Principal Aderica Grier stood up, clutched a microphone and tried to say a few words.
The school’s cozy cafeteria, which doubles as the gym and auditorium, with a raised wooden stage on one side and basketball hoops lining the other wall, was packed — parents, grandparents, teachers and students filled the seats.
It was May 15. Just a few days of school remained. The final talent show was over. The last cartwheel spun, the last song sung. The dancers had all taken their bows.
Grier thanked everyone for being there. She recognized the school’s former principals for coming to lead the Louisa May Alcott Elementary School song and chant one last time.
Then she looked out at the crowd and began to tell them that her goal, every day, is to make their kids feel loved.
It was at that point that her voice began to crack. And, as it did, dozens of students dressed in the school’s colors got up and enveloped her in an all-school hug.
Off to one side, Brandi Baggerman was getting misty-eyed while her first grader, Ryan, got lost in the crush. On the other side, Jonathan Salazar gestured for his sons to join in. Next to him stood Danelle Chappell, a classroom aide who helped organize the talent show and Salazar’s “brother.”
“Of course I teared up,” Salazar, a parent of twin fourth graders, told me later. “The same thing was going through my head that was going through everybody’s mind: Reality is setting in.”
It was a bittersweet moment, a reminder of how special this community is and a reminder that it won’t exist next year.
Uncertainty after the school board’s vote
Alcott is one of the 18 Cleveland schools shuttering its doors for the last time this week.
Parents, teachers and staff fought to keep the little school, tucked into a leafy corner of the Edgewater neighborhood, open. They gathered petitions, wrote letters and spoke at school board meetings.
It didn’t work. On the evening of Dec. 9, 2025, the school board voted to close Alcott. Over the next few days, I texted some parents to see how they were feeling.
“Frustrated and defeated, honestly. I wish we could have heard directly from each member why they voted and that they’d publicly comment on our efforts,” Baggerman messaged me back. In her view, the people in charge of deciding whether her son’s school would close didn’t know the school at all, she said later.
After the vote, anxiety became a familiar feeling for the school’s parents and staff. Every day brought a reminder that the school was closing.
District maintenance workers took the school’s washer and dryer. They measured the windows, presumably to board them up. A dumpster was parked out back.
Initially, the district promised students and staff at closing schools that they would all move to a designated “welcoming” school together. In the case of Alcott, that was Joseph M. Gallagher School, a new building in the nearby Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood.
But then the district opened the online portal families use to choose a school. It was clear the Alcott community wouldn’t be able to stick together. Many families were intimidated by Gallagher’s size. The school is projected to enroll close to 1,000 students, a big jump from Alcott’s 167 students. Students with special education needs — who have always been an important part of Alcott’s community — learned they could be assigned to different schools.
For Salazar, learning that his sons, both of whom have autism, wouldn’t join their peers and the teachers they had come to know wasn’t only frustrating. It made him worry his twins might regress. At the same time, other parents, like Adam and Brandi Baggerman, felt alone as they wrestled with the choice of where to send their son next year.
“Everything went silent after the decision,” Brandi Baggerman said. “I wanted to get all the parents I knew together and ask where they were going, but it felt kind of like there was this taboo around doing that.”
School staff members such as Chapell, Rachel Kolecky and Elissa Cintron, all classroom aides, worried about what schools they could be transferred to or if they’d even keep their jobs.
Kolecky, who runs the planning center at Alcott, a space designed for students who are having a hard time to come take a break, described to me what she called the “I want your job meeting.” It was a session to plan for transitions that included her and the person she was basically competing with for a job at Gallagher. It was unsettling, she said. There were lots of moments like that.
But over the last month, the mood has shifted. The uncertainty that fueled a lot of Alcott’s anxiety has slowly begun to resolve. Students settled on where they would attend school, and most staff learned their fates.
At a get-to-know-you event at Gallagher, kids from both schools, their faces painted with butterflies and unicorns, ran around waving wads of pink cotton candy. Parents took tours of the school. Many were impressed by the central courtyard, art studio and modern building. A group of teachers from Alcott clustered at a cafeteria table, listening as a teacher from Gallagher explained an inside joke his colleagues have.
Mayouri Inthavong, the mom of a fourth and third grader at Alcott, is sending both her children to Gallagher. Though she enjoyed the visit to the school, she’s still a bit nervous about sending them to a school that will be six times the size of Alcott.
The siblings, on the other hand, are very excited about their new school. They like how big it is and that it’s a new building. They’re also looking forward to making new friends and meeting new teachers.
A school closing is a community unraveling
But not everyone is going to Gallagher.
The Baggerman family chose the nearby Paul L. Dunbar Elementary because, initially, that’s where they thought Alcott’s principal was going. She’s since taken a job outside of the district, but Adam and Brandi are still cautiously optimistic about the school’s arts focus and larger library; Ryan is excited about its dragon mascot.
Salazar’s twins were assigned to Luis Muñoz Marín School. He was initially skeptical, but after the school’s principal visited Alcott with invitations for its students, he was convinced that it could be a good fit.
Salazar made it his mission to convince Alcott’s special education students and the aides that work with them to all go to Muñoz Marín. Once he’d vetted it, Muñoz Marín was “the spot.”
He’s also realized that the only way to make sure that his twins have what they need next year is to push for it himself. Salazar has even brought some of the equipment from Alcott to Muñoz Marín already.
“A lot of the stuff that we have in the [special education] classrooms, even stuff that I donated, I made sure that it went over there,” he told me. “I packed it up and dropped it off myself.”
Cintron is one of the aides Salazar convinced to take a position at Muñoz Marín. It’s probably for the best that she’s going to Muñoz Marín, she told me, because it would have been too hard to leave behind the “babies” she cares for at Alcott.
“I don’t have worries about who I’m gonna end up with, because, again, the rest of the district is full of amazing, amazing, amazing teachers, and I’m not worried,” she said when I asked her how she’s feeling. “It’s just sad. It’s like a fabric unraveling.”
Some of the community won’t be coming. Several teachers are retiring. Principal Grier is leaving the district. And Chappell was laid off along with all of the district’s college and career coordinators, who help students think about what their options are after graduation.
He’s not upset about it, personally. He understands the district’s financial situation, and he’s proud of the work he’s done at Alcott: Keeping the library open for students, starting a project-based learning program for special education students, and exposing hundreds of Alcott kids to career paths.
“I learned that, man, special education is the holy charge of public schools,” he said when I asked him what he gained from his time at Alcott. “And I’ve just enjoyed being consistent for the kids.”
Helping students think about who they want to be in the future is something Chappell was committed to even in his final days at Alcott.
During the last visit of Alcott’s kindergarteners to the library, before he read to them from a Spiderman storybook, Chappell had his students go around the room and look at posters left up from his career exploration class.
As the students walked around the room looking at the pictures and pointing at the posters they liked, he reminded them: “You know, you can be anything.”
‘I’m just trying to squeeze all the juice out of it’
The teachers and staff at Alcott packed its final weeks with good stuff: a trip to Edgewater Park, a field day, tie-dyeing that stained the sidewalk, the Museum of Illusions, take-home time capsules for the students and t-shirts for everyone in the school’s blue, white and gold colors.
“I’m just trying to squeeze all the juice out of it,” Cintron said. “It’s like chaos, but organized chaos. We have all these little commemorative things that we’re doing to help us kind of accept or make peace with it.”
The last full week of school, Salazar decided to cancel many of his sons’ appointments and just spend time at Alcott. He described trying to take “mental pictures” all the time, whether he’s helping to handle dismissal or grilling hundreds of hotdogs to greet students when they return from Edgewater Park.
There’s a lot of things Salazar says he’ll miss. It’s not just the big stuff like Christmas or dressing up for the school’s Halloween festivities, though he was pretty proud of his Rick and Morty costume this year. It’s hardest to leave behind the everyday reminders of why the school mattered, like hearing the Alcott chant every morning or watching a student slowly grow into themselves.
For Alcott students, what’s coming is still sinking in. Right now, many of them are excited about moving up a grade or going to a new school. They aren’t thinking about what the end of the year really means.
“This week is full with the events — they’re for the kids — it’s like having fun. They haven’t had time to really process,” Salazar said. Still, Salazar knows that the closing will hit his sons, and every kid at Alcott, at some point, and when it does, it will be up to him to really explain it.
Brandi Baggerman’s first grader, Ryan, is starting to feel sad already, as much as he’s excited for his new school. His parents have explained to him that, even if his best friend is coming with him, not all of his friends are. Baggerman is helping him put together a photo book about Alcott to remember some of the people who won’t be with him next year.
A couple of weeks ago, his family started a countdown calendar to help him prepare for a full summer without school. As the end of the year neared, every day when they’d do the count down, Ryan began to note it was one less day until “my school closes forever.”
“He’s almost not looking forward to summer,” Baggerman told me. “He’s almost not looking forward to that time because he knows the school’s gonna close, and then he keeps asking when we walk past [Alcott]: What’s gonna be here? Who’s gonna go here?”
Grier arranged for snow cones for all the kids after the talent show. Hyped up on sugar and excitement, the students zoomed around Alcott’s playground long past dismissal time.
Their parents lingered off to one side talking about how brave the kids were for performing in front of such a big crowd and how cute the little girl who showed off her drawing of the solar system was. There is a feeling of closeness amongst these parents who all worked together to try to keep Alcott open — close enough that Salazar could tease Baggerman about her tears during the talent show.
“I couldn’t help it, just watching like the kids, their performances, how much life is there,” Baggerman told me later about those tears. As she looked around, she wondered if all the other schools that were closing had the magic that Alcott did. And then she felt even sadder, thinking that they probably do and their kids are losing it, too.
