Glenville High spotlights career programs, sets math, literacy and graduation targets

At the Board of Education of the Cleveland Municipal School District’s organization meeting and work session at Garrett Morgan High School, Glenville High School Principal Kendra Holloway presented a school spotlight that highlighted career and technical education programs, enrollment and demographic data, and academic goals for the 2024–25 school year.

The spotlight matters because Glenville’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs—nursing, dental assisting and criminal justice among them—provide certifications students can use to enter the workforce immediately, Principal Kendra Holloway told the board. “In our nursing program, once you take the classes and pass the certification, when you leave Glenville High School, you are an STNA,” Holloway said. “In our dental assistant program, once you take the classes, pass the certification, you are a dental assistant which mean you're marketable.”

Holloway laid out current enrollment and demographic figures: she said the student population is about 67% regular education, 29% special needs and 4% English-language learners; grade counts she reported were 118 ninth-graders, 86 10th-graders, 50 11th-graders and 61 12th-graders. She gave the student ethnicity breakdown as 96% African American, 3% Hispanic, 2% white and 2% other, and described school staff as roughly 67% African American, 24% white and 9% other.

Holloway described explicit growth targets tied to the school’s Academic Acceleration Plan (AAP). Her presentation said the school aims to raise the math proficiency measure from 4% to 13% and ELA from 16% to 25% this year, and to increase the graduation rate target from 44% to 56%. She also told the board the current four-year graduation rate is 53% and the five-year rate is 65%.

On school climate and supports, Holloway reported 15 total suspensions so far this school year, a drop from last year, and gave attendance rates by grade: ninth and 10th grades at 67% each, 11th grade at 75% and seniors at 78%. On social-emotional learning metrics she said, “For SEL, we are at 21% and we're at 8% excellent for SEL. We are we need 71 we're at 71% needs improvement.”

During Q&A, Board Member Dr. Sreedhar asked Holloway to explain how the stated areas of focus connect to the growth targets. Holloway said the school aligns daily instruction and professional development to AAP priorities—explicit vocabulary instruction, math discourse and comprehension strategies—and uses class time and 50-minute professional development sessions to practice those strategies. “These areas of focus are things we utilize in the class every day and we impact with our AAP,” Holloway said.

Board Member Miss Peek asked about the CTE programs’ track record and how long they have operated at Glenville. Holloway replied that CTE programs moved to Glenville after a merger with the former MLK campus and said teachers and a planning-center instructional assistant provided examples of alumni who returned as police officers and students who train at area hospitals and dental clinics.

Principal Holloway also described culture-building efforts—an open-door policy for families, emphasis on relationships, and school events and incentives—saying the school treats itself “like family” to strengthen ties between students, staff and the community. She invited board members to visit Glenville to observe programs and student supports.

The board’s discussion included encouragement to use the current AAP season to perform root-cause analysis of attendance and graduation barriers and to identify practices that could be replicated across the district.

Holloway and her staff left board members with contact and program information; she thanked district staff and named Andrew Coontz and Anthony Brown for assistance in her remarks.

The presentation is part of the board’s regular school-spotlight series and was presented by Holloway and members of the Glenville leadership team.