Cleveland Abandons Small Schools in Favor of Boosting Larger High Schools

Cleveland Abandons Small Schools in Favor of Boosting Larger High Schools

Patrick O’Donnell

Fri, December 5, 2025 at 11:30 AM UTC

9 min read

Cleveland’s MC2STEM High School was once the crown jewel of a failing and nearly bankrupt school district — an “island of excellence,” as officials once crowed, in a system in danger of state takeover.

Launched in 2008, MC2STEM attracted the city’s best students to classrooms in locations ranging from Cleveland’s science museum, the world headquarters of GE Lighting, and at a local community and a commuter college.

The small school with an enrollment of 218 students even caught the eye 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 change in district priorities away from the small schools model that was once popular nationally, MC2STEM won’t exist anymore. Instead, it’s being 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 reduction of schools in Cleveland as ever-declining enrollment forces budget cuts. The cuts come as the district also changes its philosophy from highlighting a few star high schools to keep strong students from fleeing, instead shifting toward offering more opportunities at all high schools.

“I kind of see this as an ending for the school that I knew,” said Feowyn McKinnon, the school’s principal from 2015 to 2021, who believes turning MC2STEM into a program inside a standard school will damage it.

With the cuts, Cleveland is reversing the once-popular movement in districts across the country of carving up big schools into smaller schools that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his foundation once promoted and funded. Cleveland adopted the small schools approach heavily in the early 2000’s as well as the similar “portfolio” school district model that downplays large, standardized schools in favor of offering students a choice of many schools with different approaches.

But the tide has turned against the small schools movement with Gates shifting his support in other directions several years ago and Cleveland now facing both budget troubles and a desire to make schools big enough to offer more language electives and career training classes.

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Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education that promoted the portfolio district model across the country, said districts shifted away from small, specialized schools to save money before the pandemic, then moved further from the model by seeking standardized ways to recover.

“I don’t think it’s an educational decision so much as just the financial pressures on districts to find ways to keep operating,” he said. “As everybody gets bled out of money, one way to do that is to eliminate an administrative layer from a school and call it a program. I don’t think people have come to the conclusion that great big schools are better than smaller ones.”

In Cleveland, the school board is expected to vote Dec. 9 to fold 27 high schools, many of them small specialized schools of fewer than 300 students, into 14 large comprehensive high schools.

If the plan passes, several specialized high schools — including MC2STEM, two early college high schools, two schools that teach medicine by partnering with hospitals; and an aviation and maritime school helping students earn pilot licenses — will all become programs within large combined schools.

Along with closing 16 preK-8 schools, the changes are estimated to save about $30 million a year by slashing administrative and building costs.

Cleveland district CEO Warren Morgan has cast the changes as a matter of both money and equity after cutting extra school days and year-round classes at several schools.

“Right now, we have pockets of excellence,” said Morgan. “We have some schools that have programs, some that don’t. We offer some things at some schools, but we don’t offer them at others. Now is a time for us 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 and Rust Belt cities, has been losing students for years. The Cleveland school district had 115,000 students in 1979 before several factors — court-ordered busing to integrate schools, white flight, suburbanization, creation of one of the country’s first voucher programs and then the growth of charter schools — cut enrollment to about 34,000 today.

Though the district has closed buildings several times over the years, it now estimates schools have space for 50,000 students — about 16,000 too many.

Former district CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who had been involved in creating small schools in New York City and later became CEO of Chicago schools, enthusiastically adopted the approach in the early 2000s. Then longtime CEO Eric Gordon, who ran the district from 2011 to 2023, aggressively created small high schools with distinct themes, ranging from project-based schools to one built around students creating digital artwork, music or video games.

That gave 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 justify always having sports teams, Advanced Placement classes, foreign language options and — as a recent focus of the district and state — full career pathways that let students earn valuable career credentials.

Morgan now wants all high schools to have at least 500 students and promises to add career training teachers and classes so that all schools can offer career pathways recognized by the state.

It’s why the 218 student MC2STEM is merging into the 475 student East Technical High School, and why the district is undoing a major Gates-funded project that split the old, large John Hay High School in the early 2000’s into three magnet schools that now have 211, 259 and 375 students. They’ll all be turned into programs next fall of a re-combined school that will also add a fourth 207-student high school to the mix.

The changes could have drawbacks. The magnet schools at John Hay have been district leaders in test scores and college enrollment for years and have been a significant draw to families, particularly the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine, which has students learning from staff of the nearby Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital and Case Western Reserve University medical school.

Morgan pledges to maintain those partnerships, though whether becoming a program instead of remaining its own school will be just a bookkeeping change or whether it will dilute the program remains to be seen.

Students aren’t sure yet about the changes.

Ruby Love, a freshman at the School of Science and Medicine where 375 students are enrolled, said it mattered that her school was focused on medicine when she chose it. She’s not excited about having the three schools mix 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 offers only Latin as a second language and the merger could let her take Spanish, or even engineering classes.

Eri’elle Jones, another Science and Medicine student, also likes the possibility of taking Spanish so the change has some appeal.

“I don’t have an issue with it,” she said. “It gives you a lot more opportunities”

Bekah Lejarde, a teacher at another small high school that will be merged into two others, said smaller schools help students and opposes combining the three into a 1,400-student school. The three schools already share the John Marshall High School, but their distinct themes and personalized approach has boosted graduation rates in the 10 years since opening.

She told the school board that the merger might save the district $250,000, at most.

“Is that amount of money worth a declining graduation rate?” Lejarde asked. “Is $250,000 worth a diminished learning environment, less support, increased safety issues and an easier ability for scholars to fall through the cracks?”

Another merging school, the Benjamin O. Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School, is cautiously hopeful its program — started to prepare students for careers in aviation and Great Lakes shipping — will stay strong and maintain a distinct identity. An industry non-profit called Argonaut that helped start the school in 2017 wants “aerospace” and “maritime” to stay in the name, even as it merges with a digital arts school.

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“The two sides of the name are: One is getting buy-in from industries. As this is a school specifically about these industries,you know we’re connecting to the jobs,” said Andrew Ferguson, CEO of Argonaut, who is at the school constantly, taking students onto Lake Erie on boats or helping them with flight lessons. “The other is getting kids to show up at the door. When you go to a school called aerospace and maritime, you’re pretty clear what the expectation is and where you’re going.”

Cleveland’s MC2STEM High School has freshmen take classes at the city’s science museum, but budget cuts will turn the once high-flying school into just a program inside a neighborhood high school 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 conceded having duplicate teachers at the school’s multiple sites is costly, along with the $80,000 she recalls the school spending on parking at the science museum and at Cleveland State University each year.

The former crown jewel school has also lost some of its shine. Test scores fell to the middle of the pack in recent years as the district added more specialty schools and the best students picked other options.

“If money is the issue that schools are closing, it 100% makes sense that MC2 is closing,” she said. “There were always so many additional expenses related to MC2 that every year I thought we were on the chopping block.”

Cleveland Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski agreed some schools need to close, but worried that the district is rushing the changes for next school year without carefully planning how combining the schools will work..

“When you take a building where you have these schools that have been ranked not only highly in the district, but in the state, and then you’re just going to kind of blow it up without an idea of how you’re putting it back together, that’s concerning,” Obrenski said. “I don’t really want to be building this plane while we’re flying it.”

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