Old Louisville school building going up for sale

Bidding will open on Oct. 23 and close Nov. 6 on the old school building that served generations of students first as the pre-integration Jefferson County High School and later as Louisville High and more recently Louisville Middle School.

The Jefferson County Board of Commissioners will be accepting bids through govdeals.com for the school buildings and the 16.68 acre lot on which it sits located at 1301 School Street in Louisville. The facility has been closed for the past five years.

The tract includes the land, the former school buildings themselves, the gymnasium ball field and walking track bounded by School Street, Price Street and Sinquefield Street. It will be sold "as-is" and only bids submitted through the auction website will be accepted.

Bidding on the property, which has previously been appraised at $500,000, will start at $100,000.

Jefferson County Administrator Jerry Coalson said the county has contacted two different groups who have previously voiced interest in purchasing the property.

“Govdeals is going to offer a due diligence period so that people have time to come look at the property,” Coalson said. “The only condition we’ve placed on it is that it cannot be used for a K-12 educational facility for a 20-year period.”

The property is touted as being within walking-distance of many of the city’s amenities, parks and stores. The listing reports that its foundation and walls “are in good shape,” no windows are broken and while the grounds have been maintained, no major repairs or inspections have been made in the last five years.

All questions regarding the property at this time are being directed to the online auction website.

Over the past several months, since plans to sell the building were announced, a host of area residents have made emotional pleas for the commissioners to consider maintaining and utilizing the former school facility for a variety of community-based purposes and keep it out of the hands of third-party investment interests who might not value the site’s history and look to raze it or develop it for commercial purposes without honoring that history.

The building was originally constructed in the 1950s as the county’s first consolidated high school for African American students before mandatory integration in 1971. It has been added to and modified several times since.

Pleas to preserve the property 

During the September commission meeting, several individuals asked the county to reconsider the sale or to preference to groups who might want to preserve the building and use it for the community.

Carolyn Huntley said that she is a product of the original school built there.

“I walked those halls at Jefferson County High School and earned my education,” Huntley said. “Then I went away to college and came back and taught at Louisville High School. That property is very special to me, sentimental to me. All walks of life, all occupations and careers came from that school. My belief is to keep that school as a community-based building to train, to rehabilitate, to do what we need to do for our community.”

Huntley and others pointed to old school buildings in neighboring communities that have been rehabilitated and used as community centers.

Barbara Smith, another alumni of the old JCHS, asked the commissioners to hold a round table discussion about the building before it is auctioned off.

“I’ve spoken with some citizens. All they want is for their voices to be heard,” Smith said. “I’ve heard them say they really want to collaborate on this and for this to be a win-win for the community.”

She envisions a community engagement resource center aimed at community advocacy.

Rev. Phillip Broomfield has spoken to the commissioners on several occasions about preserving the building.

“I am a classmate of Carolyn Huntley and I share her history and her heart for Jefferson County,” Broomfield said. “I’m standing here as a taxpayer, as a citizen, as one who was a product of segregation but who also lived to see unification and see this country become a better place for everybody.”

He told the commissioners that he has a concern for what has historically and continues to happen to buildings that are significant to local African American history.

"I see what happens to buildings when they are neglected,” Broomfield said. “When we do that, we allow our history and our heritage and our legacy to die along with them...We need to preserve and protect our history and our heritage. There are few buildings and symbols left that show we were there, and we were there.”

Broomfield said that he provided commissioners with an option for the building, a business plan with operations and revenue projections and talked about what such a community center could do to promote renovation in the adjacent Wren’s Quarters neighborhood. 

Sanford Lloyd, a Louisville native who grew up in the neighborhood adjacent to the school in the 1960s, later said that he feels that the contributions JCHS made to the community have yet to be acknowledged.

“The commitment of this school to the students who were coming through and the community despite the restrictions and things that were in the way,” Lloyd said. “It was the only place blacks could get a high school diploma. But it didn’t focus on the restrictions and thing like that. The focus was on preparing these students to go forth and partake in anything, have a mind to make decisions, have the education to participate.”

Dr. Gardner Hobbs, who worked as an educator and administrator at JCHS from 1959 to 1968, said that the school, which was built to fulfill the promises in Plessy vs. Ferguson, galvanized the community who it served.

County’s position on the property

The county was given the property for $1 several years ago when the Jefferson County School Board built a new consolidated middle school near the county high school and shuttered 1950s-era school buildings in both Wrens and Louisville. The other school was given to the City of Wrens under a similar arrangement.

“The reason the school board got rid of that property is that it’s too expensive to operate an old school building,” Coalson said. “It would cost us between $100,000 and $200,000 a year to maintain it on top of what it would cost to get it back up and running. None of the air conditioning systems are going to meet code and be super inefficient. All of the lighting would have to be replaced.”

Coalson said that the county has looked at using the building itself but found it too large and too expensive for it to maintain.

Several other organizations have approached the county in recent years about using it for a variety of purposes, some as community center and some for other purposes.

"At the end of the day, they want us to own it and lease it and the board does not want to be in the leasing business,” Coalson said. "More than anything we don’t want the liability, because it is enormous.”

It is the county’s responsibility to get the highest bid and best use of the property, Coalson said, and not put financial burden of upkeep on the building on the shoulders of the taxpayers.

“The commissioners, from what I have heard, have all been pretty solid,” Coalson said. “The vote was unanimous to put it up for sale.”

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Old Louisville school building going up for sale