When Lora Stewart was called into a meeting with the principal of Hannah Gibbons Elementary School on Friday, she thought she was going to support one of her colleagues.
Stewart is a fourth and fifth grade teacher at the school. She’s also the teachers union chair in her building and she knew that layoff notices were probably coming. Her school is set to merge with another elementary school, Memorial, next year, as part of the district’s sweeping school merger and closure plan.
But Stewart didn’t think she – along with half the 16 teachers at Hannah Gibbons – would receive lay off notices. Especially because with a big change ahead for her students, she hoped the district would preserve some stability by letting teachers follow their students.
“But now they might not see their trusted adults,” she said. “They might not see who they thought they were going to see, which might have led to them making the school choice to agree to go to Memorial.”
On Monday, the full scale of the layoffs became clear when Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) CEO Warren Morgan announced the district plans to layoff 410 employees, among them 146 teachers, like Stewart.
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In addition to teachers, around 120 other staff, including classroom aides, school counselors and licensed practical nurses, also lost their jobs. Morgan noted that 86 administrators, around 50 working in school buildings as principals, assistant principals and deans, were also laid off. The remaining 60 positions the district is cutting include custodians and school lunch aides.
District officials have said that the decisions — while painful — are needed now to ward off a multimillion dollar budget gap that would materialize sooner than 2029 due to steep enrollment declines, state funding shifts and higher costs.
“Definitely a grim moment right now, because when we’re talking about people, and when we’re talking about the impacts on people, that’s not a bright conversation,” Morgan said at the briefing. But he also emphasized the increased opportunities for students promised by the merger plan.
Some educators and union members say the reasons and numbers behind the layoffs don’t make sense — and that the district should have cut more administrators and fewer staff who work directly with children.
‘It is going to trickle down to the kids’
Yolonda Wilson has 29 total years of experience teaching math in the district. She was laid off last week from John Hay School of Science and Medicine.
Wilson said it is disheartening to see the district cutting teachers and staff who work directly with students, while giving big raises to “bigwigs” and administrators, and hiring consultants with contracts that are more than a quarter of a million dollars.
“I just feel like they make poor decisions financially, and it is going to trickle down to the kids,” she said. “If you are making almost $300,000, would it hurt you to take a 10% percent cut? That would have saved a paraprofessional’s job.”
Instead, she said class sizes are going to increase and the quality of instruction and support for students will not. “What are we really doing to improve the lives of the students?”
A few years back, Wilson, who previously taught at the detention center, said she quit frustrated with an ever-increasing focus on testing and changes the district was making that she felt were not benefitting children. She returned to wrap up her career at her own alma mater because she wants students to see graduates like her, with degrees, go back to the classroom.
“It’s more than just a job for me,” she said. “It was a mission to show students you have to have representation that looks like you.”
A number of other teachers who spoke with Signal Cleveland had similar concerns about class sizes and the ability to give kids one-on-one attention next year. They pointed out that the district already has long-term substitutes filling positions at schools and pays thousands of dollars in overages a year. An overage is when CMSD pays a teacher extra for taking more students than is outlined in their contract.
“We’re going to start the school year off with a lot of kids in the classroom, I think 40 and up,” said Natasha Czuba, a teacher and the union chair at Almira Elementary who spent her Friday supporting staff members who got lay off notices. “That’s not a brighter future for the kids if they’re packed in the classroom, and they can’t get individualized attention, and they don’t have the support that they need.”
For this reason, a number of teachers who got notices, like Wilson, think there will likely be callbacks. “I’m not as devastated as some other folks. I have a feeling I may get called back,” she said.
But Czuba, who has participated in the biannual staffing process every year as a union chair, said she thinks that will only happen if the teachers — and the public — advocate for it. “I do believe that we’re going to get some teachers recalled,” she said. “I think the union is going to have to fight for it, though.”
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‘We are part of that’: Deep cuts to non-teaching school support staff prompt worry
The district isn’t only cutting classroom teachers but also eliminating the jobs of over 120 school support staff, including school counselors and paraprofessionals or aides. In one case, CMSD is eliminating an entire job classification, the Community, College & Career Center Coordinators, also known as “5Cs.”
Educators who work in these roles told Signal Cleveland that by cutting their jobs CMSD is placing a greater burden on remaining school staff whether that’s classroom teachers, school administrators, school librarians or remaining school counselors. They also pointed out that many of them play vital roles in their school beyond their formal job descriptions.
Miguel Nieves works as a career and college coordinator at Davis Aerospace & Maritime High School. Though it’s not something he’s expected to do, Nieves, who is bilingual, often interprets for some students and helps families sign up for public benefits like SNAP and rental assistance if they need it.
He’s worked at CMSD for 14 years and sees his work as integral to ensuring that students have access to career exploration opportunities as well as the library and media center.
In a way, the career and college coordinators role was designed to fill in an existing gap: the lack of librarians at every school and guidance counselors at elementary schools. Without Nieves, students at Davis would likely only have access to their school’s library once or twice a week when the school librarian was on campus.
“We have students that come to the library to do assignments, to do homework, to, you know, get help. And by having the library only once a week, it’s a big impact for them,” he said.
Cassandra Brown Collier, like Nieves, often fills in as an interpreter at Natividad Pagan International Newcomers Academy. She’s also a college and career coordinator and worries about whether kids will be able to access the school’s well-stocked library next year without a staff member, like her, to watch and guide them.
In her view, cutting the roles like hers district-wide is puzzling given the district’s emphasis in the merger plan on increasing college and career readiness.
“This is the direction we thought the district was going,” she told Signal Cleveland. “They’re talking about college and career. Every school is going to have that emphasis. This is part of that. We are a part of that. We were, and we are, doing it with the field trips and the speakers.”
The elimination of her job will likely put more pressure on guidance counselors who also saw cuts on Friday. That’s worrying to Lisa Ellis, a school counselor at John Marshall High School.
She’s been a counselor at CMSD since 2011 and loves her work, in part, because right now she works with freshmen. That allows her to do more comprehensive counseling beyond just helping kids with college applications, credit recovery and other academics. That means working on things like coping skills for mental health issues.
But her work is also difficult. Many of the students she sees have experienced complex trauma by the time they get to high school and CMSD elementary schools don’t have counselors at all. Some CMSD schools partner with outside organizations that provide mental health counseling, but they can only work with students who have Medicaid plans, according to Ellis.
Next year, CMSD is likely to only have 30 counselors district-wide. The district laid off six counselors Friday in addition to paraprofessionals like Nieves and Collier.
Currently, Ellis has around 230 students on her caseload, which is in line with best practices. Next year, with the cuts, she could have over 400 students. With cuts to college and career coordinators and other classroom aides, it’s possible counselors will have to pick up extra work on top of an already-overwhelming caseload.
“It’s really just kind of incredible that they want to push all of these initiatives and increase our college and career readiness and graduation rates,” she told Signal Cleveland. “When the very people who support all of these functions, primarily outside of the classroom, are the 5Cs and the school counselors.”
With an increased caseload and likely greater responsibilities next year, Ellis expects she will have even less room for the non-academic focus of her job like supporting kids through trauma.
“We are really spending a lot of time trying to get these kids to graduate with their teachers, you know, working on recovery, making sure they have everything they need,” Ellis said. “The things that we are here to do, the comprehensive work that we’re here to do, we are unable to do.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that CMSD, according to a district spokesperson, anticipates a multimillion dollar budget gap would materialize sooner than 2029 without the current layoffs.
