Tag: Education

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Bridges Learning Center offers students a path to success

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Principal Michele Angelo in front of one of several stained glass walls in Bridges Learning Center.

When I recently parked across the street from Bridges Learning Center, I was shocked at how many times I’ve driven by the building without noticing it. A pleasant combination of Brutalist and Prairie styles of architecture, Bridges is set further back on Thornton Street than its neighbor, Akron’s Fire Station No. 4. The school building is a hidden gem, and what occurs inside its walls is even more valuable. We are fortunate in the United States that federal law guarantees all states must provide all students with a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE). This has not always been the case and is the result of hard-won civil rights campaigns waged in the second half of the last century. (For more on that history, read “Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist.”)

Mandated to educate all children, what do public school districts do when a child’s behavior  limits or prevents them, and often their classmates, from learning? Ideally, they follow clearly defined steps of positive behavior intervention supports (PBIS) to help students learn to regulate their emotions. As a tutor in two elementary buildings in Akron schools over three years, I have witnessed faculty, administrators and staff patiently assist students with PBIS.

But what if a child does not adequately respond to these intervention supports? Smaller districts might pay for the student to be placed outside the district at specialized schools. But Akron, like many larger districts, has its own dedicated facility. Bridges Learning Center was created in 2006 when programs for elementary and middle school students merged. A decade later, high school classes were added and, since 2019, the former Reidinger Middle School has been home to Bridges Learning Center. 

One might imagine the school having a carceral environment, but quite the opposite is true – every corner of the building is calm, orderly and inviting. It reflects the school’s mission to “provide social, behavioral, and academic skills through high quality teaching…by creating a positive, nurturing and supportive environment.” Michele Angelo, the school’s principal, repeatedly used the words “restorative” and “family” or “team” approach to describe what occurs in the school. Students in the United States with special education needs receive Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) – protocols developed by educators, specialists and the student’s guardians as a team – that outline specific, individual services and accommodations needed. All students at Bridges were placed on IEPs in their home schools, and it was their IEP teams at their home schools that determined a placement at Bridges was appropriate.

The range of student abilities at Bridges includes children with multiple physical and cognitive disabilities, children who are non-verbal and children with various learning disabilities. For a few students, placement at Bridges is determined to be the best location for the duration of their education. But the goal for most of the 102 students currently at Bridges (the majority of whom are in grades 3 to 12) is to acquire the necessary emotional regulation needed to return to their home schools.

How do the faculty and staff at Bridges accomplish this goal? Each classroom is staffed with a teacher, an intervention specialist (special education teacher) and an aide. Also, three full-time, floating educational assistants are available to go to any room where extra assistance is needed. And Red Oak Behavioral Health, which partners with schools throughout the district, has two counselors and three case managers at Bridges full time.

Music therapist Edie Steiner's board at Bridges Learning Center in Akron.
Music therapist Edie Steiner’s board at Bridges Learning Center.

But wait, there’s more. Art therapist Shenan May and music therapist Edie Steiner work with students both one-on-one and in group settings. In addition to their education and experience in art and music therapies, they have been trained in dialectical behavior therapy-informed (DBT) practices. According to the Cleveland Clinic’s website, DBT “focuses on helping people accept the reality of their lives and their behaviors, as well as helping them learn to change their lives, including their unhelpful behaviors.” Ms. Steiner’s classroom is filled with instruments, including several electric guitars and two drum sets – much of it purchased with grant funding. I could devote an entire column to the benefits of these therapies, but a quick look at Ms. Steiner’s board for her classes shows the seamless integration of music and behavioral development students experience in her class.

Behind Bridges are expansive fields the school integrates into its student experience. Second grade teacher, Kim Zeffer, obtained funding from Lowe’s to install several raised planting beds, gardening equipment, benches and more. One of the Red Oak therapists received grant money to create a remote-control race car team. As any parent knows, most kids love RC cars. Participation on the RC team helps students “focus on teamwork, problem-solving, and self-regulation during races.”

And Bridges also helps its students prepare for life after they leave. High school students, some of whom are reintegrating after time in juvenile detention or residential placement for mental health issues, not only work on academics and emotional regulation, but also with other governmental service providers such as Summit DD, Ohio Department Job and Family Services and High School Job Training that come to the building to help with job training and placement.

Bridges’s students are members of our community. The team approach at Bridges is an effective way to assist these students to succeed not only when they return to their home schools, but throughout their lives. What happens inside Bridges helps not only its students, it’s a benefit to us all.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, October 12, 2025.

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Experience matters in Akron school board race. These 3 candidates stand out.

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For the past few years, most of the attention and energy at Akron Public Schools unfortunately has focused on performance issues with the past two superintendents, the school board’s dysfunction and the unhealthy relationship between the administrations and board members.

This has cost the district financially – the contract buyout to part ways with Superintendent Christine Fowler-Mack in 2023 totaled $462,585.68, not mention significant legal fees. But more importantly, it has negatively impacted the education of the district’s 20,000 students. Yes, APS’s rating in this year’s state report card improved, but it also revealed that only 45% of the district’s third graders read at a proficient level.

In 2023, Gov. Mike DeWine took the teeth out of the state’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee when he signed a budget that, unlike before, allows parents whose children did not pass the third grade state reading test to sign a waiver to promote the child to the fourth grade anyway. The research is clear: promoting children to the fourth grade who cannot read at the third grade level significantly increases drop-out rates.

If the district’s current graduation rate of just under 89% is to improve, early literacy needs urgent attention. And that is but one complex issue facing the district. There are also financial concerns – rebuilding North High, construction of a building for the newly merged Pfeiffer and Miller South schools and a looming budget shortfall in 2028. Successfully addressing these issues and more requires strong leadership in both the administration and the school board.

Choosing board members, which voters are asked to do in the upcoming election, should be approached like hiring high-level personnel at a business with an annual budget of over half a billion dollars, because that’s what it is. What matters most are the qualifications of the candidates.

Fortunately, in this election highly qualified candidates are on the ballot, and Akron citizens have an opportunity to replace weak members with qualified ones, Phil Montgomery and Gwen Bryant.

For nearly four years, Montgomery has been Summit County’s director of finance and budget, managing annual budgets of more than $160 million. Prior to that, he was the chief financial officer for Summit County Job and Family Services with annual budgets around $45 million. The district needs the financial acumen Montgomery would bring to the school board as it makes the critical financial and infrastructure decisions it faces.

Bryant has worked in education for over 30 years, starting as a teacher in Akron’s schools. For the past 14, she has worked as an educational consultant at Instructional Empowerment Inc., whose mission is “to end generational poverty and eliminate achievement gaps through redesigned rigorous Tier 1 instruction.”

Bryant has worked with hundreds of school districts in cities across the country, including Chicago, DC, Baltimore, Detroit, Portland and Oklahoma City, to improve their educational outcomes. In electing Bryant voters would hire an experienced educator and educational consultant who will bring a sophisticated understanding of the educational problems facing the district and the best practices for solving them. 

Montgomery and Bryant must replace Diana Autry and Carla Jackson. Autry and Jackson were members of the school board that, in the summer of 2023, rushed through the hiring of former superintendent Michael Robinson despite community leaders citywide calling for the board to wait until after elections that fall. Throughout Robinson’s unendingly bombastic tenure, including the final weeks before he left following an investigation concluding he created a toxic work environment, Autry remained obsequiously deferential to Robinson.

Not surprisingly Jackson, who is principal of a private religious school in Akron that accepts vouchers, supports the school voucher program. This is why many find her position on the board of a public school district a conflict of interest.

The other sitting board member running for election is Pastor Gregory Harrison. Harrison was chosen last October to replace board member Job Perry when he stepped down to become a Summit County Court of Common Pleas magistrate. Harrison has been a fixture at school board meetings for many years, often as a vocal critic of both the district’s priorities and the dysfunction of its leadership. If anyone thought putting him on the board would keep him quiet, they were misguided.

Harrison, unlike some of his board colleagues, attends every board meeting thoroughly prepared to discuss agenda items. He is passionately committed to solving the problems of low student language and math literacy skills. Harrison deserves to remain on the board for a full term as the district continues to overcome past poor leadership and tackle the serious challenges it faces.

Early voting begins Tuesday, October 7.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, September 28, 2025.

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Schools should not write off the benefits of teaching cursive

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The first week of second grade, I told the girl across the street that I would be learning “grown-up writing.” She was a kindergartener and satisfyingly impressed. In truth, having just mastered reading and writing print letters, the idea of learning to decipher the connected slants and loops of cursive made me anxious.

In a 2022 article for The Atlantic, Harvard professor Drew Gilpin Faust recounts her shock at learning students in her American history course could not read handwritten documents, mostly letters, from the Civil War. It wasn’t because 19th century script had more flourishes, which it did. No, her students told her it they couldn’t read cursive at all, adding “of course.” Faust felt like a “Rip Van Winkle confronting a transformed world.”

Cursive exited most public school educations in 2010 when it was not included in the roll out of Common Core, a federal K-12 guideline of English and math standards many states adopted. As a result, most Americans in Generations Z and Alpha never learned to write, nor read, cursive. (So uncommon is the ability to read cursive today, the National Archives seeks volunteers to transcribe historical documents from cursive to print.)

A comparison of Holly Christensen's cursive writing with writing by a member of her lunchtime cursive club.
A comparison of my cursive (left) and that of one of my students after three months of cursive club.

This is unfortunate on many levels, not the least of which is the acquisition of reading skills and comprehension, which might seem odd at first blush. But according to the University of California Riverside, ample research suggests that “learning cursive can enhance brain development, particularly in areas related to language, memory, and fine motor skills. When students engage in the intricate movements required for cursive writing, this activates different parts of the brain compared to typing or printing.”

This is not new information. When my eldest child, now 31, was first diagnosed with dyslexia, the professionals handling his remediation told me to sign him up for occupational therapy. OT focuses on fine motor skills — picking up small objects with the forefinger and thumb, buttoning clothes and properly holding a pencil. I was told an early indicator of a learning disability is weak hand strength. Furthermore, if a child with a learning disability builds hand strength, their reading skills improve because of the connection between physical activity and the parts of the brain that manage reading.

When Google began giving laptops to public schools, few (if any) asked if that was a good idea. Kindergarteners in Akron Public Schools are given a Google Chromebook the first week of class and are expected to take a placement test on them a few weeks later. Never mind cursive, students spend little time ever writing with paper and pencil and never build hand strength. Each year when I proctor the Ohio State Test to third graders, they complain that their hands hurt after writing one or two sentences with a pencil for the writing section. I tutor a group of APS third graders in phonics four days a week just before lunch. Each chapter of the program we use includes a short spelling test. One day, one of the students attempted to write his answers in something not unlike cursive. “Would you like me to teach you cursive during lunchtime?” I asked. He accept my offer and the other students begged me to teach them, too.

A student in Holly Christensen's lunchtime cursive club practices making loops, cups, waves and hills.
The loops, cups, waves and hills of cursive letters.

I thought it would last a week, maybe two, before they became bored with additional learning, but no. I have spent lunch with them every day since we returned from winter break in January. I contacted a teacher at Spring Garden Waldorf School where they never dropped cursive. She told me to break the lower case letters into four groups of shapes: waves, loops, cups and hills.

 The students bring their lunches to my room at noon. We eat and visit, leaving us 15 to 20 minutes to learn and practice cursive before they go to recess at 12:30. It took the better part of three months to introduce all the lower case letters. I’d put them on the board, then show them on lined paper and, if necessary, helped them with hand-over-hand instruction. In April, we began learning how to connect cursive letters to create words.

I stopped writing in cursive long ago. Showing my students felt like getting on a favorite bicycle rediscovered at the back of a barn. The muscle memory from when I was first taught in 1972 remains. My young students discuss without embarrassment which letters they find beautiful, such as “j” and “k”. One of them told me with all sincerity that he’d come to school on Saturday and Sunday if we could do cursive.

Students in Holly Christensen's lunchtime cursive club made Mother's Day cards to show off their newly found writing skills.
A student’s Mother’s Day card shows off his newly acquired cursive skill.

Just as Buddhist monks practice calligraphy as a form of meditation, practicing cursive seems a form of mindfulness training for my students, and also for me. The creation of flowing letters calmly focuses the mind as all other thoughts recede. Cursive club is easily the favorite part of my workday.

 One of my cursive club boys turned 9 last month. I found a blank card and wrote in cursive on both inside pages. He slowly deciphered the words out loud with great pride. This past week, we made Mother’s Day cards, each child excited to show their mothers the handwriting they’ve begun to master. And should the moms find it difficult to read the sentiments written in cursive their children, unlike Professor Faust’s Harvard students, will be able to help them.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, May 11, 2025.

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Trump earns an F for abolishing the Department of Education

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When the Department of Education (DOE) was created in 1979, President Jimmy Carter warned supporters, “This thing won’t work as well as you think it will.” Time has shown his prediction accurate, however, not working as well as thought is not the same as working badly. 

Just what does the Department of Education do? Many things.

The department oversees federal funding for colleges and universities as well as K-12 public schools. The bulk of federal funding for higher education comes in the form of Pell Grants, student loans and research funding. Most K-12 schools receive 10% of their funding from the department but as recently as the 2021-2022 school year, it was 14.6% for Ohio schools, or $2,600 per student. 

Two DOE programs support school districts with the greatest needs. Title 1 helps fund supports for schools with high-poverty rates while REAP (Rural Education Achievement Program) specifically targets rural schools, which comprise more than a quarter of all U.S. public schools. My job as a tutor in an Akron Public Schools building with high-poverty rates is paid for with Title 1 funding. I see first hand the need for this support and how impactful it is.

The department also provides federal oversight for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Enacted in 1975, IDEA’s role is to ensure all states provide a free appropriate public education to students with disabilities both physical and intellectual. Within the department is the Office for Civil Rights to which students with disabilities can file complaints if they are not receiving a free appropriate public education as outlined by IDEA.

When I graduated high school in the spring of 1983, I had attended 10 public schools in four states. In none of these did I have classmates with intellectual disabilities, such as Down syndrome, nor physical disabilities that required wheelchairs or adaptive equipment. This changed in the years after IDEA federally required public schools to allow students with disabilities to attend, something that doesn’t just benefit students with disabilities. It also normalizes having friends with a range of abilities as students work and play with classmates who only a few decades ago were not encouraged, or sometimes even allowed, to attend public schools.

Just as important to know is what the Education Department does not do. It does not set curricula (what is taught) in public schools. It does not determine how schools receive funding outside of what it provides. It does not set standards for teachers nor graduation requirements. All of this is, and always has been, decided by the states.

On March 11, the Trump Administration put more than 1,300 DOE employees on administrative leave. The agency’s statisticians who analyze the data to determine which school districts qualify for Title 1 and REAP funding went from 100 to three employees, making it impossible to efficiently and effectively conduct their assigned task. The expected result is the funding for schools that rely on Title 1 and REAP will not be allocated and, therefore, distributed going forward.

Then, on March 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order charging Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the department, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” And to give “the authority over education to the States and local communities.” Which is something they already have now. Trump also promised that the funding for Title 1 and REAP would remain intact, but with the department gutted of the employees who oversee the allocation of said funding, it remains intact in name only.

No president can constitutionally eliminate an agency established by Congress — only Congress itself can do that. But officially closing an agency isn’t the only way to kill it. Lawsuits have been filed by 21 Democratic state attorneys general and parents. The state AGs’ suit claims the massive reduction of Education Department employees is the de facto death of the Education Department, while the lawsuit by parents claims the cuts mean student rights will not be protected. 

As a parent advocate for the nonprofit Oklahoma Parents for Student Achievement, Kristy Heller has worked with the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights on behalf of Oklahoma families whose children have not received the public education required by IDEA. Also a mother of a child with Down syndrome, Heller told an NPR interviewer that her family is considering moving because without federal oversight “states like Oklahoma…I don’t feel place the same importance on educating students with disabilities.” 

Here in Ohio, I worry that Akron Public Schools may eliminate or significantly water down the SAIL program my daughter with Down syndrome attends. This program, designed for students with intellectual disabilities who attend about half of the day in a general education classroom, has been a game changer for my daughter’s education. Like Kristy Heller, I am not confident that my state will carry on the work of educating students with disabilities without federal oversight and funding.

Secretary McMahon has said IDEA will remain in place but perhaps at a different governmental agency — none of which have been prepared to take over such a large and important federal act. Nor could they possibly have been in the two months since Elon Musk and Donald Trump began dismantling several federal governmental agencies. It is far easier to break things than it is to repair or rebuild them. And just who benefits from this wide-scale destruction? Certainly not America’s students.

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All Akron children deserve access to quality early learning

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In his first month as mayor, Shammas Malik asked Akron Public Schools to prioritize launching a universal pre-K program. The district has wasted no time boosting its commitment to early learning.

Next fall, Akron schools will offer full-day programming for Akron children ages 4 and up.

Why is funding a public school program for preschoolers so important and what results can be expected? Luckily, numerous long-term studies of preschool programs exist, yielding an abundance of data supporting their many benefits, particularly for the most underserved children.

Head Start, a federal-to-local pre-school program, was launched in the 1960s as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” It wasn’t mandated, so not all school districts adopted it. However, nearly 60 years later, research on the first groups of Head Start students show the impactful, life-long and even multi-generational benefits of attending preschool.

According to a recent Brookings Institute report, when compared to their older siblings who were preschool age before Head Start existed, students who attended three years of Head Start were “3% more likely to finish high school, 8.5% more likely to attend college, and 39% more likely to finish college.”

The financial benefit, both to the people who attended Head Start and taxpayers, is also notable. Again from the Brookings Institute, “Female students were 32% less likely to live in poverty as adults, and male students saw a 42% decrease in the likelihood of receiving public assistance.”

Early programming is an investment with long-term payoffs — in other words, it is not politically expedient. Also, as children do not vote, politicians often cater less to their needs than they do citizens at the other end of the age spectrum, the elderly, who not only can vote, but reliably do in large numbers.

Before entering kindergarten, students who have attended preschool will have learned many educational building blocks — things like the alphabet, numbers, colors, shapes. They also gain exposure to vocabulary that may not exist at home.

But equally important, students learn how to be in school. I’ve seen first-hand how consequential this is because my daughter, Lyra, who has Down syndrome, attended APS’s existing preschool programming, the Early Learning Program (ELP).

In Ohio, state support for children with disabilities is provided for the first three years of life through county developmental disability boards. Then, from ages three to 22, state support is delivered through the public schools, which is why Akron has an ELP.

Lyra attended Akron’s ELP for three years and when she began kindergarten, just after her sixth birthday, she could read, had basic math skills and knew her colors, shapes and more. She also knew how to behave in a classroom. Unfortunately, the same was not true for many of her more than 20 kindergarten classmates, most of whom were attending school for the first time. When the Akron Education Association negotiated a new contract with the district in 2022, student violence was a primary concern. Halfway through the 2022-2023 school year, kindergartners accounted for 24% of student “assaults” on staff and teachers.

Even with a fantastic kindergarten teacher, given the chaos of the classroom, Lyra did not learn the skills for first-grade readiness. We had her repeat kindergarten, this time with an aid to help her stay on task no matter what was happening in the classroom.

Children who are kindergarten ready when they start school are more likely to be first-grade ready at the end of the year. It’s reasonable to expect that the implementation of all-day pre-K means more Akron students will perform at grade-level. The accumulation of age-appropriate education, or the lack thereof, has exponential impact. Each year a student is promoted without the skills needed for their current grade level, the harder it becomes to acquire the skills of the next grade. But when a child has mastered grade-level curriculum, they are poised for success the next year.

The rate of return on the investment in preschool programming is eye-popping. For every dollar spent, communities gain $4 to $9 in return because students who\’ve attended pre-K are more likely to graduate and contribute to the economy and less likely to need public assistance or become incarcerated.

All-day kindergarten is a good step, but Akron still needs universal pre-k, which ensures any family that wants to enroll their preschool-aged child in a publicly funded program has the opportunity.

Foundations in Akron and Summit County should eagerly participate with the city and the school district to fully fund universal pre-K programming in because it is a direly needed game changer. The only problem with universal pre-K is that APS didn’t launch it many years ago.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, March 17, 2024.

For further reading of recent research on universal pre-K, see this NPR article.

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State grant to expand tutoring shouldn’t be limited to private firms

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Just before winter break, a tutor I work with in Akron Public Schools stated what had become soberingly obvious based upon students’ December test results: “In order to work with all the third, fourth and fifth graders who need to get to grade level, we have to sacrifice our time with first and second graders. There’re just not enough of us.”

Nationwide, the longer schools were 100% remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, the farther behind students in those districts fell. Tutors like myself are tasked with teaching grade-level skills such as multiplication and division to fourth and fifth graders (they were kindergartners and first graders when APS was remote) who have yet to master addition and subtraction.

Disparities among affluent and poorer districts had been slowly shrinking in the years before the pandemic. Those gains were vaporized in schools that remained closed to in-person learning longterm. Many students fell a year or more behind in both math and reading.

Intensive, small-group tutoring has proven an effective tool to help kids get to grade level, which is why the federal government, and many states, have invested in it. But not all tutoring is equally beneficial.

Akron schools are not alone in questioning the Ohio legislature’s offer of grant money for tutoring that can only be spent on tutoring by private companies. And these services only target fourth graders who did not pass what were, until late last summer, the reading requirements for promotion from the third to the fourth grade.

I wrote about Gov. Mike DeWine’s deeply misguided decision to promote last year’s third graders who did qualify, children whom I know well. In the second semester of the last school year, I worked every day with a group of third graders who read just below grade level. My job was to get them to grade level by the time they took the year-end reading test.

Then, for the entire month of June, I worked with another group of students who had not passed that year-end test. We worked for six hours a day, five days a week, in Akron’s Third Grade Reading Academy. Our mornings were spent on an intensive phonics program and in the afternoons we worked on reading comprehension.

I was struck by how my students with the lowest reading skills most enjoyed the morning phonics. As we broke down English into its various letter combinations, these students had several “Ah-ha” moments as the patterns and rules began to click for them. Anyone who has worked on something difficult knows the specific joy that comes with the mastery of once-elusive concepts.

Six of my eight students in the Third Grade Reading Academy passed the Ohio State Test. One of the two who did not was a student I called Tyronne in a previous column. Tyronne worked very hard in my class, which paid off because his score improved by 30 points. That put him in a strong position to acquire the skills to become fourth grade ready when repeating the third grade.

It is important to note that holding back third graders who cannot read at grade level does not stigmatize them. According to a story in the New York Times, “A [2023] Boston University study found that those held back did not have any negative outcomes such as increased absences or placement in special education programs. On the contrary, they did much better several years later in sixth-grade English tests compared with those who just missed being held back. Gains from being held back were particularly large for Black and Hispanic students.”

In other words, the folks down in Columbus blew it last year by promoting third graders who could not read at grade level and now they want to remedy their wrong-headed decision by giving those same students after-school online tutoring with people in Missouri.

That is just plain dumb.

A large factor in this year’s fourth graders being so far behind is that Akron schools were entirely remote for a full year during the pandemic. There is no credible reason to believe that remote tutoring, with people who do not know the students or the district, will fix the problems caused by remote learning.

When students are tutored in person, their tutors are part of a collaborative team that includes other tutors, the classroom teachers, the principal and the assistant principal. These teams know the students, their history both in and out of school, their strengths and weaknesses. Teams work collaboratively to teach each child.

Would Akron’s students benefit from additional funds for tutoring? Absolutely. But not the kind of tutoring for which the state has limited the grant funds. As school board member Rene Molenaur pointed out in a recent school board meeting, students would be far better served if the state gave the district $200,000 for expanded tutoring.

The state should support expanded tutoring, which our students direly need, by funding the expansion of services provided by the people in our school buildings. Anything else is a cruel waste of time and money.

This column first appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal on February 4, 2024.