Plans to build a new Atlanta school and community health center using public and private dollars received a $3.5 million boost from corporate donors.
The project in northwest Atlanta has been hailed by the Atlanta Public Schools superintendent as an example of the kind of development that should attract public investment as a tool to spark neighborhood revitalization.
APS is spending $18.5 million to build a new Woodson Park Academy at the site of the former Woodson Elementary School on Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway. The Grove Park Foundation is raising donations to cover the remainder of the roughly $38 million project, which includes the school, land purchases and other improvements to the campus.
A YMCA, health clinic and early childhood learning center also are planned for the site.
At her recent State of the District address, Superintendent Meria Carstarphen announced $3.5 million in donations from Chick-fil-A, Southern Company, SunTrust Foundation, SunTrust Bank Trusteed Foundations and Synovus to add to the $1 million already promised in April by Bank of America.
The district plans to open the new school building in 2020.
Carstarphen compared the school project to other Atlanta developments that have received public money through special taxing districts known as tax-allocation districts or TADs. After her annual speech, she spoke to reporters about her concerns with five of those taxing districts that divert some school property taxes to help pay for development in the Westside, Atlantic Station, Perry Bolton, Eastside and Beltline areas.
Carstarphen wants the city to renegotiate the terms of her school system's participation in those five taxing districts before APS considers jumping into another TAD to support the Gulch redevelopment. (That $5 billion project by CIM Group would transform downtown, supporters say. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is pushing for a public financing proposal for it that, including TAD dollars, could be worth $1.75 billion.)
The superintendent said the new Woodson Park Academy, while not funded through a TAD, is the kind of project those taxing districts “were made for.”
Public dollars should go to areas where there wouldn’t be any investment without them, Carstarphen said.
Why put public money elsewhere, she said, “when you need investment in areas that have been unbelievably disenfranchised.”
The Woodson Park Academy plan has been embraced by the Grove Park Foundation, whose website touts a mission to revitalize the community “and put an end to a cycle of generational poverty.”
The new building will house the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, currently located about a half mile away in the former Grove Park Intermediate School. Beginning next school year, the district will turn over day-to-day management of Woodson Park Academy to Kipp Metro Atlanta Schools. (Kipp runs a group of public charter schools.)
The development includes more than just a new school. The plan is to turn the area into a community hub, offering health and fitness services through the YMCA, and an early childhood learning center.
To make room for the project, APS is trying to purchase residential properties that surround the site. In August, the school board agreed to begin eminent domain proceedings to force reluctant owners to sell nine properties.
Since then, the board has authorized spending more than $460,000 to buy half a dozen of those properties, which officials have described as unoccupied and owned by investors.
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