Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Warren Morgan celebrated students’ academic progress during his annual State of the Schools address and said the district will announce its recommendations for school consolidations and closures within the next month.
The City Club of Cleveland hosted the speech at the Huntington Convention Center on Tuesday. Among those in attendance were students, educators and CMSD supporters.
The speech comes just as CMSD has finished up a months-long series of community conversations about the Building Brighter Futures initiative, intended to improve student experience and stabilize district finances by making “hard choices” to close school buildings and cut administrative staff.
Morgan said changes represent a critical juncture for CMSD’s future as it grapples with budget challenges and lower enrollment, but believes the initiative will meet these challenges while improving student experiences.
“That’s the promise of Building Brighter Futures, the part that everyone likes to hear. But to realize this brighter future, we must make tough and necessary decisions,” Morgan said.
Before diving into the next steps around school consolidation and improving student experience, Morgan took some time to shout out the academic gains made by CMSD students, including improved test scores in every academic category.
In last year’s address, Morgan was able to celebrate CMSD achieving a 3-star rating on its Ohio school report card for the first time. This year, despite academic progress, the district’s score fell back to 2.5 stars, partly because the state added a new college and career readiness category to the report card.
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Recommendations on closing and consolidating school buildings will come next month
Morgan said that following the series of community conversations, CMSD now has enough data to finalize its recommendations for school building closures and school consolidations. These recommendations will be presented to the public and to the board of education within the next month.
Typically, CMSD opens the student enrollment portal for families to choose which school they want to attend next year in the fall. Last year, the portal opened on Nov. 18, but Morgan noted the upcoming changes at CMSD will also change when the portal opens this year.
“We knew, from over the summer, the choice portal would not be the same,” Morgan told Signal Cleveland. “It would make no sense to open the choice window for students and families to choose one school and say — ‘Oh, no, that’s not happening.’”
Morgan added that next month, when the recommendations are announced, the timeline for when the portal goes live will be too. Once the recommendations are approved by the board of education, they would start going into effect in the 2026-2027 school year.
The recommendations come as the district is dealing with a decline in enrollment. In the past 20 years, CMSD’s enrollment has fallen by half from around 70,000 students in 2005 to fewer than 35,000 students now.
Part of how the district aims to address underenrollment is by restructuring so that all K-8 schools have 450 students and all high schools have at least 500 students. Right now, only 11 out of 61 elementary schools and only three out of 27 high schools meet these enrollment goals. Morgan didn’t provide a ballpark number for how many school buildings will need to close, but he said it would be the most closings the district has seen in recent years.
Morgan acknowledged that these changes would also mean big shifts for students and staff. He was asked by a member of the audience, a sophomore from the Cleveland School of Architecture and Design, what the consolidation will mean for school staff he’s close to.
Morgan said that the financial savings CMSD aims to achieve won’t come just from closing buildings but also from reducing staff, which could include layoffs for administrators. In his speech, he didn’t address layoffs for teachers.
“There’s many different things to look at, thinking about how all those different staffing decisions will happen so that we can preserve staff where possible,” Warren said. ‘But I don’t want to make promises.”
What do CMSD students think about upcoming changes?
For students like Jezebel Medina, a senior at John Marshall High School, Morgan’s speech only added to the questions they have about what the upcoming changes will mean for them and their schools.
“I know another kid asked about school consolidation, but that didn’t really answer what I wanted to know,” Medina said. “I wanted to know. ‘Like, how is that going to help our overpopulation issue? How is that going to solve anything?’”
Medina explained that John Marshall is three schools in one because their campus has three specialized schools all housed in one building. From her perspective, their shared building is overcrowded, making it hard to get to class without constantly bumping into other students or to snag a school lunch before the cafeteria runs out.
Dezmond Rattliff, a junior at John Marshall, also had a lot of questions about the plan to consolidate schools. After hearing Morgan speak, a big one still on his mind is about what could happen to the administrators and staff at his school.
“There was a question that really stood out to me, and it was, what is going to happen with admin and staff when we are consolidated?” he said. “And when the question was asked, he didn’t really answer it. And it kind of worries me — what to expect for my senior year and what to expect for these kids coming up.”