Following a contentious year of school closures and layoffs, a group of Cleveland parents and teachers is gathering signatures to put a measure on the November ballot that could end nearly 30 years of mayoral control over the city’s schools and restore an elected school board.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) is the only district in Ohio where the mayor appoints school board members, a change that came in the late 1990s on the heels of two decades of financial problems and litigation over school desegregation.
Since then, Cleveland’s mayor has picked the board’s nine members from a pool of candidates nominated by a committee that includes local elected officials, parents, representatives from the Cleveland Teachers Union and others. Cleveland voters overwhelming supported the the change in a 2002 referendum.
The current board and the district have acknowledged that the decisions to close 18 schools and lay off nearly 350 teachers and staff were painful but say they were necessary given steep enrollment declines and unsustainable finances.
CMSD Board Chair Sara Elaqad said the appointed structure shields board members from politics of the day, allowing them to focus on the long-term improvement of the district.
“We’re not here to serve the agenda of any one person or group but instead have the education of all our students to be our primary goal,” she wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland. “We take seriously our work in understanding our district data and our students’ needs—including through engaging our community—and in making decisions that deliver to our children a meaningful and equitable chance to succeed.”
In recent months, the board has faced widespread criticism from parents, students and teachers. Some of that protest was directed at the layoff and consolidation decisions but much of it centered on the perception that the board didn’t listen or include community members and educators on the ground.
Organizers of the petition effort say they’re directly motivated by what they see as the current board’s lack of responsiveness to community concerns.
“The people of Cleveland really do care about whether they can vote or not, that we care about democracy,” said Sarah Hodge. Hodge is a history teacher at the now-closed Collinwood High School and is spearheading the effort along with Polly Karr, a district parent and local blogger who gathers public records and writes about spending at CMSD.
“We care about oversight for our money. We care about parents and the community being involved in schools. We care about transportation for our kids and not having kids left by buses,” Hodge said. “And more so than anything, we care that the school board respects the public.”
The windy road to November’s ballot
When the state legislature changed the law in 1997 to bring Cleveland’s board under mayoral control, it created a legal process for changing the board’s organizational structure in the future.
The first step in the process — where the petitioners are currently — requires submitting enough signatures to the school board to put the issue on the ballot.
That means the group must gather just over 4,200 signatures of currently registered Cleveland voters, equal to 10% of the turnout in the last municipal election. In reality, the number needed is higher than that since signatures are often discarded for various reasons when county elections staff go through a process to verify them. For comparison, in recent years it required around 3,000 signatures to run for mayor in Cleveland, and candidates often try to gather twice that number.
Hodge said the group is trying to gather additional signatures, in part to send a message about how important this effort is.
What happens if enough signatures are verified?
The next step would be to submit the petitions to the school board, and if enough valid signatures exist, the school board has 30 days to do two things:
- Pass a resolution that requires a ballot measure about the board’s structure to be included on the ballot at the next “regular” municipal election, in this case Nov. 3.
- Convene a commission that must draft at least two different options for the governance structure of the board that will be put to a vote. Those options could range from returning to a fully elected board to keeping an appointed board or a mix of the two.
Ohio law requires that three of the members of the commission that would draft the language be chosen by the current school board president. The other members are chosen by local officials of the cities and towns served by the school district.
CMSD’s boundaries cover parts of five other municipalities – Bratenahl, Brook Park, Linndale, Newburgh Heights and Garfield Heights. The mayors of these cities would each pick a commission member, so would the sinking fund trustees of each city. The sinking fund is the bond retirement fund of a municipality which is typically responsible for a city or town’s debt.
How long could the effort take?
The petitioners are hoping to submit their signatures to the school board by Sept. 1, Hodge told Signal Cleveland.
It appears that would put them on track for the issue to be on Cleveland voters’ November ballot, according to the parts of the Ohio Revised Code that describe the process for changing a district’s board structure.
But there is some uncertainty about this. The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections told Signal Cleveland that this kind of effort is unprecedented and it’s unclear whether it falls under the Aug. 5 deadline set by the state for municipal ballot issues or the Sept. 4 deadline for city charter amendments.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Mike West, a spokesperson for the elections board, told Signal Cleveland. He did make clear that the board of elections will likely be involved at the end of the process after the petitions have been submitted to the school board.
