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The promise came packaged with high expectations from the beginning.
Back on January 18, 2019, some of Cleveland’s most powerful politicians, business and philanthropic leaders gathered to announce that Cleveland was becoming the latest city to get a local chapter of Say Yes to Education, a national scholarship program founded by Wall Street money manager George Weiss.
“Free college tuition starts now for Cleveland students,” one 2019 headline read.
“Why Say Yes to Education is a game-changer for not just CMSD students, but all of Cleveland,” proclaimed another.
The reality, as with most things, turned out to be far more nuanced.
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The Say Yes designation came along with the pledge that every student graduating from the long-struggling Cleveland Metropolitan School District would get free tuition to pursue a four- or two-year college degree or other post-secondary training if they meet the eligibility criteria, including being continuously enrolled at one of the district’s high schools for all four years.
Local foundations and businesses had already raised $88 million for scholarships for students, about $37 million shy of the $125 million goal set to fully fund the program for 25 years.
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“If this is not a great day, I don’t know what one looks like,” then-KeyCorp CEO Beth Mooney told the enthusiastic crowd packed into the John Marshall High School auditorium. “We are here today because we are announcing something that I think is going to change our community, change lives; and to all of us, we did it because we care about each other and we care about our community and we are doing good.”
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More than six years after that launch, the promise is still available. The group’s scholarship arm holds at least $110 million in assets, according to the latest publicly available tax form.
But in other areas, Say Yes Cleveland appears to be struggling to ultimately get big swaths of CMSD students to and through college.
In documents provided this month to Cuyahoga County Council ahead of a request for more non-scholarship-related funding, Say Yes Cleveland leaders reported 510 CMSD students have earned some type of degree or credential since 2019. Those numbers have not been made public before.
For perspective on roughly how many students graduate from the district in a given year, about 1,930 CMSD students earned a diploma during the 2022-23 school year, according to the most available state data. It is unclear, though, how many of those students would meet the Say Yes Cleveland eligibility requirements and therefore be awarded a scholarship.
Say Yes Cleveland further broke down that degree data in its debrief to county leaders. The organization told the county that CMSD students have earned 302 bachelor’s degrees, 202 two-year degrees, and 121 training certificates since 2019.
But Say Yes Cleveland repeatedly declined to discuss those numbers in more detail with Signal.
Officials also declined to answer a variety of other related questions, including what metrics leaders use to track students’ progress, how long it takes for students to achieve their degrees or certificates and from where, and how many students initially receive a scholarship but never earn some type of credential.
When asked if the figures shared with Cuyahoga County represent numbers that meet the expectations of the 2019 kickoff event, Say Yes Cleveland’s interim executive director, Catherine Tkachyk, said she doesn’t categorize that number of graduates as “good, bad or indifferent.”
“That’s the number that we have,” she said in a recent interview with Signal. “And we’re going to continue to make improvements and continue to try and expand on that number.”
Tkachyk, who’s been leading the organization since April, stressed that her main role is to oversee the work of the employees who provide what are known as “wraparound services” in the Cleveland schools.
These support services got less attention on launch day, but things such as tutoring, mental health assistance, and legal help were all part of Say Yes Cleveland’s initial promise to the community. This level of support was a big part of the national Say Yes organization’s philosophy, one local chapters were urged to incorporate.
Here in Cleveland, these services can fill critical needs in a district where half of the students missed 10% or more of the 2023-24 school year, according to state report card data. The city’s eighth graders continue to lag behind their peers in other urban districts nationwide in both math and reading.
In addition to helping students with day-to-day needs, these Say Yes Cleveland employees are also supposed to evangelize about the availability of scholarships. Tkachyk said there is no formal, uniform timeline for how and when Say Yes employees discuss scholarships with students and their guardians.
Despite the fact that the support services and scholarships are both under the Say Yes Cleveland umbrella, the two groups essentially operate in silos.
Separate volunteer boards filled with representatives of the city’s most influential organizations supervise each operation.
Each is funded differently, too. The scholarships are overseen by the non-profit Say Yes Cleveland Scholarship, Inc. Its 2023 990 tax form – the most recent publicly available – showed the organization had $110 million in assets. Those are managed by the Cleveland Foundation, which is also a financial supporter of Signal.
Wraparound services are separate from the scholarship operations. Securing stable, long-term funding for the support employees – many of whom are social workers – is one of the most challenging aspects for Say Yes Cleveland.
At a meeting earlier this month, Cuyahoga County Council Member Sunny Simon said Say Yes Cleveland’s new leadership recently “salvaged” the program after offering buyouts to all of the 89 employees providing those services. It’s a cost-cutting measure aiming to relieve some of the financial strain.
Say Yes Cleveland leaders have not said how many employees planned to take the buyouts or the total number of positions it needs to eliminate, according to Ideastream Public Media. Now, schools may share a support specialist instead of one being stationed in each building.
These cuts will mean the program “can at least exist and not be dissolved,” said Simon.
Simon – a former critic of the organization – and her fellow council members ultimately approved giving Say Yes Cleveland an additional $1.6 million last week. The money will go towards support and administrative services costs through next summer.
“We could have all this money sitting in scholarships, but if the students can’t get through their [K-12] education, there’s no reason to have [the] scholarships,” Simon said about the value of support services.
College Now Greater Cleveland handles making the actual scholarship payments to higher education institutions. But it’s the Say Yes Cleveland scholarship board that is responsible for approving the scholarship applications students submit during their senior year of high school.
Say Yes Cleveland declined to make an official from that board available to talk for this story. But publicly available documents help shed some light on the money given out.
The scholarship foundation’s 2023 tax form shows it awarded $3.5 million to 1,485 recipients that year. Those documents, though, don’t detail how many students have graduated, remain on track to do so, or may no longer even be enrolled.
If distributed evenly, the scholarships that year would be about $2,357 per recipient. But that’s not how the program works.
CMSD students with families making less than $75,000 a year get all tuition costs covered after first securing available state and federal funding. The Say Yes scholarship is what’s known as a “last-dollar” offering, meaning it only covers outstanding balances after those other awards are applied.
Families making over $75,000 annually get up to a $5,000 scholarship to go towards tuition costs.
This all means that Say Yes Cleveland’s final awards vary greatly from student to student. Plus, the scholarships only cover tuition, not additional costs such as room and board fees or books, though low-income students are now eligible to receive $1,000 annually to put towards those types of costs through the 2028 school year.
The majority of CMSD students with a Say Yes Cleveland college scholarship enroll at either Cuyahoga Community College or Cleveland State University, according to the Say Yes Cleveland 2022 annual report provided two years ago to Signal (it does not appear on its website).
Here’s what we know about how Say Yes Cleveland students are navigating their way through one college, Cleveland State University.
There is extra support available once they arrive on campus. University officials said three academic counselors specifically work with Say Yes Cleveland students, though these employees also help with the institution’s broader population, too. Plus, there’s an option for some Say Yes Cleveland students to apply to live on campus together for free.
Since 2019, a combined 162 students have graduated from Cleveland State, according to public records Signal requested from the university.
The number of graduates grew from one student in each of the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years to 63 graduates in the 2024-25 school year, records show.
A lot has changed since the big kickoff event in 2019.
The national Say Yes organization, after running several years of deficits, quietly dissolved in 2021, leaving Cleveland’s chapter with no obligations to its parent and more independence.
There’s also been a sea of leadership changes. Cleveland elected a new mayor, who legally oversees the city’s schools. Longtime CMSD chief and Say Yes Cleveland advocate Eric Gordon moved on. Foundation leaders behind the initiative retired. Diane Downing, Say Yes Cleveland’s first executive director, left earlier this year.
Amid all of that, the COVID-19 pandemic began a little more than a year after Say Yes Cleveland launched. Officials said that the pandemic, which disproportionately impacted women and/or people of color, kept some students from graduating from high school, and ultimately, enrolling in higher education.
“A lot of students had to make choices for their families during the pandemic, and going to work, supporting families, providing necessities, were part of that,” former executive director Downing told Signal Cleveland in 2023.
Say Yes Cleveland’s current leadership promises the silence about its scholarship progress will end soon.
The group is “currently in the early stages of gathering and analyzing data which will be part of a comprehensive six-year report set to be released in the fall,” an outside public relations firm working with the scholarship board said in a statement to Signal earlier this month.
This fall will mark six years since the first Say Yes Cleveland-eligible students enrolled in higher education. Six-year graduation rates are a metric used by some in higher education, especially for institutions that enroll higher percentages of student parents and/or those working while attending classes.
One national estimate finds about 22% of current college students take more than four years to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Say Yes Cleveland falls into a category known as a “promise program.” There are more than 200 of those offerings in cities across the country, including in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Pittsburgh (though that program is ending in 2028 due to funding concerns).
Many programs may have limited data collection and evaluation resources, according to Michelle Miller-Adams, senior researcher at the Upjohn Institute. She said leaders of such programs may be reluctant to share whatever data they do have in an attempt to avoid bad publicity.
The most successful programs, she said, all have simple eligibility requirements, some type of student support, and clear public messaging.
“If you have your act together, and you’re messaging about it well, you’re putting the machinery under the hood, and you have the support and the navigation there, you can get a really big impact,” said Miller-Adams.
The local leaders with the most success behind those initiatives are laser-focused on defining what critical needs they’re trying to tackle with these programs, such as boosting workforce pipelines or reversing population loss.
She pointed to an offering in Columbus as one such example (Miller-Adams and her employer have consulted with the program). The Columbus Promise offers to cover tuition at Columbus State Community College for graduates of the city’s public school district. Those students also get academic support as well as a $500 stipend per semester.
Since the program began in 2021, Columbus State has seen an enrollment bump in first-time students even as other community colleges across Ohio have watched the number of those students decline.
Ultimately, Miller-Adams said there’s another overarching theme between well-performing promise programs.
“You just want to be careful not to over-promise and under-deliver,” she said.
Signal Ohio partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
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Lila Mills
Editor-in-Chief
Signal Cleveland
Higher Education Reporter
I look at who is getting to and through Ohio’s colleges, along with what challenges and supports they encounter along the way. How that happens — and how universities wield their power during that process — impacts all Ohio residents as well as our collective future. I am a first-generation college graduate reporting for Signal in partnership with the national nonprofit news organization Open Campus.
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