By Denise Smith Amos
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Roger R. Lewis (left), interim principal at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, talks with student David Choate in the halls of the school. (Ernest Coleman photo)

OVER-THE-RHINE - Two years after launching a campaign to raise $26 million to help build a new School for the Creative and Performing Arts, two volunteer groups report they have raised less than a third of their goal, with a deadline six months away.

Leaders of the groups - the Greater Cincinnati Arts and Education Center and the Cincinnati Arts School - this week said they have reorganized their boards and combined their forces after announcing they have raised just $8 million in private funds.

They also recently hired a team of well-known arts fundraisers.

"Our attempts have been slowed considerably by a number of events," said Bill Knodel, president of the Greater Cincinnati Arts and Education Center. "People were reluctant to commit until we had a levy passed and a partnership agreement for governing the school."

The $480 million school bond levy, passed in May, will allow CPS to build or renovate 66schools over the next 10 years. At $52 million, the new performing arts school is the most expensive.

But half of that is supposed to come from private donors, some of whom questioned how the new school would be governed, Knodel said.

The Cincinnati School Board recently signed a governing agreement that would give private donors five of the 12 seats on the school's decision-making council, which will set policy for the school.

CPS Superintendent Alton Frailey said Thursday he is confident that large donors who have been waiting for these matters to be resolved will step forward now and "put us over the edge" of the $26 million goal.

SCPA has 1,057 students in grades 4-12 in a 95-year-old building on Sycamore Street. It was not designed to house dance studios, theater set construction and an orchestra pit for musical performances, said Roger Lewis, its interim principal.

The new building would be next to Music Hall, with an entrance on Central Parkway. It would feature five floors of classrooms, studios, an 850-seat theater and a media center.

The new school would expand to include 1,500 students, grades K-12.

CPS' board of education set the June 15 deadline for private financing to keep the new performing arts school on its list for Phase II construction. June is when most schools in Phase II are supposed to enter the planning and architectural design stages.

If all goes according to plan, the performing arts school could open in fall 2007, school officials said.

The two fund-raising groups recently joined their boards of directors under the Greater Cincinnati Arts and Education Center name, and will be chaired by Cincinnati Pops maestro and group founder Erich Kunzel.

The group also recently hired Cincinnati-based ZQI Inc./Dunworth & Associates Inc. as a fund-raising consultant.

Members include John Zurick, former Cincinnati Ballet executive director and an SCPA parent; Chris Dunworth, former Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra development director; and, beginning in January, Charles Desmarais, Contemporary Arts Center curator at large.

E-mail damos@enquirer.com