Cleaning up the Rustbelt: Jack Schron on Jergens Inc, politics and why America needs a reality check

Source: ExecMay

Date :08/05/2008 01:06:36

Regeneration of Ohio’s industrial heartland has been just one of Jack H Schron’s passions: now he is hoping to step onto a broader political stage

Written by John O’Hanlon

Don’t judge a place by its name. Despite having as its bard the Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip, who have recorded a track of that name, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, is no Lake Woebegone. Rather it is a small but thriving suburb of Cleveland with a strong sense of community and one of the best high schools in the whole of the United States.

That’s what Jack Schron thinks anyway, who was born and grew up there. “Maybe it’s just a peanut town but the people have high expectations for their children and for themselves and everyone works hard to achieve those expectations. I always bless the day my parents settled on that community for us to grow up in.”

Schron sat on the Chagrin Falls Board of Education for twelve years, seven of those as president or vice-president, which says a lot about his commitment to education. But he’s better known as the president of his family firm Jergens Inc and as founder of Tooling University, the online academy that trains engineers.

Jergens Inc

Jergens was founded by Schron’s father and grandfather in 1942 to manufacture specialty products for engineering workshops. The company moved four times as it grew. Eight years ago, when it ran out of space, it would have been easy to move to a Greenfield site, but as vice-chair of the Clean Ohio Council he wanted to show a lead in brownfield reclamation, so he placed his 130,000-square-foot manufacturing and office complex on the former Collinwood Railyard of the old New York to Chicago railroad, a polluted brownfield site. “It’s a model of regeneration, with the Cleveland Foodbank and the Cleveland Clinic both located right next to our factory. We have visitors every day, and they leave with a really positive view of manufacturing. Our belief is that we can compete on a world stage by manufacturing in Cleveland.”

The Jergens project gave rise to a state-wide initiative, he says, with the former Republican governor Bob Taft announcing, from the lobby of the new facility, $400 million of State funding to the Clean Ohio Foundation to clean the state’s extensive brownfield. Programs like that don’t always survive changes in administration, but the new Democrat governor Ted Strickland not only wanted Schron to continue as vice-chair, but endorsed a proposal to commit a further $400 million. “That’s $800 million going towards cleaning up sites, most of which are in inner cities whether in Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Canton, Akron or Toledo. They didn’t even change the name of the program!”

Ethical, moral and legal

Over the last four years the Schron Family Foundation has donated $400,000 to the Cleveland Foundation. “They allocate the interest on the fund to very valid community projects,” he says.

His social conscience comes from his mother and father, and ultimately…

Click here to view the full interview with Jack H Schron