MC from Cleveland2The STEM high school was once the crown jewel of a declining and near-bankrupt school district — an “island of excellence,” as officials once sang, in a system in danger of a state takeover.
Released in 2008, MC2STEM has drawn the city’s best students into classrooms in locations ranging from the Cleveland Science Museum, the world headquarters of GE Lighting, to a local community and commuter college.
The small school, with an enrollment of 218 students, even caught the attention of former President Barack Obama, who included it in a 2014 slideshow with the caption: “We need more schools like: MC2STEM High School.”
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But next fall, as part of budget cuts and a shift in district priorities away from the small-school model that was once popular nationally, MC2STEM will no longer exist. Instead, it is turned into just a STEM program at a high school in the poorest neighborhood in the city.
The school is the most dramatic casualty in a major reorganization and downsizing of Cleveland schools as declining enrollment forces budget cuts. The cuts come as the district also changes its philosophy from singling out a few star high schools to keep strong students from fleeing, instead offering more opportunities at all high schools.
“I see this as an end to the school that I knew,” said Feowyn McKinnon, the school’s principal from 2015 to 2021, who believes he is transforming MC2STEM in a program within a standard school will damage it.
With the cuts, Cleveland is reversing a once-popular move in districts across the country to break large schools into smaller schools that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his foundation once promoted and funded. Cleveland largely adopted the small-school approach in the early 2000s, as well as the similar “portfolio” school district model, which minimizes large, standardized schools in favor of offering students a range of schools with different approaches.
But the tide has turned against the small school movement, with Gates shifting his support in other directions a few years ago, and Cleveland is now grappling with both budget issues and a desire to make the schools big enough to offer more language electives and career training courses.
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Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education that has pushed the portfolio district model across the country, said districts moved away from small, specialized schools to save money before the pandemic, then moved away from the model, looking for standardized ways to recover.
“I don’t think it’s an educational decision, just financial pressures on districts to find ways to keep operating,” he said. “As everybody loses money, one way to do that is to remove an administrative layer from a school and call it a program. I don’t think people have come to the conclusion that big big schools are better than smaller schools.”
In Cleveland, the school board will vote Dec. 9 to split 27 high schools, many of them small specialty schools with fewer than 300 students, into 14 large high schools.
If the plan passes, more specialized high schools — including MC2STEM, two early high schools, two schools that teach medicine through partnership with hospitals; and an aviation and maritime school that helps students obtain pilot licenses – all will become programs within the combined large schools.
With 16 preK-8 schools closing, the changes are expected to save about $30 million a year by reducing administrative and construction costs.
Cleveland district CEO Warren Morgan touted the changes as both a matter of money and capital after cutting extra school days and year-round classes at several schools.
“Right now, we have pockets of excellence,” Morgan said. “We have some schools that have programs, some that don’t. We offer some things at some schools, but we don’t at others. Now is the time to figure out what we can do for all. Not for some, but for all.”
Part of Morgan’s goal is efficiency. The district, like others in older cities and the Rust Belt, has been losing students for years. The Cleveland school district had 115,000 students in 1979, before several factors — court-ordered school busing, white flight, suburbanization, the creation of one of the nation’s first voucher programs and then the rise of charter schools — reduced enrollment to about 34,000 today.
Although the district has closed buildings several times over the years, the schools are now estimated to have room for 50,000 students — about 16,000 too many.
The district’s former CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who was involved in creating small schools in New York City and later became CEO of Chicago Schools, enthusiastically embraced the approach in the early 2000s. Then longtime CEO Eric Gordon, who led the district from 2011 to 2023, aggressively created small high schools with distinct themes, from project-based schools to one built around students creating works of art digital, music or video games.
This has given Cleveland many small high schools with fewer than 300 students, each with the costs of their own principals and other support staff, but not enough students to always justify the existence of sports teams, Advanced Placement courses, language options, and—as a recent district and state goal—complete career paths that allow students to earn valuable career credentials.
Morgan now wants all high schools to have at least 500 students and promises to add teachers and vocational classes so all schools can offer state-recognized career paths.
That’s why the 218 MC students2STEM merges with 475-student East Technical High School and why the district is canceling a major Gates-funded project that split the grand old John Hay High School in the early 2000s into three magnet schools that now have 211, 259 and 375 students. All will be converted into programs next fall of a recombined school that will also add a fourth 207-student high school to the mix.
Changes could have downsides. John Hay’s magnet schools have been district leaders in test scores and college enrollment for years and have been a significant draw for families, especially for the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine, which has students learning from the staff of the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital and Case Western Reserve University’s medical school.
Morgan is committed to maintaining those partnerships, though it remains to be seen if becoming a program instead of remaining its own school will just be a change in accounting or if it will dilute the program.
Students are not yet sure of the changes.
Ruby Love, a freshman in the School of Science and Medicine, which has an enrollment of 375 students, said it mattered that her school focused on medicine when she chose it. She is not happy about the three schools mixing next year.
“It’s going to be weird being in classes with people I’ve never met,” she said.
At the same time, her school only offers Latin as a second language, and the merger could allow her to take classes in Spanish or even engineering.
Eri’elle Jones, another Science and Medicine student, also likes the opportunity to take Spanish, so the change has some appeal.
“I have no problem with that,” she said. “It gives you a lot more opportunities”
Bekah Lejarde, a teacher at another small high school that will be merged with two others, said smaller schools help students and opposes combining the three into one 1,400-student school. The three schools already share John Marshall High School, but their distinct themes and personalized approach have boosted graduation rates in the 10 years since they opened.
She told the school board the merger could save the district no more than $250,000.
“Is this amount of money worth a declining graduation rate?” asked Lejarde. “Is $250,000 worth a reduced learning environment, less support, increased safety issues, and an easier ability for scholars to slip through the cracks?”
Another merging school, Benjamin O. Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School, is cautiously hopeful that its program — begun to prepare students for careers in Great Lakes aviation and shipping — will remain strong and maintain a distinct identity. An industry nonprofit called Argonaut, which helped found the school in 2017, wants “aerospace” and “maritime” to remain in the name even as it merges with a digital arts school.
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“The two parts of the name are: One is getting buy-in from the industries. Because this is an industry-specific school, you know we’re connecting to jobs,” said Argonaut CEO Andrew Ferguson, who is at the school constantly, taking students out on Lake Erie on boats or helping them with flying lessons. “The other is getting kids to show up in the door. When you go to a school called aerospace and marine, you’re pretty clear about what the expectations are and where you’re going.”
Cleveland’s MC2STEM High School requires freshmen to take classes at the city’s science museum, but budget cuts will turn the once-high-flying school into a neighborhood high school program next year.
Critics of the changes agree with Morgan that the district needs to close schools because some of the specialized schools can be expensive. As protective as McKinnon is about MC2STEM, she acknowledged that having teachers duplicated at multiple school sites is expensive, along with the $80,000 she recalls the school spending for parking at the science museum and Cleveland State University each year.
The former crown jewel school has lost its luster. Test scores have fallen to the middle of the pack in recent years as the district added more specialty schools and top students chose other options.
“If money is the issue schools are closing, it makes 100% sense that MC2 it’s closing,” she said. “There’s always been so much overhead associated with MC2 that every year we thought we were on the chopping block.”
Cleveland Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski agreed that some schools need to close, but is concerned that the district is rushing changes for next school year without carefully planning how the combination of schools will work.
“When you take a building where you have these schools that were ranked not only highly in the district, but highly ranked in the state, and then you’re going to blow it up with no idea how you’re going to put it back together, that’s troubling,” Obrenski said. “I don’t want to build this plane while we’re flying it.”