CMSD CEO Warren Morgan Sets Lofty Goals, Emphasizes ‘Listening’ in First State of the Schools Address

It was shortly after Warren Morgan left his Indianapolis home, bound for his new role as head of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, when he affirmed his philosophical approach to the job.

Staying at a hotel, Morgan witnessed a Nigerian traveler arguing with staff about the location of his luggage. A storm led to a power outage, which was complicating logistics, and staff found the claims dubious. Police were called. The Nigerian was apprehended.

Morgan stepped in, refusing to be passive. The clerk admitted the next day, he recalled, she’d mixed up the rooms. “His luggage was in a different room,” she’d told Morgan. “He had everything.”

“The entire situation could’ve been avoided with empathy and intensive listening,” Morgan said at a podium at the Huntington Convention Center. “In that instant, I committed myself to starting my tenure in Cleveland by listening with deep intention.”

At Morgan’s first State of the Schools speech, which took place Thursday afternoon downtown, the 39-year-old CEO recapped his first 108 days at the helm mostly by recounting the peaks and troughs in his listening tour. In a brief, 31-minute address, heard by hundreds of CMSD students, city council members and other local officials, Morgan insisted he was open to all conversations and ideas.
How will that go? With safety a major concern for CMSD’s 36,000 students, school lunches lacking in nutritional punch, and many needing to commute an hour on the bus just to get to school, it’s yet to be seen how Morgan will concretely handle the issues talked about on Thursday.

There’s no denying that Morgan is trying. He spoke radiantly about earnest attempts to see life from the eyes of a seventh or eleventh grader. He talked about riding the 6 a.m. RTA bus to Garrett Morgan High School. He displayed photos of him eating lunch, milk carton and all, with kids at the Ginn Academy. He interviewed those “worried,” he said, “that they will be attacked” at school.

“I wanted to see, hear and feel what [kids] experiences on a typical day traveling to and from school,” he said about a recent ride-along on the RTA’s 26 bus line. “And I asked the kids, ‘If there was a school like Garrett Morgan in your neighborhood, would you take advantage of that?'”

“To a person,” Morgan added, “they all said yes.”

As if channeling his predecessor, Eric Gordon, who wowed the city for the past decade by meeting the benchmarks of the Cleveland Plan, Morgan set his own lofty goals.

By 2028, he wants to see 90 percent of students enrolled in universities, with jobs, or in the Armed Forces. He wants to increase graduation rates by 15 percent. He wants more than half of high schoolers proficient in English and Math. (Some schools in the district, Morgan lamented, are below 10 percent.)

Also, to reverse the trend of pandemic-era school skipping, Morgan’s aiming to lead a thousand-parent, city-wide canvassing effort, set to take place before year’s end.

“This will be a focused effort to reengage scholars and push back against chronic absenteeism,” he said.

Although well-received so far, at least by attendees on Thursday, Morgan’s listening tour, it seems, may carry far into 2024, or even 2025. (He’s only reached 40 of the 100 buildings in the district.) More than a thousand responses from such tour will be shared to the public, Morgan said.

Morgan reiterated that he’s only 108 days into his tenure. He needs time — to remedy IT issues, to meet with coaches and staff, to expand robotics programs. Or, as one student said during the Q&A, to add a drama program at the Newton Baker School of the Arts.

“That’s a great idea,” Morgan told the girl. “I really like that. Let’s see how we can move forward.”

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This article appears in Nov 8-21, 2023.