Cincinnati Public Schools is being run into the ground

A recent guest opinion by Cincinnati Public Schools Board member Ben Lindy ("CPS made strides by focusing on students not politics") celebrated the past two years of his term as president of the board. Normally, I’d be the first in line to join Lindy’s celebration of CPS given I am the proud parent of a CPS alumni, an employee and have worked tirelessly on every school levy campaign for the past 15 years to ensure the successful passage of critical local funding. So, it’s natural to want to paint a rosy picture, but when our district is being run into the ground, and we are entrusted with our city’s children and tax dollars, we must speak up.

Lindy celebrated the fact that CPS has the second-highest math recovery in the country. The study he cited was only based on the 44 school districts who are members of Council of Great City Schools. An honest national assessment would be to compare the 16,800-plus public school districts in the United States. He cherry-picked the data, which would make sense if he were doing it to support the case for the math and reading specialists who helped make these scores possible, but in fact, he voted to cut their funding, and he is now using this limited data to lay credit at the feet of Superintendent Iranetta Wright.

Lindy also touted the "success" of yellow buses, but the day after his column appeared in the Enquirer, his yes-vote was the only one among the board in support the superintendent’s recommendation to eliminate yellow bus services that would move thousands of seventh and eighth-graders onto Metro buses. The recommendation did not pass. Then, he voted to cut 28 more buses by consolidating routes. Let’s remember it was under his watch CPS lost our dedicated Metro routes.

Lindy voted to support that, the rest of the board did not and it did not pass.

The reality is that in the past two years under his leadership, Lindy has allowed this superintendent to drag us into a $100 million deficit with more out-of-control spending, resulting in a 47% increase of administrators in just the past five years and adding almost 60 "managers" to Central Office. Direct student services were cut to pay for these positions.

While the Board of Education lops away millions of dollars for student services such as athletics, substitute teachers, school nurses, transportation and support for students experiencing homelessness, the district's administration has been held harmless. Worse, they voted to shift Title I dollars to pay for these administrators; dollars meant for programming for schools where more than 40% of the students are from low-income families.

This new CPS administration has been here for less than two years and are almost entirely from right-to-work states such as Florida and Texas. I guess their mismanagement should come as no surprise as they ignore CPS’s collective bargaining processes like school budget and staffing timelines, processes that have worked for decades, and have refused to come to the bargaining table since last December.

CPS has been one of the top-performing districts, with a proud history. Labor-management relations have been working for our schools, but this new administration is throwing everything we have built out the window. Instead of self-aggrandizing, Lindy should be working to stop them from destroying what we have built, to protect what has been working, and show fiscal responsibility as we look ahead to having to ask voters again to pass our school levy.

Our students and families and our city deserve better.

Michelle Dunn is an organizer with the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers and the parent of a Cincinnati Public Schools alumni.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati Public Schools is being run into the ground