A wave of new charter schools is coming to Cleveland, even as the public school district is downsizing.
This school year, an all-girls leadership school and an all-boys primary school will open their doors for the first time. And a career-training school is already recruiting students for next year.
Several of the schools were recruited to Cleveland by Future Ready Cleveland, a nonprofit headed by Mayor Justin Bibb’s former education chief, Holly Trifiro. Some have received start-up dollars from the nonprofit, which wants to make sure every Cleveland kid has access to a high-quality school option.
Here’s a look at the schools that are slated to open, including details about their academics, any specialized programming they offer, which grades they serve and how they are being funded.
Opening Fall 2026
FORWARD Girls Leadership Academy: A focus on leadership for Black girls
Luciana Gilmore has always thought Cleveland needed a school option focused on the leadership development of Cleveland’s Black girls.
Over the last few years, the former John Adams principal has been building FORWARD Girls Leadership Academy to be that school. Next week, it’ll open its doors to its first crop of around 50 9th graders.
The school is modeled after a number of all-girls private schools, including the local Laurel and Hathaway Brown schools and St. Mary’s, an all-girls Black Catholic school in New Orleans, which Gilmore visited during a fellowship.
“What I found to be very much the same in each of the schools that I have visited is the instruction is no different than what you would see in a traditional school,” she said. “It is the culture that they are creating for the children that they are serving that is different…they are teaching children to be leaders.”
Her goal is that FORWARD will have a similar culture — one that sets high expectations for its students and pushes them to advocate for themselves in order to excel.
On the academics front, the school will use project-based learning and offer two concentrations for students to pick from: STEM and innovation and global humanities. Gilmore’s goal is that the hands-on teaching approach will allow students to “connect what they’re learning in the classroom to what’s relevant in their world.”
Eventually, Gilmore hopes to expand FORWARD to serve grades K-12. She chose to start with high school because while Cleveland’s public district has some K-8 all-girls schools, it has no all-girls high schools.
“When you keep girls from the start to the finish, the trajectory is just so much better,” she said.
The school, located at 9250 Miles Park Ave., is within walking distance of Warner Girls Leadership Academy and Miles Park Elementary. Parents and guardians who are interested can still enroll their daughters by going to the website. The first day of school is August 24, 2026.
Its sponsor—the state-approved organization that enters into a contract with a charter school to monitor its operations, academics and finances—is the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation.
Funding from local nonprofits and the WBNA
Future Ready gave FORWARD a grant to help get off the ground, and Gilmore told Signal Cleveland that Trifiro has been supportive of the school since Gilmore presented the idea to her when she worked at the mayor’s office.
FORWARD also received money from the Howley Foundation, a Cleveland-based foundation that heavily funds charter and Catholic schools, and is pursuing a grant from the state of Ohio and from the Charter School Growth Fund, a national nonprofit.
The school will have a partnership with Ursuline College, allowing students with high grade point averages to attend and earn college credits for free. It also will work with the Girl Scouts of America to provide STEM and after-school programming.
Fittingly for a school aimed at empowering girls, Cleveland’s new WNBA team, the Sirens, has adopted FORWARD and announced a $28,000 grant. But Gilmore said they’re still working out the details of what an ongoing partnership will look like.
“They are looking to partner in ways that extend outside of athletics, and really kind of making sure that they wrap their arms around the whole girl,” she added.
Cleveland Primary Sports Academy: A feeder for a nearby school
The new all-boys K-5, which will use athletics to contribute to the social and emotional development of students, is opening this fall.
Initially named Campy Russell Primary Academy, the school is changing its name to Cleveland Primary Sports Academy to make clear it is a feeder school for Cleveland Sports Academy, a 6-12 boys charter school in the same building in the Midtown area, according to Courtney Harritt, a spokesperson for the school.
The goal is for the primary academy to be part of a “larger intentionally connected educational pathway” that includes the upper boys school and the Ginn Thompson School for Girls in the same building.
The Cleveland Sports Academy, like the primary academy, is relatively new and does not yet have a report card rating for the state. Its model focuses on using sports for character development. Currently, students at the academy have dedicated time for sports in the afternoon; they can also participate in its competitive track and basketball teams, according to its website.
The school is located at 3121 Euclid Ave. and the first day of school is Aug. 31, and families can still enroll by going to the website. If they do, parents can sign their kids up for a free summer camp that starts Aug. 17.
Its sponsor—the state-approved organization that enters into a contract with a charter school to monitor its operations, academics and finances—is St. Aloysius Orphanage.
The school belongs to a larger for-profit charter network
Cleveland Primary Sports Academy belongs to a larger network of charter schools in Cleveland. It is managed by ACCEL, a charter management company that helps operate the schools under its umbrella by providing things like curriculum and teacher training.
ACCEL operates over 20 charter schools in Cleveland, including the Constellation Schools on the city’s West Side.
The goal isn’t to create identical schools everywhere, said Harritt, an ACCEL spokesperson, noting that schools in their network vary a lot depending on the needs of families in a particular community.
“The way that I would describe it is a bespoke relationship between family and school that is very customer-service-oriented to that family and to that child and personalized,” Harritt said.
There are some commonalities across ACCEL schools, however, including an emphasis on “short-cycle assessments.” That’s a kind of testing strategy where students take tests as often as every two weeks to check their understanding and give teachers a sense of how they are doing.
ACCEL schools, like most charter schools, get the bulk of their funding from the public dollars that follow students to charter schools. But the company sometimes provides money to help a new school start up. Those funds “are expected to be repaid by the school,” Harritt wrote to Signal Cleveland in an email.
Opening Fall 2027
GEO Academies: A college immersion model
Greater Education Opportunities (GEO) Academies will open their next school in Cleveland starting in fall of 2027. It will be the network’s first school in Ohio.
The goal is to start with a single K-5 school but eventually expand to three K-8 schools and a high school, Kevin Teasley, the CEO of GEO Academies, told Signal Cleveland.
The school received a $9.6 million charter school expansion grant from the federal government in 2024 and part of that grant will help fund its Cleveland expansion.
GEO uses a “college immersion model” where students can take as many college courses as they want while still in high school. A number of kids have graduated from GEO high schools with associate degrees, and, in some rare cases, full bachelor’s degrees.
Staci Starr, who spent three years as principal of John Hay Early College High School, one of the highest performing CMSD schools, will serve as founding principal of the K-5 school.
The network was founded in Indiana and recruited to Cleveland
The first school run by GEO Academies was founded in 2002 by Teasley in Indianapolis, as a publicly funded charter school. Teasley entered the education field through the school choice movement — he helped lead the 1992 campaign for vouchers in California.
In 2005, Teasley and his wife, Dana, opened a school in Gary, Indiana. It was built on land donated by the city. Nine years later, the Louisiana Department of Education invited GEO to start a school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Today, GEO operates charter schools in Gary, Baton Rouge and Indianapolis, as well as an online private school for Indiana students.
The decision to come to Cleveland wasn’t one Teasley made on a whim. He told Signal Cleveland he was invited to Cleveland by Trifiro, who alongside visited GEO’s schools a few years ago. He also did his own homework by visiting Cleveland and meeting with local elected officials and higher education institutions. GEO also received a grant from City Fund, the national organization funding Future Ready.
Trifiro told Signal Cleveland, in an interview, that while she visited GEO as part of some early work to examine high quality schools, the school is not part of Future Ready’s current portfolio of schools.
The goal is ‘something different’ than what Cleveland already has
Although Cleveland already has a number of college prep schools, Starr believes that GEO will offer families “something different than what they’ve seen previously.”
Unlike John Hay or Bard Early College, the school won’t have any admissions criteria for students, she noted, and its emphasis on the quality of instruction will ensure strong academics.
Starr believes the model used by the K-5 school developed by the National Institute of Excellence for Teachers is solid and evidence-based. She’s also excited that the school will have a dedicated instructional coach for teachers, allowing them to really focus on quality teaching strategies.
“When you have teachers and so much stuff is on them that they can’t focus on academics, that’s the last thing that they are to think about,” she said. “This is where everything goes wrong.”
Starr, who’s also previously worked as a school improvement coach for ACCEL charter schools, said GEO plans to offer salaries that are comparable to Cleveland’s public districts—something that isn’t the case at every charter school and will help attract veteran teachers she said.
The school hasn’t found a location, but families that are interested can fill out their contact information for updates on its Cleveland website.
Rooted School: A college acceptance in one hand, job offer in the other
Rooted is planning to open its Cleveland school in fall 2027. It will serve grades 6-12 and has an intense emphasis on career readiness.
“Rooted started out with a north star that students would graduate with a college acceptance in one hand and a job offer in the other,” Jonathan Johnson, the school’s founder, told Signal Cleveland.
In Cleveland, that means offering career pathways geared toward preparing students to enter two of the city’s biggest industries: healthcare and manufacturing.
Tim Jones, the founding principal of Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School, a CMSD high school that has a similar career training model to Rooted, will serve as the school’s leader. Davis, like Rooted, partnered with local nonprofits and companies to graduate students directly into the maritime and aerospace fields.
Jones told Signal Cleveland that joining Rooted “felt like an obvious match.” He made the decision at a time when CMSD is consolidating specialty high schools like Davis into larger, more comprehensive campuses.
Jones, however, still believes that families across Cleveland value smaller, specialized school models.
“The strategy is if you build the strongest school, people will go,” Jones said. “Parents will travel and kids will travel, and they will find the school that’s the best that speaks to them.”
The school has already signed a “letter of intent” with the Cleveland Clinic and with MAGNET, an organization that provides manufacturing training. Those letters aren’t final agreements but the goal is that Rooted will work directly with those employers to develop curriculum and let students gain work experience so they’re ready for an entry-level job upon graduation.
Jones is also excited that the school will have an “advisory” program where each student is assigned an advisor. That means they’ll have an adult who is keeping an eye on their academic performance, and, more importantly, helping them think about their future careers.
The school doesn’t yet have a location but is looking at areas accessible to both the Clinic and MAGNET. If families are interested in enrolling their 6th or 9th grader starting next year, they can fill out an interest form on its Cleveland website.
The school’s origins are in New Orleans
Johnson initially developed the idea for the school while he was teaching at a New Orleans charter school after college and participating in Teach for America.
There he kept noticing a pattern: kids would do well in school and on standardized tests, go to college, but 10 years down the line they were in no better financial position than they’d been as teenagers.
That sparked the idea for Rooted. In 2014, Johnson got the chance to pilot his concept and three years later he got the chance to open the school’s first campus. It slowly gained acclaim for its use of project-based learning and its success connecting students to local employers.
Fast forward over a decade, and the school has planted local affiliates in Indianapolis and Vancouver. This month it will open a school in Columbia, South Carolina.
Its Cleveland expansion, like GEO Academies, was facilitated by FutureReady Cleveland, Johnson said.
The nonprofit gave Rooted a $109,500 grant, and Trifiro wrote a letter of support for a federal charter school expansion grant helping to fund its Cleveland school. Johnson, in turn, said the school did extensive research on the city’s education needs and met with local leaders, including the mayor, before making its decision.
“We’re not trying to be a better version of a school that already exists,” he said.
