Collinwood residents pressed Mayor Justin Bibb and Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) CEO Warren Morgan about the district’s plan to merge nearly 40 schools at a town hall at Collinwood High School Tuesday evening. They posed big questions about how the plan that would close their neighborhood high school and two nearby elementary schools could damage their community.
Teachers wanted to know if students would be safe commuting to a new school. Residents wanted assurances that school buildings would not be left vacant. Many expressed frustration about what they viewed as decades of underinvestment in Northeast Side neighborhood schools, prompting students to leave for charter schools or families to leave for the suburbs.
Greg Wheeler Jr., who’s coached football at Collinwood High School for more than a dozen years, described it to Signal Cleveland as feeling abandoned.
“I think what bothered me the most was when they described what the schools, Collinwood and Glenville, did not have in comparison to what some of the other high schools had,” he said. “I feel like we were left to rot.”
The district’s proposed plan includes merging Collinwood High into Glenville High before opening a new high school for the neighborhoods in 2031. It would also consolidate Hannah Gibbons elementary school with Memorial and merge Euclid Park into East Clark.
This is not the first time CMSD has proposed a merger between the two schools that would close Collinwood. In 2019, the district tried to consolidate both Martin Luther King High School and Collinwood into Glenville. At the time, residents, teachers and council members pushed back and the district left Collinwood intact. The high school built for more than 1,000 students is mostly empty with an enrollment of 235 students and an average daily attendance of 96 students — a statistic Bibb returned to throughout the town hall.
Bibb is holding a second town hall at Tremont Montessori elementary school on Nov. 13 at 6 p.m. The school board will also take public comment at meetings on Nov. 19, Dec. 2 and Dec. 9.
Transportation: How will students navigate a longer commute safely?
Residents asked questions and expressed concerns about how Collinwood students would get to Glenville High School, which is two miles west of Collinwood High, should the board approve the merger.
Sarah Hodge, a history teacher at Collinwood, said the district is “dooming” students from the neighborhood to taking two to three buses, oftentimes in the dark, to get to school.
Bibb reassured residents the district already partners with RTA and, since that partnership started, the two now coordinate bus schedules with school start and dismissal times. Morgan added the merger plan would preserve programs such as Safe Passage, which posts volunteers along students’ routes to school.
Merging students from ‘rival’ neighborhoods: How would the city integrate students from neighborhoods that historically have had beef?
Robin Robinson, a Glenville resident, questioned the wisdom of merging two schools with a decades-long rivalry. She wanted to know how the district was preparing to integrate Collinwood students into Glenville.
Morgan said the district’s safety and security department already coordinates with Cleveland Police to address gang violence. He said the mergers would allow the district to add security officers at some schools.
Angela Shute-Woodson, the city’s director of community relations, on the other hand, pushed back at the narrative that students can’t be trusted to get along. Over the last few years the district has organized events for students from both Glenville and Collinwood, including for the past two years an annual joint college.
CMSD is holding meetings with families and students for each school that would be merged or closed net school year. Signal Cleveland is attending some of the meetings but we’d like to hear from parents, teachers and families about the one in their school. Email Franziska Wild at franziska@signalcleveland.org or text us or leave a voicemail at (216) 220-9398.
Closing buildings: Collinwood High School holds a lot of meaning for the neighborhood. Other school buildings will close but aren’t that old. How will the city plan for these spaces?
Bibb said by spring the city would issue a request for development proposals (RFP) for vacated buildings. But longtime neighborhood residents such as Robert Gatewood wondered how the city would develop buildings like Collinwood that carry so much meaning in ways that serve the neighborhood.
“Mr. Mayor, please don’t refer to our Collinwood building as land,” he prefaced his question. “What way are you going to make sure that our RFP process is not standard, it’s not vanilla, it’s not Cleveland, it’s Collinwood?”
Bibb said the effort to repurpose school buildings would include a “robust process” of community input, citing the redevelopment of the old JFK High School in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood as an example. In the future that school site is intended as a walkable mix of green and retail space as well as housing.
Bibb also said that he wants to ensure the buildings wouldn’t go to “reckless charters” but didn’t specifically address how CMSD might handle the state law that requires school districts to first offer school buildings to interested charter schools.
“We will make sure we’ll have a plan for these 18 school sites,” he said.
Plans for the future: Where will the new high school be? Why will it take until 2031 to build?
In responding to concerns that the planned merger didn’t take community feedback into account, both Bibb and Morgan touted the plan for a new high school serving students from both neighborhoods set to open in 2031.
“When I was running four years ago, what did you tell me? Mayor, we need a trades program on the East Side,” Bibb said. “And guess what, in 2031, who is going to deliver on that? CMSD is going to deliver that trades program.”
As a follow up, one resident asked why it would take until 2031 and where the school would be. Morgan explained that the state approval process to build a high school can often be lengthy and CMSD is still “working on” figuring out where the new school will be.
Transparency, not ‘smoke and mirrors’: Residents asked how to create more citizen oversight of the budget and the merger plan.
In one of her questions for Bibb, Hodge said that she doesn’t think the district’s budget is transparent enough and that without strong parent organizations, there’s no community oversight for how the levy and other tax dollars approved by voters, like her, are spent. She wanted to know if Bibb had a plan to “make sure the voters are re-enfranchised to vote for their school board.”
Bibb said he meets weekly with Morgan to provide oversight to CMSD and takes his mayoral control of the schools seriously but supports democracy should residents no longer want him to appoint the school board.
“If the voters of the city want to have an elected school board, then let the voters decide that,” he said. “But right now, there is mayoral control in schools, and I’m not abjecting my responsibility.”
