Cleveland Metropolitan School District and the city of Cleveland held an open house Thursday evening to unveil plan which would rebuild Marion C. Seltzer School mostly on its existing site in Cleveland's Cudell neighborhood, rather than take space from an adjacent park.
The unveiling followed several months of work with a steering committee, which included some neighbors who just a year prior had filed a lawsuit to halt construction of the building. The suit was dismissed by a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court judge earlier this year. However, the residents who had filed the suit - members of an advocacy group called Friends of Cudell Commons Park - continued raising concerns about the new school building eating into park space and cutting down mature trees.
Stakeholders attending Thursday's community meeting cited preserving more park space, involving neighbors in the planning process and building up, rather than outward, as positive changes in the new plan.
The plan, which includes work to be done by both the city at Cudell Commons Park and by the school district at the school site, shows the building largely remaining on its current footprint; previously, the building would have taken up parts of the park to the north of the building that included 34 mostly mature trees along with walkways and other green space. The new plan also shows an investment by the city of Cleveland, about $1.7 million over the next few years, to rebuild parts of the park, including moving the basketball court and possibly creating a new baseball diamond, said Jim McKnight, landscape architect with the city of Cleveland.
Jeff Henderson, with the architecture firm, TDA, which came up with the new design, noted that the district's delay on its initial plans (in part due to the lawsuit) also presented an opportunity: for the district to "swing" Marion Seltzer students to a different building at Booker Elementary, while construction occurs on the original site. Booker had been in use up until recently as swing space for another district building project.
Henderson did acknowledge that about 40 trees will still need to be removed for the project to work on the current site of the school building, as the new building will be larger and several new spaces outside will be devoted to play areas, along with a new parking lot. That drew some concerns from the crowd, although most of those trees are currently located adjacent to the school building, rather than in the park proper.
The new plan includes moving the main Cudell Park parking lot away from the Tamir Rice Memorial and landscaping around it to make it a quieter and more respectful place, Henderson said. Samaria Rice, Tamir Rice's mother and a member of the steering committee, said she was very pleased with the new plan and said it shows the district was willing to compromise after hearing from the community.
Hiawatha Powell, with the Tamir Rice Foundation, said that the new plan comes after years of local residents feeling like they weren't being listened to.
"It was very unfortunate that those things had happened, right?" he said about the district's past plan. "But when you look around, you see parents, you see teacher, you see community members. This is our chance to start all over and move forward."
CMSD CEO Warren Morgan spoke briefly at the opening of the meeting, noting that the district took residents' concerns as a reason to stop the planning process and create a new design.
"What does it look like to go back to the community to really hear the voice?" Morgan said. "It's really a matter of taking that, listening and learning. One of the things I say is listening and learning is not a moment. It's a way of leading."
CMSD did not share the cost of the redesign or the projected construction cost of the school.
