by Chuck Hoven

   (Plain Press October 2026) Cleveland City Council’s Municipal Services and Properties Committee weighed in on the funding for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s (CMSD)Comprehensive Extracurricular Activities Program (CEAP) at its September 14^th meeting.

   Some of the activities that CEAP funds include field trips for kindergarten through grade five students, middle school sports, fine arts programs, and start-up funds for high school sports.

   Committee member and Ward 13 City Council Representative Brian Kazy asked representatives of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District how he could explain to his constituents the City of Cleveland giving $950,000 to CEAP when CMSD has a budget similar in size to the City of Cleveland and receives a substantial portion of the property taxes that residents and businesses pay.

NEWS ANALYSIS

   While some of the representatives of CMSD tried to answer his question, their responses did not tell the history behind the legislation, Ordinance number 1025-A-95. That ordinance created the partnership between the City of Cleveland and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District to fund what is now CEAP.

   The 1995 legislation called for creating new sections of three taxes “to fund recreational, cultural, and extracurricular programs in the Cleveland Public Schools, a portion of the costs of renovating, improving and maintaining the municipal stadium in the City and other municipal purposes.”

   The three taxes cited by the legislation were the admissions tax, the motor vehicle leasing tax and a parking tax. For the first ten full years of the legislation, CEAP received $2 million a year. Then Mayor Frank Jackson quietly reduced the amount to $1million a year. The Justin Bibb administration has funded the program at around $1 million — $1.25 million last year and is proposing $950,000 this year.

   When the CEAP program was receiving about $2 million a year, the revenue from the three taxes was about $20 million a year. Now the revenue from the three taxes is more than twice that amount, yet the funds to the extracurricular programs for Cleveland school children have been reduced instead of increased.

   The reason for the legislation including the Cleveland school funding in the first place is because the stadium building is exempt from paying property taxes. The idea of the legislation was to make up to the school system the money they would lose from not having any property tax revenue from the stadium building. Instead of making funding for Cleveland school children a priority, the City of Cleveland over the years has prioritized funding for stadium repairs, giving many millions more to Cleveland stadium repairs than the schools received each year.

   In 1995, Cleveland Mayor Michael White, members of Cleveland City Council and many Cleveland residents were highly aware of the impact of loss of property tax revenue on the Cleveland schools from sports facilities not paying property taxes. Just five years earlier in May of 1990, full page ads in the Plain Dealer promised that the Cleveland public schools would receive $15 million a year from property taxes from the new baseball stadium and basketball arena funded by a County-wide sin tax. However, soon after the tax was passed, local political leaders successfully petitioned the State of Ohio to exempt the new Gateway sports facilities from paying property taxes. (See “Double-dealing from the start: The Gateway Board works for owners only” by Roldo Bartimole in the August 2026 issue of the Plain Press).

   In the Municipal Services and Properties Committee Meeting both Ward 13 Council Representative Brian Kazy and Ward 5 City Council Representative Richard Starr brought up their concerns that would be costly for the CMSD to implement. Councilman Kazy would like to see a track at John Marshall High School that the school system promised him ten years ago. Councilman Starr would like to see the varsity athletic programs in the CMSD have all the security, technology, staffing, and quality facilities that he sees when Cleveland teams play in suburban or out of town stadiums.

   Part of the answer to both City Council Representatives requests would be to give CEAP the $16 to $20 million a year that has been going to the soon to be closed Cleveland Browns’ stadium. Afterall, the original legislation that raised the admissions, motor vehicle and parking taxes mentions funding for the Cleveland school programs before it mentions stadium repairs.

   The Bibb administration’s proposed allocation to CEAP, $950,000 for the roughly 34,000 CMSD students, amounts to about $28 per pupil for the entire school year. Cleveland City Council can do better that for our school children.