Good news, bad news for Jacksonville's historic schools

Many preservation-minded Jacksonville residents worry the city’s historically significant buildings are under siege, either from abandonment or being torn down for parking lots — or just plain empty lots.

So there is some concern —and a measure of relief — among preservation advocates looking at the Duval school board's master plan to spend $1.9 billion to address the county's aging schools, which requires some painful decisions.

Some schools with architectural significance will see millions of dollars of upgrades. But the plan also calls for some older schools to be torn down and consolidated, and others to be torn down and rebuilt in place.

MAP |  School-by-school look at Duval Schools’ master facility plan

RELATED | Maintenance woes plague Duval schools

Preservationists got a big win when Kirby-Smith Middle School, built in Springfield in 1923, was recently taken off the early list of schools to be demolished. It's now slated to get more than $46 million to modernize the school.

Loretto Elementary School in Mandarin, 76 years old, was also given a reprieve and will be modernized.

Tracy Pierce, a school spokesman, said that was due to "significant community feedback." The district held more than 20 public meeting across the city, and made some major adjustments to plans after hearing from residents.

People take older schools personally: Generations of students attended them, and they’ve entwined into the lives and culture of their communities.

“Schools become a focal point of their neighborhood, both for activities for children and for other civic events,” said Wayne Wood, a preservationist and author of "Jacksonville's Architectural Heritage." “And those schools built prior to the 1930s, almost all of them had the best architects of the time doing the designing. They are the architectural anchors of a neighborhood.”

Pierce says the school district understands that, and will work with the city's Historic Preservation Commission as it rebuild schools.

"As educators, we love the character and charm of old school buildings as much as anyone," he said in an email. "An old school building speaks to the history of public education's contributions to the strength of our community and our nation. Today, we have to prepare students for the present and the future. We have to do that with highly limited funding, and those realities underlie decision making."

The school district is in a tough position, Wood acknowledged. Schools need work, and money isn’t there.

“Because of our leaders’ insistence on running government on the cheap, the total phobia about raising taxes — coupled with the state legislature’s affinity for robbing the public schools in order to stimulate charter schools — our schools are underfunded as far as the physical maintenance,” he said.

A consultant's study that helped guide the proposed plan found that 56 schools were in poor or very poor condition. The cost of bringing them up to modern standards would be too high, compared to just building something new, the study said.

The district says that many older schools are small, with small student bodies, and it makes more financial sense to consolidate them with another school. Increasing concerns about student safety at schools is another driving factor in favor of newer designs as well.

The message is this: Many older schools have run head-first into the realities of modern education.

The public seems to understand the need for a massive overhaul of the county's schools. A UNF poll last week showed three in four respondents favor the district's proposal to fund the master plan with a half-cent sales tax increase. While the school district wants to hold a referendum on the issue in November, the City Council, which has to approve any such vote, could decide to push it to November 2020.

The district’s master plan does provide good news for some older schools. Venerable Andrew Jackson High School on North Main Street, which was never a candidate for replacing, would get $30.8 million in modernization if the plan goes through. It was built in the late 1920s, and along with Robert E. Lee is the city’s oldest high school building still in use as a school.

Lee, in the Riverside-Avondale neighborhood, was updated a few years ago, mixing modern elements with its historic character.

"It's beautiful now," said Carmen Godwin, former executive director of Riverside Avondale Preservation. "They were able to save the school, add new buildings, make it functional for today's standards."

Her son goes to Kirby-Smith, a STEM magnet school, where she and fellow members of the school advisory council were pleased to learn the building would be saved.

"They don't make things like that today," Godwin said. "They don't build buildings like that anymore, from the architectural details to the materials they used. Those buildings have lasted so long because they're so well built."

Ennis Davis, an urban planner, preservationist and historian, argues that demolishing the city’s dwindling number of historic buildings, schools included, should be a “last-case scenario." Instead, renovation, mixing the old with new, should be seriously considered for all of the district’s historic schools — especially in areas that don’t have much political clout.

The city’s historic minority and inner-city areas have, for several decades, been more susceptible to losing older buildings, he said. Older schools such as Henry F. Kite and Annie R. Morgan, both scheduled for demolition, are just as important to residents in those neighborhoods as schools are to residents in more prosperous areas, Davis said.

If buildings can't be saved, though, adaptive reuse of the old buildings should be priority, he said — as seen in successful projects elsewhere that made lofts or apartments out of closed schools such as John Gorrie in Riverside, Corrine Scott in Springfield and South Jacksonville Grammar School in San Marco.

Pierce, the school district spokesman, noted that other old schools sold to private individuals or groups have remained unused, such as the crumbling Annie Lytle school near the intersection of Interstates 95 and 10.

"Once sold, the district has no control over what the buyer does with the building," he said. "We feel a strong obligation to prevent the blight in our city that is caused when older schools sit idle in neighborhoods."

Saving an old building requires a big — and continuing — financial investment, said Alan Bliss, executive director of the Jacksonville Historical Society, which has been keeping an eye on the master plan's progress.

"Our general position on historic buildings is that they are valuable for the stories they tell," he said. "You cannot save every historic building — we get that. So we as a community have to be thoughtful about what we save. If you want to save a historic building and do it for perpetuity, you have to want to do that really bad."

Indeed, not every old school is architecturally significant, Wood noted, and not every old school is worth saving. But the good ones have something in common: Their architectural details announce that these are someplace special.

“So a child or adult looks up and sees a thing of beauty that declares you’re coming her for a special purpose,” Wood said. “They’re of a human scale that you can relate to, as opposed to the shopping-mall architecture that many of the other miscellaneous schools have used.”

Some relatively new schools also have architectural significance, even if they're not the classic stately brick buildings of the pre-World War II era. Jacksonville architect Michael Dunlap points to the example of Westside High, previously known as Forrest.

It’s a 1959 school built in the mid-century modern style by influential Jacksonville architect Taylor Hardwick. Hardwick, who died in 2014, had iconic designs throughout the city, including the old downtown library, now a home to nonprofit organizations, and Friendship Fountain on the Southbank.

Hardwick also designed Wolfson High, which began life as a twin to Forrest. Some $16.2 million is set aside in the plan to improve Wolfson, but its sister school is slated to be torn down and rebuilt on site.

“They’re iconic examples of mid-century work, done by one of our premier architects,” Dunlap said. “They ought to think twice about bringing the bulldozers in.”

The school district's position is that it makes more sense to rebuild Westside: It requires too much upkeep, depends on 15 portable buildings and is in need of security upgrades.

For Dunlap, though, Westside High is personal: He was a high-school intern of Hardwick’s and a 1970 graduate of the the school he designed.

“There goes my memories,” he said, only half-joking.

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082