Earlier this week a friend sent me a link to something, I forget now, on the Shaker Heights City School homepage. When I looked at a photo on the page I gasped. Audibly. From the next room my wife asked what was wrong. It took me a minute to be able to say it out loud. The photo was from the new hire teacher school bus tour. I recognized faces. CMSD faces. Talented, wonderful faces. Laid off faces. Needlessly laid off faces. Faces that Cleveland school children loved. It took me a few more minutes to regain composure and be thrilled for them. From laid off to new hire. I remembered way back when my wife got her teaching job at Shaker. It was a teacher’s dream come true. I am genuinely happy for those former CMSD teachers. Shaker kids are going to love them, too.

When you think about it, the tumult in Cleveland schools ended up being pretty great for Shaker Heights. They got some talented, young teachers. They got a beloved principal for Fernway. In fact, the three finalists for the Fernway job were all CMSD administrators. I know this because I did a record request from Shaker.

These are the people who applied for the Fernway job.

Some familiar names on the big interview list.

And that is the All CMSD Final Three. The job was always Ms. Grier’s. You have to know Fernway to know that. You know who knows Fernway? Lora Cover. Who was acting as the HR Director consultant for CMSD during the Fernway hiring process? Lora Cover. Shaker Heights City School Board member, Lora Cover.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you were in the position to jostle someone out of a job they loved in order to hire them away for a different job? Wouldn’t it be awesome to not just rely on interview rubrics and generic letters of recommendation but to be able to peep into the full work history personnel file of a potential hire? You might even feel like a G_d. Or a Chief People Expert.

Lora Cover was paid $38,000 per month (out of ESC funds) to tell Dr. Morgan and the CMSD appointed school board which principals and building administrators should be cut and which should be retained. She moved people around like chess pieces. She was the HR consultant brought in to make the lists of which teachers would be laid off. There were lots of questionable moves on the teacher lay off lists. When CMSD found ways to bring back those laid off teachers, some couldn’t come back because they had accepted other jobs in other districts. Like Shaker Heights.

But wait, there’s more…

The other thing that happened this week is that Signal Cleveland had a story about a group called Future Ready Cleveland who are working to bring quality charter schools to Cleveland. I had recently been writing about how the focus of innovative education in Cleveland was now in the hands of Staci Starr and Tim Jones, two amazing school principals who just got kicked to the curb by CMSD’s HR consultant (Lora Cover) in the school consolidation plan approved by the school board appointed by Mayor Bibb.

Starr’s school, Cleveland Early College, was merged into the other schools in John Hay and she was left without a job. Jones was the founding principal of Davis Aerospace & Maritime High School, which was also merged into another high school. Both Starr and Jones quickly announced new education ventures that sounded 100% better than the consolidated schools they were leaving behind.

I brought my children into Cleveland schools for an innovative leader named, Julie Beers. I love innovative education ideas. I love when people genuinely care about education and Cleveland school children. I get the sense that Starr and Jones are like Julie Beers. For the record, that is the highest compliment I could pay to anyone. I am excited to see what Tim Jones can whip together before my 7th graders have to move on from Campus International.

I am not a fierce defender of public education for the sake of public education. Sometimes public education is the best choice. Sometimes it is not. I don’t hate the idea of charter schools. Back in the early aughts, I was enthralled by everything I could learn about the KIPP schools. There was also a flirtation with Jerry Brown’s charter military school in Oakland, CA. Not all charters are good. There are lots of unethical people working in the carter school universe.

Future Ready Cleveland was announced in a way that made the people running it seem like they are trustworthy innovators. Holly Trifiro was Mayor Bibb’s first Education Chief. She left after two years and was replaced by Michele Pomerantz, a person nobody anywhere has ever referred to as innovative. We didn’t hear much about Trifiro after she was out of city government. But she is back now.

Also back is Leah Hudnall. Hudnall was appointed to the CMSD school board by Mayor Bibb in 2022. She quit the school board two years later, determined to keep education and the Cleveland community in her interests. While Sara Elaqad said she had been honored to work with Hudnall on the school board, I was unimpressed. I most remember Hudnall being opposed to the school choice lottery and open enrollment.

“Leah D. Hudnall, the board member recently appointed by Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, said she “struggles” with the idea of the lottery system for students to get into some of CMSD’s higher-performing schools like the John Hay School of Science and Medicine, considering CMSD is an open-enrollment district that any student can attend.” -Ideastream interview, 2022.

I am grateful for the lottery system. When my daughter won the lottery for the school Julie Beers created, it was incredible. At that time we lived across the street from Nathan Hale. That would have been our neighborhood school. School choice worked for my family. And for the record, when I took my daughter to look at Science & Medicine three years ago, I was told that they struggled to fill their open seats every year. Cleveland students who met the criteria got the seats, not some boogey man student from Shaker Heights.

Anyhoo, back to the Future Ready… It was interesting to see who was behind the initiative for Tim Jones and Rooted School. We had all been wondering. But the other interesting thing is the word non-profit. When you come across a non-profit, you don’t have to just take the word of the press releases or the reporters, you can go to ProPublica and take your own deep dive. The original reporting by Signal Cleveland missed one of the board members of Future Ready. Not a big deal, as I am told she has stepped off the board. But hey, it’s kind of a big deal once you know it’s Lora Cover.

Without ProPublica, you wouldn’t know that Lora Cover was on that board. President of that board. She doesn’t include it on LinkedIn with her other board seats.

The other thing you get to look at on ProPublica is the IRS filings for the non-profits. You see, it looks like Holly Trifiro gets zero financial gain from this non-profit. And yet…

Trifiro was paid $381,591 for her consulting services for Future Ready. If you cannot find a way to enrich yourself through the non-profit industrial complex, especially in Cleveland, get yourself a consulting LLC.

So, the board of Future Ready, led by President Lora Cover, approved a contract to pay Trifiro. Trifiro was fresh off of her gig as Education Chief for Mayor Bibb and Lora Cover was about to be approved by Bibb’s board for an equally obscene consulting contract. New board member Hudnall was appointed to her school board seat by Mayor Bibb and his education chief at the time, Triforo. Lora Cover then went on to butcher the school building staff at CMSD, tossing Starr and Jones out to their ready futures with the help of Triforo and Hudnall. And Shaker Heights got a slew of excellent new hires.

During the tumult, CMSD took it’s best school (for academics) and smothered it to death with a pillow. Now it’s just John Hay High School and the entrance criteria is on pause. What are we going to tell all the future Cleveland students who excel at science and math and want a career in the medical field? Well, we could send them out of district to private school. Or, hear me out, we could create a new charter school for Science & Medicine. In fact, according to the tax documents, a science and medicine charter interest has donated money to Future Ready.

EDIT: a reeader noted “"Hey! A note on your substack Bio med stem didn't give Future Ready money -- it was the other way around. That section in the 990 is for grants given out by the nonprofit not grants they got."

As George Carlin would say, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

Let’s look at what Future Ready is promising to do for Cleveland with their non-profit.

Um, we had options, but all of you involved in this just culled some of the best options. And are you putting a high quality charter in every Cleveland neighborhood? Really?

You know, there was a time, about twenty minutes ago when Education Chief Holly Trifiro and school board member Leah Hudnall were in charge of a $1.9 billion dollar school district budget. They partly own that shitty reading proficiency.

Do you know who was getting kids ready for good paying careers right out of high school? Tim Jones. But Mayor Bibb’s school board killed his school and Lora Cover kicked him to the curb.

Yeah, about that… There was a time, twenty minutes ago, when the brain trust at Future Ready was in charge of the entire Cleveland Metropolitan School District. With money ($1.9 billion) and power (full mayoral control) they didn’t fix anything. In fact, they have made it significantly worse

You know who has been steering the direction of education in Cleveland since January 3, 2022? Trifiro, Hudnall, Cover, and Bibb. It’s not going well. Mix in the funding from the Haslams and this is almost surely going to end up being another Cleveland non-profit that gets money from non-profits and then gives it to other non-profits in what I like to call a non-profit circle jerk. I’m willing to bet a $5 bill (which is all I have) that not one dollar from Future Ready ever helps a Cleveland kid unrelated to any of the board members. If they couldn’t make education better for Cleveland kids when they held all of the power and all of the money (even CTU President Obrenski rolled over for the charter fans) why would anyone believe they can do it through this mechanism?

So long, farewell

Diana Welch Howell is stepping down from her appointment to the CMSD school board. She was concerned that her work at Key Bank would somehow be a conflict of interest with the financial dealings of the school district and Key Bank. I get that. But if the CMSD school board, headed by Sara Elaqad, can approve a $100,000 sublease of office space proposed by CEO Warren Morgan, for SAY YES Cleveland whose lease terms approving board includes, director Sara Elaqad, chair Warren Morgan, and vice chair Michele Pomerantz, is anything really a conflict of interest here?

I will most remember Welch Howell for her full throated defense of district administrator raises after gutting my childrens’ instructional minutes. You see, she said it would save CMSD money in the long run by helping us retain our valued administrators who were leaving for better pay. So everyone got at 1111 Superior got raise both big and huge. But guess what? Money can’t keep people in a toxic work environment. Money won’t keep people tied to their desk in the midst of chaos. The finance department got raises. The finance department saw long time workers flee. The program managers have bolted. The raises cost us money. Lots of it. And finance whiz Welch Howell was wrong. Now she too is fleeing the chaos she always voted Yay for.

That’s Nick D’Amico, massager of data, Anna Turner who failed to get textbooks to all students until after a full quarter into the school year, Erin Frew who runs around student protests telling children to disperse, Dr. Morgan, Jose Gonzalez the wearer of may titles and hats, Selena Turner who has unified the curriculum at all schools, Megan Traum who attends five hour Friday meetings, and JR Tomkinson, chief of staff to the CEO with little to no education background.

They were attending a program at Harvard that most added to their LinkedIn profiles before the ink dried on their certificates.

I never got any information about this expenditure from CMSD. I had kind of forgotten about it until I received records from the ESC. These Harvard program costs were paid for out of the ESC subsidy funds, which Dr. Morgan requested from his magic lamp of state funds.

Thirty-seven thousand dollars for this PELP program comes to about $4,600 per attendee. In my head, when I did the math, it made me think of how much money a student gets for the Cleveland Scholarship. That would be $6,165 (k-8) for a full year at a private or parochial school.

Public school administrators, the Cleveland Teachers Union, many parents, and Sara Ealaqad, appointed school board chair, do not like that public dollars go to private schools. While most of the decline in CMSD enrollment is attributed to the decline in birthrates, over 8,000 students use the Cleveland Scholarship each year to attend private school instead of Cleveland public schools.

At the City Club forum in May, Sara Elaqad brought up the state funding for private schools as a negative. “Elaqad also noted the state is spending more than $1 billion per year to fund private-school vouchers now. She said the $8,408 scholarship that high-school students receive to attend private schools is more than what the state provides per-student to CMSD.” Her understanding of the numbers doesn’t seem to be quite accurate. It was primarily interesting because it was the second time she had brought it up publicly.

It remains unclear if Sara Elaqad would like to deprive students using the John Peterson and Autism scholarships of their educational opportunities.

In April, at an appointed school board meeting, Elaqad brought up not only the “costs” to CMSD of public money going to tuition at private schools, but she also mentioned that CMSD is required by law to pay for the transportation of these students to their private school. That is done through RTA passes or PILO for up to $600.

In the past, CMSD officials have chosen to remain silent on vouchers. It probably would have been wise for them to remain so. Since they have chosen to speak up, we should ask: why should poor children in Cleveland be denied the opportunity to use public dollars for private schools when Dr. Morgan and other members of the district administration, made wealthy by our property tax dollars, get to use public dollars to attend private universities?

This isn’t the only record of Dr. Morgan asking for public money to pay for a self enriching program at Harvard, a private university.

The money that funds the Educational Service Centers comes from the Ohio legislature. It is public money. Dr. Morgan, who makes $299,000 from the collection of property taxes of poor Cleveland residents. Surely he could have written a personal check for this resume fluffer. No child in CMSD benefits from this expenditure. Why does our appointed school board allow this?

It’s not just Harvard getting our public dollars. Cornell does, too. We hired a bunch of people for the Equity and Talent department (before they changed their named to please President Trump) and gave them salaries for their expertise. The people we hired were not experts in equity and needed to bone up on the subject at public expense. They chose to attend classes through Cornell’s online program.

These eCornell certificates were also quickly added to the very thin LinkedIn profiles of several employees.

Why should we use public dollars so that Anna Turner can add Harvard to her resume and Nicole Tomkins can add Cornell to hers? Even if these administrators needed these educational enhancements to perform their jobs, the same programs are offered at Cleveland State and Ohio State, both public universities.

How does spending public dollars at private universities create a justifiable benefit while sending public money to Birchwood, Urban Community School, Hawken, St. Ignatius, or Our Lady of Angels is seen as taking money away from CMSD schools?

"We're not operating with the same level of resources for our public school kids who are going to need to rely on our public schools, and we've got a responsibility as a district to do the best we can with those dollars that we do get, but we are in a little bit of a tough situation in Ohio," Elaqad said.

Sure, she said it, but what is she going to do about it in the one area she and other appointed school board members can control?

Transparency note: my daughter attends a private high school that does not accept vouchers and our family does not take the PIL transportation dollars.

When I sent out my June 3rd piece, it was about public records from the Cuyahoga Country ESC. I had received CMSD spending lists and from that I made specific requests for documents. Also in June, I heard that CMSD hired a new Officer of Talent. This came as Lora Cover’s expensive HR consulting contract ended and new positions had to be created for the administrators being “laid off” in budget cuts. After I confirmed what I heard, that Paul Hoover the Network Leader is now the Talent Officer, I nodded my head because of course that’s what happened. The district level administration takes care of their favorites, ensuring that they have a fancy chair at the table when the budget cut music stops.

Of course, being familiar with Paul Hoover’s resume I did wonder what made him qualified to be the Talent Officer. I figured that his lack of human resources experience didn’t really matter as much as him being a lap dog. Probably even helped, to be honest. Paul Hoover was going to remain a highly paid administrator in CMSD no matter what.

Yes, telling people about Paul Hoover’s new position allowed me to make my favorite smirky face. But when I received a batch of records from the ESC a few days ago, the smirk became a scowl. You see, in that batch of documents was a Dr. Morgan request for money so CMSD could perform a search to fill the Talent Officer position.

Dr. Morgan “needed” this money so that he could pay the Alma Advisory Group $52,000 to find Paul Hoover. You remember the Alma Advisory Group don’t you? We gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars to find us Dr. Morgan, JR Tomkinson, and Candice Grosse. I have put in a record request for interview rubrics and application materials for all of the people that I’m sure applied for this job that Paul Hoover won on merit alone.

Let’s look at LinkedIn to see the kinds of experience one might have to be an HR Talent Officer. Lora Cover held that position back in the Eric Gordon era before becoming the go to HR consultant Dr. Morgan brought back to guide us through troubled times (of laying off teachers we really needed considering almost all have been called back and it’s only July).

Cover’s education relates to this work.

The woman clearly eats, sleeps, and breathes human resources since the moment she started higher education. Then there is Stephen Christian, a Talent Officer people were sad to see leave the district. His education?

Christian’s experience…

Laura Mulvaney, CMSD’s Executive Director of Strategic Staffing (who will make much less than Hoover) has some experience.

Oh, and there was that Matthew VanHoose guy who seemed to be in line for the top job in Talent before Lora Cover made him big sad. Wonder what experience he had?

We could also compare the CMSD Officer of Talent position to that of Amy Grover, the Chief Officer of Talent in Columbus City Schools.

Amy Grover is one of the higher salaries in Columbus, I don’t know what Paul Hoover will make as Talent Officer but he was making $160,000 (post pay band increase) as a Network Leader.

Are we curious as to what the Alma Advisory group saw when they collected up Paul Hoover’s resume for the top job in human resources? This job manages around 6,000 employees.

I do not believe that anyone other than Paul Hoover was considered for the job. I won’t know what for sure until I receive the search records. I do know that his background pales in comparison to other people who hold this position in school districts. I don’t care that Dr. Morgan wanted to reward a Yes man. I really don’t. The administration has become a clown show. I care that our appointed school board continues to let Dr. Morgan spend taxpayer money like this. $52,000 is the year long salary of a laid off teacher. But the appointed school board lets Dr. Morgan set it on fire in the middle of Superior Avenue.

Property taxes are tax payer money. ESC funds are taxpayer money. Money from Columbus is taxpayer money. Money from DC is taxpayer money. Dr. Morgan is going to waste that money like any other education bureaucrat. A school board should oversee it, guide it, and sometimes halt it. But this appointed school board will not.

Speaking of electing a school board…

Our group is currently circulating petitions to get the question of electing a school board on the ballet. We need 4,300 registered Cleveland voter signatures. We would like to have more than that when we turn them in. The first week that we had the petitions, I drove 320 miles all around Cleveland to deliver them to volunteers. While I think we have a lot of petitions circulating, we could always use more help. Sarah Hodge’s brilliant mother came up with the idea to do a big, one day petition push. So we are going to do it. Sign up to volunteer or stop by to sign the petition on Sunday July 26, 2026 from 2 to 4pm.

If you can join us on July 18th, we will have another meeting of the Elect A School Board group, during which we will be making signs and plans for Petition Day. If you have any questions, Sarah Hodge has put her phone number on the fliers and you can always email me pollykarr@gmail.com .

Special shoutout to CTU president Errol Savage and the CTU Executive board for getting so many of our teachers and paraprofessionals back into positions. Our students need them. Keep fighting, there is more to do.

If you attended one of the twenty-eight graduation ceremonies that featured a speech from Dr. Warren Morgan, you would have heard all about how difficult this past school year was for him. I wept openly upon hearing of his plight and was happy to see that he and the ELT (executive leadership team) were able to mix work and play recently at First Tee- - Cleveland. Poor Karen Thompson is still answering emails from KCBLA Grandma because the custodian at KCBLA has still not done the work. Selena Florence is doing something in those Five Hour Friday meetings with her team. I can’t imagine anything more dreadful than a five hour meeting. I prefer e-mail meetings. But that’s problematic because her e-mails are public record. I’m sure Andrew Roman has been wrung out with legal department issues. And Kevin, whoo boy, that budget is some heavy work. Mr. Burtzlaff has his hands full dealing with all the emails being sent to him by the CMSD student activists. No idea what Trent and Lisa have been up to, but I’m sure it was… whatever.

Let’s not forget how hard all of this has been for interim Talent big wig, Lora Cover. She has returned to her inspiring videos on LinkedIn to share with her followers all that she learned during her “inspiring” time at CMSD. Having read through her evaluations of Matthew VanHoose I assume she must have had a difficult time working with someone directly under her who had a vastly different impression of his work than she did. Not to mention having to sit through all of those layoff meetings when each of the people she was cleaving from their pay and benefits knew she was being paid $37,000 a month.

Anyhoo, many laid off CMSD teachers and paraprofessionals are scrambling to find new employment. The teachers who survived the Cover Cuts are being told to pinch pennies for a more realistic CTU footing when the next contract negotiations begin. Cleveland residents are facing soaring costs for daily living expenses and more Cleveland homeowners are behind on their property taxes than ever before. Oh, and the teachers at the formerly extended day/extended school year schools are going to feel the paycheck pain of the unified calendar this August. I hope they can find some comfort in that at least the rich administrators got richer this year.

School funding

Direct payments from the state are just one of the ways schools get funded. That’s the part we focus on when we talk about the Ohio legislature not fully funding our public schools. We don’t talk as much about the $50+ million dollars that the legislatures distributes to the ESCs (educational service centers) each year.

The intent of those funds is to pool together money for several school districts to be able to take advantage of cost savings and resource sharing when it comes to curriculum and instructional support, professional development for educators, school improvement initiatives, special education, early childhood programs, cooperative purchasing, fiscal services, and the rapid implementation of statewide priorities. The ESCs help spread out the overhead costs and centralize expertise. They can help leverage other grants and, ultimately, enhance teaching, learning, and student performance. One of the most important ways the ESCs support the school districts is through balloon arches.

For each request of funds from the ESC of Northeast Ohio, the district CEO must send a letter saying how much money is being requested and what the funds will be used for. In the above letter, Dr. Morgan says that CMSD needed $1,250.00 to pay Jai Pops LLC because the funds were “needed to pay a senior leadership gathering.” Needed.

Ahem, from my old high school forensics days I shall go with: need as defined by Merriam-Webster 1) necessary duty 2a) a lack of something requisite 2b) a physiological or psychological requirement for the well being of an organism.

Dr. Morgan told Dr. Mengerink that CMSD needed funds for a senior leadership gathering. Now, when this letter crossed the desk of Dr. Mengerink, or Bob, he thought of his solemn duties and the mission of all ESCs and fulfilled that need.

I am sure that you are curious how the ESC subsidy funds were spent by CMSD. Well, let me show you.

Needed.

Needed.

Need to obscure

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone connected to school district administration told me to look into the ESC funds. If I did, I still couldn’t buy a balloon arch, but I’d be pretty darn close. Way back in July of 2024, I was writing about the public records I had gotten about chairs and desks. But I had also requested spending for a holiday party Dr. Morgan threw for the ELT. I was told by CMSD legal that there were “no responsive documents” and like a sweet summer child, I believed them.

I wrote those words. But the tipsters kept insisting there was a grand party and the admin adjacent folks kept saying, “oh, they probably hid it in the ESC fund.” I did not know what that was. I asked about it but sometimes when people are well versed in their own world, they don’t spell things out enough for others to understand. Or I was too stupid to get it then. Several months ago a person gave me the ESC tidbit and explained it to me in a way that allowed me to start making requests. I still didn’t understand that I needed to make the requests from the ESC and not CMSD to get documents, but I learned.

This balloon purchase from Jai Pop was for that holiday party. I know that now because I got the public record and this part was included. This is what the ELT needed to celebrate the holidays in December 2023.

One could argue that the letter from Dr. Morgan to the ESC is a record that CMSD legal should have given me. This holiday party invoice says CMSD, not ESC, so it’s a record that CMSD probably had that they could have given me two years ago. Also interesting to note - when I make record requests from the ESC, which deals with multiple school districts and so many records, they are really quick getting me the records I seek.

Warren needs and Gordon needs

I have a real treat for those of you who think I didn’t care about spending soon enough and thus my concerns are dismissed now. I always try to cast a wide net in my record requests and the ESC gave me so much. The idea that “they probably hid it in the ESC funds” came from someone who has been with the district for a very long arc. I have the yearly list of ESC expenditures for CMSD from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and a partial list from 2026.

Gordon needed balloons, too, in 2018.

Why yes, I am curious about that Derek Richey payment and have requested the records.

I have made a lot of requests from these lists. I’ve already gotten some back and I am going through them. I think my next few blogs will be about how CMSD is using these funds. Also about what we could be using them for if our leaders were doing a better job balancing their wants with our needs. If you see something you find curious, the guy to ask is Andrew Pizzulo at andrew.pizzulo@escneo.org and just a regular email will do it. I’ve been asking in the following format: I would like a copy of the purchase order, invoice, letter detailing request from CMSD, and proof of payment for XXXXXXXX from the July 2023 fund report.

I need to tell you

The next meeting for the Elect A School Board group is set for Saturday June 6, 2026 at the CPL MLK branch from 2 to 4pm. I think this is the meeting where Sarah Hodge puts us into action, so it you can make it, we’d love to have your help.

On July 13, 2026 the Bond Accountability Commissioners will be taking an on site tour of the John F Kennedy High School, including a look at the new stadium and capital improvements. The public is always welcome to attend Bond Accountability meetings. I usually email school board attorney, Kevin Burtzlaff kevin.burtzlaff@clevelandmetroschools.org to RSVP and it seems to work.

Now go on with your summer of restoration, rejuvenation, relaxation, and golf.

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She should have resigned ten minutes after sending out this letter to CMSD families after the April 14th board meeting.

She should have resigned after the April 28th meeting when she tried to keep the public out of the meeting, claiming that the gymnasium had reached capacity. The teacher in this photo was threatened with arrest by a Cleveland Police officer because Elaqad told them not to let anymore people in. The teacher was trying to explain to the officer that she was signed up for public comment and needed to get in. He responded with, “do you want to get arrested?”

Once the rest of the public was allowed into the gymnasium, we still didn’t fill the bleachers and there was plenty of room for standing. People walked up to the podium with support and the support was turned away by Elaqad and her angry gavel, lest they create a fire hazard by blocking the aisles, she explained. The aisle in danger was never in danger.

Sara Elaqad was first appointed to the school board by Mayor Frank Jackson back in 2019. You can watch her swearing in on You Tube. While she had community involvement experience she has never had any particular education experience. I have not found any sources that indicate that she has children who attend CMSD schools. Recently at the City Club event to promote BBF, the moderator brought up former CEO Eric Gordon’s last State of the Schools speech in which Gordon said the state of Cleveland schools had never been stronger. At the mere mention of Eric Gordon many in the room snickered and giggled because the CMSD messaging post teacher layoffs has been that things have been awful since 2018 and only Sara Elaqad and Dr. Morgan have the balls to fix it.

Why didn’t she alert the public to the financial mess in 2019? 2020? 2021? 2022? Or even pre-November 2023? Was she asking tough questions during school board meetings then? No. Why did she approve such an expensive contract for Dr. Morgan if she “knew” the district was in tremendous fiscal crisis?

Has she asked tough questions behind the scenes? Did she tell people how to build brighter futures before? She has no right to curl up the corners of her mouth into a knowing smile now while everybody is blaming Eric Gordon and former board chair Anne Bingham for not closing enough schools fast enough.

In the time that Elaqad has been the board chair she has acted like she works for Dr. Morgan instead of the other way around. She has given him too much power to execute questionable contracts without seeking board approval. And if she truly believed that CMSD needed to lay off so many teachers to save money, she would have voted NO on paying full salaries and benefits to 60 teachers to act as building subs next year. Broke school districts don’t do that.

I think think Elaqad should step down. If not, she should be removed by the mayor. She should be replaced by Jerry Billups. He asks thoughtful questions. He tried to help get textbooks to students. He is a father of current CMSD students. He has yet to offend the parents of Cleveland.

Electing a school board

Replacing Sara Elaqad poor leadership on the school board is not enough. Cleveland residents should be able to elect their school board. Yes, we are going to elect some awful people, but it should be our choice. Our elect a school board group is just about ready to start circulating petitions to get this option on the ballot. You can be sure that I will let you know when it is time.

I put in a public record request for the audio and or video recordings from the speeches from Garret Morgan and East Tech high schools. I submitted the request on February 9th. I reminded CMSD of the request on March 6th. On May 6th I was told that the video could not be released because it would violate FERPA. My request was closed.

I reminded CMSD that the audio would not violate student privacy. I was going to reach out to the students who wrote to me with Vernon complaints to let them know that the video footage Vernon and The Word Church have posted on their Instagram are acknowledged FERPA violations but I got busy. I still need to do that. However, CMSD sent me the requested audio files today.

You can listen to them and judge for yourself if this was proper or improper. You can judge for yourself whether these twenty minute speeches were worthwhile at all.

The first speech of the day at Garret Morgan was almost exactly what teachers and students reported to me.

The second speech at East Tech is less rambling but has similar scripture quotations and invitations to his church.

The event that RA Vernon invited the students (though I would say implored at Garret Morgan) happened a day ago. The video he posted about it includes yellow school busses (yeah, I’m going to ask for receipts on how those got paid for) but no footage of students.

I still believe CMSD should legally force RA Vernon to remove videos with CMSD students from his and the church’s social media feeds. That CMSD has not done that but refused to release the videos as part of a public record sends the message that Dr. Morgan cares more about currying favor with his pastor than he does about protecting our students. The school board should demand it.

There is a segment of the American people that believes the teachers unions are so powerful that they control every aspect of education. Over the past two years, trying to argue in favor of keeping extended school days/years, trying to argue against a terrible curriculum imposed across all schools in the district, trying to argue in favor of keeping specialty schools special, trying to get textbooks in classrooms, trying to keep Building Brighter Futures from culling our teaching staff… well, I felt kind of alone.

There was no powerful teachers union that I could see or feel. There were impassioned teachers, yes. There were some teachers looking for a fight, yes. But they were not united. There were individual teachers speaking out. There were some individual schools standing up for their unique programs, but there was not a unified opposition to anything that Mayor Bibb or Dr. Morgan did.

Teachers at extended day/year schools lost a hefty percentage of their pay when their hours were reduced. There were shoulder shrugs in response. When I sat down with CTU President Shari Obrenski last fall and asked her about the possibility of teacher layoffs with BBF, she said she didn’t expect any layoffs. She said the retirements and natural attrition would prevent the need for layoffs. I think she actually believed that. It might as well have been a shoulder shrug.

When CTU members were frantically calling down to 1111 Superior to ask about layoff seniority lists and not getting any response, there should have been alarm bells ringing. There should have been urgency. Why weren’t they getting any answers? Public records show that an HR Director, Matthew VanHoose, was not doing his job. The job for which he received a 30% pay increase in the fall (from $98,000 to $127,836). After a brutal evaluation from the expensive HR consultant, Lora Cover, Matthew was put on an improvement plan. Matthew didn’t think he deserved that kind of treatment, so he quit. He walked away from $127,836 because he is not an educator. He does not care about Cleveland students. He will just go get another HR job somewhere else.

I’ve talked to some teachers and they had no idea there were issues amongst union leaders trying to get answers from district administration. There were rumors swirling on April 10th that there were questions about seniority lists and questionable teachers evaluations. But these issues with HR and VanHoose’s evaluation were apparent a month ago. I am not a teacher. That is not my union. But I have been feeling let down for two years now. I feel let down for the four Campus International teachers and our 5C who have been laid off. We have Campus parents who were laid off. Our school is really smelling the manure of the BBF propaganda.

Community Project

In 8th grade at Campus International School, an International Baccalaureate school, our students perform research and actions for Community Project. The students use this as an opportunity to give back to their community by identifying a need and then performing actions. The final presentation for Community Project happen in March, so our students are finished with that part of their IB education. Yet some of our 8th graders found a new cause the day they found out that Ms. K, their Algebra teacher, had gotten a layoff notice. There was sadness and crying for a few hours but then they kicked into gear. They collected the contact information for Dr. Morgan and the school board. They created a Google Doc and started compiling the information to share. They wrote out form letter examples. They made fliers and wallpapered our school with them

If that was all they had done, it would have been awesome. However, they were not finished. Inspired by the high school student walkout protests earlier in the year over ICE, and from the Davis student protests last year, our 8th graders staged a walk out in protest of the teacher layoffs. They managed to, among themselves, choose leaders for their movement, create signs, get parental permission and rally their fellow students last Tuesday afternoon.

There are some who will say that kids just use any excuse to get out of class. I am sure that is true for some students out on the sidewalk that day. But there are also genuinely informed and passionate students leading the protest. We know this because we have watched them being educated all these years. They learn about how their community works in our IB school. They learn about turning their information into action in our school. They learn how to stand up for others because of our school and our Campus families. There were a surprising number of parents are the walkout. They were there to give permission to the news crews. They were there to tell district administrator, Erin Frew, to back off, the parents were there for the students.

Officer of Schools, Erin Frew ($173,250) had no reason to be there for the student walkout. There was really no need for the CMSD Police and extra security to show up. Frew failed to disperse the crowd. Frew failed to keep the students from speaking to news cameras. Frew failed to intimidate school staff. The students were in control. They were protected by parents and staff, people who know them and care about them. No district level administrators were needed. Are they ever?

Once the protest was concluded, the students went back up to their classrooms and their school day of being brain numbed by iReady continued.

I’ll admit I was surprised later in the evening to see so many students show up at the school board meeting. They had their signs from earlier. They had their parents. They had their righteous indignation. Many of the students spoke with the assorted media before going into the auditorium for the meeting. They were calm, informed communicators. Not just Campus students, there were a number of students from other schools.

Before finding seats, the students paraded down the aisles, across the front of the stage and then up the second aisle. This was done so that the assembled district administrators had to look at the students and it elicited cheers from the assembled crowd. Now, I love Campus International students, but this picture here, is of a smooth, professional communications kid named Saadiq, and an overpaid ($153,473) Communications Director who knows he just got beat on messaging. I couldn’t love it any more than I do.

Keep an eye on Saadiq, my wife says he is going to be president some day.

The students of CMSD have the most to lose in these layoffs. As I always say, there is a short window of education time for these students. The administrators will move on to other jobs or stay here and continue to fail, but the students need teachers. They need paraprofessionals. They need their school building staff.

Out in the lobby of the East Professional Center there were teachers. More teachers than I have seen at a board meeting in the past two years. They were all wearing blue in solidarity with the union colors. Some had union t-shirts. When the new union president, Errol Savage arrived, the many colors of blue changed into one unified blue as he brought with him boxes of union t-shirts.

Teachers who had already taken seats in the auditorium came back out to get a t-shirt.

The act of putting on the shirts seemed to activate the membership. The murmurs became a solid buzz.

Sarah Hodge, leader of our Elect A School Board group had a tremendous before and after with her CTU shirt.

I’m not going to say that the shirts were everything, but they contributed a great deal to how the evening progressed.

Even the union guys were taken by the passion of the student led protest before the meeting got called to order.

When the appointed school board chair, Sara Elaqad tried to get the meeting started, the sound system failed her. We managed to get through the Pledge of Allegiance but then the crowd got vocal. The normal order of things got interrupted. Elaqad got visibly angry and kept threatening the audience of students, parents, and teachers that if they did not quiet down and let her have her way, the meeting would have to recess.

There was a lot of chanting and booing. It wasn’t like any other meeting I had attended over the past two years. When the agenda was mentioned, or budget, or math, the children would raise their signs up in the air at the appointed board. I was in the back of the auditorium, greeting parents and helping them find seats when I heard someone shout, “let them speak!” Then there were chants of let them speak. That’s when I saw Ms. Job, our Campus 5C across the room, doing the shouting.

At that point, Sara Elaqad banged her impotent gavel once more and the board exited the auditorium. The board left but all of those highly paid district administrators were sort of stuck in their seats in the front row. That’s when the students got out of their seats and took the stage with their chants and their signs. Right in the faces of the administrators who were had their eyes glued anywhere but on the children.

Left to right - JR Tomkinson makes $203,000 as the chief of staff to Dr. Morgan. Megan Traum makes $130,000 to be Dr. Florence’s strategic advisor. Nick D’Amico makes $138,871 as the statistics guy. Brent Effing Dean, the $29,000 raise guy makes $127,836 as the Executive Director of CTE. Matthew Rado makes $128,000 to be the executive director of charter schools. In the next row you have Karen Thompson making $216,176 to be the Facilities Chief. Behind her in the pink is Anna Turner making $153,473 to tell you that your children don’t really need textbooks. Everyone circled in red is keeping their job. The people in blue behind them are not. The people circled in red don’t care about your children and rarely come in contact with them. The people behind them spend entire days teaching and helping your children. Sara Elaqad is comfortable hearing from the administrators. She seems to despise hearing from teachers, parents, or students.

When the board returned to the stage, there were still chants and boos. Elaqad announced that because of the disruption, there would be no presentation explaining the layoffs by Dr. Morgan. It would just be a vote.

This is going to shock you, but even without the presentation and opportunity to ask questions, the appointed school board voted unanimously to approve the layoffs.

All substitute teachers in the district were also laid off. Some vice principals and deans were laid off from the closing/merging schools. And here are the district administration cuts:

The highest paid person on this list makes $101,000. Everyone else makes $50 and $60 thousand dollars. This isn’t even a million dollars in cuts. To make it worse, most of these people actually do work in the schools, working to make the lives of the most difficult students a little bit better. It would seem, that even if you are labeled an administrator, working with actual CMSD students is a negative mark against you.

The day after the protest at the school board meeting, there were a lot of news stories. The coverage added to the feeling of solidarity that had grown even stronger the evening before. In the afternoon every CMSD parent got a nasty-gram in their email. It was from Sara Elaqad telling us that the disruptions kept the board from being able to hear all of the many reasons Dr. Morgan had to layoff the teachers.

The presentation is a slide deck. It’s always a slide deck. This administration must get bonuses based on how many slide decks their offices generate in a month. The slide decks are always posted in the CMSD Board Docs. You didn’t miss out on any eloquent discussion. You certainly didn’t miss out on any probing, investigative questions for this appointed school board.

The best photo from Tuesday night goes to Signal Cleveland.

Keep making noise

The 13 speaking slots for public comment at the April 28th school board meeting were snatched up in less than 18 minutes on Wednesday. If you got one of those prized slots, please show up. If you didn’t get a slot to speak, please show up. Keep building the momentum. We lost the layoff vote but there are other battles and we have to keep the pressure on this appointed board, the Morgan administration, and Mayor Bibb. Share the Google Doc info in your schools and with other parents. Make yourself heard.

These two moms showed up with their kids and their very big signs. The following morning one of them answered her front door to direct CMSD retaliation for speaking out about all kinds of CMSD issues. You’ll be hearing more about that in the coming weeks. Just keep speaking out. Don’t let this board or this administration intimidate you or silence you.

Thank you to the local media who have provided excellent coverage of CMSD issues in 2026. Thank you to the CTU for flexing some muscle in the vocal chords. Thank you Ms. K, for everything, always.

Drifted off there a bit. Anyway, by the time I got home Friday, my phone was buzzing. The paraprofessionals labeled 5Cs (I can never remember what all the Cs stand for) and the PICAs, which are the planning center paraprofessionals, had ALL been eliminated. Not long after that, I started hearing about the teachers. So many messages, mixed messages, big numbers, smaller numbers, some panic, lots of confusion. Mixed in to that, the CMSD internet went down during OST testing, which seemed like a sign. It came back up and your child’s tests were fine.

Two years ago when I started this blog, if you had described to me what Friday April 10, 2026 was going to be like, I would not have believed you. Back then, I just wanted this information out and I wanted local news to cover our school district beyond sharing press releases. Two years into this and I’m giving out information to six or nine (depending on the subject) local reporters. I bothered one guy on his vacation but to his newsy credit, a few minutes after our texts I was hearing from his colleagues. Before noon I had done a Zoom interview with Ed & Peggy Gallek. Later in the day, ten minutes before I started working for our after school program, I was doing a Zoom interview with WKYC. The three news stations had a rotation of newly installed teachers union president, Errol Savage, myself, and Alicia Dodson, a fierce paraprofessional who had gotten her lay off notice.

Errol’s message, as the new leader of the union, smacked in the face with a mess just minutes after being sworn in, is this:

The District is NOT in financial crisis. Teacher and paraprofessional cuts are unnecessary. The cuts will not lead to a brighter future.

In the most recent audit of the school district by the state, administrative bloat was highlighted as an area of concern and where cuts are needed. Right-sizing the district means fewer buildings, yes. It also means fewer administrators at the district level.

Alicia Dodson’s message is that paraprofessionals are vital to the day to day student experience in our schools. Yet they are paid barely livable wages and shown a level of disrespect when it it’s time for union leadership to bargain for the next contract. One of the laid off paraprofessionals posted this anonymously on the Publicly Cleveland Conversations Facebook group.

I really do hope that the paraprofessionals are better represented in the next round of negotiations. As Dodson said so well when speaking at last month’s board meeting, “honor the work.”

What or who is driving this?

On Thursday, before the layoff notices went out, before Errol Savage was sworn in as the new union president, we both took turns in the News 5 studio chair to talk with Sarah Buduson. Sarah does a great interview. She asks open ended questions and just lets you talk. She has a great editing team, too, because I know I ramble and they make me sound like I am good communicator.

The main focus of that Thursday story was the expensive contract CMSD CEO Warren Morgan had given to an old friend of the district, Lora Cover. After leaving CMSD’s HR department, Cover did what so many former CMSD administrators do - she started a consulting business. She is a Chief People Expert. She is an HR content creator on LinkedIn. She is an elected school board member in Shaker Heights City Schools, where she claims to be committed to excellence in education for Shaker kids. She has never said a word about wanting an excellent education for Cleveland kids. To be fair, the members of shCEA would argue that Cover is not at all interested in excellent education for all children in the Shaker schools.

Here is an example of what I call the LinkedIn circle jerk (apologies, I am GenX and there is just no other way to describe CMSD administrator content on LinkedIn) and a perfect example of how Lora Cover doesn’t know anything about what Cleveland schools need.

At the time, Lora Cover was under contract as an HR consultant with CMSD schools for $272,000 for seven months of work. $38,000 per month to gut our teaching staff. That’s more money per month than a paraprofessional makes in a year. Stephen Christian, the man who was the head HR guy was making $175,000 when he left. Warren Morgan said, hey let’s spend more for less! Reminder, there are no financial guardrails in CMSD. The appointed school board is a YES on everything put before them. Drunken sailors look at CMSD and wonder why they stay on boats instead of plush offices at 1111 Superior.

The grand plan that Lora Cover has been working on for a couple of months involved sending the highly paid and not at all useful Network Leaders to the schools on Friday Morning, during working hours, to deliver folders with layoff notices in them. I wonder if the folders were emerald green to match Cover’s signature eyewear?

Network Leaders now make $160,000 after three years of pay bumps. So, Paul Hoover handed out layoff folders to paraprofessionals when his salary is the equivalent of 4.57 paraprofessionals. Some laid off teachers told Signal Cleveland that they got taken into a private room to get their folders. Since it was during their working school day, they were also told they could take the rest of the day off. WHAT ABOUT THEIR STUDENTS? The whole point of public education is educating students, so laying off their teachers during their class period and then telling them they can just go home, is insulting to the families that send their kids to your schools. I don’t begrudge anyone who chose to leave under upsetting circumstances like this, but this should not have been done during my child’s school day. During the f*cking “uber important” OSTs?? If this is Lora Cover’s work product, I think she should shut down her business. She is a failure at all of the things she claims in her LinkedIn content creation.

The layoffs are the Cover-ages

But let’s talk about overages. CMSD is understaffed in teachers and paraprofessionals. I think it’s mostly by design. Why bother with credentialed teachers when you can make due (not make education) with a long term substitute? Why spend money hiring a full teacher, when you can make due (but not always make education) with overages.

What is an overage, you might ask. It happens when teachers are given more students per classroom than they are contractually obligated to have. They also happen when teachers are out and there are no subs so a teacher is asked to cover those classes or class periods in addition to their work. For special education, it can mean having more students on a caseload or having more students in a classroom with IEPs (individual education plans). This is just basic overages examples and I’m sure the teachers in your life can tell you more.

Teachers get paid for overages. Well, in CMSD, they often have to file a grievance through their union to get paid because CMSD really only likes to pay district administrators and consultants on time. Paying teachers for overages costs a lot of money. For the 2022/2023 school year, CMSD paid out $729,067.27 in overages. That’s like 2.66 Lora Covers, which is a lot of money. This number does not included the extra percentage of money CMSD has to pay after a grievance.

Worse than that, you may not know if your student is in a classroom with a bunch of extra students. The district isn’t going to tell you that. I get notices if a child that came in contact with my child has a communicable disease. But no notices if my child is packed like a sardine in class all day because their teacher is covering additional classes. I find overages offensive because it’s not teaching. It is purely behavior management. How many days is that happening to your CMSD student?

So, we have teacher overages and we have long term subs and we also have a contract from last year to pay Teach For America $50,000 for them to recruit teachers for CMSD.

We need more teachers. I see that as a parent. We need more teachers, Warren Morgan sees the need to funnel more money to Teach For America using it as an excuse. We need more teachers, we see it in the overages. We see it in the exhausted faces of our current teachers. And yet, the great and powerful Lora Cover, who gives off Wizard of Oz vibes (reporters, don’t look behind the curtain or she will yell at you), came to the conclusion that our brighter future involves getting rid of 150 teachers and 120 paraprofessionals.

Make it make sense

We need those 150 teachers because that number is in addition to the 250 that have retired or been removed this year. A lot of people are saying that when September comes, most of those teachers will be recalled. That’s likely to be true. But when they get recalled, Lora Cover gets to send them wherever she sees the need. That’s not something that is easy to do in general in CMSD. Which is why a long term sub has been “teaching” music and now ELA in Kenneth Clement Boys Leadership Academy.

But it’s more sinister than that. The teachers union collective bargaining agreement says that if there are layoffs, teacher planning periods are automatically reduced from six each week to five. Perhaps the layoffs were issued just to trigger that clause, which gives the district administrators an opening to move encore teachers around? Encore are the extras that Warren Morgan has been promising that if we clicked our heels three times, and closed buildings, the brighter future would appear with more encore opportunities for all!

Once would have to be exceptionally cruel to layoff a teacher in the middle of a teaching day or hand a paraprofessional a folder with their COBRA health care options (which nobody except Lora Cover could possibly afford) just to recall them to jobs that are more convenient to administrators when it’s the administrators who makes those jobs unfillable in the first place.

Make all the NOISE

Go to the board meetings, even the ones without public comment. Talk to the reporters when they are begging you to give a comment. Make signs. Have your kids carry the signs. Tell the stories of what the paraprofessionals mean to your student. Don’t let this just happen. Lora Cover gets to slither back to her ginormous house in Shaker Heights with buckets full of cash meant for Cleveland kids. But make sure the school board feels the pain. Embarrass them. Shame them for the unanimous YES vote on these layoffs. If you are on the fence about staying in CMSD schools, find the truly greener grass and run. But still speak out for the teachers and the paraprofessionals. Still speak out about what your property taxes are paying for.

Shout out to this guy

Don’t know who he is, but his district is making cuts too and he didn’t take a pay increase.

I remember CMSD school choice assignment day in 2017. We already had paid a deposit for a seat at Menlo Park Academy, our safety school, and we were anxiously awaiting word from CMSD. We had only selected one school in the choice portal, Campus International. Up to that point I had only ever heard stories from Washington DC about school choice lotteries and they made me feel desperate. I really wanted a seat at Campus for my daughter. The way the lottery was explained to me at the time was that we got a ball because we were Cleveland residents. We got a second ball or maybe it was a weighted ball for Campus because my wife was getting her PhD at Cleveland State.

On the day that the selections would be made I took my children to the Cleveland Botanical Garden with our friends who were also waiting to hear about a seat at Campus. We were also with a friend who lived in Mayfield Heights and knew exactly where her children would go for kindergarten, middle school, and high school. While that kind of thing isn’t for me, on that day I thought she was better off for knowing without doubts. There are days now when I think about how much easier our lives would be had been house hunting in Solon three years ago instead of buying another Cleveland house. I hate to feel that way.

My friend got her CMSD email first. Her son got a seat at Campus. She was relieved that her choice to live downtown and stay downtown with little kids had been rewarded with a highly sought after school assignment. I had not gotten my email yet so I was instantly filled with dread and jealousy and beat myself up inside for ever moving into Cleveland with children. How stupid and reckless had I been? We were living in a house with boarded up windows and no roof and were counting on an education bet to pay off. I was distraught for what seemed like hours. In truth it was about ten minutes later that I received my CMSD email with the Campus International assignment. WE WON THE LOTTERY!

I thought about that day in 2017 a lot over the past few weeks. While my daughter has been off in high school for two years now, her fellow kindergarten class are about to be promoted out of 8th grade. They are all big now, like giants. Some of them have changed so much as their faces matured that I barely recognize them. Some are gone, of course, having left Campus throughout the years. But many have stayed and I have gotten to watch them grow up. I’ve gotten to be with their parents at those first events when we all felt so fortunate to be at Campus. I’ve been with them while we complained to one another about our school disappointments over the years. It’s weird to think that I will likely never cross paths with some of them ever again. Campus is not a neighborhood school. If we don’t make an effort to get together, our social lives mostly don’t overlap. It’s not all gooey sentimentalism. There are some parents that I look forward to never seeing again after May 28th. It’s the don’t let the door hit you on the way out feeling, but with a little bit of hoping the door does in fact hit them. Repeatedly.

I’ve also been thinking about it because the Communication department has been reminding everyone that Assignment Day is coming for the past two weeks. They encouraged people to film their scholar getting the assignment news and send it to the district to post on social media. In my social media feed I have seen several announcements for Benedictine, St. Ignatius, St. Edwards (all from CMSD employees, teachers and administrators) but none for CMSD high schools. CMSD asked the TikTok Vice Principal of Riverside to make an assignment day video, which they posted. Once scholar’s family submitted a video, too, but not much else. I didn’t see any happy videos from the Merging students jumping up and down about being assigned to their Welcoming School. CMSD communications should be advised to stop trying to make fetch happen.

I have heard from sources inside 1111 Superior that fewer than 50% of families from merging schools even made selections in the school choice portal. I don’t know if that is true, so I will do a record request for the school choice portal data. I do wonder what CMSD enrollment numbers will be at the start of the 2026-2027 school year. I think CMSD is expecting the enrollment to be disappointing. Not long after Assignment Day, Dr. Morgan and outgoing CTU President Shari Obrenski released a joint statement that “right-sizing” the district means there will be staff layoffs. We won’t know the numbers or staffing areas until April 14th.

Layoffs were always coming. The savings from building mergers come from salaries and benefits. The HR consultant, Lora Cover, has a contract that spells out her responsibilities in creating RIF lists. CMSD is paying her $39,000 per month to create the list of teachers and paraprofessionals to cut. There are some teachers who believe that the layoffs will lead to recalls as soon as the school year starts, but I think they are overly optimistic. I think Dr. Morgan and his team intend to cram classrooms full of students because none of this is about education.

On to the public records

A while back I was read the SMORE newsletter from Humanware or some such department in the many layers of CMSD bureaucracy. I was initially reading it to see how many people it takes to run Humanware for this school district. But I stopped at some photos from a Closing The Gap event for teen girls at Glenville High School. In the photo they are in a hallway listening to some adult speak and on the tables in front of them are several copies of a book. I think they were reading it together as a book club.

I was curious about the book so I made a public record request. Last week my request was fulfilled.

This is the invoice CMSD paid to Amazon for the book. It appears to be a self published item through Amazon’s service, which means the author gets a percentage of the sales.

There is a glowing review of the book by a CMSD Family Engagement employee.

The author of the book, Cierra U. Malone is an assistant principal at Glenville High School. CMSD spent $479.00 purchasing a self published book. A percentage of the sale went to the employee who may have been the one to select the book for purchase. The Amazon ranking of the book suggests that it may have only sold one or two books per month. The conclusion I’m drawing is that it may have only sold as many copies as are listed on the invoice.

Did CMSD pay Pastor Vernon for the speaking tour?

No. I asked.

Here are the records I received

None of these records are for the RA Vernon High School Speaking Tour. They are from CMSD paying for the rental of The Word Church sports complex facilities. The football coach for East Tech, Mr. Hardaway, claims that the team lost access to practice facilities last fall and CMSD did not help the team. But “within 12 hours” Pastor Vernon solved the problem. East Tech used to practice at the Tri-C Metropolitan campus. I have sent a email to Tri-C to see why East Tech no longer has access to their facilities. One of the payments is from 2022 when Eric Gordon was still the CMSD CEO.

I’m still waiting on CMSD to give me a copy of a photo release form from The Word Church that they would have had to had to record CMSD students to use on their social media. I am also waiting from the video and audio recordings CMSD made during the controversial February 5th speaking events.

The CMSD appointed school board meeting March 31, 2026

I was looking at board docs from October 2024 and the list of people in the public comment section tickled me - Alicia Dodson, Famika Bonner, Donese Harris, Andrea Dockery Murray, Courtney Gargiulo, me, my wife… Public comment often has the same names and the same faces showing up for Cleveland students, their teachers, their paraprofessionals, their transportation. This happened again on March 31. Alicia Dodson spoke passionately for the district’s paraprofessionals. Demanding that the appointed school board honor the work. This school board doesn’t care. They were appointed to not care. Kelly Kruger Lardie spoke passionately about how Dr. Morgan and his academic team are destroying the CMSD specialty schools - IB and Montessori -with the crappy canned curriculum that may work for some children, but not for all, and are beneath the standards of International Baccalaureate and Montessori certification requirements. Newly elected but not yet installed CTU president Errol Savage spoke too, asking the appointed board to rip up the MOU they signed with Shari Obrenski that is disrespectful to the paraprofessionals.

Other noteworthy things from the meeting: the board felt the need to address the textbook issue. While Communications Director Jon Benedict wants you to believe that it wasn’t a big, widespread problem (it was huge), CMSD has a plan for the ordering and purchasing of textbooks this April so they will be in classrooms when school begins next year. I think I heard that we are spending $7 million dollars on textbooks even though Dr. Anna Turner thinks your kids are fine learning on Chromebooks all day. Guess she got overruled during a five hour Friday meeting at 1111.

Karen Thompson and Transportation consultant, Bill Andexler, also made a presentation about how they are now handling the previously ignored corrective action plan for the “death trap” school busses. Karen also explained away the cab company whose van broke down on the way to school.

This gave me the opportunity to post emails that I got the day the Cab Incident happened. To say the stories don’t match up is an understatement,

The intervention specialist at Davis spoke to the students as soon as they arrived at school after the cab arrived. She wrote up what they said, noted that there is a GPS photo and that one student had photo and videos from the journey. In the next email, the Davis principal takes the teacher off of the email chain.

There is a cover up of what happened that day. The district is protecting themselves and the cab company at the expense of CMSD students. If they will cover up this story, do you think they would hesitate to lie about mold, procurement, data, anything really?

Taking the fight to the inner ring suburb

The Thursday evening before spring break, I wan invited to speak to at the inaugural meeting of shcEA (Shaker Heights Coalition for Equity and Accountability), which was held at the Shaker Heights Library, main branch.

I enjoyed meeting Melissa Joiner and Ardelia Holmes (current Congressional primary candidate for the OH-11) who are leading the group. I also got to meet Angela Priestly, with whom I had previously had an epic phone call about all things Shaker Heights City Schools and their special education failures. What also impressed me was the attendance of a Shaker Heights school board member. She was there to listen and I really admire that. Maybe that’s something you get when you have an elected school board. I look forward to working alongside shcEA as they work to make Shaker Schools work for all of the students, not just a few. If you are a Shaker resident reading this, consider following their group and participating.

Causes

I generally speaking, do not support recall campaigns when there was a general election just six months previous. I think that people had an opportunity to rid the city of failed leadership in November. While turnout was extremely low and that alone should have been a message for change, Justin Bibb continues on being a failure. The only real difference is now Ed Gallek has exposed that Justin Bibb is an expensive failure. Some guys are starting a recall campaign and I kind of just ignored it.

Last night Juan Callado Diaz who is one of the organizers of the recall campaign called me. His enthusiasm for this recall is contagious. He is young and full of energy. He has a plan and an attorney helping him. This seems like more than a political stunt, which some people have called it. Toward the end of our phone call I had become convinced that the project was worthwhile and that I would lend my CMSD (mayoral control) failures information to the cause. If you would like to learn more about the recall campaign, go to this link.

Lending support to the Recall Campaign does nothing to change my support for ending mayoral control over Cleveland Schools. I want an elected school board. I am working with a group of like minded individuals to get an elected school board. We held out second meeting in March. During the meeting, Sarah Hodge (a true leader) told us that she had spoken with the Board of Elections and that we are waiting on what kind of language we can use for our ballot issue. Until we get that, members of our group are charged with attending Ward Meetings and talking to Cleveland residents about getting an elected school board. I look forward to the day I can update you with a plea to sign our petition.

Cool CMSD thing

On April 2nd, I got to help chaperone a trip for the Campus International chess team. We went to the downtown public library for the 2026 Carl Bowers Chess Tournament.

While there weren’t as many participants this year, I was delighted to see that the teachers from Harvey Rice had a large number of students with them, including several girls, which is a sad rarity in the chess world. I am told that there is always a surprise guest at the chess tournament and this year that guest was Congresswoman Shontel Brown. She handed out the trophies which was thrilling for the parents who got the photos I sent them.

On April 25th, the Campus International School Parent Organization is hosting a girls chess event. We will be partnering with Ohio Education Advocates and a new non-profit called, She Plays Chess, that is dedicated to getting more inner city, public school girls involved in chess. It will be free and we are inviting all CMSD girls who are even remotely interested in chess. Fliers with more information will be going out to schools this week.

Gratitude

Interest in talking about the problems in CMSD continues to grow. The Facebook group Publicly Cleveland Conversations now has 2.5 thousand members. Sure, many of the new members and participants are there just to yell at me for not appreciating the injection of Pastor Vernon in our public schools, but there are also other participants who are actually concerned about spending, curriculum, losing teachers, building consolidations, what happens with closed building records and supplies… We have some interesting conversations. We also have threads where a parent will ask a question about CMSD preschool and I will tag some preschool experts and they end up having a great conversation and really helping out that parent. Another time, a parent had transportation concerns for their new high school student. Several parents jumped in with suggestions and recommendations. There are times when the Facebook group becomes what I always hoped it would be - a districtwide parent/teacher group. Other times it kind of sucks and people call me a jerkoff.

Thank you for the coffee dates, the tips and tidbits, the messages and background information. Sometimes, like that book thing from a few paragraphs back, I go off on my own hunches. But most of the time I am making requests based on your suggestions. I am always learning and I love that.

I’m sad that Shari Obrenski will no longer be a part of our CMSD conversations. Minutes after I sent out my last blog on March 20th called It’s The People That Make A Good School, Obrenski removed herself from the Substack email distribution list. She is no longer one of my 620 subscribers.

I moved rather abruptly the week before I started first grade. One day while I was playing in the front yard and my mother came outside. She told me to get into the car because we were going to the grocery store. Three hours later we arrived in a different city, to a different home, to a whole different life. We had to go buy all new clothes because my mother didn’t pack anything for our move. I started school a week later and I didn’t know anybody.

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Coleman, in the photo above, was a veteran teacher. She was warm and kind. Her niece was my third grade teacher two years later. The staff in the building took my horrible situation and made it better. School is a large part of a child’s day. The people in the school have a big impact on a child’s life.

At first, it felt like my only friend was Mr. Gruber, the custodian, who was the sweetest person when I really needed someone to be sweet. I made other friends that year and two of the kids in this photo above, are still Facebook friends. But it was the grown ups in the school that made all of the difference for me. There weren’t many in the building, it was a small school. Kindergarten through fourth, with a PE teacher, a music teacher, and two ladies in the cafeteria serving lunch that they cooked on site. We had a principal but I can’t remember if there was a vice principal at that school. There was a school nurse and I remember her because she took me to her office that first October to tell me that my grandfather had died.

I remember my older brother yelling at my mother because she didn’t put me in the other elementary school that was bigger and had a real playground. I did feel envious when we would drive past the school with the playground, but I know that my mother chose the correct school for what I needed at the time. It wasn’t about the building. It was about the people inside of that building. That is what she knew I needed.

I realize now, when I think about Campus International School, that I chose a people school. My children all had kindergarten teachers that are related to veteran teachers in the building. There is longevity in the staff. When a new person comes in they were chosen to be there because they have the attributes that all of the other successful teachers and staff members have. We have a kind school nurse and a wonderful, gruffly sweet custodian. We also have security guards, which I did not have in the 1979, but combined, their personalities are strikingly similar to my childhood PE teacher.

Campus International has never been about the building. It’s the principal. It’s the teachers. It’s the staff. It’s the parents. It’s the students. I think that explains the success more than the IB curriculum. I hope it is enough to sustain it because it even on its worst days, it is the best place to be.

Brighter Futures For Some, Not All

A few weeks ago an MOU was signed by the Warren Morgan and Shari Obrenski. Two people who make healthy salaries have agreed that the PICA 5C (Community College and Career Center Coordinator) paraprofessionals who may (will) lose their jobs in the brighter future will be thrown some bones. They may be offered classroom paraprofessional positions, at a lower salary but to soften the blow of not being able to afford modern living, they will keep the hours they accrued as PICA 5C years. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have to sit and wait to hear what someone who does not care about you has managed to salvage for your future.

While the paraprofessionals lose out, again, the district administrators are putting out the Help Wanted ads. Executive Director of College and Career Readiness, Brent Dean, fresh off of the 30.44% pay increase is getting a new underling. CMSD is hiring a Director of College and Career Readiness with a possible six figure pay.

CMSD will also be hiring a new Director of Procurement now that Dianna Rutti has turned in her resignation. I mentioned Rutti in Nice Work If You Can Get It because she had changed titles and gotten a sweet 23% pay increase. CMSD is also still hiring Program Directors. There are people who defend the hiring of new Program Directors, claiming that they are the powerhouse of the cell. Fine. But if they can run the cell can we hollow out the rest of the bloated, fetid Academics division? How many people can Selena Florence really fit into those five hour Friday meetings? I used to think there could be no bigger waste of time than my sons reading excerpts on HMH, but those academic meetings are problem worse for the human brain.

You know who else isn’t getting a brighter future? Students at East Tech. Currently they have passionate educators preparing them for good jobs in Agricultural and Environmental Systems. Despite Dr. Morgan’s getting the numbers wrong because he was give bad numbers by someone two people I wouldn’t trust to walk my dog, the agriculture program at East Tech is robust and well attended. Students love it, are learning from it, and getting an enriched education from it.

Here in the Bleak Present the current offerings are:

Plant and Horticultural Science

Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources

Greenhouse and Nursery Management

Floral Design and Marketing

Business Management for Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Companion Animal Selections and Management

Animal Anatomy and Physiology

Vet Science

Plant and Animal Science

Urban Forestry

Food Science

After Brent Dean and Anna Turner fixed education the brighter Future of East Tech will offer:

Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources

Plant and Animal Science

Food Science

Business Management for Agriculture and Environmental Sciences

Brighter as defined by people who think HMH Into Reading is a good curriculum but can’t figure out how to purchase textbooks. When teachers at East Tech protested the reductions and provided real numbers and data, Dean and Turner just smiled. When told that they would like lose good, veteran teachers over this, Dean and Turner advised not to let the door hit them on the way out. CMSD’s brighter futures means gleefully getting rid of good teachers because of the decisions made by shitty educators. The goal of Dr. Morgan and his team is a district all about buildings and not about the people inside.

Speaking of the difference between teachers and educators… Cleveland Clothing Company designed a t-shirt last fall to honor Cleveland teachers. But a person from CMSD’s HR department contacted the company and asked them to make the t-shirts with the more inclusive term, educators.

Then the HR person boasted about this win on her LinkedIn account. Baltas Grenig sometimes posts anonymously super rah-rah CMSD administrator posts in the Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook. Occasionally she will pull back the mask and post under her own name. Like when she defended the special-only-to-top-administrators gym in 1111 Superior by saying that anyone who works in the building can use it. When pressed to describe how “anyone” gets to use it, she could not. It’s almost too cute that the human relations person with employee relations in their title cares so little for employees.

I do not believe that everyone who is employed by CMSD is an educator. They all have different roles and in the case of a Network Leader, the proper cute title is Data Snorting Money Hound. For people in HR - headcount manager. They are not educators. I get that Eric Gordon was trying to really do a thing when he started calling everyone in the district an educator, but it waters down the value of the people who are educating out children. Teachers, principals, paraprofessionals - the people who spend seven hours a day with your child.

There isn’t anyone at 1111 Superior these days who cares at all about education. If they did, they wouldn’t go along with any of this, especially not the constant iReady machine hooked up to the children like an IV. iReady minutes are the new Magic Beans in education. Minutes on iReady is how we measure the school day now. I’m not having it. It is gamified edutainment and since it’s not for a grade, I’ve told me sons they don’t have to participate.

A month ago the company that sells us iReady sent amusement park-like characters around to all of the classrooms in the schools and had the iReady characters encourage the kids to do more iReady. Count me and mine out of that. My son Jonah wrote a little essay about his thoughts.

There is a great article on Unheard about how iReady is part of the plot to replace teachers with screens all day. You can read it here if you bypass the pay lock. Here’s a veteran teacher writing about how iReady is dangerous. I am often told that the best thing about iReady is that it offers instant insights into our students and crafts lessons based on what they need. How novel. That’s what teachers have always done.

I chose my school for the teachers. I would love it if they got to go back to teaching instead of being education app facilitators. I would love it if they got to go back to teaching novels and writing. I would love it if they were appreciated as teachers instead of educators along with the HVAC guys and the flak at HR who sent out a file with an unredacted social security number in it.

More Advanced Placement course are not in the brighter future

I was upset that there were not going to really be more AP courses at all of the high schools like Dr. promised there would be. However, I have changed my mind. Some of our high schools offer a ton of AP classes and some of our high schools offer very few. There is no high school where the offering of AP classes is resulting in lots of students attaining college credit.

In the vast majority of AP courses throughout the entire district, less than ten students are earning a 3 or higher which is required to get the college credit. It really does seem like it would be better for the students if we encouraged them to partake of College Credit Plus classes if we want them to be earning college credits for their brighter futures.

Elect a school board

The weather is finally better and the schedules have aligned for a second Cleveland Elected School Board meeting. If you are with us on the need to take education control back into our own hands, or merely elected curious, join us for a meeting. We will be at the Cleveland Public Library: Carnegie West on Saturday March 21, 2026 from 3:30 to 5 pm, in the Rookwood Room. If you would like to read more about our efforts or read about how it worked out in Chicago, check out Franzi Wild’s story in Signal Cleveland.

Gratitude

This blog now has 616 subscribers and 50,000 views over the last few months. The Facebook discussion group has 2.3 thousand members, many of them active in the conversation. I get some many tips and tidbits each day now that my head spins and I am overwhelmed. I’ve been helping people find and hire lawyers lately which makes me feel useful. I ran into an acquaintance a few weeks ago and he said he saw on the news that I am “the watchdog” and now he always calls me that. I think the best part, recently, is that a handful of people, separately, have called me their team, when talking about how they were dealing with issues that had come up for them. “The I told her that I would give these files over to my team and…” They meant me. They meant that they feel like we are working together on this. Which is more than I ever hope for. I will always help you out to the best of my ability. And when I can’t do anything to help other than to listen and commiserate, I’ll do that with passion, too.

Congratulations

All across the district, people filled out their ballots and took a true leap of faith. I don’t think it was an easy thing to do. My friend, Errol Savage, has won election to be the president of the Cleveland Teachers Union. It’s a terrible time in the district for the people he is going to represent. I suspect lots of bad news will be coming. I can think of no finer person to represent the CTU during this time.

I was doing a little research into the Comprehensive Extracurricular Activities Plan (CEAP) for a tip I had gotten and I came across a blog post written about Gene Tracy fighting for that promised money for the school children in Cleveland. It mentioned how Mr. Tracy spoke at every board meeting, holding them to account, even after he got sick. That made me think of Errol. When I got to the end of the piece, I realized Errol was the author. You can read it here. I particularly loved these last two lines:

“Will you pick up this fight for children? Will you demand politicians restore this funding?”

That’s how good people talk.

In case you haven’t heard, it’s Transportation Week at CMSD. Not officially, of course, but all of Cleveland’s media ran with stories about CMSD transportation this week and a fun time was had by all. It felt a lot like waves crashing against the shore, one bad story after another. With each new story, Communications Director Jon Benedict, rose to the occasion with perfectly formed statements like the one above. That one was delivered when confronted with the story that CMSD has been in big trouble with the state since last fall and either hasn’t taken the issues seriously or is just incompetent. Either way, CMSD’s well paid communications guy should have been ready with a decent statement.

I suppose it all started last month when a random woman contacted me because someone gave her my name. She said she was a school bus monitor for a bus company and had just been laid off with no notice. She said that the company secretary told her the layoffs were because CMSD had made transportation budget cuts that forced the company owner to make personnel cuts. I told her that I would look into it, but that I hadn’t heard of CMSD transportation budget cuts.

The contracted company is named Rightway Transportation. I learned a lot about them while putting together my record request. It’s a smaller company with nine very nice looking busses. They are owned by Quinton Sims and his staff is his family. It is the epitome of a small, local business. In advertisements, Rightway offers $27 per hour for drivers, which is so much better than CMSD’s driver pay. Good looking busses, great driver pay, seems ideal. It took a couple of weeks for CMSD to answer my record request and when they did, I looked them over and then put them online in the Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook. I had also gone through the board docs to see any mention of transportation budget cuts and found nothing.

In the public records I found that there were two big unreconciled payments to Rightway. On the Facebook page, some parents voiced frustrations they had had with Rightway over the past year. Almost immediately Quinton Sims contacted me to tell me that the laid off monitors were going to be rehired in March and that he had read the parents concerns and was planning to address them. He also mentioned that even though his company is contracted by CMSD to transport students with IEPs, the company isn’t always made aware of the transportation requirements of those students. That’s a failure on the part of CMSD, not Rightway.

The other interesting thing that came out of looking at transportation contractors is getting all kinds of tidbits about CMSD’s failure to pay transportation contractors and the fact that CMSD is currently in big trouble with the state of Ohio and has been for many months.

Last Fall CMSD got dinged by the state for a whole host of issues. Click one of the Fox 8 links in the first paragraph to hear a current CMSD bus driver describing their busses as “death traps” and then never, ever put your child on one again. Some of the problems the state found were that drivers did not always do pre-route inspections to make sure the required first aid kit was on the bus. Or check to see if the STOP sign and lights were functioning. Or even checking to make all of the doors operated in the event of a firey crash trapping your children inside.

From the December 19, 2025 Department of Workforce & Education letter:

Numerous Vehicle Violations & Lack of Pre-Trip Inspections

Tpr. Joel Hughes shared with the District that he found numerous serious vehicle violations on

December 9, the majority of which would have been detected had the driver conducted the

required pre-trip vehicle inspection (OAC 3301-83-11). These issues included, but are not

limited to:

• Heated mirrors inoperable

• Exhaust issues

• Loose pit-man arms

• Inoperable amber/red lights

• Flat tires

• Broken stringers

• Missing first aid kits

• Gauges not working

• Exit doors not working

• Service doors not working

Tpr. Hughes emphasized that during his District inspection last spring he specifically

discussed vehicle safety issues and the need to conduct pre-trip inspections, and yet the

District failed to cover vehicle safety in its August in-service training. Tr. Hughes questioned

how the District is monitoring whether drivers are actually conducting pre-trip inspections

and what corrective action is taken if not. Ms. Hollis-Taylor indicated: “we spot check . . . not

as frequently as we should”, and that drivers are issued a verbal warning, then a written

warning, and then a hearing if the driver is non-compliant.

The letter also detailed multiple driver legal violations, missing evidence of driver qualifications, and a lack of accountability and leadership in transportation. To be fair, the lack of accountability and leadership is in every department of CMSD and a threat to the students. CMSD was ordered in October to create and execute a Corrective Action Plan. They did not.

Request For Corrective Action 12

190KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

It looks like CMSD made a lot of excuses as to why they could not do as they were told. People took vacation days. People quit. It was too hard. They just didn’t care. So many excuses, none of them good. So CMSD did the one thing they are really good at - bringing in a consultant! Bill Andexler has a great reputation from his time in Akron and one has to wonder how fat the contract is for him to risk his reputation by coming into the CMSD failure factory. He has managed to get CMSD to create a new Corrective Action Plan and this time, they pinky swear they will do it.

Anyhoo, I am not a reporter, so when I got the tips about CMSD transportation I sent them out to every reporter I could think of. They have the ability to ask questions and get people to make statements. I’ve just got public records. The state of Ohio responds to record requests so much faster than CMSD. I had submitted requests on February 23rd and by the 25th I had more information about why CMSD transportation was in trouble.

Remember, Eric Taylor was the long time boss of CMSD Transportation.

Your children are not in the very best of hands. Hell, your children are an afterthought, if anything, in this school system. You aren’t disgusted enough on a daily basis. My children have never relied on the school bus. I have always driven them. I enjoy our talks on the way to school. I also didn’t want them, when they were small, to be on the bus with big kids. Other than the worry of bus crashes, I never really considered that CMSD might actually be putting students in danger on those school busses.

But wait… there’s more!

On Tuesday February 24th I had a spot to speak during public comment at the school board meeting. I had two things I wanted to talk about - busses and the teachers at INA not being allowed to do a lesson about Islam during Ramadan, which I felt showed a favoring of one religion, Pastor Vernon’s, over others, which is not allowed in public schools. I had crafted a little speech covering both concerns with about 30 seconds to spare. Then I got a tidbit. Bigger than a tidbit, I suppose.

Earlier that morning, four students were picked up at each of their homes by a CMSD contracted cab company. The students are limited English speakers and/or students with disabilities. The cab was supposed to drive them directly to the digital arts high school.

It did not.

Instead the cab drove them to Metrohealth Family Care [sic] in Berea, Ohio where they sat in the cab for approximately one hour waiting for two adults (one male and one female) to exit the medical facility. These two adults got into the cab, the the driver drove the four students to CHSDA for school. They arrived at school at 10:1

5 am. On a typical day they arrive at school at approximately 8:45 for breakfast. The parent of one of the students had contacted CHSDA at 10’ish because her daughter’s location app showed that she was not at school yet. The parent took a screenshot of her daughter’s location as well. The cab and the students arrived at school not long after the mother’s phone call.

A teacher talked to all four students to ask what happened and each of them described the situations outlined above as best they could. The teacher talked to three of the four parents to help make arrangements to get them home that day and back to school the next. The teacher wanted to make sure that a different cab company could be used in light of the circumstances. She also mentioned that one of the students had taken photos and videos to document what happened to them. Those videos were transferred to CHSDA’s principal.

I was floored by this tidbit. When I walked into Garret Morgan High School I ran into Ed and Peggy Gallek, who were hoping to catch a quick comment about salaries and raises from Dr. Morgan or appointed board members. I told Ed everything I had just heard. Then I told Signal Cleveland’s Franzi Wild as soon as I saw her. I wanted to weave it into my public comment but I ran out of time. I made some calls to people in the know when I got home and wrote about it in the Facebook group the next day. It’s shocking, the story. But what’s even more shocking is that the next day a reporter showed me the statement gotten from the very well paid, Jon Benedict:

CMSD was under investigation by the state and had multiple communications about a corrective action plan but when Jon Benedict was asked about it, he could only say that he would look into it. When four students are taken off route on the way to school and the families haven’t yet talked to an investigator from CMSD police or a detective from Cleveland Police, Jon Benedict has an amazingly thorough statement on the fly. What’s gets really weird is that Jon Benedict’s statement matches up perfectly with the explanation Danielle Martin, CMSD Senior Routing and Planning Specialist, came up with at 4:24pm the day before, when no investigation at all had yet occurred. The lies are finely tuned running machines at CMSD even if the busses are broken down death traps.

I, of course, being the kind of person I am, reported the Cab Incident (their words, not mine) to Holly Fischer because I saw her name on the corrective action letters from the state. I suggest that if you have serious CMSD transportation concerns, you contact her, too. Makes it harder for CMSD to smother the stories.

I have spent several Saturdays this school year volunteering to take students on field trips to chess tournaments and robotics competitions. I’ve traveled on school busses and had wonderful drivers. I have felt safe in those travels and made a point to use the compliment a bus driver link of the CMSD website.

To add another aspect to the CMSD school transportation collapse, I want to talk about my interactions with independent van contractors.

I volunteer every morning at the Campus International morning drop off. Having me and other parents getting students out of cars saves a little bit of money by not having to pay building staff to do it. I have come to love it, even during the frigid temperatures. I enjoy getting to know the students and having little daily interactions with their parents. Or what I assume are parents.

We have several kids who come to school in minivans. My own children get to school in my minivan. There is a woman who drives [name redacted] to school every day. We chit chat while I help her student wake up, get backpacked, and slowly out of the car. Since August, I have assumed that by the way this woman is so kind with this sleeping child, that she is her mother. Or maybe a grandmother. Until this week when there was a second lady in the van. I was introduced to the second lady and she showed me an ID card. It was explained that she would be [name redacted’s] drive going forward. She is just as sweet and kind as the other lady. Their van is nicer than mine, cleaner, too.

There is another van driven by a dad and is full of adorable boys. We greet each other and chat most mornings. There is a company name on the side of the van but I always thought it was so nice that he could drop his sons off on his way to work. His attention and behavior toward them made me assume he is their father. But no, I now understand he is their school transportation driver.

I’ve only been at this for seven months but I have yet to have any worrisome interactions with contracted school transportation companies. I just wanted to put this out there for added nuance to the clusterfudge that is CMSD transportation.

One morning a few weeks ago, News 5 Cleveland sent a cameraman to film some b-roll of me volunteering at school drop off, getting students out of cars. Not going to lie, it was odd on some of those close up shots. The footage was used to go along with an interview I did with Sarah Buduson about the ginormous increase in CMSD administrator salaries that were given out after instructional minutes were cut from schools to save money. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate having News 5, Fox 8, and Signal Cleveland covering these stories. I pass on to them all of the tidbits I get because real reporters have more power to get information than a mom with a blog.

Sarah Buduson also included a link to Publicly Cleveland in her story and I have seen a big increase in subscribers. Remember, this blog is FREE and always will be. Thanks to threads about CMSD student ICE protests, the proselytizing pastor, and the van kidnapping, the Facebook group now has over 2,000 members and lots of active conversations. I do not monetize the Facebook group either. The conversations are the only currency I desire. Thank you to all and please, keep those tidbits coming. I hear there is a lot to be learned in the school lunch and nutrition pocket of CMSD. Know something? Meet me for coffee!

VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE

When I went to one of my first school board meetings, Errol Savage made sure to see that I got one of the board packets full of information. He sends me emails to let me know that a short notice public meeting of the Audit Committee is happening and if I can’t make it, he sends me a synopsis. Sometimes I have teacher questions and he finds me answers. He has taught me a lot, in a very short time, about CMSD history. He is thoughtful and generous. He is everywhere. He is at all the meetings keeping an eye out for teachers, for students, and for families. When I was hearing about schools not having textbooks, Errol and Mark Steinbrunner took my information and eventually got textbooks in classrooms.

The CTU is having elections March 9th through the 13th. Some wonderful people are asking for electoral support. One of my most favorite CMSD people is Alicia Dodson and she is running for 3rd vice president. Errol is running to lead the CTU. It will be a different union if this slate of people are in leadership.

If you want to know Errol’s platform and what he intends to change please watch this video on You Tube.

I am not a teacher. But I love teachers and I love the people who work directly with students in CMSD. When they are getting what they need they are better able to to ensure that our children are getting what they need.

I have created a Google Drive to hold all of my public records. I have made it so that you all can have access to it. Please look through the documents and use them as needed. If you spot something I missed, let me know! None of this matters if I am not sharing the information. PUBLIC RECORDS.

The ads were no longer about school choice fairs, now they were advertising Vernon going into the schools on a school day to talk to the students about attendance.

This particular ad comes from Vernon’s Instagram feed. Though someone in the Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook asked if CMSD Communications made it since there is a misspelled school name. In the ad Vernon uses the tour’s catch phrase “Can anything good come out of Cleveland,” and he announces that he is going into the schools to talk about attendance and giving out name brand sneakers to valedictorians and students who show up to school. Then came a follow up ad shown on CMSD’s Instagram as well as Vernon’s account. Vernon is announcing his high school tour and he says, “I asked my church is there any major stage I could be on, is there any national preaching assignment I could take that would be more important than speaking into the lives of these students,” and that’s where things got weird for me. It sounded more like a preacher doing a series of revival-type events than a school attendance rally. I figured I would keep an ear out to see if anyone else found this high school tour a bit odd for a public school system.

When Thursday rolled around I saw a Facebook post by the new City Council Rep, Nikki Hudson, in which she posted a photo from the event at Max Hayes High School, indicating that she had been there and that she found his words inspiring. I like Nikki and I admit that her seal of approval on the event made me think it really wasn’t anything more than celebrating kids in school. By eight o’clock that evening, the tidbits from teachers started rolling it. Multiple teachers from the two different schools the pastor visited that day.

The accounts were all similar - it was hard to listen to, it was kind of a sermon, there were Bible quotes, he told students they should come to his church, at one school he talked about his church more than school attendance, teachers were really uncomfortable, some Muslim students couldn’t leave the rally, he talked a lot about God and intact families and money while quoting scripture, students and staff were uncomfortable, it was mandatory, he was introduced as Dr. Morgan’s pastor and fraternity brother, Jewish teachers were uncomfortable, gay teachers were uncomfortable, surprised by the content, afraid to speak out, the disagreement with the staff created a racial divide because some really like the preacher and some didn’t think it was appropriate, it ended up being a straight up sermon… and so on.

The relief I felt from Nikki Hudson’s Facebook post about the event was replaced with a head nodding along with every message I received because I assumed this was going to happen. It did seem that some of the teachers and staff that messaged me knew more about this pastor than I did. When I used to live in the Union-Miles area our morning drive to Campus International took us past The Word Church and the pastor’s billboard. I never though much of it. I didn’t know much about him until last Friday afternoon.

After I started a thread about the teacher reactions to the high school rallies, people sent links to controversies involving R.A. Vernon. Initially, he just seemed like one of those Joel Osteen prosperity gospel types. He seemed to like attention, both good and bad attention. He also seemed inappropriate, to me. For background, I am Jewish. I have left two synagogues over rabbis who said things I found sexually inappropriate during Torah study and spoke from the bimah in ways that made me uncomfortable. I do not stay where I am not comfortable. I care very much who is around my children and influencing them. That said, I get that other people are more tolerant of certain things. The awesome part of religion is that I cannot compel those people to stop worshipping how they chose and they cannot compel me to worship with clergy that gives me the ick.

One of the complaints I read on Facebook is that he sucks money out of the poor in Cleveland through aggressive tithing. Which leads me to the opinion that his views on homosexuality are somewhat influenced by having a bunch of single, childless gay men with fat wallets in his pews trying to pray the gay away with dollars.

I would not choose to worship with Pastor Vernon at The Word Church and I don’t have to. But it shouldn’t be much of an argument that Vernon has NO business being in a public school, during the school day, speaking scripture to a bunch of students who are compelled by law to be there. Not to mention a staff that are compelled by the need to pay rent to be there. This was unacceptable and incurably stupid on the part of district administration in CMSD. As someone pointed out, these administrators must have had to take a school law class along the way, right? Did the legal team at CMSD sign off on this?

I am told that at the rallies, Dr. Morgan introduced Vernon as his pastor and his fraternity brother. By wrapping his arms around this pastor in front of the compelled audience of public school students, he was giving the pastor an implied endorsement. Our public school CEO was endorsing everything Vernon said that day - come to his church, the scripture quotations, and what were the non Christian students in the audience supposed to do with that? Convert? Or feel less than and perhaps judged because they don’t believe the same things Dr. Morgan and his pastor believe?

R.A. Vernon immediately had his team create an Instagram Reel about Thursday’s tour dates. From the video you can see all of the borrowed authority he is getting from the important people who were there that day. It wasn’t just Dr. Morgan endorsing Vernon, his church, and speaking scripture in a public school, it was also administrators Leo Serrano and Lisa Farrer Cole. And council rep Nikki Hudson, too, though I think she has now taken a step back from the controversy.

Even if R.A. Vernon was the the Rabbi Wolpe of his form of Christianity, it would still have been inappropriate for him to speak in the public school during the school day to a mandatory attendance assembly. This never should have happened. It certainly should not happen again and again every Thursday through March 5th. The appointed school board must step in and tell Dr. Morgan to end this now. Mayor Bibb who has appointed them all, should step in an end this now.

I put in a public record request to see if CMSD paid R.A. Vernon (or any of his 11 non-profits and LLCs). I also asked for video and audio from the events, which I know exist because Darielle Snipes and a cameraman were there filming it. I’m sure it will be months before I get that request fulfilled. I will keep you updated.

This is a legal issue as well as a philosophical issue. The Supreme Court has been clear about not allowing religious speakers in public schools for mandatory events. The Department of Education provides clear guidance on this. One genius down at 1111 Superior could have done a Google to see that this was going to be a bad idea and should never have happened. Anyone familiar with the pastor beforehand should have known that he wasn’t just going to talk about attending school and getting good grades. Dr. Morgan, who attends The Word Church, absolutely should have known better. The ADL spells it out quite well, that having your school CEO embrace the messenger sends a message to the students. Dr. Morgan should consider going back to those schools and apologizing to the students.

In a perverted twist to this whole affair, I found out that Dr. Morgan cancelled a meeting of the Student Advisory Committee due to “too much instructional loss” because of the snow days we’ve had. The SAC meetings are required by law in HB525 (the Cleveland Plan law) but on this Dr. Morgan is flexible. The separation of church and state? He’ll crash through that wall like the Kool-Aid Man. After all those snow days of missed HMH teaching, I can’t imagine CMSD has the pacing chart time to turn their gymnasiums into pulpits for Dr. Morgan’s pastor.

If you agree that having RA Vernon preach to students in our public schools during mandatory assemblies is wrong, please consider speaking out by contacting Dr. Morgan’s office through his Chief of staff, JR Tomkinson (salary $203,175) at 216-838-0022. Dr. Morgan’s office manager is Kamal Chatman and his phone number is 216-838-0023. The CMSD Ombudsman can be reached at 216-838-0090. Perhaps you should contact MPomerantz@clevelandohio.org as she is the Education Chief under Mayor Bibb. If your student was in one of the assemblies and you don’t like that make a complaint with the Ohio ACLU.

Remember when Dr. Morgan got to the end of his 2025 State of the Schools speech and brought up the moving story of the John Adams valedictorian? He was moved to tears recounting how she was asking why she couldn’t have more Advanced Placement classes at John Adams when other schools had them. She felt limited in the rigor of the academics CMSD offered her. He vowed that with Building Brighter Futures, CMSD students would get more AP classes. Who could possibly argue with that? Of course we need to “right-size” the school district, but if there is a higher calling to the process, a wider offering of electives and AP classes for all, well then get on board with this plan. When the mayor’s office loaded up their workers into the public comment spots, the valedictorian and her AP wishes were intoned again and again.

When citizens and parents attended the Building Brighter Futures stakeholders meetings, we were told that only with this consolidation plan could we get sports, band, orchestra, arts electives, Algebra 1 in 8th grade, and more AP classes for our scholars. Maybe you wanted to argue about which schools were getting merged, but nobody disagreed with our scholars getting more.

Algebra 1 in 8th grade was the first promise to go silent. The reality is that there are fewer than 120 8th graders in CMSD who are prepared to take Algebra 1. It would be a waste of money and resources to offer it in every building for all 8th graders. But we will still have increased sports teams, band and orchestra, and increased electives. They wouldn’t promise that and then not come through, right?

When the School Choice Portal opened, the big focus was on all of the CTE pathways (and the killing off of the popular horticulture pathway at East Tech) so I went looking for high school information and all of the increased AP offerings. Since John Adams had played a big role in the emotions of Building Brighter Futures messaging, I started looking there. I couldn’t really find anything. I thought I might ask some high school teachers to see what they had been told. Still waiting to hear back. But I did get my official copy of The Playbook and guess what I found?

Instead of bringing new rigor to our scholars, Brent Dean (I assume) figured out which AP courses our scholars have had before and which ones they done well in, and then continue to offer them. When you click the Academic Resources link, you get the list of AP courses that will be offered and they don’t look all that different than before our future got brighter.

I guess Dr. Morgan and Zak Reed just used that John Adams valedictorian for emotional manipulation. I assumed the tears were fake when I watched the speech but now I know it.

The Playbook also says that there will be a students electives interest survey to send out for out middle school students. You know, the ones that deserve more and are going to get more with BBF. There is a link for the survey.

But it really doesn’t matter what your middle school student is interested in. You see, there are so many amazing electives, but CMSD is only committed to offering the electives based on the abilities of the teaching staff.

This is a school district that had a long term substitute “teaching” a music class at Kenneth Clement Boys Leadership Academy for the past eight years. Don’t worry Valley View parents, that teacher is no longer teaching music. Now she is the middle school ELA teacher.

To keep a worried and stressed out staff in line, The Playbook has lots of links in the Resources file dedicated to dealing with change. Principals are directed to watch You Tube videos for guidance on making their staff adapt to the mergers.

HR is You Tube now. Which you would think saves us a big chunk of money, but no. We are still paying the contract of an HR consultant who fancies herself an HR Influencer. I like this post where she pretty much tells me, a Cleveland taxpayer, that she has been doing a poor job. How inspiring is this? The average income of of a Cleveland household is around $38,000, and this is how Dr. Morgan and our appointed school board think we should be spending tax money?

Building Brighter Futures passed. Building Brighter Futures is going to happen. But it is just a slogan and some fake tears. We did need to close some buildings and consolidate schools. We did not need to lie to the public to do it. Dr. Morgan and his team have lied to the stakeholders. They have lied to the students who will choose CMSD next year based on more AP classes or more electives. Money saved will go to paying district administrators and consultants, just like before, but the administrators and consultants will be paid more.

To read The Playbook for yourself, click this link. To read all of the public records I have collected over the past two years, click this link. That’s a Google Drive with everything in it. I will add new documents to it when I get them. You are welcome to use them any way you like. Even though the file says CMSD Public Records, the documents come from CMSD, Akron, Atlanta Public Schools, Portland Public Schools, Akron, Canton, Shaker Heights City Schools, CH-UH, Medina, DC, Saginaw, Cincinnati, Columbus, Missouri, and some others.

In addition to copies of the documents I have received, I have also included in the file screen shots from email exchanges with the legal department of CMSD. Sometimes they don’t give me documents but do give me conversational answers to my requests. Here is an example:

I have information like that from when I first asked about the people who worked in Communications and when I asked about how much having the various IB programs cost CMSD each year.

Bond Accountability Commission

Late one night as I was getting ready for bed, I got an alert from Twitter that the Bond Accountability Commission had posted for the first time in awhile. So I checked it out and they were publicly announcing on Twitter a meeting for the next day.

It wasn’t quite 24 hours notice, but it was the required public notice, so there’s that. I couldn’t find any other announcement of the meeting anywhere else. Just Twitter for their 503 followers. They have a website but it’s kind of awful and it’s difficult to know if anything is current. I did use it to find an email address for commission member Michael Houser so I took the opportunity to ask him some questions.

And that is where the story ends. Houser did not respond to that question. I would have also like to have asked, if all of their meetings for the year 2026 are set from that December 29th, 2025 meeting, why don’t they just post them all at once so that people can plan to attend? I guess we’ll never know.

Recommendations

Trying something new here. I love podcasts and one of my favorites is called Chalk & Talk with Anna Stokke. She is a Canadian math teacher but she interviews math instruction experts from around the world. I recommend the podcast overall but particularly episode 62, “Why classroom technology is making students learn less,” during which Stokke interviews Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath about his new book, “The Digital Delusion.” It is a great episode and I paused midway through to order the book. I’ve been reading it the past few days and it is alarming but good. My 6th grade son, Jonah, also loves books like this so when I can’t locate it by the sofa, I know to go look for it on his bedside table.

Resolutions

This semester’s schedule is going to make it difficult for me and my wife to make it to school board meetings as much as we would like. I had also planned to attend more city council meetings to speak on the changes in CMSD. Our city council members should know what is happening to the schools in their wards. I thought maybe we would make it once a month, but now I am not so sure. But we will make it sometimes. It’s important to show up.

I have a lot more to write about and I am running out of steam tonight. Forgive me if I hit your inbox a couple of more times in the next week or two.

Finally, it is school board appreciation month and I wanted to make sure you know that our group remains committed to getting back to to an elected school board, even though the weather made us cancel our January 24th meeting. If you are on the email list for the Elected Board group, watch for a reschedule notice. If you are just waiting to jump in, watch this space and the Facebook group, Publicly Cleveland Conversations (1.5k members) for our next meeting notice.

Stay warm and safe. Enjoy the snow day tomorrow.

I have not and will not turn on the setting to charge money for what I do. I do this for my own curiosity and to share the information. I state this frequently because sometimes Substack sends out it’s own reminders that people can pledge money toward my writing. Do not do that. The only thing I ever want is the sharing of tidbits or your own hunches and I might let you buy me a cup of coffee in exchange for you telling me all about what you do or know about CMSD.

The Decline

I used to think of CMSD as a large school district and trying to get into all of the pockets to even begin to understand how it all worked was daunting. Two years into this, however, I have changed my mind a bit. The square mileage of the district is large. At the moment the number of CMSD buildings is large. The number of CMSD employees is large. But this school district isn’t large. It’s three tiny raccoons standing on a box wearing a large trench coat. It just appears bigger than it is. It also pays bigger than it should.

CMSD used to be a large school district with 70,000 students. Now it serves some number between 33,000 and 31,000 depending on how we pad the numbers. Cleveland, the city, isn’t what it used to be and even though we are in our Cleveland Era and the mayor tries desperately to make fetch happen, Cleveland isn’t going to grow families anymore. Even if that miracle happened, those families would likely follow all of the other families to charter schools or take the Cleveland Scholarship to parochial or private schools. You see, it’s not just the decline of birthrates that is reducing the size of the Cleveland student population.

The birthrate in the United States has been falling for over a decade. The enrollment of Cleveland school children dipped a bit during the Covid era but didn’t start to plummet until the 2023-2024 school year. Hmm…

(hat tip Rod Flauhaus for teaching me how to properly use the ODE Website)

Over the last decade, the decline in the US birthrate has affected the Columbus City Schools, too. They lost 3,000 students in the last decade.

Fun thing I learned, Columbus spends less on it’s top ten administrator salaries than CMSD does even though they have more students. Also, when you record request salaries from Columbus City Schools, they give you every single employee. That’s transparency from a large school district.

The other thing about birthrates is that Ohio actually did have an increase birthrate after Covid. Just not in Cuyahoga County.

Greater Cleveland saw that increase in birthrates, just not Cleveland. [This is from a Cleveland.com article from 2022 but I can’t link to it for some reason.] As an open enrollment school district, some of our schools attract students from outside of Cleveland. Or at least they used to. I suspect we will be losing some of those students next year. For the 2025 school year, 8,345 Cleveland children are using the Cleveland scholarship to NOT attend CMSD. I suspect the number will be higher next year and the kids who come to us from Beachwood and Rocky River might not be here either. Leading to an ever small student population. Keep an eye on the number of students who are currently enrolled in Valley View Boys Leadership Academy. Their families are being asked to send them far from home to merge with the Kenneth Clement Boys Leadership Academy and for what? What is the Brighter Future they are being offered?

Here’s another idea to ponder since district administrators and the mayor don’t seem concerned about losing students. Why not send the five or six IB Diploma seeking kids to Shaker Heights High School for the next two years? Pay the out of district fee and just be done with high school IB. It was a failed experiment. Even Cleveland Heights put an end to their IB program.

The Raise

Last school year the CMSD administrators at 1111 Superior hired Brent Dean to run their College and Career readiness program. They started him at a salary of $98,000 . Prior to joining CMSD, Brent Dean was working in the Danbury Schools in Connecticut. In June of 2024, Brent Dean was celebrated as 40 Under 40, which is something highly prized by CMSD talent search folks. Did you know that when you typo 40 Under 40 it looks like $0 Under $0, which is absolutely fitting in CMSD.

What’s kind of odd is that a month later Brent Dean resigned from his job in Danbury, citing family obligations. He resigned while in the middle of a big project, creating a whole new building for careers services students in Danbury. So odd.

He was only there for two years and the one big project he was working on got delayed when he chose to resign on short notice. Dean’s resignation seems less odd when you read that tit did coincide with the start of a district investigation into a complaint about him. The linked article states that, “School human resource officials received the complaint on June 7, his personnel file shows.” June 7th? Well that’s a week before he got his 40 under 40 award.

While I am sure coming to Cleveland was a huge draw for Dean, it might also have something to do with the complaint that Hearst Media was able to obtain. “The complaint alleged Dean emailed a Danbury High School math teacher the day before, asking if they were interested in taking an online statistics course for money over the summer. The teacher, whose name was redacted from personnel records obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media Group, indicated they were interested, as they at the time assumed Dean either sought an instructor for a new course, or that another instructor was piloting a new course and wanted feedback, according to the complaint.” Sure, that could have had an innocent explanation. But the article goes further into the complaint relaying that,” The teacher said that after speaking over the phone with him for a few minutes, it instead ‘became clear to me that he wanted me to complete a class posing as another individual for money. I asked if that was the case and he confirmed. I told him that I was not comfortable with that,” the complaint stated. The complainant sought advice on how to proceed, according to the personnel file. The complaint did not say who would have paid the teacher. On June 12, Danbury Public Schools Superintendent Kara Casimiro emailed Dean to inform him that a meeting was scheduled for June 14 to “discuss the status” of the complaint, which she said was investigated, according to personnel file. Two days later, Dean resigned, the records show.”

Anyhoo, when I made my yearly record request for CMSD administration salaries I saw that after having worked for just one year, Brent Dean had been given a pay raise, taking him from $98,000 to $127,836 which is an increase of 30.44%. Please, for the love of all things holy, will someone in the media demand that Sara Elaqad justify this pay raise?!

Here are the files for the CMSD administration salaries I have requested .

Adminsalary2025 2026

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Admin Salary Report2024 (3)

95.4KB ∙ PDF file

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Adminsalary2023 2024

502KB ∙ XLSX file

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Last year the CMSD school board voted to take away instructional minutes from school children and then voted for raises for administrators. The HR guy (who’s gone now) said it was justified to hire the best people. Midori Lebron from the school board said the raises would save us money over time. They upended the functioning of Davis Aeronautics & Maritime High School to give Brent Dean more money. His was not the only outrageous raise. The finance department which doesn’t pay bills to the point that vendors refuse to work with our schools got some big time increases too.

Dianna Ruti, the manager of accounts payable, has had her pay increased 23.39% since the 2023-2024 school year. James Wright, Executive Director Financial Controller, has had his pay increased 34.37% in the same time period. Kathryn Baltas in HR has also seen a 24.27% increase in the same time. Meagan Coggins, who went from being one of the tragically laid off administrators in May 23,2024, got quickly hired back in a better position and with better pay. In fact, she has had a 28.62% increase in pay since that layoff. The CFO won an award for his budget under the final year of Eric Gordon and that seems to have earned him a 13.2% increase in pay. Some of the Network Support Leaders got 17% raises even though their Networks should be decreasing next year.

I remember complaining that Dr. Morgan’s eleven member Executive Leadership Team ma, collectively over $2 million dollars. But Now that team is down to nine members and still make a collective $1.9 million in salaries. This doesn’t even include their benefits and bonuses.

Here is a link to my spreadsheet CMSD Admin Pay Over Time. The first sheet is the eye opener with some of the pay increase high lights. The other nine sheets are broken down by departments so you can see just how many people we are paying big salaries even though they never interact with Cleveland school children.

Last year our hardworking CMSD paraprofessionals got a salary increase that will START their pay level at $28,000 (which is the size of Brent Dean’s raise in dollars) and a $1,000 raise per year in the current contract. Have you ever seen a paraprofessional at the end of a school day? They are the epitome of bone tired. They work hard all day long with students who need them more than anyone else. There are diaper changes and toileting. There are long walks around the building and up and down stairs. There are constant redirects. There is a lot of getting screamed at. Smacked. Bitten, even. There is also so much professionalism, determination, and love in their work days.

Even if I were to be generous and say that someone spending their day skimming EdReports at 1111 Superior or at the East Professional Center deserves a cost of living increase, the salaries and their increases are still outrageous. The people who work directly with the students in a school district should be making the most money. Money that comes from taxpayers and the families of those students. As my friend said, I am tired of paying more in property taxes and reducing the money I have for my family just to increase the financial comfort of school administrators. I share the sentiment because my property taxes shot up and my school lost instructional minutes and my beloved teachers faced significant pay cuts due to the reduction of their hours.

I look at these administrative salaries and I wonder who exactly this school district is for. It’s not for the students. It’s not for the people who work directly with the students. Sometimes the transparency makes me gag.

Speaking of transparency

A bit of a kerfuffle broke out in the Publicly Cleveland Conversations group over the lack of transparency in the Cleveland Teacher’s Union. It was not helped by Executive board members writing, “call me and I’ll tell you,” in response to extra pay and stipend questions. I think the CTU leadership needs to be transparent with their dues paying members.

Hopes for 2026

I want to hear more CMSD perspectives. The student project Unsilenced Voices has come to an end, or at least a long pause. I understand why but it’s still a loss. I would love to help students share their stories, either running on my blog or supporting them to run a Substack of their own. Parents and teachers, please spread the word. I would also love to highlight the stories of students and building staff through the building transitions. Maybe write something anonymously in the Facebook group. Maybe we figure out the podcast capabilities of Substack. Let’s see what we can do.

I noticed today that I have blog subscribers in 29 states. I wonder why someone in Louisiana is following a niche subject blog, but it’s also kind of cool to think about. Maybe I can pick up more states in 2026? I have 586 subscribers for the blog and we have 1.3k members of the Facebook group. I noticed that there is a reader survey thing from Substack. I looked at some of the responses. My favorites response to the question, “What do you hope to get out of Polly Karr’s Substack,” is, “Keep up with CMSD news, not available on mainstream media.” I kind of hope mainstream media is getting better at reporting about CMSD. I think Franzi Wild at Signal Cleveland has been doing a lot of work in such a short amount of time. Spectrum News has Siobhan Harms covering education and she seems to be digging in, too.

I got to meet Siobhan last week when she came to observe the first meeting of the Elect A Cleveland School Board group. We will eventually get a better name and maybe some branding. Here is what I wrote about the meeting for Facebook:

On Monday December 22, 2025 we held the first meeting of the Still Working On A Name group to get an elected school board for Cleveland.

We used a small meeting room in the MLK branch of the CPL and we filled every chair. In attendance - a mix of CMSD educators and parents. We talked about how the school district fell under mayoral control, with Sarah Hodge giving us a civil rights history lesson. We talked about going through a referendum, a lawsuit, and/or a Ohio legislative change to get what we want. All three options are on the table.

By the end of the hour-long meeting we divided up duties with someone agreeing to work on the legislative angle, another contacting the Cuyahoga County BOE, and a another looking into the Ohio Constitutional concerns for a possible lawsuit. All agreed to speak to their city council reps and other political allies to bolster our case going forward.

If you would like specifics on how you can help, contact me at pollykarr@gmail.com

Next meeting: Saturday January 24, 2026 CPL Langston Hughes Campus at 11 am

Happy New Year!

I played with some AI that was offered for free on Twitter. If you entered your screen name, it would analyze the content of your Twitter feed and then create a fake magazine cover for you. I don’t like AI, but I love this creation.

A few months ago this video of Lou Wall making a musical comedy routine out of an experience she had trying to give away a bed on the Facebook Marketplace went viral. It went double viral, popping up again all over social media after the initial viewing had tapered off. If you haven’t seen it, you simply must. I bring this up now, in relation to CMSD, because I just read public record request emails that sound exactly like this viral video.

I had heard, during the missing textbook brouhaha, that Anna Turner was completely unaware that Campus International didn’t have textbooks for our upper level math classes until she found out from an email I sent her.

When Anna Turner make assertions, always do a record request for her emails. Since late August, I had been hearing from teachers all over the district about their missing textbooks. On October 15th, Ed & Peggy Gallek did a news story about the missing textbooks. Several pronouncements were made by Selena Florence in October and November that everyone had their textbooks, which was disputed on the Publicly Cleveland Conversations page on Facebook.

From time to time, administrators from 1111 Superior will pop into conversations on the Facebook group to try to sell the CMSD line that the missing textbooks were not a widespread problem or that they were the fault of building administrators. So, in addition to checking out Anna Turner’s Truths, I wanted to see how my Campus International admins were handling the text book issue.

I received four files:

Textbookneedpdf

176KB ∙ PDF file

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Textbookneed2pdf

269KB ∙ PDF file

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Textbookneed3pdf

230KB ∙ PDF file

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Textbookneed4pdf

164KB ∙ PDF file

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The first email in the series is from Principal Julie Beers on August 13th. She tells CMSD textbook guy, Matthew Badea that Campus is missing some textbooks and needs the link to Smartsheet to get them ordered. A day later Badea sends her the link.

My summary:

August 13

Beers to CMSD Badea: please send the Smartsheet link to order missing textbooks

August 14

CMSD Badea to Beers: sure thing!

August 27

Beers to CMSD Badea: we need help! It doesn’t seem like the textbooks for compact 7/8 and Algebra were ever ordered because it took so long for the class to be approved. Can you order them?

[which is weird because they offered this 7/8 math class to my sons in a meeting on April 14th]

August27

CMSD Badea to Beers: I remember that! Let me check with the supplier.

[the supplier, remember this for later]

August 28

Beers to CMSD Badea: Any updates?

[crickets]

September 3

Beers to CMSD Badea: Anything I need to do?

CMSD Badea to Beers: No, not on your end. I’m putting in order with supplier and will hopefully be here by EOW.

[crickets]

September 7

Grzelak to 1111Superior: Hi, any updates?

Sept 9

CMSD Badea to Grzelak: I did receive notice that this shipped to your school.

September 11

Grzelak to Anna Turner: following up on our conversation about missing ⅞ and Algebra textbooks. Apparently were never ordered because the course approval took so long. Matt Badea has been diligently working with us. Anything we can do to get the books?

September 15

Grzelak to CMSD Badea: Can we get a tracking number please?

September 19

Beers to Badae and Turner: Despite our best efforts, we haven’t been able to get a tracking number for the textbook order. Can we get an update?

September 21

Anna Turner to Beers: I’m looping Maria Carlson on here to help.

[at this point, with Turner, Carlson, Paul Hoover, and Badea on the emails, CMSD had a half million dollars in administrative salaries doing an Abbott and Costello job on the missing textbooks]

September 22

Badea to Beers: Sorry! Once the POs are approved there is some time getting them out from the supplier which I should have communicated better. The books have shipped and are currently on route to their destination terminal. ETA 9/24

[communication wasn’t the problem, Badea had previously told Beers that the books had shipped on Sep 9]

September 22

Grzeak to Badea: I have entered ALL of the missing books into Smartsheet in case they got overlooked. Here is a list of everything we are missing…

September 26

Beers to Badea: any movement on those textbooks, these or the ⅞ and Algebra?

Badea to Beers: I had them being shipped directly to you and expect them next week. I will try to follow up and confirm.

[again, he claims they have been shipped]

October 6

Beers to Badea: Do you have a tracking number? Still no books.

Badea to Grzelak: I just asked Great Minds for their tracking update and I should have one shortly for EM2. The ⅞ books are in that order too. Algebra books are at the warehouse and I can get them out to you tomorrow!

October 7

Grzelak to Badea: Did we miss you today? I can come get textbooks in the morning.

October 8

Badea to Grzelak: so sorry, ran out of time to deliver and missed updating you. Have you scheduled for 10 am drop off this morning.

Beers to Badea: awesome!

Badea to Grzelak: pulled into a last minute minute, changing delivery time for the AGA books to noon.

Badea to Grzelak: heading to warehouse now and thought I’d ask if you need any geometry books?

Grzelak to Bade: No one is taking geometry. I noticed you said AGA books. We use EM2 curriculum. This may be a problem.

[Badea talks about EM2 in an earlier email]

Badea: Do you need Algebra for Great Minds? We did not order any Algebra from Great Minds. We only have AGA student copies here.

Grzelak to Badea: We have been using EM2 for three years. That is what she has been using.

[the end and notice, Carlson never did jump in on these emails to help]

WHERE IS BOOK?????

Give me names and I will record request the textbook communications for your school! I know that Errol Savage was instrumental in talking to school board members about the widespread issue of missing textbooks. Without Errol and the Galleks, I wonder how many schools would still be without text books now, going into winter break.

Speaking of school boards, this current school board has absolutely failed our children and it has failed the Cleveland taxpayers. I’m not even talking about Building Brighter Futures, because the failure has been biweekly for the past three years. Each person on the board has been chosen by Mayor Bibb. I did a public record request after the most recent three empty seats were filled. I wanted to see who had submitted applications to Michele Pomerantz to get a seat on the board. The records are a little difficult to read due to the formatting, but not impossible. Over forty people submitted applications. Some of them were extremely talented, experts in special education, school administration, architecture and construction, attorneys, people with experience in lead poising communities, educators with recent classroom experience… All people with backgrounds that would have made the BBF discussions more robust and thorough. But I suspect that isn’t what Pomerantz and Mayor Bibb wanted for their school board.

Cmsd School Board Applications 4 2024 1 2025 R (1)

354KB ∙ PDF file

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Many of us in the Publicly Cleveland Conversations world think it’s time to have a school board elected by us. There are a couple of ways to tackle the issue, but the most important part is coming together and getting started with the process. To that end, Sarah Hodge has reserved meeting room 3 in the MLK library branch for December 22, 2025 at noon. Join us if you are interested in getting an elected school board for CMSD. We need Cleveland residents for sure, but welcome everyone to help brainstorm. Someone with legal experience would be urgently helpful. If you have ever gotten an initiative on a ballot before, please tell us all about it.

To all of the school building staff, I hope you enjoy a restful winter break. To all of the 1111 Superior Administrators, a hearty slow clap for your work on the first School Choice Fair in the BBF era.

Another observation Obrenski made was that she found the CMSD high school enrollment numbers concerning. Freshman classes tend to have the largest numbers and then the numbers plummet each year. For example, the freshman class at Garret Morgan would have 126 students. The sophomore class 103. The junior class 84. The senior class just 67. Overall the number of high school students for CMSD starts at 3,376, having gotten some of the charter school students back into traditional schools. Then it drops to 2,757. Juniors number 2,219 and seniors just 1,946. I have heard from a few sources that there are administrators who encourage students to drop out. I wonder what effect smooshing (consolidating) a bunch of small schools together will have on these numbers. I wonder if CMSD wants to keep more students or is happier when students turn in unenrollment papers.

I mean, if you want to enroll your child in CMSD you have to have a bunch of paperwork and take it downtown to the central administration building at 1111 Superior. You may or may not get a seat in the school you requested. However, if you want to unenroll, just ask for the paperwork at your child’s school, fill it out and return the completed form to your student’s school. CMSD is built for quitting.

I suppose the real reason I didn’t write much about my time with Obrenski is because it didn’t make much of an impression on me. That same week some Cleveland teachers called me to come join them at a meeting with mayoral candidate Laverne Gore at Gore’s home. She was an impressive speaker and listener. But so were the other people around Gore’s kitchen table that night. Classroom teachers and paraprofessionals telling the mayoral candidate what they and their students really needed. As long as I live, I will never forget the paraprofessional who brought Laverne Gore to tears telling her about all of the ways he takes care of his students.

Every cup of coffee I have had with a CMSD teacher over the past year has given me so much to think about, write about, and left a deep impression. There have been more than a few coffee meetings that were supposed to be an hour but end up being hours long. Other than finding out about the AFT forensic accountant, that Obrenski meeting was just box checking for me. I appreciate that she sat down with me though.

Speaking of retirements, the union, and leaving CMSD

Stephen Christian, the HR guy on Dr. Morgan’s Executive Leadership team has quit the district. Before leaving he sent out a final email to teachers letting them know that the administration and the CTU had come to an agreement to extent the retirement timeline.

Seems fair, giving teachers more time to look over the BBF plan before making them choose to stay or go. I’d give them more time, were it my decision, because January 5th is still way too early to know just how much of a clusterfudge the administration is going to make of the consolidations. These are the people who still haven’t managed to get math and ELA textbooks to classrooms and we are thirteen weeks into the school year. Building Brighter Futures is all about quitting.

It appears that Stephen Christian is being replaced by HR consultants. Dr. Morgan announced on Linked in that he was grateful to be bringing back Lora Cover and Martha Woermer at this very important time at CMSD. It’s kind of darkly funny that CMSD is giving a consulting gig to a woman who is an elected school board member in Shaker Heights, when we in Cleveland are subjects to an appointed school board. Funnier still when you read Cover’s LinkedIn posts and realize she calls herself a Chief People Expert and posts deep thoughts that are better suited to an Al Franken SNL skit. In fact, in the evenings here in the Karr household, I’ve taken to performing dramatic readings of Corporate Speak Deep Thoughts from Lora Cover’s LinkedIn. Woermer’s LinkedIn is less entertaining but does boast of her work with charter schools and Teach For America, which is exactly what public school teachers want to deal with in an HR lackey.

Speaking of building space for people to process

Board Chair Sara Elaqad so graciously welcomed more people to the microphone to speak their truth about the changes Dr. Morgan has proposed. It’s just kind of weird that so many of those people who have gotten speaking slots are people who work for Mayor Bibb. Keen observers have noticed that many of the people supporting Dr. Morgan and Mayor Bibb are people who work for the city, don’t live in the city, or have children who attend or will attend CMSD schools.

It’s worth noting that about 8,000 children are currently using the Cleveland Scholarship to attend private schools. CMSD’s website claims that 15,000 Cleveland students attend one of the 50 charter schools in Cleveland. Will CMSD be sending surveys to those combined 23,000 students making the choice to avoid CMSD, asking them how appealing they find larger school populations in the Building Brighter Futures plan? CMSD is for quitting, the numbers speak for themselves.

Requesting Public Records Has Changed

When I started making public record requests, I’d just send an email with my questions to the legal department. They answered them in a timely manner, sometimes with documents and sometimes just with answers to my questions. Those were the good old days. After a few months CMSD Legal got pickier about the way my requests were worded. The time it took for them to respond grew longer. Heck, I’m waiting on a request from June 24th still. Other people were submitting more request too and the old system seems to have gotten overwhelmed.

Not long ago I requested the building budget for Cleveland School of the Arts. The responsive documents came to me in a email from someone at CSA instead of CMSD Legal. After an hour the email was recalled. Must have been a mistake for them to send it to me. Another Cleveland resident sent me a copy of the files they received that pertained to someone who worked for CMSD. The file had been sent out by the HR department instead of CMSD Legal. Four people in HR were signed onto the email containing the files: Katie Baltas Grenig, Ameer Ward, Jacob Graves and Reem Boutros. Not one of those four people realized that they had sent out completely unredacted information which included a social security number and other personal information. We, of course, reported that to legal and to the state.

Anyhoo, now CMSD is using a system similar to the one used y Cleveland City Hall to deal with public record requests. This should contain some of the errors and dissuade people from asking so many pesky questions.

The new method isn’t faster, but it will keep the records organized. I sometimes forget about a request after a couple of months, but now everything will be nice and neat for me in the system. I think, too, other people can view the records requested by others, so that’s pretty cool. If you submit a request and get a record, let me know what you think of the new system.

‘Tis the season

Feeling sappy and grateful

Thank you all for reading, sharing, and subscribing to this blog. Thank you to everyone engaging in the Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook. Thank you for sharing information, tips, and tidbits. Thank you for caring about Cleveland students and for their teachers. Thank you to everyone who is an educator and actually works with students, day in and day out. I hope you are having a restful break. And thank you, especially, Danelle Chappell, for speaking out for the students that 1111 Superior tends to ignore.

The day after the election, Mayor Bibb allowed his hand picked school district CEO to announce the Building Brighter Futures plan details. The traditional school board work session was changed into a show with dramatic lighting and a whole lot of words that meant nothing at all but dragged out each segment of the announcement like a young student trying to make a 500 word essay happen by just using the word “very” a whole bunch. There was no public comment, so most people followed along online to the CMSD YouTube livestream. Here’s a screenshot from the first revelation of the high school mergers. The sound of 2,000 computer keys screaming out in horror…

You can use the link I posted for Building Brighter Futures to get your information. Though I will include the highlights from the presentation:

The focus of the brighter futures of Cleveland’s high schools students really seems to be brighter futures for the resumes of CMSD administrators looking for better jobs before the fan gets turned on near these mergers. The Ohio Department of Education wants career pathways and CMSD is now completely focused on that one goal. Got to get that half star back! The future is brightest when we prepare ourselves for past battles.

Here’s something a little different about the plans for our K-8 schools - I thought Dr. Morgan promised that cramming more students into classrooms would bring Algebra 1 in 8th grade to every elementary school. But the weasel words on the presentation slide indicate that it could be Algebra 1 or perhaps band. In my day we called that bait and switch. I suppose that’s for the best considering Dr. Anna Turner cannot even get Algebra 1 textbooks to the mere seventy students taking the subject this year.

The presentation of the plan was overly long. Now Mayor Bibb and Dr. Morgan take the show on the road around Cleveland to build support amongst the community. Opposition to the plan is futile as this is a done deal with a mayoral appointed school board. This is what the mayor wants for Cleveland school children and he has set the table to make sure it happens. However, Board Chair Elaqad will allow the peasants to speak at the November 19th, December 2nd, and December 9th board meetings. On the 9th she will thank you for your participation and then disregard everything you have said before casting her vote.

Change is hard

The day after Dr. Morgan’s presentation and what feels like every damned day since the presentation, Dr. Morgan sent CMSD families emotional emails letting them know that while change is hard, we are in this together and we will get through this together. Actually he is not in this with us. He isn’t worried about where his children are going to school next year. He is not wondering if all of his hard work as a building principal will be tossed aside so that some other principal takes over his job. He is not wondering what his classroom will look like in the building his is shipped to next year. Dr. Morgan has no skin in this game beyond collecting a paycheck. If this fails, it won’t matter to him. If it succeeds, it won’t matter to him. Projecting warm and fuzzy feelings on leaders because they have a kind smile usually ends with suffering.

In fact all of the people pushing this plan and ushering in this plan have very little skin in the game. We are at the mercy of appointed school board members who have said to others that they never considered CMSD high schools for their children. We have network leaders collecting big salaries who would rather sell their homes and move out of Cleveland than contemplate the horror of sending their children to CMSD high schools. We have many district admins who collect fat paychecks here but reside in Shaker, Strongsville, and anywhere else but here. If they have children, those children don’t attend CMSD high schools. The administrators who blithely suggest that a brand new east side building will make the welcoming of Collinwood High School into Glenville High School a selling point, will rarely, if ever, have to walk those school hallways. Nor the neighborhood streets around them.

Thank you, Dr. Morgan

When my daughter was in 8th grade and we were looking at high schools, I was set on Cleveland School of Science and Medicine for her. I’ve already written about that. When Dr. Morgan started talking about taking the instructional minutes from the school, I worried what else he might do. My daughter ended up in private high school. That had never been my intention. But she was entering high school at 12 years of age and I wanted to know that not only would she get academic rigor, but she would be safe. Science & Medicine pretty much promised me that she would be safe because of the criteria required to be admitted into the three schools sharing John Hay. Without the criteria, would my 12 year old Freshman be safe there? I could not take the risk.

In September the SPO of Campus International School hosted a high school information night for 7th and 8th grade parents. I joked at the time that we should just call it “Your Guess Is As Good As Mine" night. We had administrators from Science & Medicine, Architecture & Design, and a teacher from Campus International High School speak. The presentation from Science & Medicine made my toes curl and my head spin. Maybe I had made the wrong and expensive choice. I told him afterward that I loved everything he had to say and how he had sewn doubts in my mind.

But then, Dr. Morgan announced that Science & Medicine would be no more. All three schools in the John Hay building will consolidate into one high school. I’m assured that it will still be a criteria high school. However, the part of the plan where Campus International High School leaves the campus of CSU and moves into John Hay gives the game away. CIHS and it’s 214 current students will be welcomed into John Hay next year. The thing is, CMSD has basically destroyed the IB high school. They admitted large numbers of students without interest or background in IB. There are behavior issues at the high school. Those behavior issues will be welcomed into the new John Hay High School.

All of these changes would have hit right at the start of my daughter’s junior year. We wouldn’t have kept her there, obviously. We would have missed the scholarship chances for private schools. She would have ended up enrolling in the CMSD Remote High School. So, I thank Dr. Morgan for giving me the opportunity to erase every doubt I had about the choice I made for my daughter’s education. Academic rigor might still come from the new John Hay High School but my child is not going to spend her junior and senior years caught up in the fight of excellence versus administrators.

During October’s student led conferences, I found this in my 6th grade son’s ELA notebook. This son has attained a perfect math score on the OST for the past three years and earned a perfect score on the science OST last year. He will be able to go to any high school he wants. But this is how we speak of CMSD high schools in our Cleveland house. We talk about the amazing educators. We talk about the exceptional opportunities. My sons have dream schools within CMSD. But the people plotting out the Brighter Future of CMSD don’t even have sons and the ones that do wouldn’t dream of sending them to a CMSD high school.

It’s not all bad

Of course the CMSD footprint needs to shrink. Some of the K-8 consolidations make sense. Pointing out the horrendous aspects of the plan doesn’t meant I want CMSD to stay the same and never change, Dr. Morgan’s preferred Straw Man.

I think the boys in Kenneth Clement Boys Leadership Academy deserve a better learning environment. Combining them with Valley View Boys Leadership Academy is a weird distance stretch, but whatever. Hopefully CMSD will be able to fill all of the teaching slots in the new school with actual teachers instead of long term substitutes. Perhaps a new custodian, too? But why is CMSD spending money finally sealing up the roof on the current KCBLA building when it will be empty after May? Why didn’t CMSD seal up the ceiling long before it destroyed the Verizon donated design lab? That was a slap in the face of our community partners.

Even though the Hannah Gibbons building is still relatively new, those students will be “welcomed” into Memorial next fall. Some speculate that the buildings left behind will go to more charter schools, thus draining even more of our CMSD student population. I wouldn’t blame families for fleeing though. Nobody in any part of our city or county government cares about the east side of the city. We have a K-8 school that claims to be the top east side school but had only 8 children test proficient or above on last year’s 3rd Grade reading OST. The closing Collinwood High School discussion shouldn’t be happening tonight, November 11th. It should have happened back in September. Not having it before the election was cowardly.

My biggest question from the BBF reveal, why didn’t Douglas MacArthur Girl’s Leadership Academy get anything? It is arguably our finest elementary school and it is in a terrible building. That school deserves better.

Election results you might not have heard about

When I sent out my only blog post in October (I was super busy being an SPO president and bookfair chair) I was writing about the Cleveland Teachers Union election for 2nd Vice President. I wrote glowingly of Chris Malinoski, not because I am a teacher but because I care about Cleveland schools and I love a lot of Cleveland teachers. I think they deserve better representation within their union. I think they deserve a union that cares about their building level issues. Anyhoo, turns out that Malinoski won. I was kind of shocked. I haven’t supported a winning candidate for anything since 1996. I do wonder, have you heard about this win? Because I don’t think there has been an official announcement yet. Malinoski hasn’t been welcomed into the leadership by CTU president Shari Obrenski. She says there are rules to be followed. Not the kind of rules one follows when another union guy retires, comes back as a substitute and runs for the office he just vacated. Those rules are fungible. Acknowledging Malinoski’s win apparently must follow strict precedent.

Malinoski planned to start his new role immediately. But the union leadership had other plans.

This is the leadership that hitched its wagon to Mayor Bibb and left the teachers and their schools behind. As the plans unfold for teachers and their brighter futures, one has to wonder how much Shari Obrenski and her cabal will fight for teachers. Mayor Bibb wants BBF. Dr. Morgan Designed BBF. Shari Obrenski seems closer to the mayor and the administrators than the teachers. This does not bode well.

Social Media Shout Outs

I love my Monday mornings with CMSD 360 and Darielle Snipes. I love that the communications team brought that segment back. I love the CMSD Nutrition account that I follow on Instagram. Yes, there are lunch and breakfast menu postings. But there are also lots of fun photos of CMSD students trying new fruit and vegetables. Or tying their hand at hydroponic gardening. It’s great to see these parts of CMSD. I missed the student stories during that time period where every CMSD communication was Dr. Morgan hagiography. Another fun account is the JustReadCMSD account because I love books and getting more kids into books.

Make sure you take the opportunity to find out and read Signal Cleveland’s new education reporter Franzi Wild. She has jumped right into the the Building Brighter Futures reporting. She is also open to tidbits and story ideas.

I am also, as you know, always open to tidbits and story ideas. I will buy you a cup of coffee and listen to your CMSD stories. CMSD families? CMSD teachers? CMSD former administrators? Anyone wanting to expand my knowledge about CMSD? Let’s have coffee. Pollykarr@gmail.com is how you reach me.

Anyhoo, some background information before we get started. I don’t like teacher’s unions. My wife spent two decades paying dues to a festering wound of an independent teacher’s association in Shaker Heights City Schools. When bad people get power, they become worse people. During her last two years she stopped paying dues and didn’t belong to that union. Turns out that hiring a lawyer was a much better use of her money. That entire experience soured me on teacher’s unions. I saw the worst people doing and saying the worst things to people that I cared about.

I love teachers. Well, I love good teachers. I want the best for them. I want them to have great pay, excellent benefits, and safe working conditions. I want them to have all the things they need in their classrooms to execute their duties on a daily basis. I love teachers and want the best for them because they spend eight hours a day with my children. Well, thirty minutes less now per day, actually, thanks to Mayor Bibb and Dr. Morgan. I want my children in an environment where the people around them can do their jobs without the added hardship of not having textbooks.

You know who else cares about teachers having textbooks? A man named Errol Savage. He is a member of the CTU Executive Board. He listened to hundreds of his fellow teachers (about 36% of teachers in the district in about 20% of CMSD schools, which is a big deal) when they told him that 4,5,6,7,8, and now 9 weeks into the school year they still don’t have textbooks for some of their classes. Or they have the wrong textbooks. Or they have reached out to 1111 Superior about the missing textbooks and gotten no reply.

So when reporters Ed and Peggy Gallek of Fox 8 News asked Errol if he would comment on story about missing textbooks, he said yes. He always speaks up for the teachers. He attends every school board meeting. He sometimes signs up for public comment at the meetings. He reads those thick packets of school board information handed out at those meetings. He keeps his fellow teachers informed. In turn, when the teachers have concerns, they take them to Errol. He is a good man. He is kind. He is sweet. He is strong. If Errol has your back as a teacher, you have the best support to anchor you no matter what comes your way.

Errol was the first crack in my I Hate Teacher’s Union stance. I’ve never met an executive board member like Errol and I didn’t know they existed. The crack widened with my every interaction with Chris Malinoski. He was reading my blog at the start and he made comments. At first I wasn’t sure what to think of him. He was a union guy and well, see the second paragraph above. Every Malinoski comment made me think, made me do more research, made me ask more questions. Malinoski is respected and beloved by all the right people.

In the past year I have had the opportunity to meet several members of the CTU leadership. I have had some of the best conversations with them. I have learned how much I do not know and been humbled by their experience. I am in awe that they have been willing to teach me. Oh and that’s the big thing, these people are teachers to the core. Not one of them gives the impression that they hope to kick back at the fancy office building and get the hell out of the classroom.

Almost every post I have written in the past year has little pieces of influence from these amazing people. They never hesitate to let me know when I have gotten something wrong. I trust them and I appreciate their willingness to engage with me. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I have learned from them.

While I am never going to forgive and forget what a teacher’s union did to my wife, I am no longer as hard hearted against all union leadership. In fact, I’m going to take this opportunity to do a little politicking. The CTU votes on October 20th and there is a slate of high quality candidates that I would love to see get the support of their fellow Cleveland teachers.

I have to admit that I initially did not recognize Chris Malinoski in this photo, so let’s look at the bigger picture (literally and figuratively).

Every teacher on this slate has your back. I know it for certain, through word and deed. They care about the things they should care about, pay and benefits, but they truly care about the craft of teaching. They care about the physical environments in which you spend 7+ hours per day. They will truly represent you. They will fight for you. And with Errol, you’ll never wonder why he isn’t out there speaking out on an important issue for teachers. He has been out there, being vocal. He will continue to be vocal and visible.

Recently I received some documents about textbooks purchased for Campus International. Large chunks of the invoices were redacted. Large, expensive chunks. I asked Public Records if the redactions we student names or other personal information. They said No, those were items not specific to my Campus International request. Inexplicable.

Last May I requested the personnel file of Demeris Bell, the custodian at Kenneth Clement Boys Leadership Academy. I finally got the file a few days ago and as I was reading through it, I noticed something missing. His work file with CMSD begins in 2009 with his hiring in security. There are notes from the district about hiring, layoffs, recalls, an evaluation, and then nothing. There is nothing in the file after 2017. It just stops. Bell still works in the district. He started at KCBLA in 2017 as a security officer. He has been the custodian there for years, I am told. But there is not one single item in his official personnel file about his work since 2017.

There are CMSD Board Docs about reclassifications, stipends, and such. But that’s not in his file. No evaluations either, which my other custodian friends tell me happen yearly.

The reason I requested Bell’s file was because there are a lot of custodial issues at KCBLA. A lot of work that has been neglected. A lot of work that isn’t being done at all. I was curious to see if his evaluations reflected this. I also requested the work orders he would have submitted as head custodian at KCBLA. Even though I used the same language I have when requesting work orders for other schools (Willson, NDB, Luis M Marin) CMSD rejected the KCBLA request as being Too Broad. So I have no work orders and no custodian evaluations but a filthy, falling apart school building that also has air quality issues.

You see, KCBLA needs a roof. It has the same issues as the other schools with roof leaks that cause mold growth. I had trials and tribulations getting a copy of the GetCo air quality report. It took months and at one point they sent me a To Do list claiming that was the report. I finally got the report and passed it on to KCBLA Grandma. She is the reason any of this was on my radar. The continued obfuscation by CMSD has made this my new hobby horse.

New theories are that Bell is not being evaluated at all and continuing to collect paychecks while failing to maintain KCBLA. I wonder if he even put in work orders. Additionally, CMSD’s HR department is a sloppy mess. Aren’t they making sure that personnel files contain accurate information? Is fastidious Stephen Christian just letting a lack of employee evaluations slide? What happens if there is a lawsuit concerning this employee or this building?

While we are talking about personnel files, here are some other curious examples of inexplicable redactions.

This is a page from the personnel file for a teacher. Heavily redacted.

Yet later on in the file, the references and work history are not redacted. Inexplicable.

The work history of LaQuetha Mixon is not redacted in her personnel file. She is the long term substitute at KCBLA, who covered music for years but is now the long term sub for ELA.

The personnel file for former CMSD employee and current Cuyahoga County Councilmember, Michael Houser, is also inexplicably redacted.

Redacting the name of his evaluator and the people he mentions working with? That’s public information.

I’ve seen many other personnel files and that information is not redacted. Phone numbers, yes. Names, no. I am particularly curious about the identity of the person who wrote, “On a needed occasion Michael could tip in to at a particular meeting with me that could benefit CMSD with his presence. I’m sure he would. I have not as yet asked him to?”

Well, except sometimes they are. I suppose that’s what makes them inexplicable.

You know what else is inexplicably redacted? Large chunks of Trent Mosely’s travel release forms.

I guess the public has no right to know Trent’s work phone number.

Want to hear about some other things you have no right to know?

At first they denied the request because again, these very specific dates and names were TOO BROAD. So I asked them for help, which is what I am supposed to do. They did not respond.

Since I sent my plea for help in July and had not heard back, I was working on another plan to get the documents. But then this hit my inbox this week…

I’ve kicked around the idea of lawsuits to get documents before, but put it off. This was the final straw. I started to draft a complaint. I messaged Andrew Roman to ask which department should get my initial complaint (first step in the process) and now I’m having a phone meeting with someone from legal to see if we can avoid an official complaint. I don’t know that it’s possible. CMSD does not act in good faith.

Speaking of acting in good faith, Dr. Morgan and Mayor Bibb should release the names of the 20 to 30 schools that they are closing BEFORE the election. They should release the names before even one ballot is cast in early voting.

At Campus International, our cafeteria area is so small that only one grade can eat lunch at a time. We have 700 students in kindergarten through 8th grade. We have largest enrollment in CMSD. Our lunch has to begin at 10 am to get all of our students through. With our shortened school day this year, lunch at 10 seems even more absurd than before. And yet… According the building capacity, CMSD thinks we could handle a hundred more students. Education bureaucrats think about how many students they can cram into a building to save money. Teachers and parents think about how those students can be educated so that they can learn. Also, Campus International does not have track. We don’t even let children run on our tiny, downtown playground.

Douglas MacArthur Girl’s Leadership Academy is one of the finest schools in our district. They have two robotics teams because they have enough girls interested to field two teams. Those teams kicked ass last year in the inaugural season of middle school robotics (a robotics season that happens in spite of CMSD, not because of CMSD). Their building is old and has so many issues that it rates 56 on the building condition scale, just ten points above the lowest rating. And yet… CMSD didn’t recommend families having to leave Newton D Baker that there was plenty of room at MacArthur. Sure, they said it existed, but they didn’t push it like they did the other options. CMSD also isn’t talking about getting this brilliant school into a new building. The single sex schools don’t get talked about much at all.

Mary Bethune is under enrolled and in a a not bad but not good building on the east side of town. It has pre-school and maybe it has the encores and sports listed here. But some of the information on these sheets isn’t accurate.

The enrollment trend for Charles Mooney is not great, Bob. It could fit a lot more students if people chose it, which they have not been doing when given the opportunity.

Wilbur Wright was pushed by CMSD as a landing spot for Newton D Baker families. Even though it has building capacity for more students, it doesn’t have the educational capacity for more students with disabilities. Lots of families chose Wilbur Wright only to be told No.

OH Perry looks like it has the stats to be inscribed in the bureaucrat book of life.

There is only one year that remains on the lease for Campus International High School. Hard to say what happens after this school year. I think CMSD invested money in renovations for the high school and I wonder if we are just going to walk away from the building, the IB high school idea, and the students who are currently in the IBDP. This fact sheet sparked an interesting discussion on the Publicly Cleveland Conversations Facebook page. One parent corrected the sheet by saying that CIHS has ZERO (0) sports this school year. I asked her why and while I impatiently waited for her to respond, I contacted another parent.

This parent is the biggest supporter of IB education that I have ever met. I don’t know her to be a sports parent at all, but I assumed she would know something about the sports situation at the school. She loves the new principal and is always hopeful that this time the school will be saved.

The original parent answered the question with more specificity.

Her son is a senior this year and was supposed to be the captain of the soccer team. Now he is not playing at all because he hasn’t been allowed to play for another school and intramural sports have not been created. She also added this July email from Erin Frew who is either a Network Leader or the Leader of the Network Leaders.

It’s tiny print and I am sorry for that. The highlighted part is where she says that CMSD is committed to hiring another administrative bureaucrat to coordinate intramural sports. CMSD had a website with a whole page for their athletic department and I wonder if Ms. Frew has seen it before. If so, she would have found a bevy of bureaucrats totaling a half million dollars in salary who are already in position to deal with the athletic issues at CIH. They just haven’t done their jobs. Adding another bureaucrat will just benefit the bureaucrat, not the student athletes.

I will say this over and over again until it starts a movement. We are a school district with full mayoral control. Justin Bibb chose Dr. Morgan to run the schools. Everything that has happened in CMSD since Justin Bibb became mayor, is on Justin Bibb. Everyone advised him not to choose Dr. Morgan and he did it anyway. We have too many schools and some should close and/or consolidate. There is a list with a potential closing of 20 to 30 schools. We are used to heaving one or two close in a year. This is going to be an earthquake. Dr. Morgan and his team already know which schools they are going to close. They need to tell us now before voting begins for the November Mayoral election. Taxpayers, families, Cleveland residents should know what Mayor Bibb and Dr. Morgan have planned before they vote. Anything less is unacceptable.

OST Data for 2025

After the June board meeting when Dr. Morgan gave such a small glimpse at the OST data, I requested all of it through public records. There was some back and forth where CMSD pretended not to know what I meant by OST data for 2025, so I got some professional help writing out my request as explicitly as possibly. This week I got the data.

Overall

Clearly, all of those excerpts our children are reading from HMH are going well, what with that 0.1% growth. Sure, the scores grew a bit more before the excerpts, but we are all in with HMH now. My 10 year old son is reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago here at home, but I’m sure his brain will just explode with ELA goodness when his class reads an excerpt from the graphic novel, The New Kid. Yippie!

Anyhoo, here is the chart for scores of students who have been identified as gifted by CMSD. It’s worth noting that there are a lot of gifted children whom CMSD fails to identify and fails to properly educate. It was a small bump in 2024 gifted scores that gave Dr. Morgan his 3 Stars on the red flagged state report card.

I am appreciative that this year the OST data from CMSD has the proper name Students With Disabilities instead of last year’s Speds.

Overall though, by grade level, this is how many students in this 34,000 student school district who are considered Proficient by the standard set by the state of Ohio.

Maybe taking away the separate schools inside John Hay will improve the education of our students. Maybe sending more families into the scramble for vouchers for private school will improve education - not for the students who remain in CMSD, that is. Maybe cramming more students into classrooms, 25 or more, will provide for the brighter future of CMSD students. But I don’t think so. Building Brighter Futures is about closing schools and saving money. It is not about improving education or getting more students into the proficient range. No matter what it is, we should have the closure list before we vote. We should have the closure list before the scholarship cut off dates for the private schools. Be bold, Mayor Bibb and release the list,

Open Houses Let The Sunshine In

The open houses for the K-8 schools was on Thursday September 11th. Families toured the schools, met the teachers, and unlike our students, got to have our cell phones with us to take photos. I was sent the following three photos from Louis Munoz Marin elementary. They have a bad roof and a leaky atrium. They have mold. They have sick students. They have sick teachers. CMSD has an honesty problem. There is money to fix these problems and CMSD chooses not to fix them.

I have a lot more to write and I have already gone over the email limit on this one. Expect more blog posts to hit your inbox in the coming weeks. There is just so much to talk about. Thank you for reading and thank you for sharing the information I gather. We all need to be more informed.