Three years ago, Tanisha Salary went out of her way to choose Cleveland schools for her son CJ. 

The Salary family lives in Euclid, which is not part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD). CJ attended a combination of Euclid City Schools and Catholic schools for elementary school. When it came time to pick a high school, the different options offered at CMSD, like MC2STEM High School, the specialized science and technology high school CJ currently attends, were really attractive to the family. 

“We chose CMSD specifically for the STEM school,” Christopher Salary, CJ’s father, told Signal Cleveland. “Because he showed an interest [and] it fit directly for the type of learning he was going to do.” 

Now, the district’s decision to merge 39 schools, including CJ’s high school, is causing the Salary family to reconsider their choice. CJ is among the nearly 4,000 students who will be displaced by the mergers, which will also shutter 18 school buildings entirely. His family is not the only one grappling with the decision about where to send their kids to school next year. 

CMSD kicked off the process for families to pick schools in early January. The online selection portal closes for most students on Feb. 27. District leaders have urged thousands of families to make their choices by the deadline so that they can plan for staffing at the newly merged schools. So far, around 3,600 current students have made their choices, which is around half of the families that need to fill out the application because their school is closing or their student is a preschooler or eighth grader. In addition, so far, around 880 new students have applied to CMSD — a noticeable uptick from past years. 

Signal Cleveland has stayed in touch with families whose schools are closing and who are now making the choice whether to attend a suggested new school, choose a different Cleveland school or leave the district. 

How many students have already made a choice?  

CMSD is counting on a total of 7,009 students to log on to the portal and pick a school by the end of February to help the district figure out staffing at newly merged schools next year. That number includes current preschoolers, eighth graders and students whose schools are closing. 

As of Feb. 9, 3,606 current CMSD students have filled out the online application. That’s around 51% of students who need to make a choice. 

Students who are being uprooted by closures or mergers have been assigned a school by CMSD for next year. But they can also pick any school in the district or choose to leave it. Even if they are sticking with their assigned school, the district wants students impacted by closures to confirm that decision in the online application portal. 

So far, just 37% of the 4,009 students who will be displaced by the mergers next year have filled out the online application. That means there are 2,546 students whose schools will close next year who have yet to tell CMSD where they plan to go. If those families don’t fill out the online application by Feb. 27, their students will automatically be placed at their assigned school. 

Out of the students impacted by the closures, 21%, or around 840 students, have decided to confirm their spot at their assigned school. The rest, around 640 students, have selected a different CMSD school. 

More applications from students new to CMSD 

The district has also received 883 applications from students who are new to CMSD this year, as of Feb. 9. Those students aren’t currently enrolled in a Cleveland public school but could have been in the past. 

In comparison, five weeks into the school choice portal being open last year, CMSD had received 320 new applications. The year before that it had seen around 314 new applications. CMSD spokesperson Jon Benedict told Signal Cleveland that most of the new applications this year are from students heading into kindergarten and ninth grade. 

The choice to leave 

When Tanisha and Christopher Salary heard that their son’s school would be merging with East Technical High School next year, they knew—almost immediately—they didn’t want to send him there. 

“It wasn’t happening, as far as I was concerned,” Tanisha said. 

They were both worried about safety issues in and around East Tech in particular because, next year, as a senior, CJ would be taking College Credit Plus classes. That means he would have to use public transit to commute from East Tech to Tri-C during the school day. They were also upset that CJ would be losing access to the small classes and the STEM focus he has right now.

Despite past issues getting CJ the special education services he needed, his parents were initially open to keeping CJ in Cleveland schools. But after the staff at the John Hay campus didn’t even take Tanisha’s name when she called, she decided it was time to leave CMSD.

CJ is a current junior, which limited his options for school next year because most charter schools in their neighborhood don’t take 12th graders, Tanisha said. Their family was also unwilling to send him to Euclid High School because of what they’d heard about the school. 

So, Tanisha began looking at the EdChoice and Cleveland scholarships, which give families vouchers to attend private school. Her family qualifies for both scholarships, and she hopes to use them to send CJ to Lake Catholic High School in Mentor. 

Tanisha and Christopher described the process of calling around to schools to see if they’d take a senior as stressful and difficult. 

“It feels like being hit with a natural disaster and now we’re families being displaced, trying to figure out where to go,” Christopher told Signal Cleveland. 

For CJ, switching schools also means he’ll miss out on doing all the classic senior year things like prom, graduation and skip day with the friends and teachers who’ve helped him grow over the last three years. 

“They’ll have stuff with my new school that I’m going to, but it probably won’t be the same as I was hoping for with my class, because we all grew up together,” CJ said. “It’s quite heartbreaking to have to say goodbye to them.”

Applying for a voucher to attend private school isn’t the only option for families to leave the district. A number of teachers at high schools and K-8 schools have told Signal Cleveland that their students are considering attending local charters or opting to pursue interdistrict enrollment in a suburban school district next year. 

That includes Sarah Hodge, who teaches history at Collinwood High School, which is set to merge into Glenville High School next year. She said the vast majority of her students, who live nearby, are considering attending either Shaw High School or Euclid High School — something students told Signal Cleveland in November when the merger was initially announced.  

Open enrollment for those districts began Feb. 1. Since then, Euclid High School has received 13 applications from CMSD families, including from two current Collinwood students. Shaw High School doesn’t yet have data on interdistrict enrollment, but, according to a spokesperson for the district, they’re “anticipating Collinwood to make a large impact.”

For K-8 families, the concerns center less on safety and more on transportation as neighborhood schools close and students have to travel farther to school. They also worry about their kids adjusting to bigger schools with more students and about keeping siblings together.  

For example, teachers at Valley View Elementary, the West Side all-boys school that is set to merge with the East Side all-boys school, told Signal Cleveland many of the families they teach plan to pull their students from CMSD. Those families, many of whom live on the West Side, are opting instead for nearby charter or Catholic schools because of how far the yellow-school bus ride would be next year.  

The choice to stay 

Joscelyn Dye, like Tanisha Salary, was drawn to the district by the STEM program offered at MC2STEM. In fact, Joshua is her only child who has attended a CMSD school. He’s also in the same grade as CJ. 

But unlike CJ, Joshua and his mom are choosing East Tech for next year. The caveat is that Joshua, as a senior, will almost exclusively be taking College Credit Plus classes, meaning he won’t be on campus much of the time. 

Still, even though they’re sticking with CMSD, Dye feels that her worries as a parent weren’t addressed by the district. 

She, like the Salary family, staunchly opposed the merger when it was announced. In fact, she helped organize a meeting of parents at MC2STEM’s Tri-C campus to devise a pitch to the school board to merge MC2STEM with a different school. 

They knew they probably wouldn’t be able to prevent the school’s closure outright, but they thought if parents came together, they might be able to convince the board to pick a different school for MC2STEM to merge with. 

The day the school board voted on the mergers, Christopher Salary used his allotted two minutes of public comment to deliver the group’s pitch. The board voted to merge East Tech and MC2STEM anyway. 

“We talked to them until we were blue in the face,” Dye said. “And they still didn’t listen.”