Officially, Mayor Justin Bibb’s next term won’t start until January. But his second-term challenges began as soon as he won reelection.

A week after Election Day, he took darts at a town hall at Collinwood High School. Residents, school staff and City Council members asked questions of — and vented at — Bibb about the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s plan to merge 39 schools, including Collinwood and Glenville.  

The mayor, who controls the schools, is caught in a political paradox. Even as he wins big at the ballot box, he faces blowback to a difficult school merger plan he argued was long overdue. 

The paradox goes beyond the schools. Of the few voters who showed up this year, 74% returned Bibb to office. That doesn’t mean Clevelanders are satisfied. 

“Why is the Northeast Side of Cleveland so ignored?” LaDonna Wheeler asked at the town hall. She pressed Bibb about the quality of the city’s many century-old houses. 

“Mayor, I’m going to be truthful with you,” she said. “When I was in that voting booth, it was pretty, pretty hard for me to check your name.”

Council Members Kevin Conwell (a mighty Glenville Tarblooder from the Class of 1979) and Michael Polensek (a 1969 Collinwood Railroader) took turns thrashing the mayor and school leadership over the proposed mergers. 

“You’re going to drive people into these charter schools and out of the neighborhood just as you’ve already done on the East Side,” Polensek said, wagging a finger. “You’re going to destabilize our neighborhoods.”

Bibb (who graduated from the Catholic high school Trinity in 2005) put the cause and effect the other way around. He described the school consolidations as the result of years of falling enrollment. 

He cited other signs of historic decline. Cleveland has lost 20% of its people and 30% of its export-producing jobs in the last two decades, he said. 

“We as a city failed to make hard choices about our economic future,” Bibb said. 

Bibb referenced his and City Council’s $50 million push to clean up old industrial sites for redevelopment, a marquee project aimed at healing an old economic wound. 

This is the heart of Bibb’s paradox. He just won reelection on the message that “Cleveland is on the rise.” But even as a two-term mayor, he can’t escape the consequences of Cleveland’s long decline — smaller school enrollment, timeworn neighborhoods and residents’ feeling that CMSD and City Hall owe them more.