When parents of young children decide where to rent or buy a new home, proximity to a good school is a make-it or break-it factor. For parents interested in living downtown or in its vicinity, now there is an option. A really good one. Cleveland State University has partnered with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District to create an elementary school downtown, Campus International School, downtown Cleveland’s first public elementary school.
“We’re a real school,” says Ron Abate, Cleveland State’s liaison to CIS.
The idea for the school started under what Abate describes as “the perfect storm.” In 2009, Ronald Berkman became the new president of CSU. At the same time, as an influx of new residents appeared downtown, Mayor Frank Jackson and the district’s then-CEO bemoaned the loss of young families to the suburbs because there wasn’t a viable public elementary school option nearby.
CIS opened in 2010 as a K-2 school with 120 students. Each year since then, the school added a grade and expanded into a full K-8 elementary school of 750 students with an average class size of about 25. Today, CIS is the only International Baccalaureate-accredited K-8 school in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and the only downtown public elementary school in Cleveland’s history. Its unique mission is to provide holistic, community-based education for a multicultural population.
As CIS added grades during the last seven years, it also developed a unique culture that suggested it would make more sense to add new students at lower grades. “We didn’t want to add lots of new students at the upper grades for the simple reason that we’ve taken seven years to build a culture, and it’s difficult to take a group of students into a new environment and expect them to buy into what the other students do,” says Abate.
Admission works strictly by lottery. There is no entrance exam. Students come from all over the city, though the original breakdown included about 65 percent of students coming from the immediate Cleveland area, 15 percent from the suburbs and 20 percent from affiliates of CSU, like graduate students with children who live in the district. The suburban quotient was supported by the idea that the best way to convince people that kids could get a quality education in Cleveland was to make people from outside the district want to get into the school. But as downtown demand and district population continues to rise,
the suburban percentage likely will phase out.
CIS’s high standards for academic and personal achievement meant a high bar for teachers, who came largely from the school district. But unlike other schools in the district, CIS had the opportunity to interview 500 or 600 teachers, with the principal, Julie Beers, present during the meetings. “We made it very clear to the teachers that this was a great environment but a lot of work,” Abate says.
With a growing student body, increased interest from the district and 300 people on the waitlist, the demand was there for a new facility. At the start of the 2017 school year, CIS students were welcomed into a beautiful, brand-new, $24.2 million building at 2160 Payne Ave. and East 22nd Street. About the expansion of the student body and new building, Abate says: “The district wanted more, so that’s what we did.”
In other words, business is good.
Abate was quick to dispel some common misconceptions about the school. Some popular notions he hears are that the students are all children of CSU professors or that CIS is a “gifted school” or a “magnet school” for talented students. Neither is true. “It’s a lottery,” he notes. “We are a public school. Everything that comes along with it we have.”