Turns No One Away

Brothers and sisters, there is no trade without a schoolhouse behind it, and there is no schoolhouse worth the name without a trade waiting on the other side of it. We may never have never said so out loud. That schoolhouse has a name. It is called public education, and in this city, its name is Cincinnati Public Schools, or simply CPS.

Picture a kid in a CPS classroom this morning. Maybe nobody in her family has ever worn a hard hat or held a union card. CPS does not ask her family’s income, her zip code, her disability, or her home language before it opens the door. It opens the door because the law requires it, and CPS has never asked to be let off that hook. Turns no one away.

Picture the young man beside her ten years from now, on a scaffold, learning a trade that will carry his family for life. Somebody taught him fractions, kept him in a seat long enough to graduate, told him a trade was a calling, not a fallback. Maybe that somebody wore a collar, plenty of us came up through Catholic schools ourselves. But whether the classroom sat behind a parish or a public building, none of it happens at the scale the trades need without public education underneath it, educating nine of every ten kids in this country, open to every child regardless of what their family could afford. Public education built the floor everyone else built on.

Turns no one away. Say it with me, because it belongs to more than one institution here. It is a legal fact about Cincinnati Public Schools. It is supposed to be a moral fact about us. We do not ask a man his church before we sign him into an apprenticeship, or tell a woman she cannot hold a torch because of who her father was. At our best, we are the same promise CPS makes that little girl every morning. When we let ourselves believe the schoolhouse is somebody else’s fight, we lose the very thing that makes a union worth belonging to.

See what happens when CPS gets starved. When state lawmakers walk away from their own school funding formula and hand this district fifty million dollars less than the law was supposed to guarantee it. When a voucher lets a private school cherry pick which children it accepts while public dollars follow the child out the door.

That is not a finance footnote. It is the same hand, in a different glove, that shows up on a job site refusing a project labor agreement, or a developer who takes public money and gives nothing back in wages or training. An institution that owes something to everyone is being starved to feed one that owes nothing to anyone but its shareholders. We have treated this as two separate battles. It has always been one, and the crafts and the trades belong in it.

As CPS goes, so goes the future of Labor in this city. Not someday, not as a metaphor, but literally, in the apprenticeship classes we will or will not fill five years from now, because that girl in the classroom today either gets a real shot at a trade or she does not, and we are deciding which.

Here is what she and every child like her could have, if the trades stopped standing at arm’s length from the schoolhouse. A real trades pathway in every comprehensive high school, not just the magnets that already reach the kids with a head start. Shop time protected the way an AP class is protected. A counselor who calls a trade a calling, not a consolation prize. On our side, real interviews for CPS students who finish a career and technical program, and a public, unmistakable promise that hometown kids get real priority in our apprenticeship halls. Neither side would be doing the other a favor. Each would be investing in the only pipeline either of us has ever had.

This week, CPS received its newest report card from the state, and for the first time under Ohio’s star system, it crossed into three stars, meeting state standards after two years stuck at two and a half. Of Ohio’s three largest districts, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus, CPS posted the best overall mark, matching or beating Columbus in every category. Its progress score, the measure of student growth, doubled, from two stars to four. Superintendent Shauna Murphy said it plainly: CPS now carries the highest performance index of any large urban district in Ohio.

Give the district its due, including the part that still needs work. Graduation dropped to one star, and Murphy owned it publicly rather than explain it away. Board Vice President Moffitt pointed straight at the fix: stronger vocational and career-tech offerings, because the state’s post-graduation metrics do not capture what a student headed for a trade is actually capable of. A CPS board member just said, out loud, the very thing this piece is asking the crafts and trades to hear.

That is not a district falling apart. That is a district climbing, and asking us to help it climb the rest of the way.
A district that is climbing is not a district you starve. A gambler does not walk away the moment the dice turn. Every gain named here happened without the resources this levy would provide, which means those numbers are a floor, not a ceiling. The wrong lesson from an improving CPS is that the money can wait. The right one is that CPS has shown what it can do with less than it deserves, and is asking us to find out what it can do with enough.

CPS has been showing up for the crafts and trades for generations, whether we said thank you or not. This November, it is our turn. The levy on the ballot is the ground on which we take that stand, not a quiet finance matter for somebody else to handle, but the whole future of our own pipeline laid out on a single ballot line. Endorse it, brothers and sisters, publicly, by name, with your local’s letterhead behind it. Walk the precincts. Open your halls for phone banks. Send your retirees to knock on doors, and send your newest apprentices with them, so this city can see the job site and the schoolhouse standing together.

Turns no one away. That is what CPS has been to every child who ever walked through its doors, including the ones who grew up to carry our union cards. As CPS goes, so goes the future of Labor in this city. Stand up for CPS. Stand up for public education. Endorse the levy, and get your boots on the ground, because the ground we stand on is the only ground our children, and our future, will ever get to build on.