The Cleveland school district will move to a single, traditional school calendar for nearly all students in the fall.
The school board voted Tuesday night to cut options for schools to have longer or year-round calendars or to have extended school days for students.
The move will save the cash-strapped district millions a year.
Some parents, teachers and students have protested the cuts, arguing that the flexibility gave students opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. A group brought handmade signs Tuesday, but they were barred from bringing them into the meeting.
CEO Warren Morgan cast the choice as tough but necessary.
“It is our responsibility to our kids that we have a fiscally sound district,” Morgan said. “Just like when you’re balancing your budget in your own home, but in our case, we have a responsibility to the state that we have a balanced budget.”
One board member, Nigamanth Sridhar, told the packed meeting that he wrestled with the decision.
“Dr. Morgan, you’ve mentioned several times in your public remarks, including today, that there are pockets of excellence sprinkled across CMSD,” Sridhar said. “Some of these pockets of excellence exist in precisely these schools we are altering.”
He told Morgan that district leaders would need to protect students from any negative impacts from shortening calendars and ensure that “any such pockets of excellence are, in fact, preserved and, more importantly, replicated in the rest of the district.”
CMSD currently has five different calendars. Most of the district’s roughly 100 schools have a traditional calendar with long breaks in the summer and winter. About 21 schools have alternative calendars with different breaks or longer academic years. Two dozen schools, including some with traditional calendars, have longer school days.
Next school year, CMSD students from first grade through high school will start school on Aug. 18, 2025, and end on May 28, 2026, according to a draft calendar shared during the board meeting. Kindergarten and preschool students will continue to have different start and end dates. The cuts will not affect the Downtown Education Center or the School of One.
The cuts will save CMSD about $9.3 million every year. That’s only one piece of the district’s goal to cut $150 million over the next three years. Without any cuts, the district would run out of money in 2028.
“It’s never my intention or the board’s intention to make things harder for students or educators,” said Board Chair Sara Elaqad. “We don’t consider it just business. We don’t take it lightly, and we have to consider every student in the district.”
Why have an alternative school calendar?
Some students, parents and teachers say specialized schools need alternative calendars for their programs.
Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School, for example, needs a year-round calendar with extra school time in the summer to train students on piloting boats and airplanes, said 11th-grade student Xavier Avery. He and other Davis students protested outside CMSD’s downtown office last week to oppose the calendar cuts.
At the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine, one of CMSD’s highest-rated schools, many students use the extra month in their calendar to work internships, said Rev. B. A. Gregg, a Latin teacher and head of the school’s professional medicine pathway. Without that extra time, it will be harder for students to land the kinds of extracurricular experiences they need to get into prestigious universities, Gregg said.
For John Adams College and Career Academy, the year-round calendar simply doesn’t work, Principal Brian Evans said during a CMSD Board of Education meeting last month.
The different start dates at CMSD schools can cause confusion and barriers for some families, he said. More than half of John Adams students didn’t come to school in the first few weeks of this school year, he said, harming the school’s overall attendance.
“Students who have working parents and younger school-age siblings have to stay at home with their siblings until their siblings’ school year starts, which not only causes them to miss instruction, but it also harms our overall attendance the first few weeks of school,” Evans said.
Can CMSD’s specialized programs work on a traditional school calendar?
Even with a shorter calendar, schools with specialized programs won’t have to scale back, Morgan said during Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting.
Teachers and school leaders could find ways to work their extra programs into a traditional school calendar, he said. CMSD officials will give schools curriculum timelines for core subjects such as math, reading and science. Each school’s leaders have the final say on how to structure days to meet those timelines.
Schools can still provide specialized programs that require more time outside of a typical school day, Morgan said, but they would have to come up with the extra money to fund them. Some schools have partnerships with local businesses that could potentially chip in to fund those programs, he said.
“I’m not saying that all the resources are there where they’ll be able to do it all throughout the year, but school leaders still have the autonomy,” Morgan said in a previous board meeting.
