Greetings,

Thank you for your interest in the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine. We are thrilled that your family is considering our school for next school year. Please review the information below to help answer any questions you may have about the admissions process.

The school choice portal, the application for the district should open in December 2024 and close in January 2025.   There is not much to prep for until that application opens, we will ask for student's transcripts to be uploaded to the portal if they do not attend a CMSD school.  All students interested in ANY CMSD school need to complete the school choice portal application online to be considered for a school.  Our school has criteria that students need to meet to be offered a seat in our building. We look for our students to have a 3.0 GPA or higher, proficient state test scores, and a low absence/tardy record. We review this information from their prior year in school to make an admissions decision. *This year we are aware that students did not have testing in the spring, we will be reviewing fall testing and looking at recommendation letters during our review this year.

Things to keep in mind:

• You will need to rank your schools in order of which school you want to attend, the top choice to the last choice. If your schools are criteria schools like CSSM you should be notified about your offer before the portal closes and you will be able to change the order if for some reason you are not admitted into your top choice. (if you wait until the last couple of weeks to apply you may not learn of your decision in time to change out)
• School admissions officers cannot see how you rank a school, so if anyone tells you they can only see your application if you rank them #1, that is not correct. We can only see that you have completed an application for our school.
• You can certainly apply to all three or any combination of the John Hay campuses, but our admissions offices are completely different. There is a separate application for each school but please know if you are offered a seat to any of our schools you must select which campus you would like to attend. For example, if you select Early College but then decide to switch to CSSM you can do so until we start classes in August, as long as you were offered a seat to both campuses. If you were not offered admissions to one campus but you were to the other, you can only attend the school that offered you a seat.
• Please make sure if you attend an out-of-district school or a charter school in Cleveland that you select that you do not attend a CMSD school, this will prompt you to upload your students test scores and transcripts. These items are required to complete an application for our school. We will reach out to families to let them know of any missing information, but your student's application cannot be processed until all that information has been received. If you are a CMSD student, we have access to these items but will not be able to look up charter school students.
• We typically update individuals via e-mail with the status of your student's application so please be sure to give an active e-mail address.
• Last year our school had over 500 applications for just over 100 spots at our school, we are thrilled that there is so much interest in our school and please know that we would love to be able to admit all of the students that apply but that is not possible due to physical space restrictions. We wish you luck with your application process and I hope to see many of you in the fall at the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine.
• If you run into any issues with the portal itself (password problems, issues with ranking schools etc) please contact the downtown office at 216-838-3675 they are able to see your application before you complete it, our school can only see your application after it has been submitted to us.  If you have any questions about our school, please feel free to contact us at 216-838-8300.

School Admissions

Cleveland School of Science and Medicine