As the bell rings at Collinwood High School on a gray, windy day in May, students trickle out of the front doors for what is likely one of the final times in the 100-year-old school's history.
Standing on the front lawn of the 5.4-acre school that occupies a whole city block, Head Football Coach Greg Wheeler watches the students leave for the summer with some apprehension. He's lived in and around Collinwood his whole life, and he wonders what will happen to the working-class Northeast Side neighborhood after Collinwood High School closes.
"This has been a beacon for the community ever since I can remember. We've always produced quality people, so it's definitely going to be missed as closes its doors," Wheeler said.
Collinwood High School is one of 18 buildings Cleveland Metropolitan School District is closing this fall. In total, the district is merging or closing 29 buildings. The district is also laying off hundreds of staff. Leaders say the cuts are due to a complex legacy of enrollment losses and broader funding issues facing public education. But the move has prompted accusations about who's to blame and how the district got to this point.
And Cleveland’s not alone. Many large urban school districts across the country are shuttering classrooms and cutting teachers this year, from Cleveland to Columbus to Los Angeles.
It's what Georgetown University Research Professor Marguerite Roza calls "the big shrink." She runs the Edunomics Lab, a research center that studies public school finances. She said schools are finding they need to slash their budgets because many have continued hiring staff, despite falling birth rates. Salaries have also continued to increase.
"We have more staff per thousand students than at any time in history. But that's not sustainable," she explained. "Part of that was propped up with temporary federal relief dollars that came around because of post-COVID recovery, and that helped districts add more staff. And then the other factor that's playing out right now is that enrollments are shrinking. There are fewer kids being born into the United States with each additional year. We have fewer kindergartners, fewer first graders, (and) immigration is down."
Cleveland had 32,383 students enrolled as of fall 2025. Its enrollment has dropped significantly over the last half-century, mirroring the city's loss of population over the decades.
'Who's getting fired?'
In Cleveland, the cuts and consolidation plans approved by the board of education under CMSD CEO Warren Morgan, hired in 2023, have sparked protest and harsh criticism of the district.
But even before the consolidation plan was even hinted at, Morgan appeared at Cleveland City Council. In early 2024, he was questioned about cuts the district had approved and a $160-million-plus deficit it was facing.
"Where's the accountability? Who's getting fired? Who's getting fired for doing this to our kids?" Councilmember Richard Starr charged, singling out Morgan and former CEO Eric Gordon, alleging that the district had mishandled pandemic relief funds.
In the time since, Starr has softened his stance on Morgan. In a comment before City Council on April 20, he said Morgan was left holding the bag, arguing district leaders for "decades" had made poor decisions.
"No, I'm not pointing the blame at anybody, or anyone, but I know that if we're going to think that Mayor Bibb and Dr. Morgan want to layoff 410 teachers, I just think that is not the truth," Starr said. "I think for decades at a time, people have not been held accountable when it comes to education within our children within our schools."
Gordon oversaw a period of academic improvement and major investment in CMSD under the Cleveland Plan, with two levies passed and city partners creating new scholarship programs and investments in early childhood education. In his final State of the City address in 2022, Gordon said the district was in good shape.
"CMSD is healthy, strong and strategically well positioned in a way we haven't been for decades. Moreover, the district is uniquely prepared to accelerate the momentum we've built together and to face new challenges in the short few years ahead."
Marguerite Roza at Georgetown's Edunomics Lab was watching the district's spending from afar.
"What we've noticed is that Cleveland was on this trajectory for actually a number of years, of being forced into doing this big cut," she said. "You could see it in the five-year forecast even three years ago before the superintendent change. And I don't think the community had grappled with the numbers that were literally right there in these budgets that were being approved."
CMSD's five-year forecast submitted to the state in November 2022 projected a $32 million deficit by the end of the 2025-2026 school year.
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb's office didn't respond to a request for comment. In a February 2024, Bibb said the mayor's office and Gordon had discussed a upcoming deficit and the need for a levy. But Bibb also said the depth of the district's financial troubles weren't made clear until Morgan came into office.
Current Board Chair Sara Elaqad, who also sat on the board under Gordon's tenure from 2019 to 2022, defended Gordon, Morgan and board's decision-making in an interview with Ideastream.
"We're operating within the constraints of the state funding system and the shifts that have happened within our student population over 20 years, and I can understand how it's hard for people to accept it or to agree... with the decisions, but, these are hard decisions that I can't imagine anybody else would want to be making," she said.
Gordon didn't respond to a request for comment for this story. Former CMSD Board Chair Anne Bingham declined an interview.
Meanwhile, a grassroots effort is growing to change the district back to an elected school board, after almost 30 years of a mayoral-appointed system. Even beyond the recent cuts, parents and teachers have expressed concern about administrative spending and compensation and the district's use of consultants.
A recent state audit found the district spent too much on administration, suggesting it should cut more than 75 administrators. State records show CMSD spent about 16% of its budget on administrative costs in the 2024-2025 school year, about $131.3 million dollars. That's up considerably from $69.7 million on administrative spending for the 2012-2013 school year, when it was about 12% of CMSD's budget.
A neighborhood and school's fates that are interlinked
Greg Wheeler has coached the Collinwood High School Railroaders for more than 20 seasons across different sports. During that time, he's watched as students have left Collinwood and CMSD. He recalls a high school that had robust career-tech training programs and more than a thousand students when he graduated in 1989. In the 2025-2026 school year, meanwhile, Collinwood had just shy of 100 students showing up on a daily basis. Wheeler said car lifts go unused, a metalworking shop had been turned into a weightlifting room and an Olympic-sized pool sits in disrepair.
As we talk outside the school, Wheeler points down St. Clair Avenue to shuttered factories and once-busy railyards that made the neighborhood hum with life for decades. He said the neighborhood, like much of Cleveland, is the victim of several factors stretching back decades: industries leaving the city, white flight and suburbanization.
"They (students) say, 'I got to leave here,'" Wheeler said. "They're telling me that as a seventh and an eighth grader, 'I have to leave here. There's nothing here. I don't like vacant lots next to my house. I don't like the vacant lot at the end of my street. I don't have a good grocery store to go to.' I have young kids telling me. So when young kids tell me that, what do you think their parents are saying?"
Cleveland's population was 930,000 at its height in 1950. Now, it's a little more than a third of that.
But beyond that, even a brief glance through recent historical records shows a district dipping in and out of crisis points. A federal judge declared Cleveland schools to be segregated in 1976. Families, meanwhile, left the system in droves after that order and as court-mandated busing began in earnest in 1979 to address segregation. In the years that followed, the district struggled to pass levies and saw a revolving door of leaders and school board members.
With the 1990s came top-down attempts at reform: a state takeover in 1995 and orders to close schools and a state law change in 1997 to allow Cleveland's mayor to appoint school board members. The Ohio Legislature also opened the door in the '90s to school choice. New laws established both public "community schools," charter schools run by private and non-profit entities, and a private-school voucher system, which got its start in Cleveland. The voucher program has been expanded rapidly into a more than $1 billion per year state subsidy, while charter schools have spread throughout Cleveland.
Finally, there were also waves of building closures and layoffs over the years under different leaders, including former CEOs Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Eugene Sanders and Eric Gordon.
Cleveland Councilmember Mike Polensek has long represented the Collinwood neighborhood. He feels like the city and the school district have abandoned his neighborhood, especially after the latest round of school closures that targeted several low-enrolled schools in his neighborhood.
"I've got people moving out of my neighborhood. I got parents putting their children in charter schools, who are putting them in the Euclid system because it's open enrollment, putting kids in Shaw (High School) or schools in East Cleveland because of open enrollment. And I told the mayor this was gonna happen. I told Dr. Morgan, 'I'm on the edge. My ward is on the edges of the city.' I have 11 charters. And parochial schools on the edge either in my neighborhood or on the edge and I told them this was going to happen," he said during an April board meeting.
What about vouchers and state funding?
On a quiet side street in Glenville near the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, longtime Cleveland educator Meryl Johnson sits on a swing set outside Stonebrook-White Montessori School. It's a school she's subbed at for years, and that she attended herself as a girl, back when it was still Miles Standish Elementary.
It's also another school the district is closing in the fall.
Johnson, a former director of community engagement for the Cleveland Teachers Union, lives and breathes public education. She's taught for 40 years, and also served on the State Board of Education of Ohio.
She says it's a mistake to blame the closure of Stonebrook-White Montessori, or any other Cleveland school, on local officials.
"I said, 'no, no no, we don't blame school board members, look to Columbus,'" she said. "Those are the folks who have not funded schools the way they promised that they would."
Legislators created the Fair School Funding Plan in 2021, but, advocates like Johnson charge they reneged on a promise by not fully funding the formula in the latest state budget. The formula is currently bases the cost of education on old estimates. For CMSD, the means missing out on almost $160 million over the next two years, according to one analysis. Meanwhile, the state has been shifting the burden of school funding onto residential property owners through tax cuts to businesses, according to one study by the Ohio Education Policy Institute.
Johnson volunteers with a statewide advocacy coalition called Honesty for Ohio Education, which launched a campaign recently showing the cost of vouchers on the school system. She said the state's embrace of charter schools and vouchers has siphoned off both money and students from public schools. She said she believes systemic racism is a hidden factor, alleging the state has attempted to starve public schools that serve large populations of Black and minority students of funding.
"When you look at why vouchers started in the first place, the claim was to give poor families an opportunity to pick and choose, but it was really about dismantling the public school system. And that's where majority black people have been able to be educated," Johnson said.
Cleveland Teachers Union President Errol Savage agreed that, for the most part, the blame lies elsewhere.
"We have state legislators that are salivating and laughing, listening to people blame a previous superintendent or a previous board. What this is is a system of state funding, which causes us to try and operate on minimal standards rather than the gold standard for students," Savage said.
However, he said there's a final factor to consider: the significant tax abatements the city provides to juice new development costs CMSD millions each year. A Signal Cleveland analysis found that from 2017 to 2023, the district lost out on an estimated $28.8 million a year.
What does the future hold?
Cleveland Schools CEO Warren Morgan has repeatedly said that while CMSD's "Building Brighter Futures" consolidation plan will mean short-term pain, there will be an actual brighter future on the horizon.
"There's a lot we've got wrong and a lot at the hands of students who are students of color or students living in poverty. So we have every right and every responsibility to do what's right for those scholars and provide them the strongest opportunity, whether that's popular or not," he said during a City Club of Cleveland forum on the plan this spring.
He said by the time students begin attending newly consolidated schools next fall, students will have equal or better access to extracurriculars like art and music, sports, AP courses, college classes and career exploration programs. The hope is for every neighborhood to have a quality public school, compared to the previous landscape, with dozens of low-enrolled buildings that did not have enough students to support those offerings, Morgan has said.
At the same time, Morgan has said the consolidation plan isn't the entire solution. The district's latest five-year forecast shows it's almost $30 million in the red by the end of the 2028-2029 school year, despite a levy approved in November 2024. He's said the district needs a champion at the state level to get more funding.
Meanwhile, Collinwood Coach Greg Wheeler expected the district will continue to face new challenges, beyond the initial implementation of the consolidation plan. The city's population isn't growing, especially in his neighborhood. School closures might exacerbate that problem, creating a vicious cycle of families leaving with more schools closing in their wake.
"There may be more consolidations and closing before it's all said and done. I don't think that this is the end. Levies are gonna come into play, some other things are gonna have to happen," Wheeler said. "And I'm not sure that the community has the appetite for all that right now. And hurting our kids is the worst thing that we can possibly do. We're really stretching our our resources and our children thin by asking them to go to far away schools and neighborhoods they're not familiar which is bringing a lot of trepidation to the parents and just the community.
"It just disrupts the stability of the community."
