Campus International High School students protested outside Cleveland Metropolitan School District's downtown office Monday, expressing deep concern about the future of CMSD's only International Baccalaureate program.
Campus International students and the school's IB program, a rigorous, internationally recognized learning program that has a diploma associated with it, are both being moved to John Hay High School next fall as the district consolidates schools.
Students raised concerns that only four of the eight IB-certified teachers are transferring to John Hay with their students and called on the district to reverse that decision.
"They're important to us because they're teachers that have connected a lot with us," said Campus International Junior Kimberlin Duran. "We've built a friendship aside from our education. And they are teachers who have really impacted us with learning, like digging deeper and explaining how to do something, taking their time and listen to us."
The other four IB teachers are transferring to other schools, CMSD spokesperson Jon Benedict confirmed Monday. However, he said other teachers at John Hay will receive IB training over the summer.
"Next years' students at John Hay will be able to access a full and robust International Baccalaureate program as they're currently doing at Campus (International) High School," Benedict said.
Student, teacher concerns about the future ... and the past
The students said they were concerned that the district could phase out the IB program altogether.
Cleveland Teachers Union President Errol Savage said he shared those concerns.
"I think that this is pretty close to pretty effectively ending a true IB program at John Hay. The (IB) program as we knew it at Campus International High School, I'd say the district's effectively killing it," Savage said, noting he was also concerned about building consolidation affecting other specialty programs like CMSD's Montessori schools.
Campus International teacher Patrick Moorman, who received a transfer notice and will not being going with Campus' students to John Hay, said the district has long considered the IB program an afterthought.
"One of the perceptions of one of the (John Hay) union reps I talked to was, 'Yeah, the IB stuff's cool and all, but it's essentially just AP (advanced placement courses), and we're going to give your seniors IB for one last year and help them get the diploma, but then our hope is that we get to phase it out,'" Moorman said.
Moorman said the IB program's approach is fundamentally different from AP courses.
"The products you create aren't always tests and exams, sometimes they're essays, sometimes there are research studies you do about your community and how to help it and fix it," he explained.
Eric Mentges, the former IB diploma program coordinator at Campus International, left the district several months ago. He said even before the consolidation plan, the IB program had suffered from a lack of support from district leaders. A significant amount of turnover among building principals didn't help.
"We had principals kind of coming and going, we have principals who had no idea what IB even was being put into our school," Mentges said. "They would transfer students from other schools who had been expelled into our IB school and expect us somehow to do this really rigorous program with them. There was just a general lack of understanding of what IB was. They wanted us to follow different curriculums that didn't align with IB."
Mentges acknowledged the IB program can also be expensive to maintain, and few students graduate with an actual IB diploma because of how rigorous it can be. Moorman said teachers had also been given a directive from the district to be far more selective about which students sat for the IB exams due to the cost of administering them.
Benedict, CMSD spokesperson, said the district is not retreating from the IB programming, and wants to see more students graduate with a diploma.
"We are investing significantly in moving the program over to John Hay and expanding it through wider teacher training so that more students have the opportunity to take advantage of it, and ideally so that we see outcome rates increase among students," he said.
On top of moving Campus International students to the school, CMSD is merging all three John Hay programs 鈥� Science and Medicine, Architecture and Design and Early College, which are some of the district's highest-performing schools 鈥� under one umbrella next year. In total, the district will have 29 fewer schools next year and it has sent layoff notices to more than 300 staff as it attempts to right-size itself after years of enrollment losses.
