The existing John F. Kennedy High School in Cleveland will be replaced.The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that the deal clears the way to build a $36 million high school on the eastern portion of Frederick Douglass Park.
The city plans to build a $9 million recreation center at the park; it will have an aquatic center, workout room, meeting rooms and a gym that could be shared with the high school.
Plans call for the new Kennedy High to open by 2018. The 149,000-square-foot school will serve 900 students in grades nine through 12.
The school district will pay about a third of its $36 million cost from the $200 million Issue bond issue that voters approved in 2014; the state will pay the other two-thirds.
The new campus also will include a separate area for two freshman academies that the district started two years ago.
In return for the park site, the school district is giving the city the land where Kennedy High now sits. However, the school system will retain ownership of the football stadium at Kennedy and adjacent parking. The district also is giving the city land in the neighborhood where the former Robert Fulton, Emile DeSauze, Gracemount, and Robert Jamison elementary schools once sat.
In addition to the land for the new high school, the district will receive 11 acres of the park on its eastern end, near the Charles W. Eliot Elementary School.