The new school year is underway at Cleveland Metropolitan School District, its first since implementation of a consolidation plan that means 29 fewer schools, with students and staff shuffled across the district.
The first week of class, which kicked off Aug. 24, was the district's first big test of the plan, which it calls "Building Brighter Futures." Some parents and staff have reported crowded buildings and classes along with issues with transportation. Communications director Jon Benedict acknowledged those issues in an interview but also said the district is happy with how the first week went.
"Broadly speaking across the entire district, this has been an immensely smooth and successful start to school. Frankly, one of the smoothest that we have in recent memory for a normal year, let alone one where we've contracted our schools by 29 buildings and have merged and consolidated school and staff populations among dozens of different schools," Benedict said.
While bigger questions remain about the broader impact of the plan, several takeaways have become clear about the new landscape.
Students experienced transportation issues in the first week
Courtney Yancey said her 7-year-old daughter who attends Joseph M. Gallagher School was unaccounted for by school officials for almost an hour after the first day of school last week. She said her child was put on a bus she wasn't supposed to be put on. She said school consolidation caused "chaos" at Gallagher during the first few days, arguing building leaders didn't handle the transition with so many new students well.
Eventually, her daughter was located with help from a teacher from her old school, who saw her get on a bus, and a family member who found her on a street corner where she was dropped off by the bus, Yancey said.
"It's insane, you lost my child, whether you just look at it as she was put on a bus or not, what if my mother-in-law wasn't there? What if the art teacher didn't pull up? That art teacher sat with us for an hour and a half. That's not his job, but he knows us and he knows my child, so he was the only one to help. But if he wouldn't have, who knows if we would have ever seen her again?" Yancey said.
Yancey took her daughter out of that building and to another CMSD school. The district apologized for the incident. CMSD spokesperson Jon Benedict said the district is taking action, including reviewing all student records on parents' transportation preferences.
"We have corrected the student's transportation status and are reviewing our procedures to strengthen safeguards and prevent similar situations in the future," Benedict said. "The safety and well-being of our students is our highest priority, and we are committed to earning and maintaining the trust of our families."
Other parents in a social media thread on the Publicly Cleveland Facebook page relayed other incidents of students being mistakenly picked up by buses, or dropped off at the wrong stops. However, these issues are not limited to CMSD. Willoughby, North Ridgeville and other schools in Northeast Ohio have experienced similar issues.
Some schools are crowded, but enrollment picture is still murky
Some of the district’s magnet schools like John Hay High School and John Marshall High School have seen large class sizes and crowded hallways during the first week of school after consolidation.
Cameron Cutler, a science teacher at John Marshall, said he’s seen several classrooms with as much as 40 students in them. The district consolidated three schools with different focus areas at John Marshall into one. CMSD made similar moves at John Hay and Lincoln West high schools.
Marilia Tsirikos Karapanos is a senior at John Hay High School who previously attended Campus International High School, before it was merged with John Hay. She said the school has seemed crowded with all the new students this school year, but she said students and staff have appeared to handle it well so far.
Cleveland Teachers Union President Errol Savage said he has not heard about any major issues cropping up so far due to overcrowding in schools. He said full schools are actually a good thing and hopes that the district will re-hire laid-off teachers to staff up in buildings where class sizes are larger.
"I'm hoping that when we walk in those buildings, there is a lively discourse in the hallways in between class changes and the cafeterias are exciting and dynamic places that are still orderly," he said.
It will take some time for the full picture to emerge on enrollment at CMSD, spokesperson Jon Benedict said. Typically, enrollment fluctuates in the first few weeks of school.
Public records of CMSD enrollment projections from the spring suggest John Hay would have about 850 students and John Marshall would have about 1,100 students, but Benedict said it's not clear how those stack up to actual enrollment.
New opportunities and new anxieties
During a back-to-school event at Mound School of the Arts prior to the start of the school year, staff, students and parents had a mix of opinions about CMSD’s consolidation. Arts teacher Kristin Plambeck, who moved to the school from Dike School of the Arts after 20 years, said she liked the new school's facilities, adding her arts room has a ceramics kiln she's excited to use.
Plus, she said students who attended Mound School last year will get to experience a new slate of performing arts education opportunities.
Fellow teacher Chris Legrair, however, said he was anxious about how students from different neighborhoods and schools will get along in the coming weeks.
"I think it's just the culture, so the little rifts between the Mound kids and the DSA (Dike School) kids and them still holding on to their old identities and us trying to get them to understand that now we're one, so we're in a way a one big happy family," he said.
Several parents whose children had attended Mound School last year, like Anna Palsa, said they think more students and arts programs at the school will be a big benefit. Palsa herself attended Mound School several decades ago when it had more students. She noticed the building was far less vibrant recently, before the infusion of new students from Dike School.
"They didn't have as many after school programs or a lot of things that would go on while I was in school, like open houses, you barely have any parents showing up for that, and this turnout for just this meet and greet today is completely different from previous years," she said.
Research on school consolidation paints a complicated picture
While the district has said consolidation is necessary to right-size its operations after years of enrollment declines, it's also said it will save it $30 million annually. A joint study released from Stanford University and the University of Southern California released in May challenges some of those assumptions.
The research, which looked at almost a decade of school closures in California, suggests many schools actually didn't save money when closing buildings. Lead researcher Francis Pearman, an assistant professor at Stanford University, said that's because many schools actually lost enrollment and the funding tied to those students when buildings closed. Sometimes students would leave to attend private or charter schools or move to attend other districts.
"What closures did in California is they actually exacerbated many of the enrollment declines that precipitated closures in the first place. So it became part of this kind of downward cycle of accelerated de-enrollment," Pearman said.
Professor Marguerite Roza, who directs the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University which has studied recent building consolidations, said it's incumbent on schools to carefully manage their consolidation. The fewer disruptions and better programming mean families will be more likely to stay in the district.
"You can close a school and divide the population up five ways and send the kids to five different schools. And now they've not only lost the building, but they've lost the community of people. Or you can try to make sure those students all stay together in a new school, so their community is more or less intact," Roza explained.
