Phil Florian wrote:This is an amazingly hot and contentious topic and there was a certifiable guarantee that one group of people would be ridiculously upset and one would breath a sigh of relief.
Hi Phil,
I suppose what is most upsetting at this moment was the complete lack of accountability to parents and the community at large from the School Board for their decision and the way the Phase III members were treated, coupled with the loss of the ONLY TWO Blue Ribbon schools in our community in one week. (Sts Cyril and Methodius was the other Blue Ribbon elementary school that closed.) Grant is also rated Excellent-- one of only two elementary schools in Lakewood that rate that high. Grant has built up a team over time, kind of like a Fortune 500 company, to handle all of their many and diverse challenges and they are great at what they do, with all different kinds and levels of children and families.
Every time we brought up Grant's Excellence, and Blue Ribbon status, especially in the light of Grant's immigrant population and economically challenged students, the Board stared at us as if we had not spoken. How about a little recognition for Excellence huh? Is it important at all? How excellent must the teachers and staff at that school be, with almost 60 percent poverty, one in ten kids speaking English as a second language? Grant is a veritable factory for transforming threatened kids into productive Lakewood students, who go on to do well in middle school and high school. Grant is like Sesame Street, which is kind of like a microcosm of Lakewood: middleclass homeowning two parent families, working in the medical, legal, business professions, young artists and musician couples with kids, single parent contractors with snowplows, grandmas each renting their half of a double, with families up and down, people from different cultures from all over the world, from as close as Cleveland, as far away as Syria. What District in its right mind, with the kind of challenges we face with our student population, in tough economic times, would close a school like this? Without batting an eye. Without a MENTION of how Excellent it is according to the State of Ohio. This is the kind of school people pray for in a city as diverse as ours. According to the School Board, ALL of Lakewood's schools are excellent. Well, that's a great goal, but that's not the case by the State rankings.
Every time the School Board tries to look like they're accountable they trip up again. We need a walkable school community, says Ed Favre on Day One of Phase Three. "Walkability." Sounds accountable to me. Uhhh. No. We were actually told by one Coordinating Council member that "distance" was a "personal matter to be dealt with by individual families." Huh? Much longer distances through each of the most dangerous intersections Ed Favre himself defined, and this was this past December. Safety is very important to us, he said, let's try this one, this one sounds accountable. We will account for the children's safety. Uhhh no. We'll send them walking through every dangerous intersection and train track in Lakewood. Try again. Betsy Shaughnessy said "she would listen to what the community brought to the table at the September Community Forum" when no-one in the community brought
anything to the Forum. The Community wasn't even allowed a question and answer period. Almost all the Phase 3 Committee's findings were repressed, and Kirsten Senger acting alone and in the face of many complaints from Phase 3 Committee members, repressed and marginalized information it took us six months to gather and replaced it with a completely unexamined "criterion", "Best for Re-use."
Grant "won" that one. Based solely on the fact that it is in the center of Lakewood, halfway down two residential streets, also in the center of the densest population of housing and families in Lakewood. No Sub-Committee studied it, no-one could even define "re-use." But that was the main "criterion", and all the other information was GONE-- the information that the Community had ENTRUSTED us to find, and we did! The Phase 3 Committee was accountable. Even if our "leaders" were not. Even if under Ed Favre's watchful eye, ALMOST ALL OF OUR FINDINGS DISAPPEARED. That and the fact that the new "best for re-use" "criterion" was leaked to Lincoln school, and their PTA and others (of course not all, much of Lincoln's population-- teachers, kids, families-- have nothing to do with all of this deception) and the tables were carefully stacked with people parroting "best-reuse" and NOT ALLOWING people to disagree with them by scrambling the definition of "consensus" and convincing people they had to "vote." Even then, Lincoln didn't "win." There were at least as many "undecideds" and "no consensus" (for those tables that insisted that they DID KNOW what "consensus" means) and "no preference."
Well that was terrible, a Forum highjacked like that. There were many complaints. In fact, all the leadership of Phase 3 agreed, including the Lincoln fans, there could be NO RECOMMENDATION based on that Forum. This is why Phase 3 didn't use the "findings" from that Forum. Not because we were incompetent, but because we were competent, and accountable. Those findings were completely discredited and lacked all legitimacy so we didn't use them.
Well, who was accountable for what happened there? Why didn't Ed Favre step in? He was there the whole time, he saw what happened. And we know Betsy Shaughnessy must have known. Unless she didn't talk to her husband, because he was on the Phase 3 committee.
So, the School Board tried to be accountable again. They examined the claims made about the September Community Forum at a special work session in November: information hidden or marginalized, tables stacked with people who had a pre-meeting strategy to confuse and control the vote, last minute "information" brought to the Community by people with their own agenda, AS IF it had the legitimacy of having been studied and researched by the community-staffed Phase 3 Committee, effectively putting us in the position of LYING to our own community, our own neighbors, our own fellow parents; even one person who testified that when a table "voted" for Grant, the person taking the dot up the Tally Board, put it on Lincoln anyway. Anything that could be corrupted, was corrupted, no stone unturned. It was mess and a farce. The School Board presented all of the complaints. They were written up on sheets of paper around the room. What were they going to do about it? Nothing! Were they going to examine how this could have happened? No! Were they even going to acknowledge that something had gone terribly wrong there, and that the Community never even got a chance to see the data they had ASKED FOR? No! They stared at the pieces of paper. They moved on! No accountability.
But the very best moment of the September Forum Charade came at the February 1st School Board meeting, just two weeks before the Board decided to vote to close Grant for NO REASON...
Board President Shaughnessy, as I mentioned above, said she was basing her decision on WHAT WAS SAID AT THE SEPTEMBER 15th COMMUNITY FORUM. She said that they could not discount WHAT THE COMMUNITY BROUGHT UP, WHAT THEY CARED ABOUT. I'll say it again. The Community brought nothing up. Kirsten Senger did. I don't know why. I'm not aware of all the politics going on here. I know Kirsten Senger was on the short list for people to appoint to the School Board last year. I'm not sure why this was allowed to happen.
It was an appalling moment for this School Board and this community. Lying, hiding, and manipulating. And that's the moment Mrs. Shaughnessy is basing her decision on? Board Member Linda Beebe also cited the "findings" of the September Forum, as something that influenced her decision. That and her belief that a Rec Center should be placed on Grant property, "if we can't sell it", even though by law it can't be "sold" to private concerns, even though in her own words, the Lincoln site is poor for rebuilding. What gives? What kind of excellence in reasoning, or thinking, is that? Not to mention how that thinking hinders excellence in our schools. And accountability? Well, that as a goal seems about as far away to these Board members as the moon in this process. No, that's not completely true. Mr. Markling keeps trying to be accountable. The others keep acting as if he's a pariah when he talks about putting a school near where the greatest number of kids live and where it's safest to walk. What's wrong with him? He must be insane! Stop being accountable, Mr. Markling!
The people of Lakewood wanted to make sure we kept schools near kids, kept kids safe, made sure they had the shortest and safest access to schools, and a chance at equitable class sizes, which could only be accomplished by putting schools in the right places, including one in the center that kept all the others accessible, walking-distance-wise. Otherwise, class sizes will get huge at some schools, but other schools will be too far away to do anything about it. Only a central school gives us "wiggle room." We used criteria that the citizens of Lakewood came up with, and one school came in first. It was Grant, and apparently that was the wrong answer and it had been all along.
If this School Board didn't want a real answer, why did they form the Committee in the first place? The Community asked us to use real criteria and we did. What is the School Board using? Are they going to give us back a year of our lives? Or will they continue to stare back at us?
This community did an excellent job of choosing criteria that would protect our children's ability to get an education. And the Phase 3 committee did an excellent job of rounding up all that data, until it was snatched away. For those that have stated that Phase 3 data was flawed, it was re-checked by the School Board itself, new data was gathered, and all of it agreed with the data the Committee originally found.
And let's look at this "Best Re-use" thing. Just recently Lakewood Alive sent out fliers trying to attract new families to the Downtown footprint; how upsetting it must be for them to have the only school that could service those new residents, and the only Blue Ribbon School in our public school system be closed, right when the area and the city needs it most. Sure it's great to be able to walk to Downtown but not if you plan on having children. Then you're going to be walking a lot further than that. Maybe Lakewood Alive is too embarrassed by the shortsitedness of the School Board to bring that up. New homeowners! New families! No schools! Oops. School is far far away. As if education were an embarrassment. This new and shining Downtown of the future should hold its head high. It deserves a beautiful library, a beautiful school. Beautiful accessible homes. They all go so well together. Lakewood Alive and the Chamber of Commerce came in strong supporting this spring's school levy. They are acknowledging how important schools are to families and the future of Lakewood. They should see if they can get the School Board on the same page.
Our elected School Board has decided to turn their backs on even a modicum of accountability, disrespecting Lakewood tax payers so much that they never even bothered to explain why they did what they did. The Community asked real questions, they need real answers: real accountablity. This decision is too important to the future of our city and our children. Lakewood's children-- all of them-- ARE its future.
I pray that after this farce, this complete insult to the people of Lakewood, and the hardworking members of the committee, that this Board never mentions accountability and transparency again unless they are able, in any way, to demonstrate what those words mean.
Please support the levy. Together we can figure this out. We need our schools to be strong and to have people running them who can prove that they care about education. If those people aren't there now, there are so many admirable people in Lakewood who care about this city, and will step up and make responsible decisions. Many of them were on the Phase 3 Committee; I was very impressed with them, and proud of my neighbors and my community. I learned a lot from them. They proved to me that all of this effort is worth it.
Betsy Voinovich