveland and Cleveland City Council need to start reimbursing the school system for any tax abatements they grant. Otherwise, we will in just a few years be facing cuts in the increased offerings that Building Brighter Futures has promised. While other communities have chosen to attract new residents by offering high quality schools, Cleveland has been doing the opposite for years. The City of Cleveland offers new residents the money that should be going to its schools and then lets the schools find a way to cope with the loss of revenue. This has not been working. If we want to retain our families with children and give them the best education possible, we must provide a regular local source of growth in the school budget.