This time of year always feels a little nostalgic for me. No matter how old I get, a little part of me feels like I should be getting a new pack of pencils at the local K-Mart or deciding whether red is the right folder color for math class.
As I’m thinking back on my own school experiences, I’ve also got my education reporter hat on. My school experiences prepared me well for college and the future. But does it really, truly matter what elementary school or high school you went to?
That question is an important one, especially as schools in Akron, Cleveland and across the country are looking at “right-sizing,” a review process that could involve closing and consolidating schools.
If you look at state report cards, graduation rates and test scores vary widely from district to district, and even building to building, especially in the case of our large urban school districts.
Grades and tests are important, sure; I was able to get a full academic ride to Ohio University in part because I had a high enough GPA at Wooster High School.
But that’s actually just one small part of the puzzle. Before we delve into that more, let’s talk more about my own academic journey.
I grew up in Marietta and I attended the Marietta City School District. Although we had an elementary school closer to our home, I begged my mom to take me to Putnam Elementary School, where I already had friends. She (a stay-at-home mom) eventually acquiesced and drove me to school each day. I later attended Marietta Middle School.
My educational experience was fine, but the quality of facilities left something to be desired. That was largely due to the realities of school funding in Ohio at that time for a small school district. Art class was in a trailer that turned into a sweat box for the first few weeks of school, for example.
Eventually, my family moved to Wooster, where I attended the well-appointed Wooster High School. Wooster is a wealthier community, and the school benefited from RubberMaid's donation of 75 acres for the school to be built in the early 1990s. The school has an indoor pool, indoor track, an ice rink and a media center. Course offerings and extracurriculars were fairly deep, too: AP biology with Mrs. Melanie Vinion almost had me pursuing a career in life sciences!
There are several points I want to make here.
One: Not every school has the same facilities and offerings as Wooster High School, and those features matter. A well-maintained track and a good coach for a motivated student could mean athletic scholarship money for college. Writing for the Wooster Blade — which has its own lab at Wooster High School and a wonderful adviser in Mrs. Kristi Hiner — helped me realize my love of journalism.
To my knowledge, no Cleveland Metropolitan School District high school has its own newspaper.
Two: What goes on outside the classroom matters, too. Some students don’t get steady meals like I did at home, and nutrition affects students’ learning. The existence of lead in substandard housing, a common issue in Cleveland and Akron, can affect children's brain development. And in Akron, roughly 10% of the student population experiences homelessness each year, often bouncing from school to school as they seek stability. These factors make for more challenging circumstances for urban educators and the students they serve.
And three: The quality of a school only matters if you have access to it. I was lucky my mom could drive me to school every day — bus routes be damned — and that my parents were upwardly mobile so I could attend a nice high school. Many families send their kids to the nearest school building, and those don’t always have the nice amenities Wooster High School has.
In Cleveland, students who do make the trek to what their families view as a better school sometimes spend more than an hour on public transit each day to get to and from school.
I say all that to say this: Yes, where you go to school matters. Extracurriculars, facilities and staff you have access to can all inform a student's future career and prospects. But other factors matter a great deal too. Schools can't do everything.
One potential path forward for our large urban school districts as they face these challenges is consolidating buildings so that greater attention and resources can be focused on the buildings that remain. But that’s tricky. Closing a neighborhood’s school can harm the neighborhood’s vitality, as we reported in Akron. Closing a school can also leave an empty shell for a charter school to move in, or push the neighborhood's students to private schools, which would further hasten enrollment declines like those in Cleveland, Akron and other district.
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and CMSD CEO Warren Morgan have both said the district will need to adjust its “footprint” to better serve students. I’ve been digging into what that means for CMSD's portfolio of schools, and I hope to have an in-depth story for you to read in the coming weeks.
I hope the result of these school districts looking inward is that every student has the chance to thrive in a school that has great facilities, plenty of opportunities and caring teachers and advisers, like Mrs. Hiner, who inspire them to pursue a career that fulfills them.
Got thoughts about the subject? Drop me a line at cmorris@ideastream.org.
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