The Illusion of Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. I asked.

Here are the records I received

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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