Gadfly Bites 5/21/25—Steamed

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1. In my steamed opinion, there are no good reasons to operate a school building at half-capacity or less and lots of excellent reasons to act immediately to merge/close/right-size your buildings to keep that from happening, especially if your reasoning focuses on how best to serve students. Cleveland Metropolitan School District is sidling hesitantly up to the starting line of a right-sizing process, with (I think) some key leaders ready to start chopping. But they are having to do so without upsetting a sizeable and vocal contingent of others; hence the sidling. What’s apparent in this piece, however, is that the non-closure folks (school staffers and parents who also happen to be staffers) have zero hard evidence to back up their position and so resort to speculative rhetoric and supposition, the contentless hot air of which takes up the majority of this piece. It’s not super doomy yet, since district leaders are still hedging about what the closure process will look like, but I have no doubt it will get there quick if and when the hedging ends. And while the adults sidle and hedge and speculate, we hear clearly and directly from a graduating senior already affected by the unsupportable—yet lingering—status quo. Straight-A student Angelina Vaughn tells us that not only is her half-empty high school unable to offer AP courses or extracurriculars—a cold hard fact that has demonstrably limited her college acceptances—the adults in charge don’t even seem to care. “My teachers weren’t very supportive of my academic dreams, either,” Vaughn tells us in paragraph four of this story. “My guidance counselor told me to actually stop looking for schools that were more selective.” In my now-extremely-steamed opinion, the piece should have stopped right there and spared us all the remaining 1,035 worthless words. The ironclad case for right-sizing has already been made. (Signal Cleveland, 5/20/25)
   
   

2. Unlike the above, which is clear-cut and honest, here’s a different piece about school closure that requires some reading between the lines to get to the truth. For the last 10 years, Avon City Schools has used an entire decommissioned elementary school building to house its elected school board. Yep. That’s it. Seven members, some staff, and a copier. It is, obviously, too large and expensive a space for such minimal usage, but the law says (even if it isn’t spelled out here or in any other coverage of the facilities shenanigans going on up there) that this has kept the space “active” as an “education use” and thus the district has not been required to sell or lease it (to, say, a charter school operator who might want it for its intended use) for lo these many years. Well, the financial chickens must have finally come home to roost in Avon because this week we learned that the school board is ready to right-size themselves into a corner of some other active district building and, at last, declare this an unused school facility. But thanks to a loophole in Ohio’s school facilities law, sale to a charter school a general sale can be avoided because Avon’s elected City Council is, serendipitously, ready to swoop in and buy the building from the district once they finish shaking out the couch cushions for the pocket change required. Avon City Hall is apparently bursting at the seams at just the right time for the deep-pocketed city to be ready to pay up (and getting a pretty sweet-sounding deal unconnected from any appraisal or actual market potential) after talking about it (waaaa we only have one conference room waaaa) for years. The cover term everyone is using in print here is “preservation”. The building needs to be “preserved” and the city government is obviously the only possible buyer who would do that on the district’s terms…even though it sounds like some potentially-expensive renovations will be required to make it fit for the city to actually use. But why let such realities get in the way of a sweet, back-scratching deal, eh? (The Chronicle-Telegram, 5/20/25)
   
   

3. I have to admit I had never heard of the Ohio Association for Pupil Transportation before this week. How did this niche-y, apparently Methuselan (active since the 60s) advocacy organization blip onto my radar now? By issuing a faceless, nameless, voiceless press release in regard to the student transportation mess in Dayton that got picked up by one equally niche-y national organization. While OAPT is new to the fray, they are tiresomely echoing the same local voices saying the same unhelpful things and trying to pass the same old buck to someone else. Meanwhile, the students of Dayton get nothing new to help them travel safely to and from school every day. How APT. (School Transportation News, 5/19/25)

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