At our May 1st Regular Board meeting at approximately 7:50PM administration and school board representatives from Cincinnati Public Schools will adress Clifton Town Meeting about a new neighborhood school including plans for use of the Historic Clifton School(3711 Clifton Ave) and adjacent Rawson Farm property as its future home. We invite all members of the community to come out and hear the information CPS has to share with us. There will be an amount of time for Q&A and opportunities to learn how to be a part of the process in shaping this change to our community.
Clifton Town Meeting has over the last almost 2 years worked on the issue of assured high quality education access for children of Clifton and keeping the Clifton Cultural Arts Center in its current building. Early on these two issues became intertwined due to the fact that Cincinnati Public Schools had suggested a new school as an option for solving the education access concern. Of course it was clear a possible location for this school could be the Historic Clifton School Building where the CCAC currently resides.
CTM worked with the several stakeholders and developed a position statement. Our board of Trustees unanimously passed supporting this statement last year. Two goals in that position were:
- Assured access to a high quality public school
- The CCAC remain in its current building.
This position was clearly and repeatedly provided to CPS.
Recently CPS announced termination of the lease with CCAC and also moved to purchase the neighboring Rawson Farmhouse property. Our understanding is both will be used for a new neighborhood school serving Clifton, CUF, and Spring Grove Village, or parts thereof.
The lease termination action was taken without knowledge or consent of Clifton Town Meeting and in contrary to our stated position of support of which CPS was well aware.
Now that this situation exists it will begin to have many impacts on our neighborhood, other Clifton education institutions, the immediate surrounding property owners, traffic on Clifton Ave, etc. CTM wants to start today to reach out to our community and begin a process of collecting input for the property use as a school. This input will help us formulate the positions we want to take as community with regard to the future development of the property as a school. Our intent will be to again reach out to CPS and advocate these positions with the purpose of helping make this a successful high quality public school.
Comments from the public at the April CTM Board Meeting on this subject are here.