Schools are ubiquitous in American life. We all attended them. Anyone with children likely spent a lot of time with them. We pay a lot of taxes to support them, and news accounts regularly discuss them. In spite of all that, consider how much you know about what actually goes on in classrooms today. Taking a step further, how much do you know about what goes on in an urban school classroom, like those in Cleveland? Get ready to change that. We are about to take you inside. In one of the most challenging and ambitious efforts we’ve undertaken, we’ve embedded two reporters in a Cleveland school classroom since last fall, when students returned following the pandemic school closures. The reporters started with students in a fourth-grade classroom, and they remain embedded this fall as those students navigate fifth grade. Reporters Hannah Drown and Cameron Fields have been with the students in their classes and their homes. They’ve been with them as they work with all the specialists the Cleveland schools use to help the students succeed. We call the project Cleveland’s Promise, which has a double meaning. It’s about the children, who are the promise for Cleveland’s future. And it’s about this community’s promise to provide these children with what they need to thrive – so they have a bright future. This is an entirely new form of education reporting. For too many years to count, education reporting fell back on traditional coverage of school boards like governments. Lots of battles between the districts and the teachers’ unions. Discussions about money woes. School funding formulas. Standardized testing. School report cards. Charter schools. Educational strategies and theories. What we did not write about were the people at the heart of the issue: the children. When we started talking about this in early 2021, we set as our goal the exploration of the challenges that Cleveland schools face in educating children living in poverty and illumination of what the district does to meet those challenges. We have long reported on how poverty makes education so much more challenging. Studies have shown how trauma children experience living among violence impedes the ability of their brains to learn. And we know how homelessness interrupts the education process. People without means have difficulty providing the clothing, transportation and supplies children need to get to and have success in the classroom. What does all of that mean to the children and teachers in the system? As we gnawed on how to tackle our aim, I put in a call to Eric Gordon. We’ve had regular meetings and conversations with Eric over the 11 years he has been the Cleveland Schools CEO, and we’ve always found him to be an inspiring, passionate advocate for education. When I posed the challenge we faced to him, he had an almost immediate answer: A Greater Cleveland, set in the schools. A Greater Cleveland is a project we launched about five years ago, to examine the challenges faced by children living in poverty. For nearly two years, reporters spent uncountable hours with a handful of families, chronicling the extra challenges people without means face as they go about their lives. Our goal then was to activate Greater Cleveland to help. Ultimately, the series persuaded hundreds of people to join Open Table, now called Community of Hope, the movement led by the late Amber Donovan to work with children recently aged out of foster care, to help them thrive. I’ve been a journalist for more than four decades, and I consider A Greater Cleveland the high water mark of my career. It did something no one else had done -- opened a window into the daily life of people contending with overwhelming obstacles. It made an impact on our readers. I was surprised by Eric’s suggestion that we use the model in the schools, because that would mean granting us access that schools don’t generally provide. Reporters don’t get unlimited access to classrooms. Eric didn’t hesitate for a second, as he explained recently to the reporters on the project, Cameron Fields and Hannah Drown: It wasn’t something I deliberated. We have this remarkable story to tell of these hidden people who are treasures in our community that are looked over and looked past and assigned value by others by what they perceive of a school district. And what you’re doing, by doing this embedded project and telling these stories, is uncovering these hidden gems of people that deserve their story to be told and deserve to be celebrated for what they’re able to accomplish despite some just incredible circumstances. So, there was actually not a moment when I was in -- there was never a moment that I wasn’t in on this project… You know, I’ve been here 15 years, and in those 15 years I’ve come to believe that people fully underestimate my kids and their families and how much they go through to get the education that they get. And so, giving cleveland.com the opportunity to embed in a classroom for now more than a year and see in real time these remarkable young people and their families and the great work our teachers do, it was an opportunity that I’ve been waiting for frankly for years to show the truth about who my kids and families actually are. Like I said, Eric is inspiring. We have a couple of rules for this unusual kind of reporting. The most important is do no harm. We will not write pieces if we have any indication or suspicion that doing so will cause harm to the subjects of the stories. They are giving us unfettered access to their lives. They should not suffer as a result. Second, we don’t use actual names. Someone searching the web in 20 years for details about one of these students shouldn’t be able to dredge up whatever we’ve written about challenges they’ve worked to overcome. Cleveland’s Promise will start rolling out Monday on cleveland.com with an introduction by editor Leila Atassi, who was the lead reporter on a Greater Cleveland and oversees the latest project. Also appearing Monday will be the first installment of the series. It’s gripping. We’ll have a new story every weekday for two weeks and then settle into a twice-weekly cadence that will eventually number hundreds of stories. We have no end date. In The Plain Dealer, watch for stories from the series beginning Sunday Sept. 25 and continuing on subsequent Wednesdays and Sundays. The project has been a significant commitment of resources for us. We have about 75 people on our newsroom staff these days, so dedicating two of our most talented reporters full-time without them producing stories for most of a year shows how important we think it is. And I want to point out that we can do this work only because of your support. The money you pay to subscribe to cleveland.com or The Plain Dealer allows us to hire reporters of the caliber of Cameron and Hannah, and to dedicate them to such a daunting endeavor. Come Monday, I think you are going to be proud to see what your support has created. I said earlier that A Greater Cleveland was our high water mark. I think the water is rising. (If you don’t subscribe but believe in this kind of work, please consider becoming a subscriber. You can do so at cleveland.com/subscribe | 