Original Research by School Decision on Citizens Academy Southeast
Citizens Academy Southeast is a public charter district in Cuyahoga County serving kindergarten through eighth grade. The school operates a single campus in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood of Cleveland and enrolls roughly a few hundred students, with relatively even distribution across grade levels from early elementary through middle school.
The student body is overwhelmingly Black, with a small Hispanic population and a two-or-more-races population. Data on free-or-reduced-price lunch eligibility and counts of students receiving special education or English-language services were not available, so a reader cannot assess poverty rates or the scale of support services from this reporting.
The charter operates under the Breakthrough Public Schools network. As of the 2024-25 school year, it has adopted Ohio's Science of Reading mandate, a state-mandated phonics-based approach to early literacy instruction that all Ohio public schools were required to implement. This shifts reading instruction across kindergarten through the early elementary grades and shapes what families should expect in how phonemic awareness, phonics, and foundational literacy are taught.
The school shares its Lee-Harvard campus with Citizens Leadership Academy Southeast, a 6-8 middle school within the same network. That middle school uses the EL Education model, which emphasizes project-based, real-world learning. For families, this arrangement means a K-8 pathway on one site with a clear transition: students progress from traditional instruction in kindergarten through fifth grade into a project-based, real-world-focused middle school experience in grades 6 through 8, all without changing schools.
Chronic absenteeism at Citizens Academy Southeast runs above the midpoint among Cuyahoga County's districts, a data point worth exploring directly with the school. Per-pupil spending falls in the lower half of the middle range for the county, suggesting resource constraints that a parent may want to investigate when thinking about class sizes, program breadth, or staffing.
State assessment results in reading and math proficiency were not available, so the school's academic performance against state benchmarks cannot be evaluated from this data. The charter serves only elementary and middle grades, which is why no graduation rate applies. A parent interested in how well the school is meeting students' academic needs, or how achievement compares to similar schools statewide, would benefit from requesting that information directly from the school or reviewing any publicly available assessment reports the charter may publish.
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