Parents, teachers and elementary-school aged students at Leggett Community Learning Center in Akron - including some refugee families - showed up in large numbers to Akron Board of Education meetings Monday and Wednesday this week, asking the board not to displace them from their building.
The Board of Education for the last two months has publicly discussed a series of facilities improvements and swaps in tandem with a potential bond issue and school levy that will likely be needed to pay for those improvements.
Specifically, the board has discussed moving the National Inventors Hall of Fame STEM Middle School to the current location of Leggett to allow for the NIHF STEM High School to move to that location, due to an expiring lease at the current High School location.
Parents noted Leggett has served as the home for a growing population of Mon students (from Myanmar) who have grown close relationships with other staff, other students and the building itself.
Leggett parent Raymond Roteian said he was among the first wave of refugees to come to Akron. He said he left his home country after he fought in a rebel group against government forces, after he and his family were forced out of their village. He said Leggett has been a strong source of support for them.
“This is a good place for our community … now we have about over 300 families in and around that area,” he said. “So we found this is like our backbone.”
Kaohtaw Raman, a junior at Akron Early College High School who went to Leggett, said the school’s staff have adapted to the Mon community’s needs, and losing the school at its current location would be a major step back.
“Historically, my people were displaced from war and discrimination,” she said. “We have finally found a home right here in Akron. For the past 20 years, we've been building relationships with Leggett's staff and the surrounding community. This school is one of the only places where we can come together as a community.
“This school not only allows us to learn the American way of life, but allows us to keep our culture alive.”
Jacqueline Jacobo, a fifth grade student and student ambassador at Leggett, said the district should have acted far in advance of the lease ending at the NIHF High School to find a new home for that program.
“Why should the students at Leggett have to get separated from their friends and favorite teachers because the district did not plan ahead?”
Board members and Akron school administrators have previously noted the district did do a series of community meetings on its facilities plan last year, but have acknowledged attendance was lighter than they would have liked.
Board President Derrick Hall said Wednesday no decisions have been made yet on the facilities plans, but said after hearing from the commenters and from others at Leggett in recent weeks, he will not support any plan that relocates the students and staff from the building.
Other large groups of parents, students and staff have showed up to the board in force in recent weeks to protest potential changes to their school buildings as well. Specifically, they have been concerned about:
- A lack of school buildings in the Kenmore neighborhood, which for years has seen buildings closed by the district. The board has responded it will look to build a new building on the site of the old Kenmore High School.
- A potential decision to move the Miller South Visual and Performing Arts school from its current location, with parents mostly worried about the loss of grades four through five in that grade four-through-eight program in tandem with that move. Hall and others on the board have said they will keep the program whole but will still move the program to a new building due to the age of its current structure.
- And most recently, a potential decision to move the NIHF Middle School, which caused protests by parents and students and others recently who said they don’t want to lose a building specifically built for that STEM program.
It's not clear when the board will vote on its facilities plan. It had previously said it wanted to move quickly due to the need to use expiring pandemic-relief funds and the expiring lease on the NIHF STEM High School, but that was roughly a month ago.
