About 60 Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School students gathered around the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) downtown office building to protest the potential shortening of their school’s year-round calendar.
CMSD officials recently proposed cutting all the district’s alternative school calendars to save money, but Davis students say doing so would hurt the quality of their education. The Board of Education is sent to vote on the cuts next week.
The students chanted “save year-round” and took turns talking about the benefits they see in their school’s specialized calendar. Cleveland City Council Member Kris Harsh showed up to the protest to voice his support for them. District officials have said that schools will still have flexibility to provide specialized programs within a traditional school calendar.
Jonathan Aranda, a junior at Davis, said he found his passion for aerospace engineering at the school. He’s concerned that cutting the year-round calendar could make it harder for teachers to provide the hands-on learning experiences he’s gotten throughout his time at the school, he said.
“I see this school as the future,” Aranda said. “It helped me a lot to look at my path and see what I wanted to pursue.”
Cutting calendars to save money
Davis is one of roughly 21 CMSD schools that operate on alternative calendars. These calendars have longer school years, longer days or different breaks compared with a traditional school calendar.
Last month, CMSD officials proposed putting nearly all of the roughly 90 district schools on the same calendar. Officials cited a CMSD-commissioned study that found, with a few exceptions, alternative school calendars did not translate to better scores on math and reading tests.
The cuts would save the district about $9.3 million every year, which it needs to whittle down a looming budget deficit, officials said. If the district doesn’t make any cuts, it will run out of money by 2028.
The CMSD Board of Education will vote on whether or not to approve the district’s proposed school calendar cuts at its next meeting on Tuesday, April 29. If the board votes for the cuts, they will take effect at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year in the fall.
‘Future students wouldn’t have the same opportunities as me’
Xavier Avery, a junior at Davis, helped to organize this student protest after his mother told him last week that his school’s year-round calendar could be in jeopardy. Avery went to every classroom in his school to drum up support, he said. Like himself, many students didn’t know about the potential calendar cuts.
Avery and about 40 other students protested at the CMSD administration building that day, he said. He got the chance to talk with some CMSD officials, he said, who told him about the district’s financial situation and that they were trying to work out a compromise with Davis’ leaders.
“Our education shouldn’t be a compromise,” Avery said. “We shouldn’t try to remove some of the opportunities of Davis just to save some money.”
Davis students also posted a petition online that has collected nearly 600 signatures in support of the year-round school calendar.
“It’s not about me or about my opportunities,” Avery said. “I’ve been able to take advantage of all the opportunities that they have. I just feel like it’s unfair that the future students wouldn’t have the same opportunities as me just because of funding.”
As it is now, Davis’s year-round calendar has about three more weeks of class over the summer compared with CMSD’s traditional school calendar.
Davis has specialized programs to teach students how to operate boats and airplanes. Many students earn pilot and captain licenses by the time they graduate, Avery said. Those programs rely on the good weather during the school’s extra weeks in the summer.
The licenses and hands-on experiences help students land internships while still in high school, Avery said.
Kylie Turney is finishing up her last year at Davis, but she’s worried about the students who will come after her. She puts her education above everything else, she said, and she sees that same dedication in a lot of the younger classmates that she has mentored.
“I care deeply about them and their education,” she said. “The things that they’re passionate about are getting taken away from them, and they’re scared to use their voice.”
Can schools still provide specialized programs on a traditional school calendar?
CMSD Board of Education Member Nigamanth Sridhar said he had some concerns about cutting the alternative calendars during a recent board meeting.
“I just want to clarify that what we are talking about is we are taking away some autonomy from school leaders as we are doing this, making this transition occur,” Sridhar said.
District CEO Warren Morgan said leaders and teachers at schools with alternative calendars could find ways to work their extra programs into a traditional school calendar. The district will give schools curriculum timelines for core subjects such as math, reading and science. Each school’s leaders have the final say on exactly 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, 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.
