5/20/2011 6:00:00 AMSchools CEO sketches challenges, successes
May 20, 2011
By MARILYN H. KARFELD, Cleveland Jewish News
Peter Raskind briefly considered the offer to temporarily lead the Cleveland city schools before saying yes.
“This opportunity may never come along again,” the interim Cleveland schools CEO said at a Corporate Club luncheon last week. “It’s hard to conceive of anything more important to the region and the city.”
Raskind, who got high marks when he was interim head of the troubled Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority last year, concludes his stint at the Cleveland Metropolitan School District in a few weeks when a new leader will be named. The former National City Bank CEO has tackled challenges since taking the city’s top education job after Eugene Sanders retired Feb. 1.
Raskind closed seven schools, laid off nearly 900 of the district’s 6,500 employees, and cut administrators’ perks. He chopped costs for the 44,000-pupil school district by over $74 million, more than filling the anticipated $47.5 million budget gap this year.
This has enabled him to create a two-year budget for the school district, which previously budgeted on a year-to-year basis, said Raskind, who has served on the board of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland among other civic enterprises.
“The next two years are looking pretty good,” he said. “But the next five are very grim. We will need an operating levy.” No operating levy for the Cleveland city schools has passed since 1996.
Eventually, there will have to be more school closings, he said. “This was a system built for a much larger enrollment base, which is steadily decreasing.” While he cut some administrators, Raskind, 54, said the vast majority of expenses are in the classroom and there is not that much central bureaucracy to trim.
Slashing the budget was painful, he said. But addressing media depictions of the urban district as “failing” and “struggling” is equally difficult and frustrating. “The public perception is that everything is a disaster, everything is a failure. This is not the case. Not to trivialize the district’s challenges. But it’s important to celebrate the victories along the way.”
There is no magic bullet to improve education and raise the graduation rate, which hovers at around 50%, he said, noting that schools can become more efficient but a school district cannot be run like a business. Students face challenges every day and a high percentage live in poverty.
“You can’t expect the schools are going to address and solve every social ill we face in society that has accumulated over decades,” Raskind said.
On the positive side of the ledger, he cited the emotion and passion that people have for their schools. “They see them as pillars of the community. The school building has the lights on at night. It plays a role in the neighborhood. We need to leverage that emotional attachment to schools and infrastructure to improve people’s lives. So students come to school ready to learn.”
Senate Bill 5, which restricts collective bargaining for public employees, including teachers, and will affect teachers’ contracts in the future, “is an imperfect law,” Raskind said. “But there’s a need to recalibrate those arrangements. School districts can (no longer) support” the compensation and work rules now part of teacher contracts.
The Cleveland schools have adopted a more cooperative relationship with charter schools, which now educate 14,000 children living in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, Raskind said. In March, the Cleveland schools awarded sponsorships to additional charter schools.
“We’ve had decades of public policy which has caused people to leave the district who can,” he said. “To fight off (charter schools) or put our heads in the sand and pretend they don’t exist” was not productive, he said. “We have to compete for students and families.”
Suburbanites, as Raskind described himself, must realize the crucial role Cleveland schools play in the region’s workforce, public safety, quality of life and economy. “You can’t have a healthy city without a healthy school district,” he said. “No one has the luxury to say ‘it’s not my concern.’”