Last year, Cleveland school leaders voted to shutter 18 schools, casting the decision as a hard but necessary move for the shrinking urban district.

Cleveland isn’t alone. Public school districts across the country have closed thousands of schools over the last two decades. That includes Chicago, where I grew up. More than a decade ago, in 2013, Chicago Public Schools announced the largest simultaneous school closure in American history — the district closed 50 schools, uprooting 13,646 students and sparking widespread dissent from parents, teachers, students and activists.

At the time, then-CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett made some big promises: that Chicago students would improve academically after being sent to better schools with more resources, that school buildings would be redeveloped for the benefit of communities and that the closures would help the district fix a nearly $1 billion budget deficit. 

After months of protests, on the day his appointed school board voted in favor of the closures, then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel put out a short and optimistic statement. 

“I know this is incredibly difficult, but I firmly believe the most important thing we can do as a city is provide the next generation with a brighter future,” he wrote.

Cleveland leaders are adamant that their plan will also “build brighter futures” for students. Chief among them is CEO Warren Morgan, who was principal at a Chicago high school back in 2013. The district has made strikingly similar promises, including: adding academic opportunities and extra resources to all schools, redeveloping buildings to transform neighborhoods and addressing a budget shortfall and enrollment declines. And he’s also hinted that there could be more cuts to come because state funding for public education isn’t keeping up with rising costs.

Before Cleveland’s board voted to move forward with its sweeping plan, that will impact 16,302 students across 55 schools, leaders heard from families, teachers and community members who expressed lots of anxiety, frustration and distrust. They worried that certain mergers were misguided, that transportation wouldn’t be nearly as seamless as district leaders assured and that special education students might be left behind. As I had one conversation where families expressed one skepticism after another, I began to wonder: How did those promises made in Chicago more than a decade ago work out? What happened to the kids, families, teachers and neighborhoods? 

For two months, I’ve been digging into those questions. I talked to more than two dozen Chicagoans impacted by the closures – students, parents, teachers, activists, school board members, researchers, administrators and community members. Some of those conversations helped me understand why the decisions were made; others offered a glimpse into whether the promises were kept. Twice, I traveled to Chicago to see the buildings left behind and walk through the neighborhoods that residents fled in the wake of the closures. On one of those trips, Signal Cleveland Visual Journalist Michael Indriolo came with me so we could show Clevelanders the changed neighborhoods that we saw and the changed people we met. 

I learned that most of the promises didn’t pan out the way district leaders said they would and that people fought hard for their schools. The district characterized these schools as underutilized and low-performing. But families saw them as second homes for their kids and anchor points in their neighborhoods. Digging into this disconnect helped me understand something I’ve noticed in Cleveland: that despite the many meetings for feedback organized by the school district, many students, parents and teachers feel as though their voices don’t matter to the people making all the decisions. 

Over the next few weeks, Signal Cleveland will publish a series of stories sharing what we’ve discovered. Our goal is simple: to learn what we can from a sister city that has already navigated the type of change that we have ahead of us. And to be equipped with those lessons to ask better questions of our own school and city leaders. 

We’ll take a look at the vacant buildings that still dot Chicago and explain how attempting to sell all the buildings at once got many of them off the district’s books but left them languishing in neighborhoods. We’ll also revisit how it looked and felt for students and teachers in a transition year marked by overcrowded classrooms and faculty rivalries. 

In Chicago, the closures also spurred a movement for an elected school board. We’ll tell the story of one activist who now sits on that board and is faced with the tough choices he used to protest. And, we’ll spend some time with a family still grieving the loss of a school that shaped generations, including a grandmother who later dedicated herself to preventing similar school closures.  

We also asked people what they would tell Clevelanders about living through this kind of change. Many encouraged Cleveland parents, students, teachers and neighborhood residents to keep speaking up. And to hold the district to its promises.  

“These are our kids,” one parent told me. “Listen to us. We know what we want. We know what we need.”