Polly Karr likes to celebrate what she’s taken to calling April 4th Day.
She christened it two years ago right before the solar eclipse when Warren Morgan, the CEO of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District since July 2023, posted a video from Perk Plaza.
“Are you ready for it to be completely dark in the middle of the day?” Morgan said in the video. That coming Monday, he said, “the moon will go behind the sun and the earth, creating a solar eclipse for nearly 11 minutes.”
Karr, a wife and stay-at-home mother of three who has two boys in CMSD, was flabbergasted. Morgan, a former science teacher himself, had incorrectly explained the celestial event about to happen.
“I was like, ‘This is not how an eclipse works.’ And the video stayed up all day,” Karr, 53, recalled to Scene recently. “Then, I’m thinking, who is in communications and why are we paying them this much money?”
Karr’s curiosity quickly morphed into a fact-finding endeavor. Days later, Karr wrote blog posts on her Publicly Cleveland Substack and Facebook page that combined a rant from a concerned mom with armchair public records journalism, outlining her investigation into what she called Eclipse Gate.
Her questions were somewhat answered by a paper trail. A CMSD spokesperson emailed Karr a document surely no one else had requested: what Morgan was supposed to say on camera standing in Perk Plaza that day.
“He went off script,” Karr said.
Karr’s foray into being a thorn in CMSD’s side comes when the school system is dealing with a string of bad news and rough headlines. It’s facing teacher shortages and layoff plans; dealing with ongoing safety issues in transportation following a state intervention; and, most notably, will soon be shuttering nearly half its school buildings in a massive and controversial consolidation effort.
It also comes in an era when only a few local journalists are covering CMSD on a regular and in-depth basis.
“I don’t see myself as a watchdog,” Karr said. “I’m just a mom with a blog. I mean, you get this information and you gotta tell people about it.”
Since May 2024, Karr has posted twice a month on average, while helping manage a companion Facebook group with select quips and records from her findings. And everything she gets, she posts: audit reports; textbook expenses; contradictory power outage messages for Charles Mooney; emails revealing internet chess servers crashing; those outing problematic bus drivers. Even fraud reports she’s filed to the state auditor.
Her brand of document digging has gained the respect of fellow parents and even CMSD teachers. In the past two years, subscribers to both her Substack and her Facebook group have quadrupled, she said, now totaling thousands of followers.
Those who follow along recently got a first glimpse into a story that would jump to traditional media based on Karr’s reporting.
In early February, the lead pastor of the Word Church, R.A. Vernon, announced he would be giving speeches at a handful of CMSD gyms and auditoriums in a series called The Word Church Tour. It was a “national preaching assignment,” Vernon wrote in an Instagram post, meant as a morale boost as CMSD deals with issues of chronic absenteeism.
Karr found it unacceptable.
“I would not choose to worship with Pastor Vernon at The Word Church and I don’t have to,” Karr, who is Jewish, wrote in a post February 8.
“But it shouldn’t be much of an argument that Vernon has NO business being in a public school during the school day, speaking scripture to a bunch of students who are compelled by law to be there,” she said.
Non-students or media weren’t invited, and neither was Karr. But some students protested regardless. “Don’t preach to me,” one’s sign read at a Rhodes High event. “I don’t want a sermon in the same place I take a math class,” said another.
Vernon acknowledged the protests in a recap video posted on Word’s Instagram, showing him in a gray plaid suit shaking hands with students and hugging Morgan. “By the time I got through,” he said, “the same people holding signs were giving me hugs and taking pictures.”
In an email to Scene, CMSD Communications Officer Jon Benedict said Vernon’s series, for which he wasn’t paid, “wasn’t about going to church. It was about the importance of going to school.”
(As for what CMSD thinks of her work: “We value Ms. Karr as we do all of our district parents, and we appreciate her passionate interest in our schools,” Benedict said in a statement on behalf of CMSD.)
As for Karr’s end goal, she feels that Publicly Cleveland has grown to a point outside her initial intentions. She’s become both an armchair watchdog and a reluctant assistant to Cleveland’s journalist milieu. She said she trades emails and records with nine on a regular basis.
Over coffee at Van Aken, Karr was at a lost for words—a rarity for someone who talks like she writes—as far as where this all goes in the future, when her children will be out of the Cleveland school system altogether.
For now, however, she’s intent on keeping anyone interested in CMSD informed. What they do with that information is up to them.
“I don’t believe that I’m going to change anything,” Karr said. “I don’t think I’m an activist. I just want people to know what’s going on—so they can make their own decisions.”
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