Carthage may receive a welcome boost from the first new housing planned there in four decades, but some residents are concerned that the northern Cincinnati neighborhood may lose its public school not long after.

        Carthage Paideia, a magnet school that draws a third of its 330 students from the neighborhood and the rest from around the city, would close around 2007 under the Cincinnati schools' rebuilding plan.

        With the school could go the neighborhood's only gym, which is used two nights a week for youth recreation.

        “I don't know if (the school's closing) would change the neighborhood now, but it would lose hopes for any more redevelopment,” business owner Mike Flory says. His store, Burkhardt Pro Hardware, sits along Vine Street in the center of Carthage's small business strip.

        On a wall of Mr. Flory's store hangs a drawing of the planned redevelopment at the vacant Carthage Mills industrial site. The city of Cincinnati has paid $6 million to clean the site and is negotiating with a private developer to build 32 manufactured houses along its streets.

        Residents have been hopeful that Carthage is ripe for a turnaround. During the 1990s, the neighborhood's population fell 14.2 percent.

        “We're trying to change the neighborhood,” Mr. Flory says. Losing a school won't help, he adds.

        School officials say they have no choice in closing some neighborhood schools. They say they're just adjusting to the trend of population loss that has plagued the city for years.

        “We have 11 more schools than can be justified by our enrollment, and something had to close,” says Cincinnati schools superintendent Steven Adamowski. “Between Hartwell and Carthage neighborhoods are enough students for a school, not two schools.”
       

More than a school
        But that reasoning is hard to swallow for some residents who value the half-century-old school building.

        Their concern stems not from their love of the school's architecture or even the school's colorful Rookwood fountain. The two-story box-like brick structure is not terribly historic or architecturally significant. It isn't trimmed with elaborate terra cotta like Over-the-Rhine's Rothenberg Elementary and doesn't have jutting gargoyles decorating its corners like Hughes Center in University Heights.

        Instead, it's the school gymnasium scented of gym socks that has this community growing nostalgic. They wonder what options will be left for neighborhood kids who use it at night.

        “This is the only gym we have for our children,” says Buddie Hill, senior coordinator for the Carthage Recreation Center. “A lot of these kids are not going to school together. This is where they come to meet and be friends.”

        The Bearcats, a Carthage teen basketball team that recently won its first game in two years, uses the gym two nights a week for practice. About 15-20 kids, including the basketball team, regularly pour into the gym on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for neighborhood recreation.

        “Without this we'd have nowhere else to go,” says 14-year-old Vincent Bonomini, who lives a few blocks away. f

        School district officials say there may be options for the Carthage Paideia building, including purchase by a charter school or reuse by community agencies or developers. They also say population shifts by 2007 could merit keeping a school in the neighborhood.

        “There is nothing that would make us happier than to have enough students there (in Carthage) to justify a school,” Dr. Adamowski says.

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School, housing plans don't always mesh
School plans by neighborhood
       

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