Mentor Exempted Village Schools — OH

1. Snapshot

Suburb-Large district along Lake Erie east of Cleveland in Lake County. 6,896 students across 13 schools — Mentor HS, Memorial MS, Shore MS, plus 9 elementaries (Ridge, Hopkins, Bellflower, Orchard Hollow, Fairfax, and others). SAIPE poverty 5.4% — second-lowest in the brief set. Demographics 83% White / 4.7% Hispanic / 4.4% Black / 5.4% Multiracial / 2.3% Asian. Per-pupil expenditure $15,415 (FY2020). This is the largest district in the May 2026 brief set by a factor of 2x (next-largest is Mount Vernon at 3,374), and the only one where the absolute dollar magnitude ($13.5M/yr ask) is on the scale of large suburban districts.

2. Community context (ACS)

This is the most economically secure community in the brief set — high homeowner share, above-median income, highest college attainment, low poverty. And it still rejected the levy 54-46. The diagnosis is not “voters can’t afford it”; it’s “voters could afford it and chose not to.” A $172/yr-per-$100K-home ask on a $213K median home = ~$365/yr — well within tax capacity but rejected by 1,226 votes (8.0-point margin).

3. Gap story — finance / staffing / school climate

• Plant operations spending: $1,200.16 / pupil vs national median $1,324 — only 9.4% below median. Mild under-investment, not the lead story here.
• Capital construction outlay (FY2020): $1.17M — small relative to district size ($6,896 students). Active capital activity exists but is modest.
• Per-pupil instruction: $8,963 — solidly mid-pack for Suburb-Large peers; classroom protected.
• Total revenue $117.3M with 71% local share ($83.3M local of $117.3M total). Mentor is the most locally-funded district in this brief set — heavily dependent on property tax base, exactly the structure voters just rejected expanding.
• Chronic absenteeism: 15.6% district-wide — below the brief-set median. Mentor HS 23.3%; Memorial MS 20.8%; elementaries 4-11%. School climate is better than peer-average.
• Suspension rate: 6.7% — low.
• Counselor ratio: 363:1 — slightly better than peer median (419:1).
• Nurse coverage: 11.5 FTE across 14 schools (3 schools without a dedicated nurse). Nurse coverage is thinnest in this brief set on a per-school basis.
• Total expulsions: 19 — middle-of-pack for district size.

The honest read: Mentor’s data profile doesn’t tell a “we’re starved, give us money” story. They’re spending mid-pack, climate is mid-pack, classroom is protected. The case for the levy is prospective — Superintendent Heath’s “$10M five-year reduction plan, year one done, 30 positions cut, $3.4M more cuts coming if this fails” framing per Hoodline is what voters were asked to prevent. That’s a harder ask than “we’re underwater right now.”

FMX peer operational benchmarks (live)

Strongsville City (OH) is the highest-leverage peer — 37 miles southwest, same Suburb-Large locale, same Cuyahoga/Lake-area NE Ohio political context, and also on the May 2026 failed-levy list (its own $147M bond at 48% Yes). Mentor and Strongsville are peer-failures of each other — when Mentor’s next campaign cites Strongsville, both districts can run a coordinated benchmarking story. Rockford (MI) is the cleanest data peer with full operational snapshot (25 buildings, 1.44M sqft, 53.4-yr portfolio age, 95.5% resolution).

4. Levy history

• Mentor has historically passed levies — this 4.9-mill May 2026 ask is the first failure in the recent cycle per available coverage.
• May 5, 2026: 4.9-mill, 5-year, additional — failed 46% Yes / 54% No (margin -1,226 of 15,314)
• Pre-election Hoodline coverage: Heath said Mentor was in year 1 of a 5-year, $10M reduction plan, had already cut 30+ positions, and projected an additional $3.4M cut if the levy failed (which it did).

The May 2026 result is the start of the failure cycle for Mentor, not the middle of it. Outreach in the next 90 days has the most leverage of any in the brief set — the district is choosing what its November 2026 / 2027 ask looks like right now.

5. What voters / opposition said

Hoodline reported Heath’s pre-election framing but no organized opposition committee surfaces in coverage. Ideastream lumped Mentor into the broader “NE Ohio income-tax levies mostly rejected” framing — but Mentor’s ask was a property levy, not income tax. The 54-46 No vote in this affluent, high-attainment, low-poverty community is harder to explain than the rural EIT failures elsewhere in the brief set. Likely explanations:

• Lake County property-tax exhaustion. Mentor sits in the same county as Wickliffe (recently turned-around levy story), Painesville City (failed May 2026, 49.64% Yes — also in this cohort), and other levy-active districts. Voter levy-fatigue across the county is a plausible cross-district headwind.
• “$10M reduction plan year 1” framing read as managed decline, not crisis. Voters who saw Heath’s “we’re already cutting, the levy avoids more cuts” message may have read it as: “they’re handling it; we don’t need to add taxes.” That’s an easier read in a district where the operational data doesn’t show acute crisis.
• No organized opposition coverage suggests passive No, not active opposition — meaning the campaign didn’t generate counter-engagement, just absence of enthusiasm.

6. What we could have told them

1. “Strongsville City — 37 miles southwest, same locale, same demographic mix — also failed its bond at 48% Yes the same day we failed at 46%. The NE-Ohio Suburb-Large levy environment is the binding constraint right now, not Mentor’s specific operational case. The next ask has to be calibrated to that, not to Mentor-internal urgency.” Cross-district peer-failure pattern reframes the diagnosis.
2. “Plant operations $1,200/pupil — 9% below the national median, but mid-pack for our peer set. The under-investment story is real but mild — and that means voters need a different headline than ‘crisis facilities.’ The headline is ‘we are the largest locally-funded district in our cohort (71% local share), the most exposed to property-tax-base shifts, and our 5-year plan needs $13.5M/yr to keep that local-share resilient.’” Honest framing about the modest gap, then the structural argument.
3. “Our high school is 23% chronically absent. The middle schools are 14-21%. These are not crisis numbers but they’re trending; the 5-year plan is what keeps them from becoming Mentor HS at 30% three cycles from now. Funded buildings don’t fix attendance alone — but cutting support staff makes them worse.”
4. “Rockford Public Schools (MI) — our 94%-similarity peer — runs FMX on a 25-building, 1.44M sqft portfolio. They resolve 95.5% of work orders. We have no comparable published number. The campaign asked voters to trust that we’re efficient. Rockford proves it for theirs.”
5. “71% of our revenue is local. That makes us the most property-tax-exposed district in our peer set. The 4.9-mill ask wasn’t expanding dependence on property tax — it was preserving capacity in the funding mechanism we already rely on. Reframe the next ask around ‘protect the funding model we already have’ rather than ‘add new burden.’”

7. FMX outreach hook

Mentor is a high-value, time-sensitive outreach — large district, first-failure-of-cycle, sophisticated leadership (Heath has been publicly framing a 5-year plan), and a peer relationship with another May 2026 failure (Strongsville) that’s geographically and culturally close enough to enable joint storytelling.

Lead with the Strongsville-as-peer angle. Both districts failed on May 5, both Suburb-Large NE Ohio, both now need to redesign their next ask. FMX has Strongsville already as a customer (scsmustangs.gofmx.com, 12 buildings, 51.9-yr portfolio age, 78% resolution rate — Strongsville has its own resolution-rate problem, which makes the Mentor-Strongsville peer story bidirectional: “you can publish your data, we can publish ours, we both look better than going alone”).

Contact unit: Craig Heath, Superintendent (publicly named in Hoodline). Outreach team to identify the Treasurer/CFO and Director of Operations via district website / OSBA (not published in OSBA per spec).

Opener: “You and Strongsville both failed on May 5 — same locale, same county-area, both Suburb-Large, both relying on a 5-year plan voters didn’t believe was urgent enough. Strongsville is already an FMX customer with 12 buildings published in our system. You can join Strongsville on platform inside 60 days, and your November or 2027 ask gets to cite ‘we and Strongsville City both publish per-building work-order and portfolio-age data — here’s how Mentor’s 13-building portfolio actually performs.’ Rockford Public Schools (MI), our 94%-similarity peer, is running 25 buildings at 95.5% resolution and 53-yr portfolio age — that’s the operational profile voters need to see compared against yours. Right now your campaign cited plans; the next one needs to cite numbers — and the operational data layer doesn’t exist outside FMX for Suburb-Large NE Ohio.”