Atlanta

In a once-thriving neighborhood in the southeast part of Atlanta, Lakewood Elementary served families who came to work at the General Motors assembly plant, a sprawling 100-acre landmark that became a path toward economic mobility for entry-level workers. At its height in the late 1970s, the plant employed as many as 5,700 people. 

But by the early ‘90s, when Gloria Hawkins-Wynn moved into the community, signs of decline were evident. The last Chevy Caprice rolled off the assembly line in 1990, and a popular antique market at the now-defunct Lakewood Fairgrounds shut down in 2006. The closure of the elementary school two years earlier further contributed to neighborhood blight, turning the abandoned structure into a hotspot for criminal activity.

“We get prostitution. We get drug dealing. We get drive-by shootings,” Hawkins-Wynn told four years ago. A neighborhood representative, she urged city leaders to turn the eyesore over to a developer. 

Former students begged the city to save the school, home to some of their earliest : Dick and Jane books, dances in the auditorium, a principal named Mr. Hinkle. Still visible on the school’s deserted playground is a faded map of the United States.

“Please don’t demolish it,” wrote one woman. Walking to Lakewood with her mother, who died when she was 7, is a cherished memory. 

Now the old school is one of several in Atlanta It’s a transformation that is increasingly taking place across the country as city leaders and developers look to give new life to vacant buildings once bustling with students and teachers.

In 2024, nearly 2,000 apartments were built in former schools across the U.S., a record high and four times the number a year earlier, according to from RentCafe, a property search website. School-to-apartment conversions are now the fastest growing segment of a niche industry devoted to makeovers of historic spaces. 

As student enrollment nationwide and more districts, including Atlanta, make the painful decision to close schools, the Lakewood project offers a glimpse of what’s to come: Seventy-four school conversion projects are already underway across the country, RentCafe’s data shows. With enrollment loss in traditional schools , districts will be left with even more surplus properties. 

Renovating existing structures “offers a way to help those buildings continue on as community assets,” said Patrice Frey, president and CEO of RePurpose Capital, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

For the first time since the Great Depression, renovation projects, including historic preservation, surpassed new construction in 2022, according to the . Supply chain gridlock and “the rapid escalation of materials costs” likely contributed to the shift, Frey said.

The pandemic also played a part as parents chose charter schools or uprooted to other districts and states to find in-person learning. The rapid expansion of private school choice has also contributed to enrollment declines, school consolidations and closures.

Data from the Brookings Institution showed that between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, 12% of elementary schools and 9% of middle schools lost at least one-fifth of their students. Many districts delayed closures in response to parents and generations of former students who pleaded with leaders to keep the neighborhood institutions open. Some districts, , are still putting it off.

But maintaining underenrolled schools, especially those with just a couple hundred students, can be a financial drain. The , and districts are among those that have recently announced or discussed closures. That means they’ll eventually have to decide what to do with the buildings.

An earlier Atlanta project, completed in 1999, offers a preview of what’s in store for Lakewood and many other former schools. was redeveloped into Bass Lofts, a three-story structure that sits in a bohemian neighborhood known for vintage clothing stores, dive bars and record shops. Mallory Brooks, a photographer, moved into one of the units 10 years ago after relocating from Florida.

“It was the first place I looked at, and I was definitely smitten,” she said. Stepping through the main entrance, “you are transported immediately to being in a school.” 

Old lockers, welded shut, line the ground floor hallways, and a large Depression-era mural of women dancing sits above the stage in the auditorium. While rows of seats remain intact, some tenants also use the space to store their bikes. Brooks appreciates how sunlight pours through the 10-foot-high windows — “I’ve been able to basically create a greenhouse in my apartment,” she said. But regulating the temperature is difficult, and she looks forward to HVAC upgrades. 

‘Legacy residents’

Lakewood Elementary is one of eight sites that the Atlanta Public Schools is now repurposing through an agreement with the Atlanta Urban Development Corp., a nonprofit arm of the city’s housing authority that renovates historic properties into mixed-income residences. The plan, part of to increase affordable housing, includes giving teachers the first choice of apartments. That was important to Cynthia Briscoe Brown, a former Atlanta Board of Education member whose last vote in December was to . 

“Seventy percent of APS employees do not live within the city limits of Atlanta,” she said. “One of the board’s priorities in developing these properties is to make it possible for our employees to not have to drive so far before their work day.” 

A lawyer with experience in real estate, she took an interest in the dilapidated properties when she was first elected in 2013. But she also has personal ties to the site where Peeples Street Elementary, one of the eight former schools, once stood. Her father, Woodson Briscoe, attended the school, which sat just down the street from the boarding house, run by an aunt, where the family lived. 

“This was the Depression. They were a young couple with a family, and they couldn’t afford their own house,” she said. Today, as in the neighborhood climb, with some homes priced well over $500,000, families are facing the same problem. “The West End is gentrifying to a point where a lot of legacy residents are having trouble staying.” 

‘A pall over neighborhoods’ 

Peeples Street closed in 1982. has been gone for 30 years, torn down after a fire left little worth saving.

But some shuttered schools can sit vacant for decades, attracting crime and casting “a pall over neighborhoods,” Alyn Turner, a sociologist with Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, told a group of Atlanta leaders in February. 

In a hotel east of downtown, they gathered in a dining room to discuss ways to lessen the negative impacts of the upcoming closures on both students and the neighborhoods where they live.

Turner cited a showing that between 2005 and 2013, 12 urban districts, including Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh, sold, leased or repurposed 267 school properties, but still had more than 300 on the market. 

School closures “tend to concentrate in communities that have already experienced displacement and disinvestment,” she said. “People can experience a closure as yet another signal of neighborhood decline.”

In Gary, Indiana, a rising number of 911 calls near abandoned schools — an almost 600% increase between 2022 and 2024. They found fires, hundreds of requests for extra police patrols and 26 reports of “shots fired.”  In 2015, a was found dead in Emerson High School, a Four years later, three teenagers fatally shot a woman and in an emptied-out elementary school.

Like any abandoned building, a boarded-up old school can “provide cover” for criminals, according to at Arizona State University. Run-down, vacant structures can even escalate criminal behavior, they write, sending a message that no one owns or cares about the property.

Maintaining former school buildings until they’re sold or repurposed can make the neighborhood feel safer, Turner told the Atlanta group. But like Briscoe Brown, some participants said they worry about the opposite effect — gentrification that leaves some lower-income families behind.

“How can you help the people who are still there?” asked Femi Johnson, a senior director at Achieve Atlanta, a nonprofit that focuses on college access. “Can it be a food bank? Can it be a community health center?”

In her hometown of Philadelphia, she saw the former Edward Bok Vocational School, part of a wave of closures in 2013, transformed into an event space with , a destination she felt didn’t serve the community’s needs.

Developers are drawn to former schools because of their historic architectural features, like wide hallways and stairwells. The former Monsignor Coyle High School in Taunton, Massachusetts, now , boasts “soaring ceilings” and original windows. 

Tax credits for historic preservation can offset some of the costs of modernization, but come with restrictions on what developers can change and which “character-defining features,” like a gymnasium, must go untouched, said Pittsburgh developer Rick Belloli.

In 2022, his company, Q Development, Mt. Alvernia, a former Sisters of St. Francis convent and all-girls school north of Pittsburgh. He described the massive, 333-room main building, the Motherhouse, as “a gloriously spectacular historic building” with cast iron stairways and arched ceilings. But he’s still navigating the approval process, and some developers, he said, avoid former schools because of those hurdles. 

‘Choice properties’

Like Coyle and Mt. Alvernia, many of the school-to-apartment conversions are concentrated in the northeast and midwest. Columbus, Ohio, ranked first on of cities with the most school conversion projects. 

Next on the list is Cleveland, where the former Martin Luther King Jr. High School, in the predominantly Black , was among those affected by more recent enrollment loss. In 2020, the district , which had dropped to less than 350 students, and a Maryland-based developer for $880,000.

Exploring one of Cleveland’s abandoned high school’s

Last fall, knowing the building might be demolished, former students gathered to reflect and grab what mementos they could. Some cut strings off the basketball hoops, said Ronald Crosby, who attended in the late 1980s. Others took old library cards and team jerseys. 

Ronald’s sister Johnetta Crosby has fond memories of the school. “We had teachers that took their time to make sure you learned,” she said. “If you didn’t have anything to wear, they made sure you did. If you couldn’t afford to eat lunch, they fed you anyway.”

D’Angelo Dixon, who graduated in 2018, felt more conflicted. “Black stuff” leaked from the ceiling, he remembered, and academically, he felt behind friends who attended other schools. 

“Once I went to college, I felt like I didn’t know anything,” he said. But he credited the school’s career-tech program with inspiring him to work in health care. He’s now a nursing assistant. At the alumni gathering last year, he headed for the art room to grab a ceiling tile he painted with his nickname, Delo — part of a senior class assignment.

Some alumni hoped the developer, Kareem Abdus-Salaam, would save the building but that’s not part of his vision for the new residential community, a mix of apartments, townhomes and retail space.

“I really want to just level the whole site and bring it up, almost like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” he said. He expects to break ground this spring. “There are so many abandoned schools in this country that are sitting on choice properties.”

He does, however, intend to make use of the large stones that still border one corner of the property by crushing them into gravel for a quarter-mile walking trail that will wind through the development. Along that pathway, he plans to erect signposts with historical photos of the school so former students “can have some feeling of yesteryear.” 

In Atlanta, the partnership between the school district and the city gives officials a say in what the developers preserve. They’ll integrate the original Lakewood Elementary building into the overall design. 

With a strip of commercial properties on the corner, including a popular restaurant and coffee shop, Hawkins-Wynn, who still lives a few blocks away, hopes the redevelopment will spur even more investment in the neighborhood.

On a recent afternoon, the transition was obvious, but so were the obstacles in its path. As she walked the perimeter of the property, a construction crew put up plywood on a new home across the street. A few lots down, trash and discarded mattresses piled up on the curb.

“This is why we need redevelopment,” she said, pointing to the debris. “It’s still shady around here, but it’s changing like you won’t believe.” 

Launched in 2008, MC²STEM attracted the city’s best students to classrooms in locations ranging from Cleveland’s science museum, the world headquarters of GE Lighting, and at a local community and a commuter college. 

The small school with an enrollment of 218 students even caught the eye of former President Barack Obama, who included it in a 2014 slideshow with the caption: “We need more schools like: MC²STEM High School.”

But next fall, as part of away from the small schools model that was once popular nationally, MC²STEM won’t exist anymore. Instead, it’s being turned into just a STEM program at a high school in the poorest neighborhood in the city.

The school is the most dramatic casualty in a major reorganization and reduction of schools in Cleveland as ever-declining enrollment forces budget cuts. The cuts come as the district also changes its philosophy from highlighting a few star high schools to keep strong students from fleeing, instead shifting toward offering more opportunities at all high schools. 

“I kind of see this as an ending for the school that I knew,” said Feowyn McKinnon, the school’s principal from 2015 to 2021, who believes turning MC²STEM into a program inside a standard school will damage it.

With the cuts, Cleveland is reversing the once-popular movement in districts across the country of carving up big schools into smaller schools that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his foundation once promoted and funded. Cleveland adopted the small schools approach heavily in the early 2000’s as well as the similar “portfolio” school district model that downplays large, standardized schools in favor of offering students a choice of many schools with different approaches. 

But the tide has turned against the small schools movement with and Cleveland now facing both budget troubles and a desire to make schools big enough to offer more language electives and career training classes.

Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education that , said districts shifted away from small, specialized schools to save money before the pandemic, then moved further from the model by seeking standardized ways to recover.  

“I don’t think it’s an educational decision so much as just the financial pressures on districts to find ways to keep operating,” he said. “As everybody gets bled out of money, one way to do that is to eliminate an administrative layer from a school and call it a program. I don’t think people have come to the conclusion that great big schools are better than smaller ones.”

In Cleveland, the school board is expected to vote Dec. 9 to fold 27 high schools, many of them small specialized schools of fewer than 300 students, into 14 large comprehensive high schools. 

If the plan passes, several specialized high schools — including MC²STEM, two early college high schools, two schools that teach medicine by partnering with hospitals; and an aviation and maritime school helping students earn pilot licenses — will all become programs within large combined schools.

Along with closing 16 preK-8 schools, the changes are estimated to save about $30 million a year by slashing administrative and building costs.

Cleveland district CEO Warren Morgan has cast the changes as a matter of both money and equity after cutting extra school days and year-round classes at several schools.

“Right now, we have pockets of excellence,” said Morgan. “We have some schools that have programs, some that don’t. We offer some things at some schools, but we don’t offer them at others. Now is a time for us to figure out what we can do for all. Not for some, but for all.”

Part of Morgan’s goal is efficiency. The district, like others in older and Rust Belt cities, has been losing students for years. The Cleveland school district had 115,000 students in 1979 before several factors — court-ordered busing to integrate schools, white flight, suburbanization, creation of one of the country’s first voucher programs and then the growth of charter schools — cut enrollment to about 34,000 today.

Though the district has closed buildings several times over the years, it now estimates schools have space for 50,000 students — about 16,000 too many.

Former district CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who had been involved in creating small schools in New York City and later became CEO of Chicago schools, Then longtime CEO Eric Gordon, who ran the district from 2011 to 2023, aggressively created small high schools with distinct themes, ranging from project-based schools to one built around students creating digital artwork, music or video games.

That gave Cleveland many small high schools with fewer than 300 students, each with the costs of their own principals and other support staff, but not enough students to justify always having sports teams, Advanced Placement classes, foreign language options and — as a recent focus of the district and state — full career pathways that let students earn valuable career credentials.

Morgan now wants all high schools to have at least 500 students and promises to add career training teachers and classes so that all schools can offer career pathways recognized by the state.

It’s why the 218 student MC²STEM is merging into the 475 student East Technical High School, and why the district is undoing a major that split the old, large John Hay High School in the early 2000’s into three magnet schools that now have 211, 259 and 375 students. They’ll all be turned into programs next fall of a re-combined school that will also add a fourth 207-student high school to the mix. 

The changes could have drawbacks. The magnet schools at John Hay have been district leaders in test scores and college enrollment for years and have been a significant draw to families, particularly the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine, which has students learning from staff of the nearby Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital and Case Western Reserve University medical school.

Morgan pledges to maintain those partnerships, though whether becoming a program instead of remaining its own school will be just a bookkeeping change or whether it will dilute the program remains to be seen.

Students aren’t sure yet about the changes. 

Ruby Love, a freshman at the School of Science and Medicine where 375 students are enrolled, said it mattered that her school was focused on medicine when she chose it. She’s not excited about having the three schools mix next year.

 “It’s going to be weird being in classes with people I’ve never met,” she said.

At the same time, her school offers only Latin as a second language and the merger could let her take Spanish, or even engineering classes.

Eri’elle Jones, another Science and Medicine student, also likes the possibility of taking Spanish so the change has some appeal.

“I don’t have an issue with it,” she said. “It gives you a lot more opportunities”

Bekah Lejarde, a teacher at another small high school that will be merged into two others, said smaller schools help students and opposes combining the three into a 1,400-student school. The three schools already share the John Marshall High School, but their distinct themes and personalized approach has boosted graduation rates in the 10 years since opening. 

She told the school board that the merger might save the district $250,000, at most.

“Is that amount of money worth a declining graduation rate?” Lejarde asked. “Is $250,000 worth a diminished learning environment, less support, increased safety issues and an easier ability for scholars to fall through the cracks?”

Another merging school, the Benjamin O. Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School, is cautiously hopeful its program — started to prepare students for careers in aviation and Great Lakes shipping — will stay strong and maintain a distinct identity. An industry non-profit called Argonaut that helped start the school in 2017 wants “aerospace” and “maritime” to stay in the name, even as it merges with a digital arts school.

“The two sides of the name are: One is getting buy-in from industries. As this is a school specifically about these industries,you know we’re connecting to the jobs,” said Andrew Ferguson, CEO of Argonaut, who is at the school constantly, taking students onto Lake Erie on boats or helping them with flight lessons. “The other is getting kids to show up at the door. When you go to a school called aerospace and maritime, you’re pretty clear what the expectation is and where you’re going.”

Critics of the changes agree with Morgan that the district needs to close schools, because some of the specialized schools can be expensive. As protective as McKinnon is about MC²STEM, she conceded having duplicate teachers at the school’s multiple sites is costly, along with the $80,000 she recalls the school spending on parking at the science museum and at Cleveland State University each year.

The former crown jewel school has also lost some of its shine. Test scores fell to the middle of the pack in recent years as the district added more specialty schools and the best students picked other options. 

“If money is the issue that schools are closing, it 100% makes sense that MC² is closing,” she said. “There were always so many additional expenses related to MC² that every year I thought we were on the chopping block.” 

Cleveland Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski agreed some schools need to close, but worried that the district is rushing the changes for next school year without carefully planning how combining the schools will work..

“When you take a building where you have these schools that have been ranked not only highly in the district, but in the state, and then you’re just going to kind of blow it up without an idea of how you’re putting it back together, that’s concerning,” Obrenski said. “I don’t really want to be building this plane while we’re flying it.” 

“They teach you ABCs,” Pobrega said as he picked up her third grader after school. “They teach you how to write. They teach you small little words and it prepares them for first grade.”

But not all parents value kindergarten as much as Pobrega. So many parents treat kindergarten as less important than other grades that it adds up into a major problem — nationally, across Ohio and particularly at Lincoln Park and other high-poverty schools.

Kindergarten has the highest absenteeism problem of any elementary grade in several states, studies have shown. In Ohio, attendance can be so bad that state data show some kindergartens approaching 90% chronic absenteeism.

Though chronic absenteeism — students missing 10 percent or more of school days — is drawing national attention for high school students, there has long been a second, less publicized, peak in absenteeism in kindergarten and sometimes preschool that is also damaging. 

Hedy Chang, one of the leading researchers of absenteeism and its effects, said kindergarten absenteeism needs educator’s attention, not just high school absences.

“You really want to worry about both,” said Chang, founder of the nonprofit Attendance Works. “You want to care about your youngest incoming learners, because that’s going to be critical for the long term. What you don’t invest in and address early, you might pay for later.”

Consider: In Ohio, more than a quarter of Ohio kindergarteners missed at least 18 days of school in the 2023-24 school year, state data shows, making kindergarten the highest chronic absenteeism rate of any elementary school grade in the state.

That matches findings by nonprofit FutureEd in March that kindergarteners had the highest chronic absenteeism of any grade in Hawaii and Utah last school year. In all 20 other states FutureEd looked at, Kindergarten had the highest chronic absenteeism rates before 7th grade.

“We see this U-shaped curve,” when charting absenteeism by grade, said Amber Humm Patnode, acting director of Proving Ground, a Harvard based research and absenteeism intervention effort. There is high absenteeism in kindergarten, it improves for several years, and typically rises again in late middle school.

She said there are really two separate absenteeism problems — one for the youngest and one for the oldest students — that need different strategies to fix.

Ohio State University professor Arya Ansari, who specializes in early childhood education, called kindergarten absenteeism “problematic” because missed classes add up over the years.

“Kids who missed school in kindergarten do less well academically in terms of things like counting, letters, word identification, language skills.., they do less well in terms of their executive function skills, and they do less well socially and behaviorally,” Ansari said. 

“Days missed in preschool or kindergarten kind of set the stage, or are precursors for future absences,” he added. “So when you’re frequently absent, it kind of begins to have a snowball effect and sets habits that are harder to break later on.”

There’s also another dynamic at play with kindergarten absences: It varies by school, in very dramatic ways.

Though Ohio’s kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate was just above 26% last year, 27 kindergartens had chronic absenteeism triple that rate, coming close to or exceeding 80%. Lincoln Park had the worst rate in the state last year at nearly 90%, with close to 9 out of 10 kindergarteners qualifying as chronically absent.

Adding to the damage, the worst kindergarten absenteeism is happening in places where the students need it most. Ohio’s list of highest absenteeism rates is dominated by schools in, or next to, the state’s biggest or most poor cities — Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo and Youngstown — where students have performed well below suburban students for years.

In contrast, affluent and higher-performing schools easily have less than 5% kindergarten chronic absenteeism, with several at zero.

Students in the high-poverty schools are not only missing days that could start them on a path to catching up, the absences are holding everyone back even more, Chang said.

“I consider high (absenteeism) at 20%, 30% in a school,” Chang said. “80%? That’s an extremely high level of chronic absence. When schools have really high levels of chronic absence, the churn just makes everything harder. It makes it harder for teachers to teach, set classroom norms and kids to learn.”

Some of why kindergarten absenteeism is so high is easy to understand. For many kids, it’s the first year of school, so kindergartens become superspreader sites for colds, flu and other illnesses kids haven’t been exposed to before. Since chronic absenteeism includes any days missed, even for illness, rates could legitimately spike.

The pandemic added a twist to that, said Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University professor and another leader in absenteeism research.

“It used to be that parents got guidance (that) If your kid just had sniffles, you could send them to school,” Balfanz said. “Then, coming out of the pandemic, parents got the message… perhaps overload, perhaps not…that should you have any sign of illness, you could have COVID. That’s another factor.”

Just as important: Only 17 states required students to attend kindergarten as of 2023, according to the Education Commission of the States. That easily leads parents to consider it optional and for school to really start in first grade.

Then there’s kindergartners’ need for parents or siblings to take them to school or to their bus stop. If school and work schedules don’t align, or if a sibling’s school is different, kindergarten falls lower on the priority list.

“A kindergartener not coming to school is not necessarily the kindergartner saying, ‘I’m not going to school today,’ ” said Jessica Horowitz-Moore, chief of student and academic supports for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. “That has to do a lot with the parents.”

Parents oftentimes don’t appreciate how fast absences add up. Another parent picking up children at Lincoln Park was a perfect example. That father said his child only missed school “a couple times a month” when in kindergarten. But twice a month is 10% of the 20 school days in a month (Four weeks of five days each) which is right on pace for chronic absenteeism.

Some of the kindergartens in Ohio with the worst absenteeism in 2023-24 were failing in many other ways too: Two charter elementary schools with kindergarten chronic absenteeism over 87% closed before school began this academic year. Some, including the Stepstone Academy charter school in Cleveland, did not respond to multiple messages from The 74.

Lincoln Park, with the worst kindergarten absenteeism problem in the state, is part of the ACCEL charter schools, a fast-growing multi-state charter network, that had five of Ohio’s 10-worst kindergartens for chronic absenteeism.

Representatives of the network said the schools are often in high poverty neighborhoods with families that move frequently, which disrupts attendance. Students often don’t have reliable transportation, they said, and Ohio’s charter schools have less money to put toward attendance issues than districts.

Lincoln Park school leaders say they’re trying to improve attendance and academic performance. Both the school’s principal and kindergarten teacher are new this year and interim Principal Erika Vogtsberger said she expects the preschool attendance rate to go up from 74% last year to about 80% this school year. 

She said fewer families are moving during this school year than last, and more than 90% of Lincoln Park’s students have signed up to return, bringing stability she thinks will help attendance.

The school has also been trying for a few years to encourage attendance. It has early morning and afterschool sessions so working parents can drop children off at 6:30 am and pick them up as late as 5:30 pm. It holds special events like pancake breakfasts for families to encourage attendance and gives classrooms with 90 percent attendance for five days a chance to spin a wheel for rewards like pizza parties or a chance to wear pajamas to school for a day.

But even at 90% goal to earn prizes still leaves 10% of students absent racking up days toward chronic absenteeism.

“We have to make it attainable,” Vogtsberger said. “If I had it at 95%, the kids who are here without missing a day are going to get discouraged because… we do have a small cluster of people who are out pretty regularly.”

“Nobody would get it,” added Sherree Dillions, a regional superintendent for ACCEL. “At least, with the 90%, peer to peer pressure is a big piece. You say ‘You better come … You better come tomorrow, because we want that pizza party’, or we want whatever … Because the kid wants the prize.”

Voghtsberger said she also does not want to punish students, either, because their parents aren’t doing what they need to do.

“No matter how bad some students want to be at school, if their parents are not getting up in the morning and bringing them, they cannot get to school, and… that’s not their fault.” she said. 

School officials also said parents are a problem beyond not bringing children to school. Parents, they said, are often abusive when called or visited to check on students and have sometimes threatened school officials with guns or dogs. Ohio has also moved away from taking action against students or parents for truancy, so parents face no penalty for keeping students home, as they do in other states, including Indiana, West Virginia and Iowa.

“If I had my way, parents would be held accountable across the board,” Dillions said.

The Toledo school district, whose Sherman elementary school has the worst absenteeism of any school district kindergarten in Ohio, also saw parents push back when the school called or visited about students skipping school. The district decided in 2017 to pay for well-known people in neighborhoods, like football coaches or local volunteers, to serve as “attendance champions” to talk to parents instead of school officials.

“(They) go out to the homes,” Baker said. “They complete home visits. They work with the families to remove barriers to attendance. They’re in the buildings every day, building relationships with students, removing barriers on that end as well.”

“They are not truancy officers,” Baker stressed. “They are not to issue any punishment. That’s not their thing. This is about, ‘How can I help get Johnny back into school?”

The champions have reduced some of the tension between schools and parents, she said.

Baker has seen better attendance this year, so she expects kindergarten chronic absenteeism there to fall from about 87% to 77% — still about triple the statewide rate.

There are some reasons for optimism across Ohio and nationally. Absenteeism at all grades, including kindergarten, is improving yearly since the end of the pandemic everywhere.

Baker said, though, that kindergarten may need to be more of a priority.

“We’re going to have to really hit preschool and kindergarten a little bit harder with our interventions that we are setting up,” she said. “We have been very much focused on high school. But I think for us as a district … we really have to continue to hit this hard across the board.”

Year-round schooling, which gained popularity in the 1970s, avoids long summer vacations in which students can during the school year. Under the plan, students attend classes as part of a normal grading period most of the summer. Their school years aren’t much longer than with a traditional schedule, just spread out differently, with their lost summer vacation days added to other breaks during the school year.

Cleveland’s move comes as some states like South Carolina and Florida have recently embraced or are trying out the approach, along with districts hoping to address pandemic learning loss. The number of schools using year-round schedules nationally fell from about 6% in the 1970s to under 3% before the pandemic, researchers report.

In Cleveland, previous district leaders once considered year-round school a promising way to turn around the struggling district. But it caught on in just six of Cleveland’s high schools, and new school leaders now want all district schools on the same calendar and curriculum so students aren’t lost if they change schools.

Leaders also aren’t convinced year-round school is helping. Athis year with researchers from Cleveland State University and the American Institutes for Research showed the city’s year-round schools often have higher math and English scores than other high schools, but mostly because the schools have more gifted students and students who would do well with any schedule. Research nationally is also mixed.

District CEO Warren Morgan decided gains were not enough to justify the additional $2.6 million in teacher salaries year-round classes cost.

“There was no evidence that there was substantial, meaningful difference in the academic outcomes in our different calendar types,” Morgan said before the school board vote last week. “We also recognize and value the excellence of our many different schools …but there’s also other variables…that make them great.”

David Hornak, executive director of the National Association for Year Round Education, said the pandemic renewed interest in year-round school as a possible way to tackle COVID learning loss, as well as increasing interest in related strategies, like adding summer learning programs or extra school days to the start or end of the school year.

Hornak estimates about 4% of schools now have a year-round schedule, but the association has scaled back over the years and has no staff to track it.

He said students are less likely to forget lessons over a shorter summer vacation. Longer breaks during the year, often about three weeks long, give schools a chance to give struggling students targeted help catching up, rather than waiting until July for a summer school that feels like a punishment.

“I would love school leaders to consider summer as just another academic block of time,” he said.

Paul Von Hippel, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas and prominent skeptic of year-round school, said he sees no difference in learning from just scheduling the same number of school days in different ways.

“Instead of having one long break where students forget a lot, you have a bunch of short breaks where students forget a little,” Von Hippel said. “The amount of forgetting adds up to be about the same.”

He added that though the pandemic prompted districts to consider year-round classes, he sees no evidence that they have caught on in a meaningful way. 

Teachers, parents and students of Cleveland’s six year-round schools, however, fought the district CEO and implored the district school board at two hearings to keep a schedule they say made their schools unique and offered students chances they wouldn’t have with a standard school year.

Students from one year-round school even protested the change outside district headquarters last month.

Xavier Avery, a junior at Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School who organized the protest, reminded the school board right before its vote April 29 that his school has received state awards and has better test scores than the district average. He also said that students spend part of school days in warmer months on boats and planes, both learning to operate them and studying Lake Erie as part of the school’s specialized focus.

“Our year-round calendar plays a huge role in this success,” he said. “It’s what makes our programs, internships and hands-on learning possible.”

Cleveland also cut other non-traditional schedules as part of its push to put all schools on the same schedule. Morgan and the school board also axed extended school years, which added extra days at 17 other schools, as well as extended days, running 30 minutes longer each day at six schools. Those cuts drew more fire from parents, who said that being able to choose schools that offer extra time keeps them in the district, rather than selling their homes and moving to suburban districts.

Year-round schools started gaining national attention in the 1970s, experts say, for two major reasons. In some cases, most notably fast-growing California where schools were too small to handle exploding enrollment, schools spread classes out over the whole year so they could stagger student schedules to accommodate all of them.

The other major draw, the one that appealed to Cleveland, was limiting “summer learning loss” or “summer slide,” where students forget much of what they learned during long vacations. 

A found mixed results, with Black, Hispanic and low-income students more likely to see gains and the staggered schedules in California more likely to show losses.

California stopped using that strategy after building new schools for all its students. 

The total also fell as cities like and dropped the approach several years ago after not seeing big academic gains. Post-pandemic data was not readily available.

Educators still see promise in the approach. and three school districts in Florida are now  

Other school districts in Dallas and Philadelphia are trying a related, though different, approach: simply adding voluntary days to the year to reduce summer slide and to help students who are behind catch up, whether from the pandemic or just needing more class time. Richmond, Virginia, has also added at a few struggling schools, though squashed attempts to do that for the whole district.

Cleveland’s experiment with year-round school started in 2009 at a specialized STEM school created as a magnet for the city’s top students. Former Cleveland school district CEO Eric Gordon soon after considered moving the entire district to year-round schedules. 

In launching a district turnaround plan in 2012, he jokingly dismissed the traditional school year as an “agrarian calendar we currently use so that all of my students are free to bring in the harvest every summer.”

Gordon said the district could close half the gap between his students and higher-performing suburban students by eliminating the accumulation of 12 years of summer slides before graduation. 

But attempts to use a year-round calendar at one large neighborhood high school failed after parents objected to students losing summer breaks and its effect on family vacations, summer jobs and school schedules of siblings on regular schedules.

A lack of air conditioning in some old schools and parent objections to a much-smaller change — starting the school year earlier in August than before — put plans to use the schedule at more schools on hold.

The year-round schedule ended up at no neighborhood schools and just six schools the district created with alternative class styles — a school based in a hospital or one focused on learning through digital art projects — that families could pick, but not be assigned to.

When the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered schools in 2020, students were suddenly thrust into a world of online classes at home. That wasn’t an easy switch, even for affluent students with their own computers and internet service at home. 

But in high-poverty cities like Cleveland and Detroit, it was a full blown crisis with thousands of students lacking computers and any internet access.

Nearly half of families in the two cities had no broadband internet service —  strong connections to home devices such as computers, not just on mobile phones — making them the worst-connected cities in the U.S. in one ranking. Other high-poverty cities, including Baltimore, Memphis and Newark, were close behind.

Today, a little more than five years since the pandemic shut schools down, the crisis isn’t as immediate — schools are open after all — but structural issues remain. Connectivity rates have improved nationally from about 71% of homes having broadband service in 2019 to more than 76% in 2023, still far from everyone.

”The pandemic highlighted for federal and state government that we have an issue,” said Charlotte Bewersdorff, vice president of community engagement of the a partnership between Michigan’s universities that has worked to improve internet access even before Covid hit. “A lot of our work prior to that was trying to convince people that there was an issue. The pandemic made it undeniable.”

Gains were greater in the cities that had the greatest need. Cleveland and Detroit each went from having nearly half of homes without broadband down to a third, according to U.S. Census data.

But now those gains are threatened.  

Most connectivity improvements were made in 2020 and 2021 — at the height of the pandemic —  but have since stalled. A key federal emergency effort to help families be online by paying part of their monthly bill has ended. Some long-term improvements using Covid relief money are planned but have been slow to start. 

The programs are now in limbo as Congress has changed its focus and President Donald Trump ordered a pause in January on many infrastructure investments, including internet efforts with funding set aside in pandemic relief bills but hadn’t started work yet. There’s also which would benefit Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the Starlink satellite company and close advisor of Trump.

 “The initial agility and efforts to help everybody get connected lost steam as other programs and other problems emerged,” said Johannes Bauer, the chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission in 2023 and 2024. “There’s a risk that the gains that were made very early on are actually diminishing over time, and new programs haven’t yet filled that gap.”

Providing internet access for all has long been a goal of digital equity advocates, though it has never been easy to achieve. There’s an infrastructure challenge: Homes need a service to connect to, which isn’t always the case. Families need to be able to afford it. They need computers to use it. And they need to know how,

All of these were hurdles when the pandemic hit, particularly for low-income areas.

Schools and nonprofits scrambled to hand out laptops and mobile hotspots. Some parked buses with wifi service in neighborhoods. Learning pods sprouted at churches, community centers or clubs like the Y.M.C.A. or Boys and Girls Clubs, where plexiglass dividers separated properly-spaced desks for students to take classes on just-acquired laptops.Club staff came to work every day while school staff stayed home.

Suddenly, “digital equity” was a focus of legislators and the federal government, which soon offered billions in grants to help families pay internet bills and to add fiber optic lines and other internet infrastructure to disconnected areas.

block by block to help target aid. All 50 states created digital equity plans to compete for grants and help connect and educate underserved groups. Many states have also submitted plans and won early approval for plans to connect rural areas.

But there are worries. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), created by Congress during the pandemic, gave a peak of 23 million homes $30 a month to reduce their internet bills, but Congress let the funding expire in 2024. And billions set aside for both rural and urban 

infrastructure and for internet education is also uncertain while the Trump administration picks new leaders to oversee grants and Republicans in Congress seek to change rules guiding them.

Beyond just pausing infrastructure projects overall, Trump’s orders to half spending on “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” in all parts of government threatens efforts to connect and train families under the Digital Equity Act, another pandemic response.

Cleveland and Detroit highlight the mixed impact of the pandemic on connectivity. The two cities remain the worst-connected cities in the U.S., but they have also seen the greatest improvements in connectivity rates the last few years, according to census data

Those cities each slashed the percentage of families with no broadband service in half –  from around 46% in each city in 2019 to about 23% today, according to Connect Your Community and 2023 data from the census. 

“It has gotten completely better,” said Gloria Jones, director of the Boys and Girls Club near the King Kennedy public housing apartments in Cleveland. The club’s pandemic learning pod once drew  more than 30 students every day to do online lessons.

 “When we first started out, there were kids that didn’t have any access,” she said. “That’s why we had to set up. Or their internet was running slow. If you’ve got three kids in the house and y’all are trying to get on the same internet, it slows it down.”

Today, students mostly use the club WiFi only for an online tutoring program the club provides. She said families seem to have found low-cost service, even if not at ideal bandwidth, often from cell phone companies.

The landscape has changed so much in Cleveland that the Cleveland Municipal School District, which had to scramble to buy its 35,000 students laptops and digital hotspots for the 2020-21 school year, has cut its hotspot program way back. The district gave hotspots to 12,000 students — about a third of the district’s enrollment — in 2023, but cut that in half to 6,000 by last spring because students weren’t using them for months at a time.

“We turned them off,”  Curtis Timmons, the district’s Chief Information Officer, said as budget cuts were announced last spring. “If you don’t use a hotspot that tells us something – that’s a waste of our money.”

The need for hotspots will reduce further with the district now offering students free internet service from DigitalC, a unique non-profit the district has partnered with since 2020 that aims to provide low-cost broadband using wireless technology. It’s a plan that has caught the attention of connectivity experts, who could not point to another new, public—private partnership like it.

Using private donations and federal pandemic relief dollars from the city, DigitalC has nearly finished building a network across the city so it can offer 100 mbs service for $18 a month.

The school district, city and county housing authority all allowed the company to put transmission towers on school buildings to keep costs down. About 1,300 families with students in the district now use it for free internet.

Nichelle Montoney, guardian of two boys, 13 and 10, in the Cleveland school district said free service from DigitalC makes a big difference for her. She kept her internet service after ACP ended, but her $50 monthly bill from the cable company was hard to pay.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “That bill barely got paid…when you have to choose between paying the gas bill and the light bill. You pay just under the minimum requirement to put it towards the cable bill, so you can try to get just another 30 days and hope that it stays on. It was a struggle.”

Other residents are still slow to sign on. The service has about 3,600 subscribers, out of about 90,000 households in its service area. DigitalC still aims to eventually have 22,500 homes subscribed, nearly half of those without internet service now.

Detroit also had major efforts to connect people. A partnership with the city, United Way and the Rocket Mortgage company, which is based in Detroit, rallied as “Connect 313” — named after the city’s area code — to provide training and low cost laptops and hotspots to people. The city also used pandemic relief money to ” in libraries, community centers and non-profits around the city that remain open today for residents to access the internet.

It is also trying to add fiber optic cable to one neighborhood to improve connectivity there as a pilot project, but the .

And it boosted its connectivity numbers with a major drive with television and radio commercials in late 2023 to sign up more residents for ACP internet benefits. , but many more eligible families never took advantage.

“It was kind of like a last chance effort to show them (federal officials) this is a really big need, in the community,” said Jenninfer Onwenu, a senior advisor in �ٱ�ٰ��Ǿ���’s Digital Equity and Inclusion office. “This is something that people were not aware of that they could be benefiting from. Imagine how many lives we could change by keeping this program in place. Unfortunately, that did not work out.”

Republicans opposed extending ACP as a “wasteful” part of a Democratic “spending spree”  because it was costing billions and some estimates showed that only about 20 percent of recipients added internet service because of ACP,while most just enjoyed a discount on service they already paid for.

Digital equity advocates worry, though, that new census data available this fall will show that families had to drop their service without ACP’s help. Some loss is likely, with major communications companies reporting subscriber losses last year they attribute to ACP’s end. Comcast, the nation’s largest internet provider, reported losing 87,000 subscribers in one quarter last year mainly because ACP expired.

John Horrigan of the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, a Chicago-area non-profit, and that ACP bill reductions kept 8.8 percent of households nationally online.

“The digital divide is not about being ‘on’ or ‘off’ the network,” Horrigan said. That framing makes it seem as if once a household is on, it has permanently hurdled the barrier that separates disconnection from connection…There is more uncertainty and churn in broadband at the low-income end of the market than some may appreciate.”

At-risk families like these are who DigitalC in Cleveland is hoping to connect, though Detroit and other cities don’t have a similar backstop.

“Their safety net is being cut,” said DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds. “In the absence of that funding, locally, we have an answer.”

Republicans in Congress are also opposing grants to states and communities under the pandemic-passed Digital Equity Act and the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD) for their focus on serving ethnic and racial minorities, both in who the projects will serve and who is hired to work on them. Such a race-based program is unconstitutional, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has charged.

U.S. House members have also raised concerns about the BEAD infrastructure program, which has states with plans ready to begin, but are now on hold. A House subcommittee blasted that program in a

”The Biden-Harris Administration saddled the BEAD program with regulations unrelated to broadband to appease left-wing interest groups,” said Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican, the sub committee’s chairman. “These included technology preferences, burdensome labor rules, and climate change requirements, to name a few. 

He and others want to ditch BEAD’s old preference for fiber optic lines for a “technology-neutral” approach that would allow the allotted $42 billion to also cover satellite projects.

Democrat Doris Matui of California immediately objected to what she called “sabotage” of projects ready to begin.

“Republicans claim they’re just being technology neutral,” the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee said. “But can we trust this when the Trump administration has given Elon Musk nearly unfettered authority to further his business interests by taking over government contracts and dismantling agencies regulating his companies?”

The Cleveland Transformation Alliance, a panel created in 2012 to put warring charter schools and teachers union officials together with city, school district and philanthropic leaders, voted this week to disband at the end of March. 

The panel successfully promoted strong charter schools while warning parents away from those that were failing students. 

The alliance was a crucial part of the broader Cleveland Plan For Transforming Schools, which  let the struggling school district avoid state takeover and made it the first district in Ohio to share local property tax dollars with charter schools. 

In return – coming at a time when even national charter school advocates blasted Ohio as the “Wild, Wild West” of barely-regulated charter schools – the alliance was created to prevent  charter schools with bad reputations and no sustainable plans from opening in the city, while also promoting strong ones.

But the Alliance never had the teeth some expected when it launched and its one attempt to block a school from opening failed. The state also increased its own charter oversight in 2015, reducing the Alliance’s importance.

The panel met another of its major goals – rallying community support for the district. The Cleveland Plan and alliance helped the district pass its first operating tax increase in 16 years in 2012. The district has since passed multiple tax renewals and increases, with the latest coming last November.

With the district no longer in crisis, the panel’s role continued to shrink, and it lost support after a change of mayors in 2022 and school CEOs in 2023.

Mayor Justin Bibb said in a statement that the alliance had a “pivotal” role as the city “strengthened collaboration, improved school choice, and built a foundation for sustained educational progress.” 

Other members of the panel agreed that its time has passed.

“We have fulfilled our original purpose,” said Ann Mullin of the George Gund Foundation who was part of the 2012 negotiations to create the Cleveland Plan. “We can now identify other ways to best support our schools and families moving forward.” 

The mayor’s office and other alliance members say they are still committed to its main task the last few years — creating a school choice guide for families — and will soon pick another group to create it.

The plan was created after then—Gov. John Kasich, who later was the last Republican challenger of Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential race, told the city to come up with a turnaround plan or face state takeover after repeated poor scores on state tests. State Sen. Nina Turner, who later became co—chair of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2020, was a key player in the negotiations and co—sponsor of the state law enacting a plan that had bipartisan support..

Success of the Cleveland Plan included the district improving academically, though not to levels the plan had hoped to achieve. The district had the second-worst test scores out of more than 600 districts in Ohio when the plan passed in 2012. Today, it is the 11th worst.

The district has also shifted  its old focus on neighborhood schools to being a “portfolio” district of different school models, both district and charter, that families can choose from.

School district CEO Warren Morgan and school board President Sara Elaqad said the end of the Alliance does not mean the end of the Cleveland Plan.

“(Having) quality schools, at scale, in the system is the work of all of the community, and that’s what the (Alliance) was about, and it’s what we’re going to continue to be about,” Morgan said. “We’re still committed to the work of high quality choices.”

The district’s financial support of charter schools, controversial when it started in 2012, has continued and even doubled over time. In 2012, after the Ohio legislature approved the plan, the district started sharing more than $5 million a year with selected charters with strong academic results, that served almost entirely Cleveland kids and that agreed to share data and expansion plans with the district.

The district is now sharing more than $10 million with 11 partnering charters, most of them with the Breakthrough Schools, the state’s highest-rated charter school chain and which helped create the Cleveland Plan.

But the district has also not shared money with any new schools or authorized any new charters since before the pandemic.

The Alliance’s control over new charters was never as direct as former Mayor Frank Jackson had wanted. Though Jackson wanted the city to have some say in what schools could open, the state legislature balked and gave the Alliance power to review authorizers and recommend to the state whether that authorizer could open new schools in the city.

Though the Alliance recommended that a Cincinnati-based authorizer should be blocked, its recommendation missed a deadline because of communication issues with the Ohio Department of Education and the recommendation was not followed.

Another controversial part of the Cleveland Plan was eliminating seniority when it came to teacher layoffs and having the district be one of the first in Ohio to use student test scores to evaluate teachers and affect contracts and pay. Those evaluations were changed when test scores lost favor in Ohio and nationally as part of teacher evaluations.

Access to child care and securing a solid workforce at child care centers is a “crisis” for which many federal and state entities have been searching for solutions.

For advocates and economic experts, the role of businesses and employers is becoming more and more important to not only ending in Ohio, but also keeping the state from taking a big economic hit because of it.

In a recent panel discussion hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, policy advisors and local child care advocates emphasized the need for public-private partnerships, and creating more incentives for the workforce to stay in child care.

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“The question really isn’t whose responsibility is it, but in whose best interest it is, and there’s a real business case for employers,” said Sarah Savage, senior policy analyst and policy advisor for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Savage said on-site care and subsidies for child care are “rarely offered” even among organizations with 5,000 employees or more, citing a private study from 2023 by .

That study showed 10% of employers with 5,000+ employees offer on-site care, with 40% of businesses that size offering none of the services listed, including child care referrals, tutoring, subsidies or reimbursement.

Businesses have their own roles to play, but the child care sector can’t improve without first looking at its own staffing issues, according to Kyle Fee, policy advisor for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Fee said the workforce struggles are a “key constraint in the child care situation,” with many of the patterns shown in workforce retainment and pay found to be “typical of low-wage occupations.”

Citing a 2019 national survey of early care and education, Fee said 1/3 of child care centers had staff turnover of 20% or higher, with turnover higher in centers with lower pay. That turnover was also linked to the combination of pay and the amount of child care and educations services offered at those centers, according to Fee.

The profile of the workforce shows primarily younger female workers, who are “more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity than the broader workforce,” Fee said.

In 2022, the child care workforce had the 10th lowest annual median wage nationally, just ahead of fast food workers and cashiers, and Fee said estimates for Ohio “tend to be slightly lower.”

“The pay for a child care worker does not provide a living wage for single adult plus one child in any state,” Fee said.

Those numbers account for those that stay in the workforce, a consistently decreasing population, according to Fee’s analysis.

He found that from 2010-2022, an average of about 15% of child care workers left the occupation, above the 8-9% of preschool and kindergarten teachers who left their profession in the same period.

In 2022, job turnover in the child care sector was 65% higher than turnover in “typical occupations,” according to Fee.

On average, half the workers who leave the child care profession don’t re-enter the workforce at all.

“The emphasis here again is pointing on the churn among child care workers in and out of the workforce that needs further exploration,” he said.

Groups in Ohio are attempting to improve the wage conditions for workers, but also keep up the quality of centers to persuade more families to enroll.

Nancy Mendez, president and chief executive officer of Northeast Ohio child care advocacy organization Starting Point, said they have been working on collaborations with Cuyahoga County to provide pre-K scholarships for those up to 300% of the federal poverty line and have used federal ARPA dollars to provide scholarships, along with bonuses for child care staff.

“We’re trying to do our best to help stabilize this system,” said Mendez, whose organization helps child care centers maintain quality and connects parents to services in the area.

But improving wages means increasing tuition which can lower enrollment as families lack the money to keep up with rising costs of child care and everything else, leading to a never-ending cycle for centers, according to Mendez.

“There’s this chicken-and-egg thing here that’s going on that they really can’t solve,” Mendez said.

The organization saw the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on many economic sectors throughout the state, with child care seeing a hard and sustained effect.

“We were waiting for this tsunami of low enrollment and staffing issues to kind of move on with everybody else, but what we saw was our workforce issues just continue to exacerbate,” Mendez said.

Starting Point heard from 60% of the child care centers and homes they work with, who reported they were “operating at low enrollment and mostly because of staffing issues.”

To break even, Mendez said child care facilities need to be at more than 70% enrollment at least.

The lack of affordable child care combined with the staff shortages have created a situation that Mendez and policy advisors on the panel say will have its impacts on the economy. Mendez said neighboring states like Pennsylvania and Michigan have seen estimated economic losses of more than $2 billion because of a lack of child care.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re looking at about $2 billion that we lose annually in Ohio due to breakdown in child care or the inability to access child care,” she added.

to try to create an employer-state partnership on child care costs, along with efforts to create a tax credit targeted at child care and family costs and even a tax credit to Ohioans who contribute to child care facilities. Many of the measures are Republican-led, giving them more likelihood for passage in the GOP supermajority House and Senate.

However, the Ohio General Assembly is on break until the Fall, likely until after the November election. So, the measures won’t see possible action until the tail end of the General Assembly’s term. If no action is taken by December, the measures would need to be re-introduced in the new year.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Those initiatives, created to help the high-poverty district’s students after schools closed during the pandemic, are among the highest-profile cuts out of $91 million proposed by new district CEO Warren Morgan.

Other proposals to cover the loss of an additional $12,000 per student in COVID aid also include ending a decade-long experiment of year-round classes in some schools.

“We got almost $500 million in COVID relief dollars from the federal government that allowed us to do really extraordinary things during an extraordinary period of time,” Morgan said as he announced his plan. “Those dollars go away, creating a little bit of this cliff.. in the financial situation that we’re in.”

A placed Cleveland with the third-highest per-student grants of big cities in the country, after Detroit and Philadelphia.

The exact details of cuts will be set over the next few months. More cuts are expected for the 2025-26 school year.

But the broad plan for cuts outlined by Morgan and which the school board will vote on Tuesday is Cleveland’s first public attempt to sort out which pandemic programs are worth keeping and what older efforts must be cut as a tradeoff.

Cleveland is not alone in having to make cuts as the $190 billion infusion the federal government gave schools through relief grants known as CARES, ESSER and ARPA run out. 

But both the financial boost from pandemic aid, and now the crash, is far more dramatic for high-poverty districts like Cleveland, which has the highest child poverty rate in the country among big cities.

Because the aid formula sent more money to high-poverty districts than affluent ones, the pandemic grants gave the neediest students more help with tutoring, laptops, better ventilation, mental health and other programs to catch up from lost school time. 

The Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University reported in the fall that .The , though enrollment swings the last few years make exact numbers impossible.

“For many of those districts, it made up an outsized percentage of their usual budget, which we think from an equity perspective, was a great thing because it allows those districts to make investments that they have long needed,” said Qubilah Huddleston, who works on school funding issues for the Education Trust. “That said, they are also now faced with making some of the toughest budget decisions that they probably had to make in a while.”

Huddleston also cautioned that other factors, including state aid changing as enrollment fell across the country, are adding to districts’ budget troubles.

”Districts are dealing with a lot more than just the ESSER loss,” she said. “It’s certainly the factor that’s contributing the most, but they have also experienced enrollment declines that they did not expect. They have also inflation, right, things costing more, whether it’s energy, whether it’s labor… happening all at the same time that this loss of ESSER dollars is happening.”

Cleveland has its own local issues affecting how the cuts play out. The district has a new CEO, allowing him to pick his own priorities without being accountable for past promises. The district expected budget deficits in the next few years regardless of COVID and COVID aid, so typical financial needs are hard to separate from those caused by the loss of federal money. 

And the district is negotiating a new contract with the Cleveland Teachers Union, which will add costs, so Cleveland officials have incentive to highlight a lack of money while teachers have incentive to focus on what is still available.

Cleveland Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski said the long-expected cuts are not a crisis and noted that all the federal money may have bought the district an extra year before needing to ask voters for a tax increase.

“This is what I find frustrating about the narrative that’s coming from the district right now,” Obrenski said. “We were able to use our ESSER dollars to make our general fund dollars last longer, which I think was actually a very good idea.”

Some of Cleveland’s proposed cuts hit programs that started using federal aid, while others cut efforts championed by former CEO Eric Gordon that Morgan is re-evaluating.

Morgan has proposed cutting $6.4 million budgeted for providing every student a laptop and providing many with portable wifi hotspots when they do not have internet access at home. So-called “one-to-one” computer programs are increasingly common in suburban districts and was a goal of Gordon for years before the pandemic forced the district to buy devices for remote classes in the 2020-21 school year.

It was a huge step for Cleveland, ranked as the worst-connected city in America by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.

The district also made continuing this program a key promise of its fall 2020 campaign for a tax increase for the schools.

But Morgan said not all students are receiving laptops and teachers are often not sending them home with students.

The district would not immediately answer questions from The 74 about how many laptops or hotspots are included in that estimate or how much progress has been made in attempts to provide affordable internet access in disconnected neighborhoods.

Cleveland’s summer learning program, which took traditional remedial programs and turned them into a mix of classes and fun activities as a way to re-engage students, is also being trimmed. Morgan estimated he can save $30 million over the next two years by cutting the program from 4,225 students last year to 3,500 this year with more class time in shorter days.

Morgan also proposed cutting $34.1 million over two years budgeted for afterschool programs run by outside groups like the Boys and Girls Club or America SCORES, a national program that mixes soccer with poetry. Traditional school athletic teams and clubs are not affected.

A coalition of providers, Clevelanders for Afterschool, has formed in opposition, saying cutting 93 programs from 17 providers will hurt students. David Smith, who runs some programs and is organizing the push to keep them, said they help students emotionally and academically, along with helping reduce crime in the city.

“It’s not a good idea to push these kids out in the streets after school and close the building behind them,” Smith said.

Morgan said he hopes these programs can find other funding or that city recreation centers can fill the gap.

Morgan also proposed saving close to $14 million by cutting extra school days from schools that have classes year-round or extra days in the school year. Gordon started several specialized high schools that focused on topics like STEM, medicine, or aerospace and maritime careers that run through the summer to keep learning momentum with students and avoid summer learning loss.

Those eight schools have 20 additional school days, while another 13 have 10 extra days added to their school years.

Morgan said the academic results of these schools are mixed, even though they receive more money than other schools to pay teachers for extra days.

“Right now, that sets up some inequities,” Morgan said. “We have schools that are receiving disproportionately more resources, more time and school days. Staff are receiving more resources. We do want to really make sure that we are equitable.”

Like most colleges, posters and artwork line the hallways at the Cleveland School of Cannabis. Except the key difference here is what’s featured on the posters — marijuana.

The Cleveland School of Cannabis prepares students to work in the marijuana industry by giving them hands-on experience in the school’s grow room, dispensary, and cooking lab.

“We’re not sitting around smoking all day,” said Nicole Fenix, the school’s director of education. “We do have fun, but it is like any other educational institute.”

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The school expects to see a boom in Ohio’s cannabis industry if Issue 2 passes next week.

The citizen initiative would legalize and . It would also legalize home grow for Ohioans 21 and up with a limit of six plants per person and 12 plants per residence, and impose a 10% tax at the point of sale for each transaction.

A recent  estimates the potential annual tax revenue from legalizing marijuana ranges from $276 million to $403 million in the fifth year of an operational cannabis market.

While Fenix is excited Issue 2 is on the ballot, she said it’s been disheartening hearing from the opposition.

“You feel like you’re making such great strides, and then you hear all this rhetoric come back up,” Fenix said. “It’s a shame that (marijuana has) been ostracized and villainized for as long as it has been.”

Protect Ohio Workers and Families, the opposition to marijuana legalization, predicts Ohio would see an additional 48 fatal vehicle crashes and 2,298 more injury crashes if voters approve Issue 2, based on projections using the Ohio Department of Public Safety’s crash statistics and research from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety.

“Legalization of marijuana use leads to public safety issues as well, including higher percentages of fatal car crashes directly attributed to the marijuana impaired drivers,” Delaware County Sheriff Jeff Balzer said in a .

Doug Berman, the executive director at the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University, previously told the

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who is against legalizing cannabis, has previously said “this is not your grandfather’s marijuana.”

Fenix agrees with the governor’s assessment.

“Now we test it to make sure it’s safe,” Fenix said. “It’s regulated, it’s a better quality, it’s gonna have more medicinal effects. … The cannabis industry is a science from growing the plant, to how the plant works in the body to processing. So chemistry, biology and a little bit of physics.”

Cleveland School of Cannabis

CSC opened in 2017 — one year after medical marijuana was legalized in Ohio, but the state’s first dispensary didn’t open until 2019. 

Students are not smoking marijuana in classes and it is not a licensed cultivator or dispensary, so the school is not actually growing or selling medical marijuana. Instead, the school uses hemp which is destroyed after it’s been fully used.

The school received state approval from the Ohio State Board of Career College and Schools and their certificate program teaches students in five different areas — cannabis dispensaries, cannabis horticulture, cannabis processing, industrial hemp and medical applications of cannabis. There is also an executive program, which is a combination of all five certificate programs.

CSC’s tuition ranges from $7,500 to $14,000 and it is the only State Approved Career School for Cannabis education east of Colorado.

The school — which offers a mix of in-person and online classes — usually has between 130-150 students per term. More than 900 students have graduated from the school, which has an 82% graduation rate.

“Our students have a good foundation of understanding what their job is going to be,” Fenix said.

CSC has capped their in-person classes to 24 students and they try to keep their online classes between 30-35 students. They offer six-week terms and six terms are offered per year.

A sampling of courses include history of cannabis, dispensary operations, cannabis law & policies, and CBD comprehensive, among others. Some of the career options graduates pursue include master grower, cannabis gardener, dispensary manager and cultivation consultant, to name a few.

While a majority of their students are from Ohio, it’s not uncommon for an out-of-state student to attend. One student drives in from Pittsburgh everyday, Fenix said. Most of their graduates stay in Ohio after graduation, but sometimes students move out west for the jobs.

While the school typically attracts young adults and those fresh out of high school, CSC also enrolls people in their 30-40’s who are looking to make a career change. Students have to be 18 or older to take classes, but the marijuana industry only hires people 21 and older.

From high school teacher to marijuana educator

Education is Fenix’s background. She previously taught in an alternative high school setting and also worked with homeschooled students.

But her introduction to cannabis started when her son started using medical marijuana to help treat his ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease that causes inflammation and sores in the digestive tract.

“I really got to witness cannabis as medicinal through my son,” Fenix said. “It was just a big eye opener.”

She started working at CSC at the end of 2017, the same year the school opened.

“I’m a big believer in cannabis as medicine,” Fenix said.

Ohio Medical Marijuana

There are 29 active dispensary licenses, but 104 certificates of operation as of Sept. 21, according to the .

Twenty-three cultivators in Ohio have received Level I provisional licenses and 21 have received certificates of operation. Fourteen have received Level II provisional licenses and 13 have received certificates of operation.

There have been 822,760 medical marijuana patient recommendations (a patient can have more than one recommendation), 391,692 patients have registered and 182,068 patients have both an active registration and an active recommendation.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Not this year.

A U.S. Department of Education known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) means college advisors nationally will have to wait two months until December, or even after Christmas break, to start helping the 20 million students that typically apply.

It’s a delay that wipes out two months in which about half of applicants fill out the forms nationally. Deadlines have been extended, but the time until colleges announce financial aid packages and students must make decisions has been slashed. And it raises fears students needing extra attention — particularly low income students and families who are unaware how the financial aid process works — will be left behind.

Advisors like Zwyghuizen are preparing and bracing for a scramble in the new year to make sure they have multiple chances to nudge students to apply and walk families that need extra help through the process. Many students don’t believe they can afford college and need repeated prodding to apply and find out.

“There’s fear of the unknown going into this later and with less preparation than we did before,” said Zwyghuizen, who works for the Grand Rapids Promise, which helps pay tuition for students in a city where a third of children live in poverty. “There’s already so many barriers people have with FAFSA.”

Bill DeBaun, a director of the National College Attainment Network, said he has “real concerns” college access will drop, particularly for low-income students and those who would be first in their families to go to college.

“The outreach to these students, the helping them understand that college is for them is what takes time and energy on top of actually completing the FAFSA,” he said.

FAFSA determines eligibility for federal Pell grants for college expenses of up to $7,400 this school year. It is also the starting point for almost every need-based financial aid system in the country.

But with more than 100 questions asking for detailed financial information from families, it’s complicated and can scare some families off, particularly those who have not used them before.

“It’s the graveyard for so many college students,” said Tom Harnisch, vice president of government relations for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

The “cumbersome” process and “outdated technology” on the current form means “far too many are locked out of aid,” Richard Cordray, chief executive officer of the U.S. Office of Federal Student Aid

The new forms, ordered by the FAFSA Simplification Act that Congress passed in 2020, will cut the number of questions more than in half. And applying will be even easier online if parents let the application import their tax filings.

The new forms will be accompanied by new aid formula that . Though more students may be eligible for aid and expected family contributions could fall for many, the formula no longer accounts for siblings also going to college and there is debate over how the value of family land or small business assets are weighed.

The department has said for months the new forms will be available in December, but hasn’t clarified if that will be early or late December, when holidays will slow completion.

That delay is of immediate concern to a dozen national associations of colleges and counselors who wrote U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona earlier this month urging him to set a release date as soon as he can, so they can plan their completion campaigns.

“Because the timeline for completing the FAFSA will be much shorter than it has been in recent years, every day counts when it comes to supporting students and families through the new process,” the letter said.

Harnisch, whose organization is one of the dozen, said he hopes advisors can start working with families before Christmas.

“We’ve told them that December 1 and December 31 are quite different for us,” Harnisch said.

In cities like Grand Rapids, Zwyghuizend said, counselors are planning to jam the one-on-one meetings with students they normally spread out over the fall into just January.

“It’s going to be a lot of work in the second semester to try and get people ready at the last-minute,” she said.

Others are focusing this month on a key initial step to completing the new forms — creating log-ons and IDs in the online system — that they can do now and avoid having to start from scratch in January.

In Cleveland, advisors have set four workshops just to create IDs between October and December. They are also planning intense family outreach in January.

“We believe that our ‘prework’ now will help keep parents and students engaged around FAFSA and financial aid,” said Alison Bibb-Carson, spokesperson for CollegeNow, the nonprofit that handles college advising for the city’s schools. “We hope that this work and our extended outreach will keep numbers the same or maybe increase the number of FAFSA completion.”

Cyekeia Lee, executive director of the Detroit College Access Network, is also banking on advance work and setting FAFSA IDs now will help students in that high-poverty city connect to aid they need.

“So as long as you take that first initial step to get them the most prepared that we can, we will work with that,” Lee said. “As long as families start to work on the FSA ID I think you’ll still get enough traction once it comes out.”

The 74’s Linda Jacobson contributed to this story.

By searching for district communications and media coverage in each state from fall 2022 through summer 2023, CRPE identified districts publicly responding to AI last school year. We conducted more thorough research on these districts and .

Most of the reactions have revolved around ChatGPT, the large language learning model-based chatbot . 

Many large districts were initially wary of the new technology, with , and issuing , largely because of concerns over cheating. 

But many are adapting. New York City Public Schools , with Chancellor David Banks acknowledging a and a determination to “embrace its potential.” 

in Washington State reported that while it blocked ChatGPT to “get out ahead of it,” the district doesn’t plan to stop it long-term. In April, the district established a committee of teachers learning how to use ChatGPT to work on related policies.

In California’s , Superintendent Don Austin embraced ChatGPT’s potential to enhance learning and improve efficiency. Likening AI pushback to early resistance to calculators and the internet, the superintendent this spring to start using the technology. 

Supporting learning and emotional well-being

While most districts CRPE reviewed have not released precise plans for using AI, some are exploring opportunities. 

The introduced a tool called that functions like a literacy tutor that listens to students read and corrects mistakes in real time. The district piloted the tool at four schools last spring and had a small group of teachers experimenting with a tool to help create unit and lesson plans.

is piloting , an AI-powered “tutorbot” created by Khan Academy to give students individualized support across core subjects. The program , offering personalized prompts, diagnosing errors and helping students develop deeper reasoning skills, and gives teachers .

in Arizona and in Texas are piloting AI-enabled “early warning” programs that track student performance and send alerts if kids are off track. Mesa’s program collects academic, social and emotional data from teachers and students to predict up to three months in advance whether a student will pass or fail coursework. 

Creating new AI courses and standards

Other districts are designing curriculum to build students’ AI literacy. Most are in states creating conditions to help steward the advancement of AI curriculum. 

Baltimore County Public Schools an AI program at three high schools this year that will feature . The program is a byproduct of a 2020 state innovation grant, which funded district staff to develop curriculum and lead an advisory council.

In Georgia, the district is opening up a K-12, AI-themed that will provide progressively more sophisticated study of AI . This will in core subjects, and Gwinnett hopes that piloted lessons will spread across the entire district. The Georgia Department of Education worked with Gwinnett to write new academic standards so all schools in the state can launch their own AI courses.

A dozen districts in Florida, including those in the , are rolling out AI and data science programs this year in partnership with the , part of the university’s broader goal to infuse AI into K-12 curriculum across the state. The state is also providing funding to train teachers. 

Supporting teacher development

A small number of districts reviewed are using AI to strengthen teacher practice or generally orient educators to the technology as a teaching tool. 

This year, Spokane Public Schools in Washington, St. Vrain Valley School District in Colorado and Keller Independent School District in Texas an instructional coaching platform called that films classroom instruction and uses AI to offer teachers feedback and in developing an “action plan” to implement suggestions.

in Maryland launched training sessions this summer to help teachers learn how to incorporate AI into their lessons as part of a three-year agreement with nonprofit training partner aiEDU, which provides curricula and learning resources. 

Improving communications and operational efficiency

Districts are using AI to provide individualized guidance to students and parents. In April, the announced a chatbot to answer parents’ and guardians’ questions online and track whether issues were resolved. In August, unveiled a chatbot “student adviser” that provides parents real-time access to grades, test results, and attendance and assists its “” program. is one of many Arizona districts using , a chatbot digital assistant that helps students navigate the federal student financial aid — FAFSA — application. 

Districts are also using AI-powered technology to support safety and operational efficiency. in Florida uses AI to . uses AI-powered, self-driving floor cleaners, and in North Carolina uses AI to detect student illnesses as part of their pandemic response. 

Districts face essential questions about AI in 2023-24

A year ago, few districts or stakeholders were paying much attention to AI. Now, it’s clear that this technology will evolve faster than districts can develop formal training and guidance for staff. Leaders need to respond by thinking through how they train their workforce to responsibly use AI, and prepare for fundamental shifts in teachers’ roles and students’ opportunities in the coming years.

We suggest that districts:

• engage early adopter educators to discuss strategies and guidelines;
  
• communicate regularly and transparently with parents;
  
• train teachers on responsibly using AI; and
  
• partner with organizations, industry and higher education institutions who have AI expertise and can weigh in on best practices. 

We also urge state departments of education and regional associations to provide guidance and tools to help districts navigate AI. Students, parents, teachers and employers are looking to districts to do this well and to provide a learning environment that is both safe and reflective of the 21st century and beyond.

When Gordon started, Cleveland had the fourth-worst scores out of more than 600 districts in Ohio, had sometimes scored last, and was on the verge of takeover yet again by the state.

But in 2012, he and former Mayor Frank Jackson negotiated with the state, charter schools and unions to create the Cleveland Plan for Transforming Schools, a recovery plan that let the district aggressively use new teacher evaluations and made Cleveland the first in Ohio to share local tax dollars with charter schools in return for some safeguards on charter quality.

That allowed the district to pass a new tax, starting a rare period of financial stability. 

Gordon has since worked to create a portfolio style of district with magnet high schools and several others with specialized approaches. He helped create partnerships with charters, philanthropies, higher education and business aimed at improving preschool attendance and students preparing for careers.

And he helped make Cleveland the final city to join the Say Yes to Education program that provides social supports to students at school and offers free college tuition after graduation.

In 2016, he was named urban educator of the year by the Council of the Great City Schools. 

District test scores now rank 13th from the bottom — not outstanding, by any means, but ahead of other urban areas like Toledo and even with scores of Columbus, Ohio’s largest district.

He steps down in July and into a new position at Cuyahoga County Community College as senior vice president of Student Development and Education Pipeline, where he will help students manage college and a transition to careers.

In an exit interview with The 74, Gordon reflected on his time as CEO, the importance of removing barriers of poverty and life that hurt kids’ learning, how school choice is changing and how competency or mastery approaches should be the model for schools in the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: So your time here as CEO has been notable for many reasons.What stands out as the thing that you’re proudest of doing?

Eric Gordon: When I got the job, I gave myself three personal goals: show that we can improve the worst performing district, make it matter when we do — which means that you can go to college, you can go into a good career — and then work to remove the barriers that made it so hard in the first place. I feel like I can say that while there’s still a lot of undone work, I’ve in some way managed to accomplish something on all of those goals.

I have demonstrated that we can improve the worst performing district. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve proven that we don’t have to be dead last. Through Say Yes and through PACE (a career preparation partnership), I have proven that it can matter, that you can actually have access to high wage jobs, or you can go to college, and we can help you do that, and that it’s affordable. And with the wraparound support, we can start removing the barriers that made it so hard in the first place. So I feel like I’m leaving having managed to accomplish something meaningful in all three of the goals I set 12 years ago.

Is there anything out there that you really wish you had been able to do that you haven’t, that you most regret as you leave?

For all of the success that is visible and you can see, there is still a group of young people that we failed. And I say that personally as the CEO: The number of young people that didn’t graduate high school or didn’t graduate high school as ready as they ought to be.

But I also see it as a community issue that we have a whole bunch of Clevelanders that live in the visible economy that you and I and others enjoy. And then there are a group of Clevelanders, including kids, that live in a hidden economy, in a hidden world where they have figured out how to be successful, in spite of the fact that they don’t have access and have not found a way to the paths that we consider successful.

And I worry greatly, that there are kids under my watch over the whole course of their lifetime, that I and we failed. 

Is there something you think needs to change with the structure to reach those kids?

I think we need a larger youth and family agenda that really thinks about the students’ role in the schools as kind of their job, but also what is their full youth experience and the family experience? How are we thinking about housing stability? How are we thinking about lead poisoning? How are we thinking about poverty and all these other things that make it hard to be a kid. And if it’s hard to be a kid, it’s hard to be a kid that does well in school. 

How do we really disrupt the things that make it so hard to be a kid in the first place, so that the things that we’re doing for kids in schools has a magnified impact?

So when we talk about Cleveland, Cleveland has giant child poverty problems. And so are you talking about that as a Cleveland problem? Are you talking about this as a national problem with Cleveland as a very, very intense example of it?

I think it’s a national problem with us being an intense example of it. But part of why I’ve always loved Cleveland is that we are small enough to figure out how to do these things. And then we’re big enough to matter when we do. So I hope that people have watched what we’ve managed to do so far, and think about how that can be done in their communities. And I hope this community continues to figure out how we fix these seemingly intractable problems, and make it a model for the country when we do. 

If there’s any one or two things that have happened here in Cleveland that you hope other communities would take lessons from, and emulate or adapt, what would you say to them?

I would say, the collective public private partnerships at all levels of the organization. I just can’t tell you how many people around the country over all the years have said we could never do that in our community. And I think people have got to stop saying you can never do that, because that presumes that you’re going to have to do it alone. And there’s just way more opportunity to succeed when we’re all doing it together. So I think that’s a big lesson learned. 

I think Say Yes has been the thing that matters most to me — that we have to find a way to provide social service interruptions for the poverty barriers that kids face. And then make sure that they have a path out of poverty through education, but one that is designed to keep them in their city, so that you disrupt poverty over time.

You have had a much more open viewpoint on charter schools and cooperation with them as partners in educating the city’s kids than other cities in Ohio have had. How do you think that’s gone? 

If you look at the reforms in the (Ohio) charter school environment over time, and draw them back to where those reforms started, they started with the Cleveland Plan. And so from a policy influence — that we should have more rigorous accountability to have better opportunities for kids — I think we’ve got some real successes. None of us are serving every child as well as needed, but we are more competitive now that we actually have a choice point of view.

What I’m more concerned about is that as choice is becoming more prolific across the state and including the vouchers and parochial and private, that we’re not taking a ‘choice with accountability’ point of view. I’m all for choice, but we should all be playing from the same scorecard and if you take the money, you should take the test. And I think that that’s getting eroded in our state. And that that does worry me, even as someone who has always advocated that parents should be able to choose.

So that’s not changing with charters. But that is the ongoing case with a lot of the private schools getting vouchers. 

That’s right. And in my read, the state politics has moved past charters and is all about vouchers. There’s been a little bit of some form of accountability in this last budget, but it’s the first I’ve ever seen a glimpse of it. I’ve had legislators say right to me that we don’t need accountability, because people should be allowed to make bad choices, and they know a good school when they see it. And then when I say, ‘Well, then why do we have accountability?’ ‘Well, somebody’s got to hold you accountable.’ So that is the circular logic, but I’m watching just a move away from the importance of accountability for knowing what schools are doing. And that alarms me. 

So, talk to me a little bit about Say Yes? How much of a difference do you think they’ve made? And how much do you think that the social supports in place for Say Yes have helped the pandemic recovery?

I think Say Yes is having a really outsized impact that isn’t always easy to see. I know so many situations where we have addressed food scarcity, medical needs, avoided foster situations, I mean just real and real time moments of supporting kids, and removing those barriers. And I wish the pandemic had not happened, because we’re seeing Say Yes supporting the recovery from the pandemic, so we’re not seeing kind of a through line as visibly. But I know it’s making a difference in so many ways. And then, while we haven’t had the college-going numbers we would have wanted because of the pandemic, the persistence numbers of those who are going are pretty remarkable.

I just went to my last graduations and watched half to three quarters of the class stand up with their Say Yes cohort because they are eligible and planning to go on to college. That’s what it was for. 

I think people have to remember, it was designed as a two generation strategy that if we got kids to and through colleges for two generations, and kept them in Cleveland, then they would become property owners and have family sustaining wages and benefits and not draw on the social service systems. And that’s how you finally disrupt this suffocating blanket of poverty in this town.

The pandemic hit Cleveland and CMSD pretty hard. It seems to have affected you guys more than a lot of other cities, largely because of the really high poverty levels here and families living more on the edge. What’s your take as to how much the pandemic has set back kids in Cleveland?

I appreciate the words of ‘setback kids’ in Cleveland, because you’ve heard me say over time, we didn’t lose learning, we lost time. And our kids need more time to begin with, because they don’t always get to come to kindergarten as ready as others. So we know that literacy has been hit hard. We know that graduation rates got hit hard because kids went to work, right? I mean, when you think about when we were all sitting home, who wasn’t? It was my community. They were running the essential services. They were working at Amazon and getting us our packages delivered. They were cleaning. 

The good news is we also know from last year’s report card, and I’m optimistic you’ll see it again, that our progress scores were among the highest and that our gap closing scores were really strong, which is evidence that we can and will recover.

I think the thing we have to be careful for is we cannot just go back to assuming that young people who have had this incredible disruption are just going to somehow be right back on track, and us getting in a deficit model of ‘They’re broken if they don’t.’ We’ve got to meet them where they are and keep moving forward, and that means we’re going to have to provide support for early learning, then as we go into fourth grade, fifth grade, you know, until they catch up. But we have to do it with an eye that they can, that it was a setback, that it was not somehow a break.

We had talked a bunch before about the mastery and competency models and how that applies to kids who may have fallen behind. How much do you think you’ve actually been able to use that? And do you think that’s something that the city needs more of going forward?

I absolutely think it’s something that the city needs more of going forward. We have continued to make progress on it. We now have district-wide demonstration days (in which students give presentations to show what they have learned in many areas, rather than testing by subject). We have 10 schools going into next school year that have written it into their achievement plan to make sure that all teachers are teaching some form of mastery content, and that all students get to experience two different kinds of demonstration days with their parents. 

I actually think the reason we saw some of the great progress scores and gap closing scores is because of these more complex tasks that are more authentic, that kids are more engaged in. 

Right now, the way we’re expecting students to prove learning in school is completely disconnected from the way that we do living outside of school. So what would happen if we said to all of our students, take your state test, but you can have your phone? And when I asked kids they said, ‘Well, that would be cheating’. And I said, ‘Well, why would that be cheating?’ ‘Because you’re not allowed to look stuff up when you’re taking the test.’ And I said, ‘Okay, fair. As soon as you walk out of these doors and you find something you don’t know, what are you going to do?’ ‘Well, we’re gonna look it up on our phone.’ So what if instead of testing whether kids can memorize things that we already know, they know how to look up, what if we started actually figuring out if they know what to do with the information once they found it? And I just think we’ve got to start making school model the world they live in, instead of making it this completely disconnected place. And I think that’s why we’re not seeing the attendance rebounds (post-pandemic). I think kids have figured out that school and the world are disconnected.

A lot of folks, you included, were talking about treating coming out of the pandemic as a way to reset everything. But a lot of the time, it was mostly about trying to keep your head above water as you’re going forward. How much do you think things have actually been able to be reset in the best way?

I think locally, we have really made an effort to reset. We are now one-to-one technology. And we’re committed to it. And we’re making sure kids leave with devices post-graduation, so that they stay digitally connected, because we do know that’s how the world works now. We’re moving in this mastery-based way that we just talked about. We’re trying to think about that whole human experience. We’re trying to make sure kids have agency, voice and choice, and indeed get more focused on who they think they are and what they want to be. 

But in the state, for sure, and then the nation actually snapped back to what was pre-pandemic as hard as it could. We have not re-examined whether Carnegie Units and seat time are the best ways to measure learning. We have not really examined the way we’re assessing kids. You know, the federal government provided such incredible resources, but at the same time, didn’t rethink at all how we’re assessing learning. And I worry that the policy context did not take advantage of an opportunity to incentivize, at least, and change, at best, the way we think about schools in America.

So if I give you a magic wand, and you get to waive it and make a couple of changes in policy you think will reset things the way they should, what would you do?

I would much further incentivize real mastery of learning, and obliterate seat time, so that you could literally say to a kid, it’s super easy that if you can show me you know how to do this, that you don’t have to sit through this class. That would be a big place that I would really lean.

I’m really interested in how some of the AI technologies can be really helpful. We are using an AI high-dose tutoring system that I think is going to get some really exciting results. I think there’s just real upside opportunities to the emerging technologies that schools are almost always the last ones to figure out how to embrace. Instead, our strategy is usually ‘shut it off.’ Again, ‘keep the real world out of the school,’ instead of figuring out how to leverage the real world in education.

You got a decent amount of federal money to help things coming out of the pandemic? How are you most happy with how that’s been used? What challenges is that going to leave for the district? 

Schools must spend their ARPA dollars by 2024, unlike city, county and state that have until 2026. I think that created some negative incentives if you’ve got a lot to spend and quickly. I’m excited that we tried to put ours towards creating a better student experience in so many ways — out of school time, expanding periods to add more art music and phys-ed classes, the summer learning experience, our after school tutoring programming that our families can now access live teachers for tutoring, investments in our extracurricular program, investments in nurses and LPNs, so that we can provide a healthier experience, investments in PACE. But those ARPA dollars will be done at the end of 2024, and shortly thereafter the community is going to have to ask itself the question: Are we willing to pay to keep these things? 

We’re gonna have to ask ourselves: ‘Of the things ARPA allowed us to do, what are the things that we want to keep? And how are we willing as a community to pay for them and keep them?’

The last thing is your new position. You’re going to be taking on helping some of the same kids that you’ve been working with for the las12 years? How do you think you’re going to make a difference over at Cuyahoga Community College?

Well, honestly, if somebody had said, ‘Write the job you want, and we’ll give it to you’, I would not have come up with this. What I’m really excited about is that (college President Michael) Baston has asked me to really understand, from the students perspective, what makes it easy or hard to get into the college, what makes it easy or hard to get through the college and what makes it easy or hard to get out successfully. That means I get to interrogate systems and figure out where it impedes and help clear those barriers. And it also means I get to continue to be an advocate for students. And I continue to learn from the people who know best, which are the students. So in some ways, it’s a dream come true kind of job. If and when I do the job really well, you’re gonna see far more students, whether they be right out of high school or returning adults, finding their way through and into a successful life post-college and I’m really looking forward to taking on the challenge.

What haven’t I asked you about the things folks around the country should know about Cleveland? 

I hear far too often the people who visit say we could never do this at home. And if that’s the approach you’re taking, then it’s not worth the bother. Locally, I want people to know how grateful I am. Nobody gets to do this job for 12 years, and I’ve been here 16, when you consider my prior work (as chief academic officer). That’s more than half of my career. And so I just want people in this community to know how grateful I am to have had the honor of being the CEO, literally 12 years to the day, on my last day.

Flush with federal dollars, new and robust offerings have been open to a wide swath of students starting in the summer of 2021 and will continue in many districts this year. But the trend could stop as that pandemic relief money runs out.

Some districts, including , have summer programs, inviting only those students identified as struggling, while others can’t even reach all the children on that list — at least not during the summer. 

Baltimore City Public Schools saw some of the most staggering losses in mathematics at the fourth-grade level — on the 2022 NAEP exams compared to those in 2019 — tying it with Cleveland for worst-in-the-nation.

Baltimore’s and Cleveland’s decline in fourth-grade math scores was nearly double the average eight-point drop among the 26 big city districts that took the tests and dwarfed the average five-point drop of fourth graders nationally. 

Eighth graders in both cities also saw their math test scores plummet: They dropped nine points in Baltimore and eight points in Cleveland. These losses are on par with the rest of the nation: The major cities’ average and the national average for eighth grade math both declined by eight points. 

The 76,000-student Baltimore district has been working for years to remediate those who have fallen behind. It offers extensive summer programming for children at every grade level — more than 22,000 seats from pre-K through 12th grade for summer 2023 programming, up by 2,000 from the year before, district administrators said. But only 15,000 children participated last year, meaning thousands of seats were left open. 

And even with the additional slots, the number might not match the need as it relates to this subject: Just on recent state exams. At 23 Baltimore schools, not a single student tested proficient in math.

Administrators said their district’s summer program was developed, in part, in response to recent NAEP scores. But they know some children who might have benefited from the program will be left out because of budgetary restrictions. 

“Of course, we would love to be able to offer every student an opportunity to engage in learning during the summer,” said Laurie-Lynn Sutton-Platt, director of summer and extended learning.

The upcoming program can’t be a catch-all, but it can help, district administrators said. 

“It’s a start,” said Kerry Steinbrenner, Baltimore’s director of mathematics. “Summer is an ideal opportunity for students to continue to develop their math skills and we don’t want to miss that … We want to try to impact as many kids as we can during that time.” 

Cleveland Metropolitan School District, which serves , is also working to undo damage done by the pandemic. Some 4,200 students are enrolled in its five-week summer learning program with more added to the list every day. The district hopes the figure will reach the height it did last year at 6,500. 

But it can’t guarantee participation. 

“We are working to reach all of the students we can during the summer, but it is dependent upon students and families electing to enroll,” said chief communications officer Roseann Canfora. “We cannot require them to do so.”

Although driven by poor reading, not math scores, some third graders in Tennessee are summer programming this year if they performed poorly on that portion of the state exam and are at risk of being held back.

In the long term, average for fourth and eighth graders on the NAEP between the early 1970s and 2012. Between 2012 and 2020, just before the pandemic struck, they largely flattened while achievement gaps between high and low scorers — a persistent equity issue with NAEP — widened. And then the unprecedented drop in the 2022 scores brought COVID’s impact into full relief. 

How long it will take children to recover from that — or what it will take for more students to reach grade-level proficiency in math — are big questions, but recent research has shown the sharp decline in math proficiency could have lifelong negative consequences. 

Talia Milgrom-Elcott, executive director and founder of Beyond100K, a national network focused on preparing and retaining 150,000 excellent STEM teachers in 10 years, believes wealthier children have long made up what was lost. 

But others will never reach that goal, she said. 

“What’s different isn’t the kids: It’s their experience during the pandemic and the support they’ve received since,” she said. “We could have corralled all our resources to accelerate the mental, emotional and academic recovery of all kids — and if we would have, we’d likely have created the next great generation — but we haven’t. At least not yet.”

The federal government gave schools $190 billion in COVID aid with $3 billion available for summer learning. Experts say the type and quality of the summer programming counts, while some researchers assert that even that unprecedented overall sum is not enough to reverse the level of learning loss. 

Melodie Baker, national policy director at , an organization that promotes math policies that support equity in college readiness and success, said students need engaging and meaningful content that helps them make sense of the material and retain what they’ve learned. This is true whether it’s delivered during the school year or the summer, she said. 

“It’s also important to recognize the role of teacher diversity as a long-term strategy for improving student engagement and learning outcomes,” Baker said. “A diverse teaching staff can provide students with a range of perspectives and experiences that can enhance their understanding of the material and make it more relevant to their lives.”

Some 110,000 of New York City’s roughly 1 million students will participate in summer learning this year, a spokeswoman told The 74. NYC students slid nine points on the fourth-grade NAEP mathematics tests and four points on the eighth-grade exams. 

One program, , will focus on grade-level instructional priorities for grades K-8, helping students build math foundations, fluency and conceptual understanding to support learning recovery, acceleration and enrichment, she said. It includes assessments meant to identify weaknesses and help teachers narrow learning gaps ahead of the upcoming school year. Other programs include project-based learning and financial literacy.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, where fourth graders saw their math scores drop 13 points and eighth graders 11 on the 2022 NAEP exams, plans to grow its summertime math offerings for middle schoolers heading into ninth grade.

Mark Bosco, the district’s senior administrator for expanded learning and partnerships, said the four week-long program is expected to swell from 400 to 1,000 participants this summer. 

“This is designed for students who find math abstract,” Bosco said. 

Pre- and post-assessments reveal improvement: Children who stayed for the 16-day duration who could not answer a single pre-algebra question correctly at the start of the program could successfully answer five or six questions out of 20 at the end, Bosco said. 

He described the summer program as hands-on and project-based. In one instance, he said, reflecting on last year’s program, students were made to go through the steps of finding and financing a car, learning about credit applications, compounding interest and loans. 

“It really got them thinking about how math can be so important in everyday life,” he said. “The kids are applying concepts in pretty advanced ways.”

Chicago Public Schools is encouraging schools to implement math camps this summer for rising third and fourth graders in addition to programs for students in middle and high school, a spokesman said. Fourth graders in the district saw a 10-point decrease on math NAEP scores. The loss was worse for eighth graders, who suffered a 12-point decline. 

More than 73,000 of Chicago Public Schools’ engaged in at least one summer program last year. Math enrichment at the district includes the Summer of Algebra and Math Camp programs. A group of elementary schools also will host a Computer Science/Engineering Camp for students in kindergarten through fifth grade. 

Despite the success of some programs, funding remains a concern: Canfora, of the Cleveland schools, said federal COVID relief funds likely will not be available for summer 2024. Her district is building next summer into this fiscal year’s general fund budget, which will be submitted to the school board this month. 

Aaron Philip Dworkin, chief executive officer of the , said districts should always work to establish and strengthen relationships with outside partners to build better programs and to secure funding so they are not as reliant on federal dollars. 

“What do you do when the money runs out?” he asked. “We will figure it out. Everyone will contribute what they can and we will make it work.” 

In an evaluation of 26 public and private Ohio teacher training programs by the National Council on Teacher Quality released today, seven received A grades for instructing new educators in how to use the science of reading with young students, while six received Fs.

The report offers some encouraging news for DeWine who wants to ban other literacy approaches that have lost credibility: Colleges are teaching phonics — a key part of the science of reading — to teacher trainees. 

But just nine of the 26 programs fully covered all five parts of the science of reading — phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, along with phonics. In addition, most did not give new teachers enough practice with students. 

“The review yields mixed results, with some programs providing strong coverage of reading science and others barely scratching the surface (or worse, actually teaching candidates bad stuff),” the report concluded.

Colleges are also training prospective teachers in strategies that many consider outdated or damaging, the study found.

“When teachers use these methods, it takes valuable time away from scientifically-based reading instruction, the best methods for children to efficiently and effectively learn to read,” said Shannon Holston, author of the report.

How well Ohio’s colleges are teaching science of reading is a big factor in whether, and how fast, DeWine can succeed in his plan to ban other reading approaches by the fall of 2024; or if the state will have to spend years retraining teachers.  

Though the state will likely start tracking what colleges teach soon, it does not now, so the NCTQ analysis offers an advanced insight.

“It doesn’t make sense to shift elementary schools to science of reading, but not address teacher preparation,” said Aaron Churchill, the Ohio research director of the Fordham Institute, which partnered with NCTQ on the study.  “Future teachers will struggle and need expensive retraining when they are expected to teach reading consistent with the science.”

The Ohio analysis is part of a larger report coming from NCTQ in June on teacher training in reading across the country. Ohio results were released early at the request of the Fordham Institute, which is active in Ohio education advocacy and helped create NCTQ in 2000. Reports from NCTQ have often been controversial and critical of teacher training programs overall.

One surprise finding: “Three-cueing,” a strategy that DeWine and legislators in other states have singled out to ban from elementary schools, is not commonly taught to new teachers. That strategy, which has students guess at words from pictures or context clues, is part of the popular whole language and balanced literacy lessons used in many elementary schools.

Only three of the 26 rated programs — the University of Akron and Ashland University’s undergraduate and graduate programs — teach new teachers to use cueing with students, Holston said. 

The report graded each teacher training program in the science of reading instruction by reviewing course descriptions and syllabi to see what classes cover. They did not observe classes.

The review gave seven Ohio programs overall A’s: Marietta College, Mount St. Joseph University, Ohio University, University of Dayton, University of Findlay, University of Rio Grande, and Youngstown State University.

Six programs were given F grades: Ashland University (undergraduate and graduate programs), Defiance College, Kent State University, Miami University, and the University of Toledo. 

Ohio State University, the state’s largest university, scored well, earning a B grade overall.

The 74 is sharing the findings immediately as the Ohio Senate weighs DeWine’s proposal. Universities have not yet had a chance to respond to the report, but The 74 plans to provide additional coverage soon.

The Ohio analysis is part of a larger report coming from NCTQ in June on teacher training in reading across the country. Ohio results were released early at the request of the Fordham Institute, which is active in Ohio education advocacy and helped create NCTQ in 2000. Reports from NCTQ have often been controversial and critical of teacher training programs overall, not just on this specific issue.

Don Pope-Davis, dean of Ohio State University’s College of Education and Human Ecology, has previously said  his school, the largest in Ohio, prepares students well in the core skills of teaching reading, including phonics. In a letter to the legislature in March, he said that 96 percent of his graduates in the last three years have passed the state’s teacher licensing test in reading knowledge.

“Our teachers perform at that level year after year because they are well-prepared to teach reading,” Pope-Davis wrote.

“What we teach at Ohio State is in no way at odds with the administration’s proposal.”

At the same time, Pope-Davis joined the Ohio Education Association and Ohio Federation of Teachers, the state’s two large teachers unions, in warning against banning any strategies that could help different students.

“No single commercial program is appropriate for all students, just as no single tool is the only implement for a given task,” he wrote. “We would urge caution with any legislation that prescriptively adopts one approach without any consideration for the individual student.”

Though DeWine, like other Republican officials in other states, is seeking to ban three-cueing, the NCTQ report did not find that it was a major part of teacher training in the state. Out of nine practices that NCTQ considers contrary to the science of reading, the most common ones taught to prospective teachers in Ohio, according to Holtson, are “guided reading,” “running records” and “miscue analysis.”

Though three-cueing is not prevalent in teacher training programs, Aaron Churchill, Fordham’s Ohio research director, said he still wants that strategy banned. School boards are still buying lessons that use it, he said, and veteran teachers who graduated years ago are using it in whole language and balanced literacy instruction.

“If Ohio reforms teacher-prep but does nothing in K-12, we’ll end up with well-prepared teachers in science of reading who end up conforming instruction to what their school is doing,” Churchill said.

Morgan, who had previously worked for the Cleveland schools from 2014 to 2016, served as Executive Director of Teach For America’s St. Louis branch for three years before joining the Indianapolis district in 2020 during the pandemic.

For three years he has overseen Indianapolis’ academic recovery from the pandemic, with . 

Raised in Chicago, Morgan started his career teaching science in St. Louis public schools as a Teach for America recruit, years before leading the program there. Teach for America has drawn national attention for its model of recruiting strong students from non-teacher training programs at universities, giving them a crash course in teaching.

But reviews have been mixed in the program’s 30 years, with some educators praising the energy and insights that new recruits bring to schools that often have trouble finding good teachers. The program has churned out school leaders, including former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, former Louisiana State Superintendent John White and Morgan’s current boss, Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Aleesia Johnson.

Others, including teachers unions, have said teachers are not well prepared and that many leave the profession after their two year term.

In a press conference announcing Morgan’s selection, outgoing Cleveland CEO Eric Gordon pointed out he hired Morgan for his first school district administration job in 2014. Morgan responded he was glad for the chance to come “home.”

“I can’t describe how excited I am for this opportunity,” Morgan said as Gordon pulled a baton from a gift bag and handed it to him. “I’m extremely humbled, honored. But above all, just extremely grateful.”

Morgan cautioned, however, that he does not want to force Indianapolis solutions on Cleveland and that he would launch a listening tour to hear parents, staff and students. Though he presented a “first 100 days” plan in interviews for the job, it was not immediately available. 

In two interviews, one with parents and one with students, Morgan highlighted a commitment to extracurricular activities and making sure schools in every neighborhood have the resources to offer quality education. 

Mayor Justin Bibb said Morgan’s humility and ability to listen helped win the job, along with his commitment to equity between schools and “making sure that we do everything we can to accelerate and address the learning loss that we see coming out of COVID-19.”

Bibb avoided discussing how much Morgan’s Teach for America work was part of the decision. Bibb, 36, a former member of Ohio’s Teach for America board, had also tapped another veteran, former Cleveland TFA leader Holly Trifiro, as his main education advisor. 

A press release about Morgan becoming one of two finalists for the job conspicuously did not name Teach for America, saying only that Warren had worked for an “education nonprofit in St. Louis.” 

Morgan was chosen over Rocky Torres, a Cleveland native and also a former Cleveland schools administrator, now Assistant Superintendent of Student Services with Seattle Public Schools.

Morgan will start as CEO July 1 when Gordon, who has led the district since 2011, steps down. Gordon, 53, was named Urban Educator of the Year in 2016 by the Council of the Great City Schools, the nation’s association of large urban districts.

Until Bibb took over as mayor last January, Gordon had served as CEO only under former Mayor Frank Jackson. Last spring, Bibb said in an interview with The 74 that he would review whether any school official, even the highly-regarded Gordon, was the best fit for the district.

Gordon then announced last fall that he would leave after this school year, giving Bibb and the board time to pick a successor. He has not revealed plans for after his departure.

Along with his multiple leadership positions in Teach for America, Morgan has worked as a department chair and principal in Chicago Public Schools and spent two years in Cleveland overseeing some of the district’s “investment schools,” which received wraparound social services and other supports to improve.

Cleveland’s mayor has more say in the selection of the district head than other districts in the state. Though school districts in Ohio have elected school boards, Cleveland was the first to change to mayoral control in the 1990s. State law calls for the mayor to pick school board members and for new CEOs to be chosen by the board in concurrence with the mayor. 

The presidents of both the Ohio Education Association and Ohio Federation of Teachers praised DeWine for making literacy a priority in a new state budget bill. But both object to DeWine’s attempt in that same bill to make Ohio one of the first states to ban teachers using “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — in reading lessons. 

That strategy is a large part of long-used teaching approaches like whole language or balanced literacy.

“I would strongly, strongly urge the house to consider removal of language that explicitly bans any particular instructional practices,” OEA President Scott DiMauro told an Ohio House subcommittee considering DeWine’s plan last week.

DiMaruo said if the state offers training and teaching materials for science of reading, “there’s no need for the heavy hand of the state government to single out any specific instructional practices.”

OFT President Melissa Cropper said limiting teachers to one approach would take away other methods that may work best for some students.

“Banning certain methods opens the door to politically-charged attacks that can limit a teacher’s ability to choose the most appropriate method for meeting a student’s needs,” she told the subcommittee.

But DeWine, acting state education superintendent Stephanie Siddens and legislative leaders in the state’s Republican majority, which has often dismissed union concerns, are not deviating from DeWine’s plan to join Arkansas and Louisiana in banning cueing in favor of phonics-based lessons. Teachers still hope ongoing discussions with DeWine and his staff can help shape the final bill.

DeWine has been promoting science of reading at events in Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati, including a discussion Thursday in which former Mississippi state Superintendent Carey Wright came to Columbus to tell how changing to science of reading approaches helped students there leap from 49th in 4th grade reading nationally in 2013 to 22nd in 2022 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Siddens called three-cueing “counter-productive” for students after that event, in which Wright and others dismissed that approach as having children “guess” at words.

“You can’t guess your way into reading,” Wright said. “You have to be taught explicitly how to read.”

DeWine, when told after that meeting that teachers had called his plan too limiting, disagreed: “The science of reading is not one size fits all.” 

“Look at what the state of Mississippi did,” he said. “They did it, frankly, by being very strong in regard to the science of reading. So the evidence is just … there.”

Andrew Brenner, the Republican chairman of Ohio’s Senate Education Committee, said he sees such strong support for DeWine’s plan he sees less need to file a separate bill to require phonics to be taught.

“We believe that the governor’s plan will get through the budget mostly intact,” he said.

He dismissed teachers’ objections about banning cueing, asking if teachers prefer the low reading scores of many third graders on state tests, which DeWine has cited as a reason for his push.

Cropper said blaming any teaching approach for low scores “is an unsafe assumption.”

“There has been no analysis done on which districts are using which teaching methods or curriculum,” she said. “Many other factors contribute to students’ academic success including their socioeconomic status.”

More than half of all states have passed laws encouraging or incorporating science of reading in classrooms, as the so-called “reading wars” have ramped up over the last 10 years. Ohio has made science of reading part of the state’s recommended literacy improvement strategy since 2018, but has not required schools to use it.

DeWine’s proposed ban would go much further. Similar legislation has been filed in Indiana (SB 402), New Hampshire (HB 437), Florida (SB 758), West Virginia (SB 274), and Texas (HB 2162) with experts expecting more soon in Nevada, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

Mississippi, however, did not have such a ban to achieve the results DeWine praised. After DeWine and Carey spoke at the same event last week, the OFT’s Cropper asked Carey from the audience if Mississippi needed a ban or just focused on promoting and teaching science of reading.

Carey said there was no such ban, but the state continually told schools and teachers to avoid cueing and that teachers were often glad to be trained in science of reading methods, for which they received continuing education credits.

Both Cropper and DiMauro testified they would prefer promoting science of reading over any bans or mandating training for all teachers as DeWine wants. They praised DeWine for setting aside money in the budget for training, stipends for teachers doing the training, and for books and other curriculum materials for districts wanting to change.

But they raised concerns over DeWine’s aim to have the entire state change by the fall of 2024 and forcing even high school science and math teachers to do training. They noted that the state department of education doesn’t have a training plan yet, doesn’t know how long such training would need to be, how many teachers already have strong science of reading training and how well state teacher training programs are teaching it.

“We ask that all of you seriously look at, not just what does it take to implement or impose some state level mandates in terms of literacy instruction, but to truly get buy-in and meaningful implementation of that program,” DiMauro said. “We know there are many unanswered questions right now.”

Currently, state law allows districts to teach reading however they want. Under his proposed bill, Gov. Mike DeWine would force them to pick only phonics-based Science of Reading materials from a list the Ohio Department of Education will create. 

Dewine has also asked the state legislature to ban use of any “three cueing” materials or lessons — an approach considered the foundation of popular teaching methods known as Whole Language, Balanced Literacy or, particularly in Ohio, Reading Recovery. 

“The jury has returned,” DeWine, a Republican, said in his State of the State speech late last month where he led off his address with the importance of the Science of Reading. “The evidence is clear. The verdict is in.”

“There is a great deal of research about how we learn to read,” he said. “And today, we understand the great value and importance of phonics. Not all literacy curriculums are created equal, and sadly, many Ohio students do not have access to the most effective reading curriculum.”

DeWine is seeking $129 million from the legislature to retrain teachers and replace elementary school textbooks. 

With hearings on the bill just beginning, it’s still unclear whether DeWine’s ban, which other states are also considering, will win support. 

While DeWine’s plan to back the Science of Reading won strong applause at his speech and praise from some Republicans, there has been no debate yet on his ban, which only became public when bill language was released a week ago. And one of the state’s teachers unions has raised concerns about mandating a single approach to teaching reading.

There could also be logistical issues to such a dramatic shift going into effect in less than 19 months. 

How many Ohio schools or teachers will need to change how reading is taught remains unclear: The state does not track how many teachers are trained in the Science of Reading or how many elementary schools are using it to teach children. The state education department could only say that “many” teachers are not trained in the Science of Reading. 

Additionally, the state’s Department of Higher Education said  it does not know which reading methods colleges and universities are training prospective teachers in.

DeWine’s ban also puts Ohio State University’s Reading Recovery, a widely used reading intervention program based on three-cueing, in his crosshairs. Officials of the program did not respond to requests for comment.

The so-called “Reading Wars” of the last decade have pitched supporters of phonics against those who back related methods like whole language and balanced literacy in which students are taught to guess words they don’t know from cues such as context, pictures or letters.

As studies in support of phonics and other Science of Reading concepts have mounted, even ardent champions of other methods like Lucy Calkins of Columbia University’s Teachers College have backed down and started incorporating more phonics into their books and lessons.

In the last 10 years, more than half of all states have passed laws encouraging or incorporating Science of Reading in classrooms. Ohio has moved in that direction in recent years, making Science of Reading part of the state’s recommended literacy improvement strategy, but not requiring schools to use it.

Only a few states have gone as far as DeWine proposes, including Arkansas and Louisiana, which have already banned schools from using any of the methods based on three-cueing. 

But officials in eight other states are joining Ohio in seeking similar bans, according to Tom Greene, national legislative director for ExcelinEd in Action, the education advocacy group created by former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush. 

Legislation has been filed in Indiana (SB 402), New Hampshire (HB 437), Florida (SB 758), West Virginia (SB 274), and Texas (HB 2162) with bills expected soon in Nevada, Oklahoma, and South Carolina outlawing three-cueing, he said.

“Eliminating three cueing is a strong step in the right direction to ensure all kids are proficient readers by the end of the third grade,” Greene said. “These state leaders are looking at the research, hearing personal stories of struggling readers and listening to the concerns of teachers about the harmful effects of this approach.”

But Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, one of two teachers unions in the state, has already said educators shouldn’t be limited in how they teach reading. 

DiMauro said last week — before the full scope of DeWine’s plan was made public — that all teachers use phonics as part of their lessons, but they are “just one piece of a larger puzzle” when it comes to teaching reading, and that a “one size fits all” solution was not a good move. 

 “As far as saying approach x versus approach y, as a prescribed reading plan, we don’t don’t think it’s appropriate,” DiMauro said. 

Ohio State Senate education committee chair Andrew Brenner, who plans his own bill to require phonics, predicted the change would not only affect elementary schools, but also the state’s universities and teacher training programs. 

DeWine’s plan sets aside $43 million in each of the next two years for the Ohio Department of Education to create training in the Science of Reading for any teacher who hasn’t had it, run training sessions and pay teachers a stipend for attending.

DeWine’s plan is built into his proposed two-year state budget. Though the budget bill won’t likely be passed until just before the end of June, portions of it could be split off for a vote sooner as part of Brenner’s bill or others.

Thankfully, teacher Tawana Dukes was right there for the rescue.

Jay’Ceon and his classmates at Mary B. Martin Elementary School in Cleveland had a fun afterschool task as they wound down from Halloween earlier this month: Describe a haunted house. Jay’Ceon had many ideas — including some popular movie characters along with the chainsaw maniac — but needed a hand putting them on paper.

“Sound it out,” Dukes told him, as he started writing, turning the task into a real lesson. “Chain..Saw. Compound word. What makes a ch sound?”

The stakes of the exercise were clearly not the same as dodging a real chainsaw. But for students at Mary Martin and all of the Cleveland school district, the stakes are still high.

Cleveland students’ ability to read was devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show. Cleveland had the worst reading score declines in the country on that test known as the “nation’s report card.”

“The drops were more severe than I think I had anticipated,” said Holly Trifiro, education advisor for Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb. “It’s startling to see how far behind our kids are. It’s the kind of thing that could be keeping lots of us up at night.”

Though concerning,the NAEP don’t appear to have changed recovery plans in a city where students have long lagged behind their more affluent peers and where educators saw the impact of the pandemic unfold daily.

Instead, Cleveland officials are banking on support programs, like the afterschool sessions at Mary Martin which was in place before the pandemic. The recovery strategy also relies on initiatives yet to be rolled out. Some programs, like the district’s summer school initiative, may help, but aren’t drawing all the students that need it.

Cleveland still beat Detroit — the city it routinely trades places with as the poorest district in the country — on the NAEP tests. But Cleveland slipped behind other poor urban areas it often compares itself to, as the pandemic undid more than 15 years of gains on the tests.

Of 26 cities measured, Cleveland had the biggest score drop nationally in both fourth and eighth grade reading assessments. Cleveland’s fourth grade reading scores fell more than five times as much as they did nationally since the last pre-pandemic tests in 2019.

In math, eighth grade scores fell about the national average, but fourth graders tied for the worst drop in the country.

District officials say the results provide a new post-pandemic baseline to measure future improvements from.

“While it’s difficult to see, it (NAEP) does give us the chance to really work on what’s happening,” said school board member Denise Link. She and other board members credited the district for not skipping the tests earlier this year, even when they likely knew the results would be bad.

Whether those scores become a rallying point for any new efforts remains to be seen. Some downplay the severity of the results because of Covid outbreaks and how early tests were given in the school year.

The district is also relying on key programs that other cities are just now turning to in recovery efforts – like the afterschool sessions and accompanying wraparound services – that were already in place or rolling out as the pandemic hit. And a few new efforts, like book giveaways and online tutoring, were already lined up to launch when NAEP results came out.

The district is also in the middle of a leadership switch. Along with having a new mayor this year, district CEO Eric Gordon is stepping down at the end of the year. The school board is in its early stages of its search for a replacement.

The score drop comes as no surprise for a few reasons. Cleveland has long been one of the poorest cities in the nation and multiple analyses show poor students faring worse during the pandemic than more affluent ones.

The district was the least-connected city in the nation, according to 2019 Census data, which put Cleveland behind others in online learning when school buildings closed.

“People didn’t have any access,” said Sajit Zaccharia, a Vice Provost at Cleveland State University and former dean of its education school, who also sits on a district oversight board. said. “You had stories of people trying to get on their phones, trying to be next to libraries with free WiFi, and things like that to try and get access. But only a small percentage of the population could probably even do that.”

Cleveland Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski said acclimating students to school after more than a year away dominated the early part of the 2021-22 school year, leaving little time to catch up by January’s NAEP tests.

“That you saw dips in math and reading on NAEP after students not being at in-person school should be no surprise to anyone,” Obrenski said. “There were people not used to being around other people, students who are not used to being at school all day every day. It was really difficult.”

She’s not convinced that transition is over, even today.

“I don’t know that we’re there yet,” she said. “I think we’re getting there.”

Gordon and others say the Omicron variant of Covid hitting Cleveland earlier and harder than most cities also hurt scores. Right before Christmas 2021, the Cleveland area had the fourth highest Covid infection rate in the country. That forced a week of remote classes just before NAEP tests.

A few programs are key in that recovery. With students disengaged from school and the district having severe chronic absenteeism issues, Gordon added more music, art and gym classes at each school this year. The district also launched an optional summer learning program for both 2021 and 2022.

And the district is counting on Say Yes to Education, a college scholarship and student support program launched in early 2019, to provide much of the boost students need.

Along with scholarships, Say Yes puts staff in every school to offer supports and afterschool tutoring.

Mary Martin principal Gary McPherson, said afterschool programs, once aimed at helping kids catch up to suburban peers, are now focusing on pandemic recovery.

The district is about to launch an online tutoring program students can access at night for extra help. District teachers will be paid to provide the tutoring each evening with additional hours provided by a private company.

Bibb also plans to launch a still-developing citywide literacy program in December, starting with giving away 50,000 books.

But the programs still aren’t reaching the majority of students. In 2021, the summer program enrolled more than 8,000 participants, a little over 20 percent of Cleveland’s total enrollment. That fell to about 6,500 in 2022.

Afterschool programs also don’t have openings or enough buses.

“You have to start somewhere,” Zaccharia said. “Are there subgroups that are not taking advantage? I think that would be the next stage.”What are strategies that we can use to then try and reach those groups that haven’t taken advantage?”

“I need some volunteers,” says Becker, an instructor for the new Manufacturing Innovation, Technology and Job Center, a $17 million business incubation lab and student teaching center opened last week to support local industry and show students skills and jobs that might lead them to a career.

Becker points to six students and has them gather around a table where they each pull a lever to press the strip against the mold. One by one, they bend the strip into the shape of Ohio to create a cookie cutter.

“This is an example of metal bending which is a process in manufacturing and we can make as many as we want,” she tells the students. “You can take them home.” 

The lesson Friday morning was the first for the new center that’s part factory, part museum and part classroom — and already drawing national attention. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attended its grand opening Thursday night, praising its potential to boost the city and nation’s manufacturing economy as it helps students.

With debt handcuffing many graduates and making college out of reach for others, career technical education programs across the country like the Cleveland center are trying to help students earn skills for middle-class jobs without piling up massive financial obligations. 

For students from the nation’s poorest school district, Cleveland education officials say the center is part of a plan to set kids on a path toward well-paying careers after graduating from high school.

“It’s… exposing thousands of students to the good paying manufacturing jobs that our economy has created,” Yellen said. “They’ll learn that this is exciting technology, and a wonderful source of jobs in the future,” she told The 74.

Signs next to equipment in the center list potential manufacturing jobs and their hourly pay — $17-25 for brake press operators, $32-45 for mechanical technicians or $40-$60 for industrial engineers.

Housed in a long-shuttered elementary school built in the 1960s, the center is the new headquarters of a local manufacturing association, the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network (MAGNET). About a third of it is set aside as a teaching hall for manufacturing demonstrations and museum-style exhibits on processes like laser cutting, vacuum forming and metal stamping created in partnership with the Great Lakes Science Center. 

The Cleveland school district, which sold the former Margaret Ireland Elementary School to MAGNET two years ago, leases five classrooms in the center and plans to send 3,000 sixth and ninth graders through the site each year on field trips to see demonstrations and exhibits.

Autumn Russell, who heads a consortium to help kids in the Cleveland area find jobs after graduation, hopes the center will “break students’ misconceptions” about manufacturing.

“Students can see what 21st century manufacturing looks like and be introduced to well paying careers that are right in their backyard,” she said.

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown also lauded the center for using a former school in the low-income Hough neighborhood to reach students in a high poverty school district.

“I love it where you’re located,” Brown said. “I love it that this was a grade school. I love what this symbolizes. I love it that … hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of mostly Cleveland public school kids, but other public school kids too, will come through here and they will get to operate equipment and machinery. And they will understand there are all kinds of roads to the middle class.”

For MAGNET, the site replaces a smaller, crowded home that limited what it could do for students and for businesses that need help starting or expanding. Leah Epstein, MAGNET’s vice president of engagement, said manufacturers in the region need more than 10,000 employees right away. Though MAGNET already sponsors some training programs, including its Early College, Early Careers apprentice program for high school juniors, she said sparking interest in more students at earlier ages is important.

“As baby boomers retire, we expect that number is only going to increase two or three fold in the next 10 years,” she said. “If we don’t do something now, we’re going to be in a bad spot.”

Though the National Museum of Industrial History teaches some similar classes in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and many factories offer tours to the public or school groups, Epstein said MAGNET could not find another site offering the degree of lessons the center will. And factories, she said, specialize in certain tasks, not many, and can’t shut down production lines for hands-on student visits every day.

The plan calls for Cleveland schools to bring 6th graders to the center for short visits as add-ons to their yearly field trips to the science museum. Ninth graders will come for a half day each year, then more for students with extra interest.

In addition, a STEM-themed playground outside is open to the public. With a mural of six Black innovators looking over the site, the games and climbing equipment all offer lessons. A giant fulcrum with dangling ropes traces about leverage as students try to lift a basket of bowling balls. A “geo-climber” with many metal panels asks students how many corners or triangles are in the structure. And a seesaw has sliding weights to let students explore balance between the sides.

Student Don Joyce didn’t want to visit the center, but was persuaded by a teacher who told him to be open to learning new things.

“I ended up going and I liked it,” he said. He is now considering the technical side of business.

“It’s interesting,” he said, then added with a smile, “It makes a lot of money.”

Though test scores in 2022 improved statewide compared to those from a chaotic 2020-21 year of shuttered schools, online classes and scarce vaccines, those historically struggling groups had taken too much of a hit to catch up.

Test scores fell twice as much since 2019 for “vulnerable” students than their white peers, one analysis shows. That meant urban, high poverty schools districts had four times the score decline as affluent suburban ones.

“We saw improvement across the board. That’s the good news,” said Chris Woolard, Chief Program Director of the Ohio Department of Education, adding a “sobering” caution: “The vulnerable students are the most impacted. We had achievement gaps before the pandemic. The achievement gaps are worse.”

Ohio’s annual report cards for schools and districts released last month mirror many of the findings of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) this month that student reading skills had their biggest drop in 30 years and that math scores, after years of incremental increases, fell for the first time.

Scores from Ohio, with the sixth-most students of any state, offer more detail than NAEP and other large states are currently providing. The NAEP data released so far only covers nine-year-old students. NAEP scores for individual states and cities won’t be out until late October. And while large states like and are allowing individual districts to release scores if they want, they are not releasing statewide data to offer any comparisons.

In Ohio, gaps were also apparent between younger students and those in high school; and between math scores and English scores. 

The greatest recovery came in English in early grades, while math scores lagged and some high school students made little recovery, or even regressed, an analysis by Ohio State University Vladimir Kogan found.

The net effect, Kogan said, is that students remain a third of a year to a half year behind in English, but full recovery could come soon.

“If the pace of recovery observed between the 2021 and 2022 school years can be sustained, ELA achievement could return to pre-pandemic levels within the next two to three years in most grades,” he wrote in his analysis. 

But the drop in math is between a half year and a year’s worth of learning, which will take longer to recover.

“The students learned more (in English) last year than students prior to the pandemic, particularly in the younger grades, but we don’t see really any acceleration in math in any of the grades,” Kogan said. 

Michael Casserly, former executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a national association of big city districts, called the results out of Ohio and other states “actually pretty encouraging.”

“It’s just preliminary, but it looks like a combination of just getting kids back in the classroom, the summer school, the emphasis on staying on grade level in the regular classroom instruction is starting to move the needle,” Casserly said. 

The good news:

• Ohio’s test scores crashed between spring 2019 and spring of 2021, but students made up more than half of that loss by 2022, regaining 5.6 points of a dramatic 10 percent drop. That comeback is “just sort of unheard of,” Woolard said, because state scores typically change just a point or two from year to year.
• Test scores for many districts have almost fully recovered or even surpassed previous scores, according to former state representative Steve Dyer, a Democrat who has remained active in state education debates. Dyer 43 out of Ohio’s 607 districts scored higher in 2022 than before the pandemic and 55 percent of districts are within five percent of their 2019 scores.

“Amid all the recent doom and gloom reporting about our children falling behind because of COVID, Ohio’s public schools have done a remarkable job recovering significant amounts of those losses,” .

 The bad news:

• Ohio’s overall test scores are the lowest since 2014-15 wiping out the small gains districts have made since then.
• State proficiency rates — students with strong scores — show students faring far worse in math in 2022 than English. Statewide, the drop in proficiency was double in math, about 10 percentage points, than the five point drop in English.
• Test scores fell much more for “vulnerable” groups than for white and Asian students or the state overall. A calculation by the right-leaning Fordham Institute, found while scores for white students fell less than five percent since 2019, it fell nine percent for Hispanic, 10.2 percent for low income, and even more for Black students and for English Learners and students with disabilities.

• Ohio’s large urban school districts, which face greater socioeconomic challenges than the rest of the state, saw test scores fall harder between 2019 and 2022, even after significant recovery over last school year. All districts in the Ohio 8, a coalition of eight urban districts, had bigger drops than the state’s overall drop of 5.4 points in Performance Index, the state’s composite of all test scores over all grades. 

Some urban districts, like Canton and Cincinnati, had double the statewide drop. Others, like Cleveland and Dayton, have fallen only a little further behind.

“The pandemic hit us hard,” Cleveland schools CEO Eric Gordon said. “But community surveys show clearly that the community expected this. Polls show also that our families remain confident that [the district] can and will get our kids and district back on an upward trend. And we have – outpacing many districts.”

• As expected, more affluent and suburban districts had much lower declines than poor and more urban ones. As Fordham’s Aaron Churchill calculated, urban and high poverty districts saw scores decline 13.3 percent – four times as much as the 3.3 percent for suburban districts with very low poverty.

• Older students in 8th grade and high school are not recovering well.

As Churchill , proficiency rates for eighth grade math and English barely improved in 2022, if at all. For high school algebra and English II exams, proficiency rates dropped slightly. 

“Ohio cannot afford to leave tens of thousands of students lacking the basic literacy and numeracy skills needed to succeed in life,” said Churchill. “State leaders need to set a faster pace for learning recovery—especially in mathematics—by restoring a focus on core academics and ensuring that schools are using highly effective practices.”

Kogan’s research found a similar pattern with older students not making up lost ground..

“Their scores are worse,” Kogan said. “So they have not caught up and in fact, if anything, they seem to have fallen further behind.”

“(That’s) obviously very concerning because we don’t have much time left for these high school students,” he said. “So obviously, that should raise the urgency of really targeting interventions to these older students.”

Now with the Cleveland schools in COVID recovery, Bibb, 35, the city’s first mayor in 16 years, still wants more gains, casting pandemic recovery work as an opportunity for rapid change. 

He’s aiming high and calling it the “Great Reset.” 

“We have to actively accelerate the pace of change inside the district,” Bibb told The 74 last month. “I will consider it a failure of mine as mayor, if in the next decade, we don’t improve the quality of learning in our school system.”

To Bibb, that means having more schools highly-rated by the state, better test scores, and students who are better prepared for college or jobs. That’s a tough task for a city that’s the poorest in the nation by many measures and where test scores are among Ohio’s worst. 

“Having mayoral control of our schools is a special moral obligation for me,” said Bibb of Cleveland, the first mayoral-controlled school district in Ohio in 1997. “With one out of two of our children living in poverty, having high quality public education is critical to our long term economic competitiveness as a city.”

Whether Bibb’s goal is achievable is an open question. COVID’s damage to attendance, enrollment and preschools will make it hard just getting back to the district’s lackluster pre-COVID results.   

Bibb is considering options before setting a plan, first conducting a listening tour of the city this summer to learn what families want from the schools and what changes they seek. 

He’s even weighing whether district CEO Eric Gordon, who has led the district since 2011, is the best person to guide that work.

“I’m happy with the work that’s been done to date,” he said. “And we are evaluating what’s going to be important for us to do in the future.”

Bibb also liked Gordon’s enthusiasm for mastery learning — making sure students keep learning skills until they “master” or understand them, rather than pushing them ahead before they are ready. 

Bibb isn’t the first Cleveland mayor to call for faster improvement. In 2012, ex-mayor Frank Jackson complained that “incremental” gains by the schools were not good enough. With the district having the second-worst test scores in Ohio, Jackson and Gordon worked with legislators to create a district improvement plan and avoid state takeover.

Since then, despite several changes to state tests, the district has slowly crept closer to average state scores while edging up the rankings. In 2019, pre-pandemic, district scores had risen to eighth from the bottom.

The district has also trumpeted improvements in its graduation rate from just 52 percent in 2010 to 81 percent for the class of 2020 as the main evidence of improvement.

Bibb applauded the graduation gains, but those are not enough, he said. 

“I think it’s past time you had a different conversation of whether or not high school graduation is a sole metric of how we’re measuring and evaluating whether or not we’re moving in the right direction,” he said, adding that he wants to see better state ratings of schools and better results on national tests like the ACT and NAEP.

Too few schools receive an A or B grade from the state, he said. In 2019 state report cards, about 10 percent of district schools graded B or higher, compared to 38 percent statewide.

And the district is not preparing students well enough for college, he said, with too few scoring well enough on tests to be considered strong enough to avoid needing remedial classes when they start college. Since 2012, the percentage of district students scoring remediation-free on the ACT rose only from 12 to 13.

“We only improved college and career readiness by just one percentage point,” Bibb said, “That’s not good enough for me.

He’s already made one eye-catching leadership change, replacing former mayor Frank Jackson’s education advisor with Holly Trifiro, the state director of Teach for America, a fast-track teacher training program.

Teach for America has drawn criticism from teachers unions nationally, which believe it doesn’t train recruits well enough before putting them in classrooms. Unions complained when the program started in Ohio in 2012.

But Trifiro, who ran the program in greater Cleveland for eight years before becoming state director, isn’t drawing protest. 

Instead, the Cleveland Teachers Union has welcomed her. 

“If she continues to demonstrate (a) collaborative spirit… and continues to demonstrate all of the positive qualities I saw in her during our work on the transition team, she can be an asset to the Bibb administration, the city, and to CMSD,” said union president Shari Obrenski.

Trifiro said the city has to focus on tests like the ACT to see if Cleveland students are keeping pace nationally.

“How does Cleveland compare to the country?” Trifiro asked. “And how do we make this a more competitive city in all the ways that we can?”

Bibb praised the district becoming part of the Say Yes to Education college promise program — in which graduates are guaranteed college scholarships; and he and Trifiro praised the district’s recent launch of a career exposure and preparation program called PACE — Planning and Career Exploration — to better connect students to good paying jobs.

“We hope that PACE is part of the answer,” Trifiro said. “We need to make sure that the business community comes around it and that kids are getting opportunities that excite them and interest them.” 

Bibb called PACE and Say Yes to Education “good building blocks”  as the city tries to rebound from COVID. 

To reach his goals, Bibb said he knows he needs support  from companies, nonprofits and residents.

”I don’t believe that I alone as mayor, or the schools can solve the problem by ourselves,” he said. “We need everybody in the community to play their respective role.”

Chris Riback: Michelle, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to the studio.

Michelle Connavino: Thanks so much for having me.

Chris Riback: What is PRE4CLE? Why was it needed? What’s the inspiration?

Michelle Connavino: So PRE4CLE is Cleveland’s plan to expand high quality preschool access across the city of Cleveland, Ohio. It started in 2014 as part of the Cleveland Public Schools Transformation Plan. So in that plan, the mayor of the city of Cleveland along with the CEO of the school district identified ways to improve student achievement in the city of Cleveland. One of those ways was through expanding access to high quality early learning. And so PRE4CLE was born out of that plan to focus especially on those three and four year olds, making sure that there’s more access available to all three and four year olds throughout the city of Cleveland. And we’ve been working ever since then toward that goal.

Chris Riback: Talk to me about the coordination. I assume that you are having to coordinate across different levels of government. Private, public, nonprofit, you’re bringing a lot of different folks together. How does that happen, particularly in a period when it’s tough to get folks to agree on very much these days?

Michelle Connavino: Yes. We’ve been incredibly fortunate. From the start of PRE4CLE, it really was a community-wide initiative that brought together people from the city of Cleveland, the county, the school district.

Chris Riback: Labor as well, no?

Michelle Connavino: Yes, labor. Our Teachers Union was part of it. Philanthropy. My gosh.

Chris Riback: [crosstalk] Really all of Cleveland, sounds like.

Michelle Connavino: Yes. Head Start. It really was. It was pretty remarkable. And that has really allowed us to, one, create an early childhood system through PRE4CLE and a lot of our partners, especially our Child Care Resource and Referral Agency and our schools that… So it created a plan that is not dependent on any one leader. So it’s a little less…

Chris Riback: Takes the politics out of it, perhaps.

Michelle Connavino: Yes. Absolutely. And I think the second thing that it did is that by bringing all of those partners together, we ensured that we weren’t duplicating things that other organizations were already doing well. So our Resource and Referral Agency, which is called Starting-Point in Cuyahoga County, which is where Cleveland is, they’re really good at the technical assistance and support for providers, for preschool providers and childcare providers that ensure that they reach those high quality standards in our state QRIS system. So they already have that. So we didn’t need to put that in place. We can just support them to do that, and then bring those providers in to be part of PRE4CLE. So it’s been just outstanding in a lot of ways.

Chris Riback: What are Cleveland Early Learning Spaces?

Michelle Connavino: Yes. So Cleveland Early Learning Spaces is a new program that we’re starting right now, actually. And-

Chris Riback: Breaking news on Early Learning Nation Studio.

Michelle Connavino: [crosstalk] Breaking news. Absolutely. We’re having our launch in just a few weeks. But we, actually pre-pandemic even, in 2018, 2019, started looking really deeply at what preschool providers need in their facilities. And that actually was born out of ongoing data that we look at twice a year, neighborhood by neighborhood in the city of Cleveland. What is the need for preschool? How many children live in each neighborhood? How many high quality preschool seats are available? How many lower quality seats are available that we could raise to quality? How many kids are enrolled in those seats? And we identified a few neighborhoods that actually needed new seats. And so this all started because we thought maybe we need to build some new preschools.

And then we thought, well, some of these community-based preschools that are already in place because of the way that financing works in childcare have not had the dollars to put toward maintenance and renovations that they really need. And so we were able to start a project where we received a grant from The George Gund Foundation and also from Gordon Gund himself to start this project. And so we’re giving providers $100,000 in a grant to do renovations. On top of that, we are working with IFF out of Chicago to provide an owner’s rep, to actually shepherd the construction project through to the end and work with the contractors, and then also professional development to help grow the capacity for this ongoing over the long-term.

Chris Riback: And as I understand, I mean, you’re talking about environmental health and safety, organization and layout, interior finishes and design, and gross motor and outdoor play space. I mean, you’re talking about reinventing these spaces outdoor to in, from top to bottom.

Michelle Connavino: Absolutely. And so some of these sites, when we did our initial assessment, we found some lead paint in some sites. We found some asbestos in some sites. We found sites that… A lot of sites need new roofs. So it’s some of all of that, but it’s also about when you’re in an early childhood classroom. Is there natural light? Are the colors conducive to learning and making sure that kids’ brains are processing what they need to and aren’t being distracted by clutter or whatever? So it’s a little bit of everything, really.

Chris Riback: And what has been the take up of PRE4CLE? And how successful has it been or where have the challenges been?

Michelle Connavino: PRE4CLE, we started in 2014. In our first five years, enrollment in high quality preschool in the city of Cleveland increased by 72%. So it’s pretty significant. And then COVID hit. So I mean, we could talk about the challenges of COVID forever.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Michelle Connavino: But I think our biggest challenge that we’re seeing, and I’m sure that you’re probably hearing this over and over today, is the early childhood workforce. And at this point, what we are seeing is that there are classrooms in Cleveland that are sitting unused and sitting empty because we don’t have teachers to fill those. And we don’t have teachers because the wages are not high enough and people have the opportunity to move into other professions right now. Early childhood teachers are also working with little kids every day who aren’t vaccinated, who may not follow masking as well as older kids do.

So they’re in a high exposure field. And then also, it’s just been incredibly hard on these providers. And they’ve had to open and close and whatever, figure out all sorts of challenges through COVID that we’ve all been figuring out, all while taking care of and teaching our youngest kids. And I think just all of those things on top of each other have really led to a huge shortage that was already coming prior to COVID, and it just exacerbated it and sped it up. And we got to figure out how to pay early childhood teachers what they’re worth for the work that they do and for their professionalism.

Chris Riback: A lot of challenges, a lot of opportunities too, with a lot of work being done by and with PRE4CLE. Michelle, thank you.

Michelle Connavino: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Thank you for joining us.

With a of over 1 million daily COVID cases reported on Monday and more than this week temporarily closed or pivoted to remote instruction, educators and families are being thrust back into the existential struggle over keeping schools open.

The second half of the 2021-22 school year began with a growing list of shutdowns, including major urban districts such as Atlanta, Milwaukee and Cleveland. In Philadelphia, leaders on Monday night announced that on Tuesday, though stopped short of shutting down the entire district.

Other top school systems such as New York City and Chicago have moved forward with plans to reopen in person, but have hit snags along the way: In New York, nearly a third of students did not show up for classes on Monday, and in Chicago, a late night vote Tuesday held by the teachers union demanding to teach remotely Wednesday.

The reactions from weary parents ranged widely. “It’s chaos,” National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues The New York Times, pointing out that when schools nix plans for in-person learning at the final hour, it leaves families scrambling for child care options. 

On the other hand, with the Omicron variant rampant post-holiday, Cleveland parent Tiffany Rossman was glad schools stayed closed to start the new year. She and her teenage daughter both tested positive for the virus in December, and she fell quite ill despite her vaccination, she told The 74. The mother worried that opening classrooms after the holidays could lead to infected kids spreading the virus.

Rossman acknowledged, however, that “if I had small children and needed to go into the office then I don’t know what I would do.”

While a handful of school systems had planned before the winter break to be remote for short stints in January or to close for testing, the vast majority of announcements were made last minute as record-high COVID case rates came into view. Yonkers Public Schools started classes this week remotely after of students who took rapid tests over the holidays were COVID positive. Detroit announced that school would be closed Monday through Wednesday after rapid testing revealed a positivity rate. Districts are open for in-person learning in and , but officials there had to shut down eight and 12 school buildings, respectively, for lack of staff.

“A lot of it was last second, and it continues to be,” Dennis Roche, co-founder of the K-12 data tracker Burbio, told The 74.

The , and school systems are exceptions to the trend, he noted, as each district had planned before the holidays to take a handful of days in the new year for students to receive rapid tests. As it currently stands, classrooms are set to open in all three districts in the coming days. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, does not re-open until Jan. 10, but has said it intends to test all students before it does.

Over the weekend, Roche watched Burbio’s jump from 1,591 to 2,181, and again on Tuesday to 3,556. Shutdowns were concentrated in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, where current COVID rates are among the .

Amid the chaos, the Biden administration has maintained that schools should keep their doors open wherever possible and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended booster eligibility to two separate groups of children this week.

“I believe schools should remain open,” the president said during a on the current Omicron surge. And in fact, despite some conspicuous closures, the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 98,000 public schools have returned from the holiday break in person. 

Hedging slightly in a conversation on Fox News Sunday, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona added: “We recognize there may be some bumps in the road, especially this upcoming week when superintendents, who are working really hard across the country, are getting calls saying that some of their schools may have 5 to 10 percent of their staff not available.”

“For anyone who has gone remote, we want to similarly keep on engaging with them, and make sure that they can come back as quickly as they can,” a senior White House official told The 74 Tuesday.

Federal policymakers underscore that districts can draw on American Rescue Plan dollars as well as multiple other devoted to helping K-12 facilities stave off COVID through purchasing tests and other mitigation measures.

To help schools stay open, the CDC in December endorsed “test-to-stay” practices allowing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus to remain in the classroom if they test negative for COVID. 

The federal agency also took the controversial step on Dec. 27 of reducing its recommended quarantine timeline for infected individuals, including teachers and students, from 10 to five days. The move divided many health experts, leaving numerous observers to wonder whether the CDC was after .

But several school officials appreciated the chance for teachers and students to return more quickly to the buildings.

“Anything that will help the schools to stay open is welcome,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, told The 74.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high. But top infectious disease experts say that the vast majority of serious infections are among unvaccinated youth. Under a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the .

​​“Most of our pediatric population is still undervaccinated,” said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Even though the Omicron variant has generated more breakthrough infections, the pediatrician assured that the vaccines continue to be successful at their key function: preventing severe illness and death.

“We’re still so much safer having received the vaccine,” she told The 74.

For youth who have received both shots and are ready for a booster, the Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for , five months after the initial two-dose series.

Amid the widespread concern and flurry of new pandemic policies, a bit of good news regarding the giant spike in cases also surfaced on Sunday. In South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, the surge in infections driven by the hyper-transmissible strain has , giving health experts hope that the U.S may follow a similar course in the weeks to come.

Still, other mutations of the virus may arise further down the road, Deeter pointed out. The only long-term path to move beyond the pandemic, she said, is getting immunized.

“If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to come through vaccination.”

But district CEO Eric Gordon knew scholarships and a diploma wouldn’t be enough for many Cleveland students who come from families making less than $20,000 a year and never get to college.

Even as cheers still echoed from the scholarship celebration, Gordon was rallying business and non-profit groups in his bid to directly attack the generational poverty and unemployment plaguing Cleveland — a program to connect thousands of high school students to real jobs with living wages and a shot at a satisfying life.

Working mostly on Zoom during the pandemic, a team of more than 115 Cleveland leaders built Planning And Career Exploration (PACE): Here to Career, designed to create clear paths to middle class jobs for all students through internships, apprenticeships, job shadowing, and visits to businesses. 

“We have a complete divide between the people who have access and awareness of all the careers that can keep them out of poverty, and the people who have no access and no awareness of the things that can lift them out of poverty,” Gordon said. “PACE is our attempt to bridge that divide.” 

Already, more than 70 Cleveland businesses have signed on to be part of the program, including hospitals and a major bank chain. 

The effort comes at a time when businesses face a worker shortage as the country emerges from the pandemic, which could be an incentive for Cleveland companies to train students.

But the Cleveland program faces steep challenges. Similar programs in other U.S. cities have not reached large numbers of students. PACE must overcome business concerns about training costs and student behavior, and the logistical issuers of having students in the workplace.  

It’s also a change in mindset for the district. The long-standing goal of preparing students for the distinct silos of college or career, which later merged into college and career. is narrowing even further.

“College, two year college, trade school is a path to a career,” Gordon explained. “But so is apprenticeship, internship, learn-to-earn, (going) straight to the workforce. And so the goal has to be ‘career’.”

A key component of PACE is making workplace learning a standard part of high school for all students, not just those in vocational programs or the top academic students. 

“We’ve built it as a universal goal – everybody should have these things,” said Anthony Battaglia, district executive director of career and college pathways.  

That’s a major challenge and one that requires a change in school and business culture that would set Cleveland apart from other cities. Workplace learning programs in U.S. cities have been unable to succeed for large numbers of students.  

In Nashville, for example, where an intense career exploration program has existed for more than a decade, only about 20 percent of seniors have a chance at an internship before graduating.

Though European countries have a culture of companies training youth, U.S. businesses shy away for a host of reasons — including insurance issues, concerns students lack skills to do the jobs, and school schedules that conflict with business hours. Transportation is also a barrier, particularly for students relying on limited public transit systems. Businesses also have no guaranteed return for their investment.

But many U.S. cities need to better connect students to high-paying jobs that bring economic security and a middle class life. 

with too many job seekers lacking the credentials for good-paying jobs. Others view it as an “opportunity gap,” where too many disadvantaged groups have never had a chance to learn what they need to compete.

“Many low-wage workers—particularly Black, Latino or Hispanic, and Indigenous workers—are trapped in without access to career exposure, premium education, or professional networks,” Brookings Institution researcher Anneliese Goger wrote. “We must focus on job creation and educational investments that offer all residents expansive career options and to new careers.”

Helen Williams, who runs educational programs for the Cleveland Foundation and helped lead PACE’s creation, said her visit to the Netherlands and Finland in 2014 inspired her to bring parts of the European model here.

“We want students to get a deep dive in what a professional career looks like,” she said. “Employers get a chance to interact with their students and think of those programs not as charity, but as really helping to develop the future workforce.”

She hopes PACE can spark a gradual change in business culture here.

“How do you make this part of the DNA?” Williams asked. “How do you bring people together so that it is seamless? It’s really a re-thinking.”

Even before the pandemic, Cleveland had a greater need to connect students to jobs than other cities. It has the highest poverty rate – 30.8 percent – in the U.S. and the worst child poverty rate in the country, with 46 percent of kids living below the poverty line.

Cleveland families made about $26,600 a year, compared to the region’s median household income of $52,100 and national median of $57,600.

Census data show just 16 percent of Cleveland adults have earned bachelor’s degrees, well below the 30% or more for the region, state and nation.

PACE aims to address those problems starting in the sixth grade when students will learn about jobs and finances, and eventually placing high school students in workplaces. 

The hope is students from poor Cleveland families will be exposed to ideas and concepts affluent and suburban parents often teach their children — careers available to graduates, jobs that fit their interests, and how to earn the degrees or certificates to succeed.

At each stage, businesses can choose how involved they want to be: At one end, companies can have tables at career fairs or let students shadow employees. At the high end businesses can offer paid internships or apprenticeships. The district hopes to eventually offer the positions to all 4,600 high school juniors and seniors each year.

PACE also prioritizes the health care, manufacturing and information technology.

Gordon has seen Cleveland’s workplace needs for years and has tried to show students what jobs are available to them, beyond the low-paying retail and fast food jobs many already have. 

The district has created specialty high schools, including one based at the county hospital and one focused on aviation and maritime careers, that do much of the work of PACE by immersing students in those fields while they also take college preparatory classes.

PACE will make those kinds of opportunities available to many more students, while also making sure that work experiences really help students. It expects students to do the real work of a job or be trained in it, as opposed to just watching or answering phones.

“We all hear about the internship where all you do is get coffee,” Battaglia said. “We want more quality internships.”

Paid internships are also an especially important piece of the puzzle. Gordon said many of his students already work long hours in fast food jobs because they need money immediately. 

“We do have kids and I’ve had this conversation directly: Mr Gordon, you want me to quit this job at McDonalds and Dave’s (supermarket) when I know we’re going to eat?” he said. “We have a lot of kids that are working in food- related industries because of food scarcity.”

How quickly the program provides opportunities remains to be seen. 

Some businesses are giving it a try. The Cleveland Clinic, the city’s largest private employer, has committed to offering paid student internships, having employees be mentors, and helping students with resumes and mock job interviews. 

And PNC Bank is adapting the that lets students apply to work and train in entry-level bank jobs. The students are guaranteed at least an interview, if not a job, after the program. 

Growing PACE will still depend on Cleveland businesses being successful with district students. Part of that will mean easing employer worries about bad behavior and tardiness from Cleveland students, the so-called soft skills that are often a barrier to employment.

“We have to change the perception of what a district graduate or student is,” school board chair Anne Bingham said. “I think at least in the downtown business community there’s a misunderstanding of what our students are, and what they bring to the table.”

‘“I think we’ll get there,” she added. “I think it’s going to be slow, but I think we’ll get there.”

Nearly half of Cleveland’s students, 47%, are on pace to be chronically absent so far this school year. Citing pandemic stress, not feeling supported and being scared of COVID among the reasons they’ve been skipping class, students have missed 10% or more of class in the first seven weeks of school.

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“We’re seeing larger numbers of that by kids who already had a larger COVID impact than a lot of their more wealthy peers,” said district CEO Eric Gordon. “Yeah, I’m concerned.”

It’s not quite as bad as during the 2020-21 pandemic year, when 54 percent of Cleveland kids were chronically absent — missing 18 days of school or more — even while classes were remote. 

But the chronic absenteeism rate this fall is more than double the district’s 22% three-year average.

Gordon, who has made reducing chronic absenteeism a major goal over the last several years, said students have much lower math and reading test scores if they miss even 10 days or more of school in a year and are 30% less likely to graduate. The absenteeism numbers this fall have him worried.

“The pattern is looking more like last year than it looked like pre-COVID,” he continued. “We’re seeing lots more students with off-track behavior.”

Cleveland’s release of  enrollment and absenteeism data for this school year is unusual compared to other school districts around the country, which have yet to make such data available. The 21-22 stats from the Ohio district, where classes started in mid-August, allows Cleveland officials to see trends sooner than other districts that wait until late August or after Labor Day.

As a result, states and districts around the country have been reporting details of absenteeism from last school year and its impact on students. 

A notable exception is California, where . having 17% of students chronically absent pre-COVID, 20% last school year and 33% this year.

Ohio reported in September that chronic absenteeism rose from 17% statewide in 2018-19 to 24% last school year. It was a problem that hit “economically disadvantaged” students across the state hard, rising from 26% statewide to 38%, but barely affected non-poor students. Their chronic absenteeism rate rose only from 8% to 11% last school year.

Shari Obrenski, president of the Cleveland Teachers Union, said teachers have noticed that students, after attending remote classes for almost all of last year, just aren’t back at school every day.

“Going back to school five days a week seems to be difficult for some of our students,” Obrenski said. “They were out for a period of time. It’s going to take a while to get a level of stamina where kids are used to being in school five days a week.”

Overall attendance continues to be down this fall from pre-pandemic levels — 84.5% so far this school year, compared to a three-year average of 93.1%. Last year, with classes mostly online, attendance was 81.3%.

Gordon recently asked his Student Advisory Committee – a group he created with representatives from every district high school – why students were skipping class. He polled about 160 students (one from each grade in the district’s 40 high schools) for answers.

Here’s what each said was the main reason for peers skipping school:

• 21% ‐ Pandemic Stress (mental and/or physical stress)
• 18% ‐ Not feeling supported as a student (challenges with mental health and/or  responsibilities) 
• 16% ‐ Scared of getting COVID
• 11% ‐ Unmotivated or feeling lazy

Gordon said he’ll use these results to find ways to draw kids to class. He just isn’t sure what those will be yet.

“The behavior’s different now,” he said. “So the strategies we used before aren’t necessarily going to work.”

The district and Cleveland Teachers Union have already tried traditional tactics such as  calling and emailing families of missing students to press them to return. Using a $150,000 grant from the American Federation of teachers, the union paid teachers to call families starting in July.

Obrenski said teachers reached parents of thousands of students who had skipped school last school year and drew many back, though how many is unclear.

After seeing enrollment drop about 1,500 students last year, the district has regained close to 300 this school year. That still leaves the district with about 35,600 students, more than 1,200 fewer than the 36,800 in 2019-20.

The bulk of the loss comes from preschool students, who have dropped from an enrollment of about 2,000 in 2019-20, pre-pandemic, to about 1,100 this year. Preschool is not legally required by the state, so parents don’t have to enroll their children.

“We’re still in the pandemic,” Obrenski said. “Families are still cautious about putting their children in in-person school situations.”

Katie Kelley, head of the PRE4CLE citywide preschool expansion effort, said preschools across Cleveland, both public and private, are still well below pre-COVID enrollments.

“Certainly the delta variant made a more complicated return to school, with many families reluctant to return their children to group settings,” she said.

Kindergarten, first grade and third grade are all down more than 200 students each. High school seniors fell by nearly 350 students.

But there is also nearly a 33% gain — almost 1,000 students — in ninth graders. District officials say part of that comes from opening two new high school buildings, one replacing the deteriorating John F. Kennedy High School built in 1965.

Obrenski also credits the 2020 launch of the Say Yes to Education college scholarship program in the city, which requires students to attend district high schools or partnering charter schools  all four years to qualify.

“If they’re not in a district high school, they’re not getting scholarship dollars,” she said.

How much of the 1,200-student drop is from students moving to parochial or charter schools is also still unclear. State data with those details is still unavailable. But Gordon said early data he’s seen suggest few have just dropped out of school altogether.