From the moment Cleveland schools CEO Warren Morgan proposed that the district merge Collinwood High School with Glenville High School next year, one word has dominated the conversation: rivals. 

“They’re rivals academically, they’re rivals athletically, and they have rival gangs,” Robin Robinson, who runs an arts nonprofit near Glenville High School, said at a town hall meeting last month. “I want to know what you’re doing or plan to do from here till fall, to get these kids ready to have this merger?”

The merger is part of a sweeping plan by the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) to consolidate schools throughout the city as a way of addressing underenrollment and financial challenges. Following the merger, the district plans to open a new high school to serve both the Collinwood and Glenville neighborhoods in 2031—though the district hasn’t released information about where it would be or what it would be called. 

Even with the promise of a new school, which would serve as a hub for the trades programs residents have been asking for for years, many on the Northeast Side have questioned the wisdom of even temporarily merging the high schools. Mayor Justin Bibb and CMSD leaders have responded to these concerns by suggesting the rivalry could be less salient for today’s students, who already participate in events like a college trip together, than for the generations that came before them.  

“We as the adults in the room have the responsibility to change that narrative,” Bibb said at the same town hall. CMSD leaders have also said they already have city partners including the Cleveland police department, a gang task force and RTA that meet regularly to tackle these kinds of school safety issues. 

Signal Cleveland spoke to nearly 20 students between both schools. We learned that they have fears about safety next year—stemming from their personal experiences surviving gun violence and witnessing school fights. 

Many already navigate neighborhood boundaries and the gangs and rivalries associated with them. They believe that a merger that forces students to cross those boundaries also has the potential to cause conflict or violence next year. 

But some also said they’ve never really met or spoken to students from the other school and, if given the chance, they could, maybe, “be cool next year.” 

One thing students were adamant about: They’d like to be consulted.  

“Mayor Justin Bibb, he doesn’t really know what’s going on inside of the schools,” one student told Signal Cleveland.  

‘We had been cut off from them’: A decades-long rivalry 

Part of why older community members and neighborhood residents have been vocal about the merger is that many of them remember the rivalry from when they were growing up. 

Greg Wheeler Jr., a Collinwood alumnus who has coached football at Collinwood for more than a dozen years, has watched the relationship between the two schools evolve over the last 40 years. 

Wheeler grew up in the Glenville neighborhood but was bussed to Collinwood as part of a court-ordered desegregation plan that lasted until 1998–it bussed Black children from Glenville to predominantly white high schools like Collinwood. He remembers at the time the rivalry was more “school versus school” in part because of bussing. 

“Even though I lived very close to Eddy Road, I had to watch myself if I went into Glenville territory, because I didn’t know those dudes like that,” he remembered. “We had been cut off from them, because under normal circumstances, if there wasn’t bussing, I probably would have been at Glenville.” 

But Wheeler has fewer concerns about safety now, in part, because even a merged high school would be relatively small. Currently, 235 students are enrolled at Collinwood and 333 are enrolled at Glenville, according to CMSD data. 

This is not the first time CMSD has proposed a merger between the two schools, due to waning enrollment. In 2019, the district unveiled a plan to merge and consolidate schools which would have merged Martin Luther King Jr. High School and Collinwood into Glenville. But neighborhood residents, teachers and council members pushed back, and the district reversed course, merging the other two but leaving Collinwood intact. 

‘I don’t got time to keep going to funerals’: How students feel

Na’Myah Scott didn’t actually want to go to Collinwood High School. She knew that there were other high schools in the district with more opportunities—ones she was accepted to—but she ended up at Collinwood because it was easiest for her to get to every day. 

But, over the last two years, Scott, a current 10th grader, has settled into a routine at Collinwood. 

She’s the kind of student who gets involved with everything: student council, after-school programs like Civics 2.0 and After-School All-Stars and sports like cheerleading and volleyball. In the process, she’s built strong relationships with her teammates and coaches, including her volleyball coach who she describes as “family.” 

When Scott found out Collinwood might merge with Glenville High School next year, she was sad. She’s easygoing and describes herself as the kind of person who likes everyone—even if they don’t like her. She doesn’t want her friends to scatter to different schools next year. But the most pressing concern on her mind wasn’t if she’d see her coaches or friends, it was if she’d be safe at school next year. 

“For us to even merge into Glenville, they see a person they don’t mess with or anything, they’re going to want to fight,” she said. “Me, I feel like there’s no point in going over there.” 

She’s not the only student who feels this way. Signal Cleveland spoke to over a dozen students at Collinwood each of whom expressed the belief that a merged school could lead to fights and worse—like gun violence. 

It’s not just about the rivalry between the two schools. Neighborhood divides and the groups and gangs associated with them also play a role in student’s fears about safety. 

John Morales, a junior at Collinwood, described it this way: “Certain kids from different neighborhoods go to that school for a reason, and kids from another different neighborhood go to this school.”

Kamiah Levert, like Scott, wasn’t supposed to go Glenville High School. She started out as a freshman at Maple Heights High School southeast of Cleveland. But after she survived a shooting in Maple Heights, her family moved to Cleveland and she transferred to Glenville. 

Although Glenville doesn’t have honors classes like her old high school did, Levert, now a sophomore, likes it overall. She plays basketball and runs track and field. 

The school also has programs that suit her interests. She’s already made up her mind to pursue the criminal justice career training program with the goal of becoming a homicide detective in order to give families closure about their loved ones. 

Given her past experiences she, like the Collinwood students, fears that merger might create conflict and violence. In part, because she and other students already feel there isn’t enough security at their school to prevent fights and keep students from bringing weapons and drugs into school. 

“We already got enough problems in the school already,” she said. “I’m worried about my safety, because you never know they can pick anybody out and then you gone. So that’s why I’m scared. I don’t want to die early.” 

She and other Glenville students described how they feel the school community at Glenville has worked really hard to create a calmer, safer and more positive environment at the school, after a difficult few years, and they worry that the merger could jeopardize that. 

“Glenville already lost a lot of people towards violence,” Levert said. “And I don’t got time to keep going to another funeral, saying rest in peace. I’m tired of that.”

Student’s fears around safety don’t just stem from the potential for conflict between rival groups. Collinwood students, who’ve never been inside Glenville’s building, think that having more students in a smaller building naturally creates opportunities for conflict even if it’s just from kids bumping into each other in the hallways.

“Personally, I feel like Glenville is a small school, some of the stuff they just got is small,” said Triana White, a junior at Collinwood. “Why won’t they just bring them over here?”

Nor are students’ concerns confined to what happens during the school day—getting to school safely is also a big thing on their minds. Particularly, for Collinwood students who will now have to travel significantly farther to get to school.  

“But see, the thing about it is, if we manage to keep that down in the school. You can’t control what happens right out there,” Jaedyn Porter, a fellow sophomore at Glenville, said, gesturing beyond the hundreds of trophies lining Glenville’s trophy room, to the school’s parking lot.

Though they’ve never met, Scott agrees with Porter. A large part of her concern is about traveling through the neighborhood around the school. Glenville is not a neighborhood she knows very well, and crossing through it early in the morning before school or in the evenings after sports practice when it’s dark out is daunting. 

“Easily, even if you’re not even a target, you can walk outside of school one day and you can just get hit,” Scott said. “Somebody gets into a conflict, somebody pulls out a gun, you walking past, you get caught in the crossfire or something.” 

As someone who lives near the school, Wheeler understands where Scott’s concerns come from. 

“Glenville is on 113th. It’s two stoplights away from my house,” Wheeler said. “People get killed or assaulted over there, regularly, so my main concern is more outside than inside.” 

‘We just got to come together’: Some students think common ground is possible 

Despite their fears, students from Glenville, in particular, also believe it’s possible for everyone to get along next year. 

Braisa Harris, a senior at Glenville, thinks that if students could get together ahead of the merger in a casual setting, like a brunch or field trip, then they might be able to work things out. 

Levert agrees, she pointed out students’ fears in part just come from not knowing each other or what to expect at all. 

“We don’t know each other. Glenville kids don’t know Collinwood. Collinwood don’t know Glenville kids,” she said. “I feel like we should come together because we probably will be cool next year. We just got to come together and talk about our feelings, talk about how everything’s gonna work out.”

DeAntae Phillips has experience bringing students from Collinwood and Glenville together. As an outreach worker from the Community Relations Board of the city for the past two years, he’s led a college visit with students from Collinwood, Glenville and Ginn Academy. 

Phillips mentors cohorts of at-risk students at each of the three schools. As his students steadily raised their grades throughout the year, he saw the trip as an opportunity to reward them for their hard work while exposing them to the college experience. The first year they visited Central State University. Last year, he took them to Ohio State.

Given the history between the two schools, when he pitched the idea of bringing 48 high school students from all three schools on a four hour bus ride, everyone was skeptical.

But, in the end, the trip went well. 

“Nobody got in a fight. They barely even had a strong argument. It was some bickering, of course,” Phillips said. “Because you’re dealing with teenagers.”

Phillips believes that’s in part because he’s built up a level of trust with the students. In his eyes, that’s the kind of work that adults, whether it’s principals, teachers or district administrators, need to prioritize over the next few months, if they want the merger to work. Though he has his reservations about the merger, he thinks that students have the ability to adapt to change as long as they are supported by the adults in charge of the process. 

“If you tell them: ‘Hey, this is what’s going on now, this is what’s better for y’all,” Phillips said. “If they trust you, then they’ll take your word at face value.”

Students at Glenville echoed this. In their eyes, as long as their principal, whom they credit with helping to make the school more positive, sticks around next year, things will probably be OK.  

But for the merger to work, Collinwood students also have to choose to attend Glenville next year. That many of them want to go elsewhere has been largely unaddressed by CMSD administrators but it’s been an open topic of discussion at school. 

“What they’re telling me, just plain out, they’re not going to Glenville,” Sarah Hodge, a teacher at Collinwood, told Signal Cleveland. 

Scott, for example, hopes to apply for and attend John Hay next year. If that doesn’t work out, she says she’ll enroll at Euclid High. 

When Signal Cleveland asked 14 students in Civics 2.0 at Collinwood if they’d attend Glenville next year, one student said he’d consider going. 

No one else raised their hands.