Cleveland students in the Civics 2.0 afterschool program are taught to speak out for what they believe in.
They lived that lesson last month at a school board meeting, where a group of Civics 2.0 students urged district leaders to keep their program going after concerns about funding bubbled up this school year.
Gayle Gadison, the founder of Civics 2.0, finished her last day as the high school social studies content manager for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) last week. Gadison launched the program about four years ago with a goal to foster a new generation of civically engaged voters in Cleveland.
Leaving CMSD is bittersweet, Gadison said in an interview. She wasn’t ready to retire, but keeping Civics 2.0 going on top of her day-to-day responsibilities became too difficult. Some administrators who valued and helped out with the program have left the district in recent years, and, without them, Gadison lost the flexibility she once had to run it, she said.
“There were times when I’m working at 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock, 1 o’clock because that was my love, that was my passion,” Gadison said.
Students say Civics 2.0 had to scale back this year because the district did not fund it until about halfway through the school year, but district leaders say the program will continue.
“Civics 2.0 is a program we invested in this year,” District CEO Warren Morgan said at a recent board meeting. “It’s in our budget for next year. We’ll continue to invest in it. You see that as demonstrated by our brilliant kids that spoke tonight. There’s no change in the Civics 2.0 programming.”
What is Civics 2.0?
Civics 2.0 is a district-wide after-school program, but its availability depends on whether or not a school has a teacher who wants to serve as a program advisor. This past school year, there were Civics 2.0 chapters at 13 high schools. The previous year, there were 17 high schools and 10 K-8 schools in the program, Gadison said.
The program relies on grant funding to cover the costs of student-led projects and trips. Civics 2.0 students have registered their classmates to vote, worked polls, questioned candidates ahead of elections, proposed solutions for gun violence and written articles about local and national issues that affect them.
Every year, CMSD’s Civics 2.0 students meet with peers across the state in Columbus for the Ohio YMCA Youth and Government conference. Students participate in a mock legislative session where they debate and vote on student-written bills. They also elect students to the positions they’ll hold in the following year’s mock legislature.
At this year’s conference in March, three CMSD students won elections. Owen Pennington of the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine will be governor, Marilia Tsirikos Karapanos of Campus International High School will be attorney general, and Antonio Harris of Ginn Academy will be chief justice.
Uncertain funding for Civics 2.0
At last month’s CMSD Board meeting, Karapanos said Civics 2.0 students didn’t have the same opportunities to organize events this year as in previous years.
Students in the program didn’t know whether they’d be able to attend the Youth and Government conference this year until shortly before it happened, Karapanos said. Because of that, CMSD had to pay late registration fees, she said.
CMSD got a $50,000 grant for Civics 2.0 from the George W. Codrington Charitable Foundation in December 2024. It’s unclear how much the Columbus trip costs each year or how long that money will sustain the program.
“While the trip to Columbus was paid for, we missed out on many things that I and other students had done in years prior,” Karapanos said at the board meeting.
When Civics 2.0 began in 2021, every student participating got a $500 gift card for every semester. It was expensive, Gadison said, but she wanted to pay the students because they have to sacrifice time they could spend working a job to be in the program. She also wanted to show students that getting involved in politics could become a career, whether through running for elected offices or community organizing.
The money for those stipends dried up, Gadison said, so the program no longer pays students.
‘You have a voice’
Civics 2.0 is unique because it’s a consistent program, Gadison said. She had been involved with some initiatives to register students to vote, but she found that many students weren’t following through on Election Day.
In 2020, Gadison proposed some ideas to get students engaged in government to Eric Gordon, the CEO of CMSD at the time. They started with a one-semester program, but district leaders told Gadison they wanted to expand it.
Dozens of teachers joined the program as advisors for their respective schools. They started getting students focused on local issues as well as national ones. Gadison pushed students to engage with local issues, she said, because they’d be able to see the impacts of their advocacy more directly.
“I figured, if kids are going to realize that their vote does count, then we need to look at the government that touches their lives every day,” Gadison said.
In 2023, Civics 2.0 students hosted a walkout protest at John Marshall High School to raise awareness about gun violence. They invited CMSD graduate Makayla Barlow to speak about how gun violence rippled through her life after she was struck in the head by a stray bullet while driving to work.
Although Gadison no longer works for CMSD, she said she’d love to continue supporting Civics 2.0 as a consultant. She’d like to see the program expand beyond Cleveland, too.
“My whole thing was to convince them that, ‘You have a voice,’” Gadison said. “Then to encourage them to use their voice, and to convince them that their voices will be heard.”
