As the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) has made drastic cuts over the past year, consolidating dozens of schools and laying off hundreds of employees, it has increasingly come under fire.
District officials say the painful cuts have been looming for years. Parents and teachers have blamed the current leadership and questioned the wisdom of laying off 300 educators ahead of a year of upheaval and transition.
The district’s financial problems, and the broken system Ohio uses to pay for public education, can both be traced back decades. In 1997, the state supreme court declared the funding formula unconstitutional because it hurt districts in poorer areas.
Since then, lawmakers have made numerous attempts to tinker with the public school funding formula while also opening up more avenues to pay for private and charter school education with tax dollars. Overall, the amount the state kicks in for K-12 public education has dipped, squeezing districts across the state, at the same time many of those districts, including CMSD, have experienced dramatic enrollment declines.
In 2018, these pressures began to catch up with CMSD, especially as the district continued to operate a large collection of specialty schools with nearly 50% fewer students than it had in 2000. That year, it became clear that CMSD was spending millions more than it was bringing in each year through state and federal funding and local property tax dollars.
By late 2020 the district predicted it would be forced to close schools and slash its workforce within a few years. Those difficult decisions were delayed by a levy and by the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in the infusion of half a billion dollars to Cleveland schools.
That federal money, which was supposed to help kids return to school safely and catch up on academics, also helped to keep the district afloat and allowed it to kick the can down the road on the painful decisions it’s facing now: school closures and job cuts.
2019: COVID cash delays hard choices
The current budget problem dates back to before the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have said that it was hidden. But it was front and center in school board meetings at the time. The budgets and forecasts showed that the district faced difficult choices as enrollment and state funding continued to drop but staffing stayed the same.
In 2018, the district began to dip into its savings to pay its bills, placing it in fiscal precaution — a step on the way to state takeover. The following year, the school board and then-CEO Eric Gordon took small steps to reign in spending and address falling enrollment with a modest number of school closures and consolidations.
Community pushback delayed some of the closures, like that of Collinwood High School, for the same reason Cleveland has seen protests and petitions this year: Schools mean a lot to people.
By the fall of 2020, the district was deeper in financial trouble. It predicted that, without a levy, it would have a negative bank account balance close to $90 million by the very next year, meaning it might not be able to do the basics, like make payroll.
At that time, CMSD was required to submit a recovery plan to the state. In the plan it submitted, the district predicted “closing 25 schools, reducing $16 million in programming, and reducing [about]15% of our workforce.” That plan, however, contained more administrative layoffs than the district has made recently.
The cuts were paused after two things happened: Clevelanders passed the 2020 levy and pandemic relief money kicked in, giving the district an infusion of nearly $465 million in cash.
The federal government, however, required that COVID-19 money for education had to be used by 2025. CMSD used some of the money to adjust to virtual learning by buying things like computers and hot spots for students, but it also used the money to pay for basic functions that used to be covered by the general fund, like school building maintenance and cleaning.
2023: New leadership and spending controls
In 2023, new CMSD CEO Warren Morgan replaced Gordon. With Morgan came new district leadership and many new school board members. At the same time, the pandemic relief money that had been plugging the district’s budget hole began to dry up, shifting millions in expenses back onto the general fund.
This was the second time in less than three years the district came under fiscal precaution, meaning it had to show the state it was taking steps to slash spending or risk coming under oversight.
New district leadership said it felt it had to aggressively tackle the district’s habit of spending more money than it was taking in, which put it at risk for having a negative bank account balance once its reserves were depleted just a year or two down the road.
The first set of cuts, in the 2024-25 school year, included:
- Cutting spending on items such as travel and food along with 25 layoffs and buyouts of central office administrators.
- Curtailing the district’s summer learning program, which had been funded by COVID dollars.
- Consolidation of school calendars, which was controversial, and cutting instructional time at extended and year-around schools like Campus International and Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School.
- Tweaking programs that provided computers and at-home internet to students
- Moving a $20 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to the district’s general fund, instead of a separate fund that gave grants based on proposals from students and teachers.
In 2024, CMSD also decided to ask voters for money for the annual budget and to spend on improving school buildings. The November levy passed by 67%, bringing in $49 million annually.
All of that was a start, but it wasn’t enough. The financial forecast in the spring of 2025 still showed CMSD fully running out of money by 2028.
2025: A ‘double hit’ from the state
Decisions made by state lawmakers in the most recent budget have hit public school districts across the state hard this year.
Cleveland isn’t the only district that’s had to make cuts recently. Lorain school board members voted recently to lay off over 100 teachers. Columbus and Akron schools are also looking to reduce their spending by millions to avert dipping into the negative and coming under state watch.
Since the Ohio Supreme Court declared an over-reliance on property taxes unconstitutional because it disadvantaged poorer districts 30 years ago, the share of the money Ohio provides to fund K-12 public education has fallen from 42% to 37%.
Things were looking up for a while in 2021, when a bipartisan group of state lawmakers passed what they called the Fair School Funding Plan. That plan — which calculated what districts should get based on a number of factors, including the actual cost of teaching — meant Cleveland got more money from the state between 2022 and 2024 than it had in past years.
Then in 2025, CMSD got $16 million less from the state than the year before due to adjustments based on Cleveland’s increased property values and a change to state aid for disadvantaged students. The same year, state lawmakers decided to freeze the costs used in the Fair School Funding formula at 2021 levels. That means, in the most recent budget that passed for 2026 and 2027, CMSD will get around $157 million less than expected.
It was a “double hit” to CMSD’s budget, CFO Kevin Stockdale said, as state funding decreased and there were no more COVID-19 relief funds. That made it difficult to plan long term, he said.
2026: This round of cuts likely isn’t the end
In December, the CMSD school board approved a plan that, in addition to merging 39 schools and shuttering 18 buildings entirely, aimed to slash $30 million from the district’s budget. The overarching message to the public was that “every dollar that we spend to heat, clean and maintain some of these buildings is a dollar we’re not using to educate our kids.”
But, in board meetings, officials were clear that only a small sliver of the promised savings would come from utilities and maintenance costs. The rest would come from people. At the time, it wasn’t clear how many jobs would be cut from the 4,300 teachers and staff covered by union contracts and how many would come from the administration, which a state audit found was top-heavy compared to sister districts.
Here’s how the $30 million in annual savings breaks down:
- Around $2 million saved comes from the physical cost of the buildings – things like no longer paying heat, power or maintenance costs.
- The remaining $28 million comes from laying people off in an attempt to bring the district’s staff in line with it’s enrollment. Those layoffs include 146 teachers, 132 paraprofessionals, around 35 principals, assistant principals, deans and other building-level administrators, and around 45 or so other positions like lunch aides, custodians and school secretaries.
The district also announced that, through its spring budgeting process, it was looking to cut another $15 million from the central office, which would include around 50 job cuts and other trims like contracts. Exactly how the $15 million breaks down is still unclear.
Even with educator layoffs and $15 million in central office cuts, the district will still have a negative bank balance by 2029. Morgan has said that means there are likely more challenging decisions and a need for advocacy not far down the road. It also could mean yet another levy ask, which the district noted as a possibility in a summer 2025 report to the state.
“I look forward to continuing to work with the state and with our federal partners and with our districts across the state to figure out what is a much more sustainable path,” Morgan said at an April 13 press conference about the layoffs. “Because the path we’re on now, this isn’t, it’s not sustainable.”
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