Charter schools get first crack at sales

2/18/2008

The Cincinnati Enquirer

By Ben Fischer

Cincinnati Public Schools, along with the Ohio School Boards Association and its political allies, are working to eliminate a state law limiting what the district can do with its surplus property.

Under the law, Ohio school districts must give charter schools the opportunity to buy any academic building at fair market value before offering it elsewhere.

Traditional public school systems argue the law hurts taxpayers because it keeps the district from getting the most it can out of its real estate assets.

It also ties their hands from an urban planning perspective, they say, because any redevelopment plans - regardless of the wishes of a neighborhood or city - have to consider the possibility of a charter school taking the building.

Ron Adler, president of the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education, which represents charter schools, defended the law.

“They paid for it with my tax dollars and your tax dollars, and the intent was to use it as a school building,” Adler said. “I don’t think it’s inappropriate that at least another school should have first right of refusal.”

In 2005, CPS sold off three buildings on the open market after state lawmakers inserted a temporary exemption into the state budget, but failed to strike a deal on many other buildings it had hoped to sell during the exemption. A similar reprieve isn’t expected again.

Many of the schools CPS is vacating have limited appeal to redevelopers.

But some - perhaps most notably the 108-year-old Hyde Park school, a historically significant building in a prime location - could leave CPS on the seller’s side of an all-out bidding war if the district could just take offers.

“Overall, with some of the facilities we own, it could be millions of dollars of difference,” said school board member Catherine Ingram.

The proposal’s sponsor, state Rep. Jennifer Brady, D-Westlake, said it has little chance of becoming law in the GOP-controlled legislature. Its language closely mirrors part of Gov. Ted Strickland’s original budget proposal last year.

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