As the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) makes plans to close an unknown number of schools, people have questioned what shutting buildings could mean for surrounding neighborhoods.
At a CMSD community meeting last month, parents, teachers and Cleveland residents weighed in. Some said having a school in their neighborhood makes it safer. Others said schools help foster a sense of community at shared spaces such as playgrounds.
Over the last decade, CMSD has offered up dozens of closed schools and vacant lots where schools once stood for sale. Some old buildings are set to be reopened as apartments for seniors and people with lower incomes. Cleveland needs more affordable housing, but turning schools into apartments can take time and sometimes requires some taxpayer investment.
CMSD currently has 21 properties that were formerly schools. Some still have buildings on them, some are vacant lots, some are being leased out and others are in the process of redevelopment, according to a district spokesperson.
Why is CMSD considering closing schools?
CMSD plans to close schools because the district needs to cut spending to avoid a $96 million budget deficit in 2028. The district hasn’t given a firm number of how many schools it expects to shutter.
Currently, CMSD has about 34,000 students, about half as many students as it had 20 years ago, CEO Warren Morgan said at a community meeting last month. Because of the enrollment decrease, most district schools don’t have enough students to fill their seats.
That makes it difficult to offer extra classes and extracurricular activities at all schools, Morgan told people at the meeting. He said that closing and merging some schools will help even out enrollment across the district.
The district wants at least 450 students enrolled in every K-8 school and 500 students in every high school, Morgan said. Right now, nine of 63 schools serving students in kindergarten through 8th grade meet that enrollment goal. And only three of 27 high schools do, according to district data.
CMSD hasn’t announced which schools it might close or consolidate. But the moves wouldn’t take effect until the 2026-2027 school year, Morgan said.
The district hopes to save about $30 million a year by closing schools.
Who can buy a school after it closes?
In order to sell a closed school, CMSD — or any other Ohio public school district — has to follow a specific procedure laid out in state law. Building sales are decided by a district’s board of education.
When school districts sell buildings, they have to first offer them to local charter schools before any other potential buyers. Districts have to give first dibs to charters that the state deems as high-performing.
Charter schools interested in a building can opt to either buy or lease. Even if a school district wants to sell a building, it has to lease it to a charter if that’s the only offer on the table, according to state law.
If no charter schools, high-performing or otherwise, want to buy or lease a building after 60 days, districts can then hold a public auction or, in certain cases, sell privately. School districts don’t have to put buildings up for public auction if they’re selling them to a local government or getting rid of them through a transfer or trade.
State legislators are considering making changes to the laws governing the sale of school buildings through the state budget. The budget won’t be finalized until the summer, but for now, lawmakers have floated changes including forcing districts to sell underenrolled buildings and giving private charter schools dibs on buildings before they go to public auction, among others.
“It leaves us in a position of doing something that we would rather not do, which is waiting,” CMSD Communications Officer Jon Benedict said. “We can’t act with these giant unknowns.”
What’s happened to schools CMSD has shuttered in recent years?
In 2013, CMSD closed Nathaniel Hawthorne Elementary School. In 2023, a decade later, the district transferred the building over to the city of Cleveland.
The city then transferred the building, for $45,000, to a local developer that plans to turn it into apartments. The new luxury apartment building, called The Hawthorne, will open this summer.
Nathaniel Hawthorne Elementary is just one of 19 CMSD properties the district offered up in 2021. That year, CMSD and city officials asked for project proposals for 12 shuttered school buildings and seven vacant lots. The Cleveland City Planning Commission approved 10 of those proposals, including The Hawthorne apartment complex, in December 2021.
Of the 10 proposals that got approved, nine were for apartment buildings, a few of which would specifically be for seniors or people with lower incomes. Under one approved proposal, charter school operator Accel Schools would fix up Iowa-Maple Elementary School and reopen it as a school.
Some of these projects are closer to beginning construction than others, with most still looking for funding. The developer behind Empire Junior High School in Glenville, for example, has secured about $25 million of its roughly $27 million project cost, according to a city spokesperson.
So far, Nathaniel Hawthorne is the only one of these buildings that has been transferred to a developer, according to property records. Cleveland City Council approved the transfer of the former Martin Luther King, Jr. High School earlier this year for $880,000, but the transfer hasn’t gone through yet.
In 2023, Ohio passed a law that created an obstacle for redeveloping old buildings like CMSD schools, a city spokesperson said in an email. The law prevented developers from getting both low-income tax credits and historic preservation tax credits on the same project.
CMSD has let go of some other buildings in one-off sales and transfers, too. Henry W. Longfellow Elementary School reopened in 2023 as senior housing, and West Technical High School has been an apartment building for more than 20 years. In 2022, MAGNET opened up its Cleveland headquarters and manufacturing training center in the former Margaret A. Ireland School.
Global Ambassadors Language Academy, a language immersion K-8 charter school, is planning to fix up and reuse McKinley School, which closed in 2017, as a new school. It’s located off Lorain Avenue on the west side.
The Western Reserve Land Conservancy started construction for a new public park on the vacant lot that used to house John W. Raper Elementary School, closed in 2010, in Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood. Over in Slavic Village, the former Mound Elementary School site got cleaned up as part of an effort to sell a swath of land for industrial use, but it has not yet sold.
