Pictured are Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson (wearing beard) and Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com,
By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief
CLEVELAND, Ohio-The slated closings of historic public schools in Cleveland, Oh, a largely Black major American city, are causing an uproar, Collinwood, Jane Addams and Martin Luther King Jr high schools and some four k-8 schools, namely Case, Iowa Maple, Michael R. White and Willow, the schools recommended by Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon for closing, all of them located on the city's largely Black east side.
Cleveland voters approved a $200 million bond issue for school construction in 2014.
Gordon says the school district will close some schools, merge others, and also rebuild build new one's such as a new John F. Kennedy High School on the city's east side.
More than 11 schools will be impacted by the closing and merging of schools districtwide.
Gordon's proposal also calls for Lincoln West High School on the city's west side to be rebuilt like John Marshall, also a west side school.
The school closings, said Gordon, are set to impact some 5,000 students.
District parents have sounded off against the school closings at school board meetings and during recent community meetings at Collinwood and Glenville.
Councilmen Mike Polensek, Kevin Conwell and Anthony Hairston, whose wards are affected by the Collinwood closing and some of the other schools, attended a public meeting on Monday at Glenville High School on East 113th Street.
Some 600 Collinwood students and 300 MLK students, MLK located in the ward of Councilman Basheer Jones, or Ward 7, will be sent to Glenville in the historic Glenville neighborhood, also a Black east side school like Collinwood and MLK.
How far the trio of councilmen will go in speaking out remains to be seen, though the outspoken Polensek, a councilman since 1978 whose largely Black ward 8 includes Collinwood, is likely to raise Cain.
Jane Addams Business Careers Center students will be sent to East Technical High School on the city's east side as well as students from Washington Park Studies school, also an east side high school.
Community activists are also upset.
"It is always the east side that takes a hit and they make up excuses for the white schools to stay open on the west side," said educational activist Donna Walker -Brown, who leads the Urban Educational Justice League. "Mayoral control has ruined the school system and it has been ruined since they got rid of the elected school board."
State School Board Member Meryl Johnson, a former Cleveland schools teacher and union representative, publicly told Gordon at a school board meeting that his proposal is racist, and targets east side schools with Black students
The slated school closings are part of a comprehensive reduction and reorganization plan.
Gordon did not say, with any specifics, what would happen to the school level administrators affected by the reorganization plan and school closings, in particular principals and assistant principals, or whether Black administrators will disproportionately lose their administrative positions, those who are laid-off as administrators and tenured of whom can, by state law, revert back to the classroom.
School district officials say more than 7,000 unused classroom seats on the city's east side and 700 on the west side are costly and the monies can be put to better use such as for school renovations and repairs, and for operating costs.
The district currently has some 68 kindergarten- eighth grade schools and 38 high schools, Gordon disputing that number and saying there are some 170 schools.
Since 1998 the Cleveland schools, which then had a population of some 77,000 students, have been under mayoral control per state law, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson of whom, by law, appoints the school board that will act on Gordon's school closings recommendations, Gordon a White man who leads a largely Black school district, and who has managed to escape controversy since he was appointed CEO in 2011.
The school board has nine members, four of them Black, and is led by board chairwoman Anne E. Bingham, a corporate banker who is White and resides on the city's largely White west side where the school closings are not impacted.
Board members usually do as they believe the mayor would want them to do, sources said, partly because the city's third Black mayor chooses the board members.
But they have some autonomy, given the mayor's laid-back leadership style.
And the mayor, who was out front campaigning for the schools construction tax levy that passed in 2014, has done a good job, his supporters say, Cleveland schools faced with the trappings of other major urban school districts, including heightened poverty, single parent homes, parental apathy, an unconstitutional state school funding formula that favors White children and the elite, and a lack of sufficient resources from federal and state educational authorities.
Proponents of mayoral control argue it cuts down on the riff-raff and political infighting that plagued school board meetings under an elected school board.
Cleveland voters, in 2002, and with the support of Black leaders, approved a referendum to keep mayoral control in place.
Whites primarily now run Cleveland's public schools, a departure from a majority Black elected school board and once a majority Black group of top level central office administrators, all of that now history.
But district teachers, some 25 percent of them Black, say that at the end of the day Jackson, as mayor, runs the school district.
"The mayor is over the school board and runs the district,'' said Cleveland Teachers Union Second Vice President Kurt Richards during a phone interview, Richards an elementary school teacher.
Richards said the teacher's union, led by longtime union president David Quolke, who is retiring at the end of the school year, has not be notified that teachers will lose jobs under Gordon's schools reduction proposal, and he expects that in the least they will likely follow their students relative to the merging and closing of district schools.
The mayor, currently serving a historic fourth term, has managed not to fallout with the district teachers as he has with the safety forces, the firefighters union at all out war with Jackson and his fire chief, and the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association hardly has a lukewarm relationship with the Black mayor.
Jackson said nothing about the controversial closings of some of the city's legendary public schools during his state of the city address last month, though he said graduation and retention rates have increased, and that there is still an achievement gap between Black and White Cleveland schools students.
Closing schools is a necessity as the student population in the majority Black school district once under a court monitored desegregation order for discriminating against Black children and their families has dropped from to 115,000 during the start of desegregation, to 77,000 by the time desegregation ended in 1998, and now down to roughly 38,000 students.
But targeting the Black community for school closings, whether purposely or inadvertently, is another matter.
Critics like activist Walker- Brown say that school officials have managed to discriminate against Blacks in closing schools even when so few Whites attend Cleveland schools, which is institutional racism at work, she says.
In spite of the student population decline, few schools have been closed, partly, say sources, because of community and political pressure to keep them open even with just a few students in them.
School officials, in June of 2010, closed East High School and South High School, both east side schools, and 15 k-8 schools largely on the city's east side, those closings part of a districtwide transformation plan.
Whites in particular have fled the school system, and for various reasons, including urban blight, school choice opportunities, changing demographics, gang violence, inferior state education department rankings, and a decline in the population in Cleveland itself, the city once with a population of as high as 917,000 in the 1950s now below a half a million people.
The school district is now less than 15 percent White, and over 65 percent Black, if not 77 percent Black.
School busing plans have come and gone, and some say busing drove out families from communities.
But Blacks in general, mainly educated types and Civil Rights advocates, say busing was a necessity, led by NAACP leaders who brought lawsuits across the country on behalf of Black children subject to race discrimination in major urban school districts like Cleveland.
Some school busing plans were regional rather than local, like in Louisville, Ky. where the city schools merged with the suburban schools, all of them now one school district dubbed Jefferson County Public Schools.
Filed in 1973, Reed v. Rhodes is a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by the NAACP on behalf of Black Cleveland schools children and their families, and against the state of Ohio and the school district where Federal District Court Judge Frank J. Battisti, in 1976, found that the state and school district were running a dual school system to the detriment off Black children and their families, and in blatant violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
In turn, he ordered the desegregation of Cleveland schools in 1979, and remedial orders, 12 of them in fact.
Those remedial orders included increased parental involvement, desegregation of school level teachers and administrative staff such as principals and assistant principals, and crosstown busing in a city were Blacks and Whites are traditionally separated by race via the Cuyahoga River, Blacks traditionally residing on the city's east side, and Whites on the west side.
Cleveland is the second most segregated city in the nation behind Boston.
The deseg-case was dissolved in 1998, the federal judge on the case at the time, Judge George White, granting release of the state and the school district from the long standing deseg-court order, White saying any disparities between Black and White students were due to socioeconomic factors and not the failure to remedy the past vestiges of racial discrimination to the extent practicable, which was the standard for determining release from the longstanding court order.
Lawyers for the NAACP, led by Cleveland attorney James Hardiman, argued otherwise, Judge White, who replaced the late Battisti on the deseg-case, siding against them and thereafter handing the school district to the city mayor at the time, Michael R. White, the city's second Black mayor behind Carl B. Stokes, the city's first Black mayor and the first Black mayor of a major American city.
Michael White, who is of no relation to the late judge George White, had lobbied Republican state legislators for the state law that propelled the mayoral takeover of Cleveland schools, community activists and several school district parents opposing the measure of appointing board members as taking away the authority of Cleveland residents to choose the school district's policy makers.
Jane Campbell followed Michael White into office in 2002, and in 2005, Jackson, then a council president, ousted Campbell, a one term mayor, all three of the mayors with the power and authority to control a city, and a school system.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog with some 5 million views on Google Plus alone.Tel: (216) 659-0473 and Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com.
