Cleveland Collinwood, Jane Addams and MLK high schools to be closed as ...

Cleveland Collinwood, Jane Addams and MLK high schools to be closed as will 4 other Black east side sc Written by Kathy Saturday, 02 November 2019 02:26

Pictured are Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson (wearing beard) and Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon and . Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@,

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Cleveland Collinwood, Jane Addams and MLK high schools to be closed as will 4 other Black east side sc Written by Kathy Saturday, 02 November 2019 02:26 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.

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Cleveland Collinwood, Jane Addams and MLK high schools to be closed as will 4 other Black east side sc Written by Kathy Saturday, 02 November 2019 02:26

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."

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Cleveland Collinwood, Jane Addams and MLK high schools to be closed as will 4 other Black east side sc Written by Kathy Saturday, 02 November 2019 02:26 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,

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Cleveland Collinwood, Jane Addams and MLK high schools to be closed as will 4 other Black east side sc Written by Kathy Saturday, 02 November 2019 02:26 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.

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