The school board of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District voted this week to lay off 10 percent of its 8,000 employees, including 545 teachers.?? Particularly hard hit will be the district's ten ???innovation schools.????? Reported the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
The seniority-based layoffs would knock out scores of newer teachers, who were handpicked for 10 district innovation schools created in recent years.
Chief Executive Officer Eugene Sanders said the single-gender and other specialty schools could lose half of their staffs. A science, technology, engineering and math high school, Design Lab Early College, would lose all of its teachers.
Those specialty schools are where the district has seen the kind of academic success it hopes to replicate through a sweeping ???transformation plan??? to be implemented next school year.
A representative of the George Gund Foundation, which together with the Cleveland Foundation has invested millions in the innovation schools, encouraged residents to call state lawmakers and demand a change to the state's last-hired, first-fired law for teachers.?? Certainly that's a needed reform, but even if the General Assembly repealed the law tomorrow, it would still be too late for Cleveland.?? But that doesn't mean the situation is hopeless for the innovation schools.
In May 2007, after the failure of local levy, Dayton Early College Academy (DECA) faced a similar fate.?? The district needed to make major cuts to its teaching force and many of DECA's teachers were low on the seniority totem pole and would have lost their jobs.?? In that case, the district converted the school to a charter school.?? It took skillful, and fast, legal maneuvering ??? and a change in state law ??? to convert the school before the following school year, but the effort was worthwhile.?? DECA's doors stayed open, and more importantly, stayed open without changing the staff and programming that make the school work.
CMSD already authorizes several charter schools and the board approved the superintendent's ambitious transformation plan, which includes plans to develop a portfolio of schools and turn some district schools over to charter operators. Could Cleveland use the charter mechanism to save its most promising schools?
???Emmy Partin
