Lakewood Observer: "It’s DéJà Vu All Over Again"

This article was posted on LakewoodObserver.com on September 27, 2025. View the article here.

by Jim O’Bryan

The School Board’s heavily controlled community meeting are their attempt to make it look like the community chose to close Grant school instead of them.

They held an identical “community meeting” at the end of the last disastrous “Task Force” debacle which was called “Phase Three.”

The Lakewood Observer covered the last one, I doubt I’m going to the one they’re having on the 29th but I’ll tell you what they’re going to do, based on their past performances.

They will divide the room into groups. They will put one of their paid “facilitators” at each table. They will make sure that the group at the table is made up of more than half of their handpicked plants. These are people who will have been tasked with, along with the paid facilitator, causing the group to examine the heavy curated “information” that they are given, and coming up with the conclusion that Grant school should be closed. At the last meeting, one of the pieces of “information” they provided to the concerned residents was that Grant school, unlike the other two schools that were supposedly on the block, Lincoln and Roosevelt (Again, right? History repeats) Grant school was “best for re-development” because of its position in the middle of Lakewood (behind Marcs Plaza). It is also in the middle of one of the densest group of residents– families with children– in Lakewood.

If the criteria for closing a school was “best for redevelopment”– Grant won. Lincoln and Roosevelt aren’t in business districts. The Board made a mistake last time because they forgot that under Ohio law, when you close a school building, it must first be offered for sale to other school or community entities before you can let your developer friend buy it and make it into mixed use businesses and condos. Had they just closed Grant, they would have had to offer it for sale to other schools. A public charter school would have immediately stepped up to buy it, and fill it full of the children who already went there, pleasing those parents because they would have kept their walkable school, though it would no longer be a Lakewood City School– no matter– it would be a real elementary school. Those new charter school kids could get back to the Lakewood City School system and rejoin the other Lakewood City School kids in middle school, if they still wanted to.

So this time, the Board came up with a plan to use Grant for something else, so they don’t have to offer it for sale. A centralized Pre-K. With no thought to the fact that if you close all the pre-Ks that are in our individual neighborhood elementary schools right now, you end walkability right there. Any family that has a pre-schooler and an elementary schooler will now have two stops every morning, and won’t be able to walk with either child. If this family doesn’t have a car, or two cars, or two parents, they’ll really be in trouble. This idea was not well thought out or researched because it’s supposed to fail. After the centralized Pre-K fails in a year or two, they no longer have to offer the building for other educational or community interests and they will be free to sell it to their developer friend, who will take it and combine it with the properties behind it on Warren, and maybe make a really big mixed use business and condo development. Or maybe the developer won’t actually be able to pull it off– like what happened the last time a big space was cleared out and torn down. Maybe we can have a Pit between Warren and Elmwood as well as on Belle.

So back to the show. No matter how many community members show up to defend our 7 walkable schools, each group will be gerrymandered, so that no matter what they think or how they feel, THEY THEMSELVES will choose to close Grant school. It won’t be as straightforward as that. They will make it look like other schools are being considered, they won’t make it look nakedly like the fix is in, because then everyone would know right from the beginning, and be upset. It will seem legitimate. The people they have hired to do this have done this before.

As we reported, it didn’t work last time. The Board said that the result of the community meeting was that the people assembled at that meeting had chosen to close Grant, even though more than half of them had not. Even at the heavily gerrymandered and rigged meeting, the Board had to cheat further. A designated person from each group was supposed to get up from each table and put a dot sticker for their group’s “choice” on the blackboard at the front of the room. When people weren’t looking, moderators at the front of the room moved stickers from Lincoln to Grant because they still didn’t have enough votes to close Grant, even with all their machinations. More disgraceful was the Board’s attempt to say that this gathering represented the entire community’s view and that the entire community — as represented by this group– had now chosen to close Grant.

The community was outraged, they saw through it and said that the whole thing was a scam and that the Board had used even more of our tax dollars to hire more “consultants” for another scam dog and pony show meeting to close Grant.

Why is it more important to our School Board to close Grant than anything else? Why are they willing to destroy walkability by closing all of our neighborhood pre-schools and by making students at the remaining 6 elementary schools walk much longer distances to make up for losing a school, especially when statistics show that after three fourths of a mile, attendance declines significantly? Especially given that the latest Ohio Report Card shows our chronic absenteeism numbers to be 26.8 percent already. Our absenteeism is already an emergency. The Board hasn’t even mentioned it. This latest “plan” will make this worse, without question. How can they ask for a levy with this miserable exhibition of incompetence?

The money closing a school saves is small compared to the devastation that it causes. It will not save residents any significant amount of money. Enrollment is stable. If it goes up, which it should if you look at the new residential buildings going up in Lakewood and you consider what a desirable suburb Lakewood is, we will definitely need 7 schools to stop overcrowding in our classrooms.

Why would being able to deliver a building for development be more important than running a school system competently? The Board of Education isn’t supposed to be in the business of worrying about Lakewood developments or finances. They are supposed to be committed to educating our children the best way possible. They are supposed to be the group that worries about the kids. The City Council is supposed to worry about development for the city.

View the article on LakewoodObserver.com.

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