Gadfly Bites 2/25/26—Sounds like you want us to be sorry about that

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1. Only one piece to talk about today, but it’s a good one. Let’s start with the buried lede: The most common re-use of a closed school building in Cleveland Metropolitan School District is reopening as a charter school. Rather than being the point of the story, it is tossed out like someone wants us to be sorry about it, but it happened like that because Ohio law says it’s supposed to happen like that. And despite the wishful thinking of every other word in this piece before and after the dropping of this incontrovertible fact, I believe that it will remain incontrovertibly true following the upcoming round of closures. In fact, the four examples of non-charter reuse included in this piece only bolster my belief. Three buildings and one parcel of vacant land were held onto by the district for many years despite having no further education use for them (can’t happen anymore due to today’s stricter state law). The vacant lot was maintained by the district for years and one of the buildings was turned into a social services incubator space with CMSD as owner and landlord (neither of these will happen this time due to the precarious financial situation of the district which will compel them to sell everything as quickly as possible). And all four of them still required the intervention of one or more entities with taxing authority to get them permanently off CMSD’s books in the end. While the tone of this piece reads like some folks are holding out hope for a white knight or two to swoop in and thwart the charter school scoundrels, I feel like Ohio’s taxing authorities are neither swimming in dough right now nor are looking to take on another drag on their balance sheets. Sorry not sorry. (Signal Cleveland, 2/23/26)

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