Overages and Cover-ages

On Friday morning I did my usual volunteer stint opening car doors and greeting students at school drop off. Then I headed home. I had a list of chores to complete and a surprisingly less busy day in which to do them. I volunteer in school drop off every morning as my tiny contribution to saving my school building money for the twenty minutes of not having to pay someone to cover this duty. There are lots of little things that go on in the school day that cost money and volunteers can help offset a few of those things. I’ll do anything my principal asks, except indoor recess. I did it for awhile a few year ago and it’s just too depressing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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