Site of former public elementary school planned for new charter school
In a few years, the sound of children laughing and playing may again be heard in Mixon Town, where the former Forest Park Elementary School was once “surrounded by a City incinerator on the East, a polluted creek on the North, and a meat and poultry (abattoir) company on the West,” according to documents from a legal case involving the court-ordered closing of seven elementary schools in 1972 as a result of desegregation.
The case document – Mims v. Duval County School Board – also indicated Forest Park school was “relatively new” back in the early 1970s, with a capacity for more than 1,000 students. After it was closed, the school building remained vacant for a number of years before it was leased by Head Start, under the Northeast Florida Community Action Agency, until the end of May 2005.
In March 2019, nearly all of a 10.89-acre site on Forest Street, across the road from the City’s Animal Care & Protective Services shelter, was approved by Jacksonville City Council to be sold for over $1.4 million to the Vestcor Family Foundation to build a new charter school, Jacksonville Classical Academy. Two smaller parcels adjacent on Forest and Margaret streets were sold to the Foundation for $55,000. The assessed value of all three parcels totaled just over $141,000, per the City Property Appraiser website. According to a City spokesperson, the funds from the sale of the properties will be put into a park land acquisition account for Council District 9.
The Foundation has committed $1.5 million and an anonymous benefactor has pledged $500,000 toward the $18 million project, of which building costs are anticipated to be $12,545,000, according to the application submitted to the Duval County School Board. The balance may come from bonds or commercial loans, and a donor has engaged a consultant to assist with the pursuit of New Market Tax Credits for the building. Once established and in operation for two or more years, the charter school would be eligible for funds through the Florida Education Finance Program.
The Duval County School Board unanimously approved the Vestcor Family Foundation’s application May 7 to open the charter school in fall 2020, but final cleanup of the property and construction of the two-story, 65,000-square-foot school could delay it for a year.
The property includes the former location of the City of Jacksonville solid waste incinerator facility, the former Forest Park Head Start School, which provided child development care for preschool children from low-income families until it closed in 2005 and was demolished in 2008, and portions of Forest Park and Center, which includes two baseball fields, basketball and tennis courts, a playground and a two-story community center built in 1986. According to the City’s Parks webpage, the park was closed in March 2019, pursuant to the sale of the property, with a new park planned for a location somewhere in the same area sometime in the future.
The City operated the municipal solid waste incinerator facility on Forest Street from 1913 until the 1960s. The City disposed of combustion ash, clinker and ash residues on the incinerator properties and ash spread to some of the surrounding areas and McCoys Creek.
At the time remedial investigations began in 1999, only Forest Park and Center was utilized. In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency initiated and completed a short-term cleanup at the incinerator site, allowing construction of the City’s animal care and control facility.
Long-term cleanup, estimated at more than $190 million, began in 2010 and, according to a report from the EPA, is over 90% complete. While the EPA notes that site contamination does not currently threaten people living or working near the site and expects the remedial action to be completed in 2022, the site will be remediated during construction of the school.
The City listed the property in October 2017 on the Brownfield Listings website.
Earlier this year, Groundwork Jacksonville had included the acreage in its McCoys Creek Restoration Plan, proposing a new park called Forest Ecological Park, but after the City sold it the original design for that space became unfeasible.
“Our initial design did include all of that city-owned property, but since much of that has been sold, we will be adapting the design to include what remains under City ownership – 1.7 acres at the back of the parcel,” said Trish Kapustka, a consultant with Groundwork Jacksonville. “We don’t anticipate it will affect our creek restoration plan, only the recreation space we originally planned for that parcel.”
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