When Julie Stanton, a horticulture teacher at East Technical High School, arrived at a recent high school choice fair, she realized there were a couple things wrong. Not only was “Engineering” spelled wrong on the sign listing the programs at East Tech but, inexplicably, Horticulture was left off the list.
Stanton has taught students how to grow plants, create floral designs and run their own landscaping businesses for over a decade. In that work, she has carried on the tradition of teaching horticulture in Cleveland schools, a history that dates back to the founding of a standalone horticulture center in 1970.
Now, with the approval of a sweeping restructuring, the district is upending that tradition and also moving away from an era where it focused on creating smaller themed high schools.
As a result, Stanton isn’t the only Cleveland teacher unsure whether the academic or career training program they teach will be offered next year. At the high school level, the district’s consolidation plan combines smaller specialty schools into more general high schools and reshuffles career training programs.
District leaders say the choices were made to make sure all students across the city had similar – and even additional – options for academics and career training. But the decisions have caused disappointment and uncertainty regarding two types of programs: small themed high schools that have been described as “pockets of excellence” and career training programs that have long been important to the community.
A shift away from smaller themed high schools
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s (CMSD) consolidation plan will nearly cut the number of high schools in the district in half from 27 to 14. Most of the mergers will combine smaller, special-focus academies housed in the same building into a single high school. For example, the three different schools at John Marshall High School whose themes range from business to engineering will merge into one comprehensive high school.
The creation of smaller high schools with unique themes, like MC2STEM, Campus International and Facing History New Tech, was a major plank of the Cleveland Plan — which improved the districtwide graduation rate by almost 30% from 2011 to 2020. The development of these specialized schools was also aided by several million dollars in grants from the Cleveland and George Gund foundations.
District leaders have pointed out that this approach led to a few very high performing schools throughout the district but meant opportunities weren’t even across the district. Now, they say, consolidation is necessary to create equitable options for all students.
“This is a plan to ensure that all of our students, no matter where they go to school, no matter where they live, their background, how they look, that they have expanded opportunities, things we can’t deliver on today,” CMSD CEO Warren Morgan said at a board meeting last year.
Next year, depending on how things go, many of these specialized schools will simply exist as a STEM program or International Baccalaureate diploma, a rigorous project-based curriculum focused on global issues, at a bigger, more general high school. And some might not exist at all.
Some students are OK with that and have told Signal Cleveland they would have been excited about the option to take a wider variety of classes. But other students are worried about their ability to finish the work they’ve started toward a special diploma or career certification.
“Students, teachers, parents and staff are wondering what will happen to our International Baccalaureate program,” Marilia Tsirikos Karapanos, a junior at Campus International who has been working toward an IB diploma for the past three years, said at a December board meeting. Next year, her school will merge into the John Hay campus and MC2STEM will merge into East Tech, likely losing its state STEM certification in the process.
District leaders, including Morgan, have said it’s their intention that all students will be able to finish out their pathways next year, but they haven’t offered specifics about what that looks like.
Patrick Moorman, an English Language Arts teacher at Campus International, said it’s more complicated than simply adding IB classes to John Hay next year because of the extra training IB teachers receive.
“I can’t say if it’s going to happen or not happen, because it’s too early in the process,” Moorman said. “We need to be involved in implementation and figuring out staffing and figuring out how we can keep IB trained teachers in the program.”
He sees a lot of value in how these special options teach independent learning and critical thinking skills—especially if the goal is college readiness.
Moorman said one of his students made a point worth repeating: If Cleveland wants to see more local kids rising to power and becoming leaders in the community, CMSD needs to invest in programs like IB, MC2STEM and Montessori.
The district has “got to understand that some kids want more and will need more,” he told Signal Cleveland.
A reshuffling of career training opportunities
The consolidation plan has emphasized improving the district’s college and career readiness score. That’s a new metric that Ohio uses to measure whether students are ready for life after graduation. This year, it brought down the overall grade CMSD received from the state.
District leaders say next year they plan to add 21 career training programs across the district, including options that students have long been asking for such as Cosmetology.
At the same time, other established career programs are on the chopping block. Signal Cleveland reached out to CMSD to confirm that next year the district will no longer offer: Horticulture at East Tech, Criminal Justice at Glenville High School and Family & Consumer Sciences at Rhodes High School and John Adams High School.
Several teachers said the cuts were puzzling and they are worried because of the significance the pathways have to students and the community. They also told Signal Cleveland that they weren’t informed directly about the cuts and are still in the dark about what they mean for the classes they teach.
Brent Dean, who heads the College & Career Readiness department for CMSD, wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland that the district evaluated factors including current enrollment and labor market demand when deciding what pathways to add or remove.
“The primary reason for not offering these pathways is program sustainability,” Dean wrote. “To offer a pathway, we must have sufficient/healthy student enrollment to justify staffing, materials, and ongoing program costs.”
Stanton pushed back on that reasoning. She said district leaders asked her to teach an introductory class to freshmen this year where they rotate through both Animal Science and Horticulture pathways but wouldn’t count the students in the rotational class toward enrollment in the pathway. She also pointed out that Agribusiness, which will be offered next year at East Tech, has a lower enrollment than Horticulture and Animal Sciences.
Stanton is also concerned about what will happen to the nearly 90 students who between Horticulture and Animal Sciences programs are currently working toward completing a credential.
“My students have also been working really hard to earn credentials,” Stanton said. “Our Animal Science and Horticulture programs are really turning out a lot of credentialed students who otherwise would not graduate.”
Janyah Carraway is a student who thrived in the program. She’s also a senior who’ll graduate this year but is considering pursuing a career with the skills she’s learned in the program. She thinks it’s unfair to her fellow classmates if the program is not offered next year.
“I would be upset about that. None of my friends are seniors in this, so I would just be upset about it,” she told Signal Cleveland.
Stanton also emphasized that Horticulture adds value in part because of its connection to the community — as part of the pathway students organize an annual plant sale that teaches them valuable planning and business skills.
“It’s not about the money that the kids make for the sale,” Stanton said. “Students who I’ve seen not engaged in traditional parts of school really flourish in the environment and flourish in this program.”
The spring plant sale, which has been going on for more than 50 years, is a big deal for the community, and some community members look forward to it for months. In the winter, the students also grow hundreds of poinsettias for community members to buy as well.
Similarly, the Criminal Justice pathway at Glenville was founded at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in the early 2000s and then moved to Glenville when the two schools merged in 2020. The idea, at the time, was to connect students to the community while preparing them for careers in public service.
“The program was explicitly created in 2003 at MLK to bridge the gap between public safety and minority communities,” Belinda Coats, who leads the program at Glenville, said at a December school board meeting.
“Rather than eliminating the Criminal Justice pathway, I ask that you invest in it, support its continued improvement, and honor the commitments and promises that were made to the community after the 2020 merger, ” Coats said.
Enrollment is an issue for the program — there are only seven juniors and seniors currently working on the pathway. At the same time, there are a lot of job opportunities for public safety officers in Cleveland.
“We’re in a situation where we’ve been running shortages of security officers in CMSD and CPD hasn’t been able to fully staff in a long time,” Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski told Signal Cleveland. “Why would we eliminate a pathway that engages students early on to hopefully continue on in public safety?”
Teachers say CMSD hasn’t looped them in on how changes will work
Stanton wasn’t the only teacher who showed up at the high school choice fair unsure about what programs would be offered at her school next year. Moorman also wasn’t informed ahead of time whether IB would be listed at the booth advertising John Hay.
Those kinds of mix ups could be written off as typos or one-offs, but Obrenski said they’re indicative of a larger problem CMSD has run into when it comes to making these changes: not including the educators on the ground.
“I don’t know what the staff was supposed to be telling the kids, because they don’t know what any of it is or what it means for their school,” Obrenski said. She said the district also hasn’t clarified what some of the new pathways mean in terms of classes and teacher certifications.
Before the consolidation vote, Dean said, his department would work diligently to understand what extra professional development or licensing is needed for a smooth implementation process next year.
Obrenski said that teachers haven’t felt that they’ve been included in that planning. She pointed to Stanton’s case, where teachers couldn’t get a clear answer from the career training department if Horticulture would be offered or not next year.
“When you’re in the second semester of a school year and you’re supposed to have much of this in place to start the new school year, it just feels like we should be a lot further along,” Obrenski said.
The criticism that the shift away from specialized programming is a shift away from the Cleveland Plan is legitimate, Obrenski said. But of greater concern to her is the move away from planning collaboratively with teachers and staff.
“One of the elements of the Cleveland Plan was about distributed leadership and shared decision making,” Obrenski said. “And that element is dead.”
