Kevin Wright, Christina Brown and Kathy Atkinson

Kevin Wright is executive director of the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation and Christina Brown is president of its board. Kathy Atkinson is a member of Frederick Douglass School’s Local School Decision Making Committee. Op-ed contributions of 550-650 words may be emailed to letters@enquirer.com.

Members of the Walnut Hills community learned of the new gifted school coming to our neighborhood via the article “New magnet school for gifted children to open in Walnut Hills” (Jan. 13). Neither the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation, Walnut Hills Area Council nor other neighborhood stakeholders were privy to conversations about this decision. In fact, the article was published at the exact time the first council meeting of 2017 was taking place – one in which dozens of people showed up to talk about a variety of issues affecting their neighborhood, including ...you guessed it, education.

But let’s not focus on the fact that the community wasn’t consulted, or the optics of a “suspension school” being replaced with a magnet school for the gifted. Let’s instead talk about how Cincinnati Public Schools’ announcement complicated existing issues of race, education and equity in Cincinnati. While Walnut Hills is a neighborhood with varying levels of diversity, it is still a predominantly black area, with high levels of poverty, as is our neighborhood school, Frederick Douglass. This context matters because there is an unspoken norm of allowing largely black student populations to continue to struggle separately while magnet and gifted schools receive investment and are flourishing.

So while we are unhappy with the lack of engagement, we believe we have been presented with an opportunity to think differently about race, class and education in Walnut Hills. This is why the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation and the Walnut Hills Area Council are calling for the Spencer School for Gifted and Exceptional Children to integrate infrastructure and student body into our existing Frederick Douglass School.

After the announcement about the new school, our two groups began researching similar gifted programs in Cheviot and Hyde Park. We were surprised to learn that both of those gifted schools are housed in the same building as the neighborhood elementary. Their building enrollments in 2015-16 were 537 at Cheviot and 438 at Hyde Park, while here at our neighborhood school we have an enrollment of 320 with the capacity to house 450 and ability to expand to 550.

Is the number of gifted students anticipated to be so extensive that we need an entire building to serve them? Or is there another reason CPS is putting these students in an aging building a block away when we have a perfectly good school down the street? This is an important question to ask for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that when the new Douglass School was built there was a land swap between CPS and the Cincinnati Recreation Commission. The community gave up tennis courts, basketball courts and a playground to locate the new building adjacent to our Community Recreation Center. We did that with the understanding that CPS would develop youth play areas (baseball, soccer, football and basketball) at the site of the former Douglass School. This never happened, and with this surprising news about the new gifted school it appears that it may never happen.

No, instead of adding the gifted program to our current neighborhood elementary as was done in Cheviot and Hyde Park, the building at 2825 Alms will now be occupied by gifted students with presumably little connection to the neighborhood while our neighborhood school will continue to struggle and our residents will continue to be without the recreational resources they asked for many years ago.

It is important to us that Douglass grows with our community. In fact, this was discussed and prioritized as part of a planning process we went through just last year. That is why we just don’t see how this decision regarding the Spencer School makes civic or economic sense. In fact, we think it furthers an idea of two Walnut Hills – an idea that isn’t sustainable, isn’t right and doesn’t further the historical or cultural values of our community.

The Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation and Walnut Hills Area Council stand ready to work with CPS to ensure that education in Walnut Hills is equitable and sustainable, but the question remains: Does the district stand with us?