The developer behind a string of downtown Jacksonville building projects is spearheading a plan to open a classics-based charter school on land at the center of a decades-long environmental cleanup.
WJCT News partner The Florida Times-Union reports Vestcor Companies Chairman John Rood is asking the Duval County School Board to approve startup of the Jacksonville Classical Academy on property facing McCoys Creek adjacent to downtown’s Brooklyn area.
Vestcor plans to develop apartments in Brooklyn, but Rood said his involvement with the school has no connection to his company or any development plans for Brooklyn or Mixon Town, the neighboring poor and mostly black area where the school would be built.
“I have no desire to buy up ... Mixon Town,” Rood said, adding he hopes the school can help that neighborhood, just west of Interstate 95, thrive without reprising the extensive demolition and redevelopment done in Brooklyn.
The potential school site on Forest Street, a block from the interstate, once housed a city trash incinerator whose lead-laden ash contaminated nearby homes and businesses for many years.
The federal government required the city in 1999 to begin a process of pollution testing and cleanup affecting about 2,500 homes and businesses where ash from that incinerator site and one other had drifted or been dumped as fill on low-lying property during the early and mid-20th century.
That $192 million cleanup is still going on, and crews from a remediation operation named Project New Ground are still working at the former incinerator site. A city spokeswoman said contaminated soil excavated from other properties is stockpiled there until it’s trucked to a landfill for disposal, and clean replacement soil is stored there until it’s needed for backfill.
An agreement that the Jacksonville City Council approved last month to sell the land to the Vestcor Family Foundation set a deadline for completing the cleanup two years after it is sold.
Plans for Jacksonville Classical list an August 2020 opening date, although there’s no school under construction yet.
Rood said the building will be ready on time if construction starts by September, but said the school could delay opening until 2021 if needed. He said backers have already paid for engineering plans for the building, described as being two stories and 65,000 square feet.
The Duval County School Board is scheduled to decide next month whether to approve the organization’s application to be a charter school, and would later sign a contract governing its operation.
An expanded version of this story and additional photos are at Jacksonville.com.
