Cedar Rapids school board supports Harrison Elementary rec center

Mary Meisterling, president of the Cedar Rapids school board, on Wednesday said the school district supports the City Council's new plan to build a city recreation center next to the district's Harrison Elementary School, 1310 11th St. NW.

Both she and David Benson, the school district's superintendent, have discussed the idea with city officials and both provided the City Council with letters of support before the council's 5-4 vote on Tuesday evening to replace the flood-ruined and now-demolished Time Check Recreation Center with a $3 million facility on school district property.

On Wednesday, Meisterling said she had made herself available to individual council members in recent months as they had asked about the possibility of a rec center that might join forces with the elementary school. Most recently, she thought the council had moved on to other ideas when it appeared the council was going to try to build the rec center in Cleveland Park. Neighbors there objected, though, and Meisterling said council members again contacted her about the Harrison idea. She attended the Tuesday evening council meeting, but she said she did not know until the vote what the council was going to do.

"We do support that location and we support investment in the neighborhood and we're hopeful that kind of investment will bring in additional students and anchor the students who are currently there," Meisterling said.

She said Harrison school now is at about 50 percent of capacity for elementary students from the area around it, but she said the district for now has brought in other classes, preschool classes, for instance, to help populate classrooms. The school is in full use, said Mary Ellen Maske, the district's associate superintendent.

Both Meisterling and City Council member Chuck Swore on Wednesday pointed to a report from the city's Community Development Department at Tuesday evening's council meeting that detailed the progress of the city's new-home construction program that is adding 200 new homes to flood-hit core neighborhoods, most in the Harrison neighborhood. The city report said that most of those moving into the new homes are young families with young children.

"We've spent all of those dollars getting homes rehabilitated and new homes built all around the Harrison neighborhood," said Swore. Building the rec center next to the school is a way to support that investment and bring the neighborhood and school "back to life," he said.

Just a year ago, he noted, Mayor Ron Corbett wrote to Benson and the school board, telling them of the city's commitment to the neighborhood and asking them to remove Harrison Elementary School from the district's list of school-closing prospects. And the district did.

The city, council member Pat Shey said on Tuesday evening, has as much interest in schools and students as the school district does, and so it makes sense for the city to join forces with the school district in one of the city's core neighborhoods, he said.

Both Meisterling and Joe O'Hern, the city's director of development services, said the city and school now will sit down and discuss all the details of how a rec center might look like on school property and how it might function.

Meisterling noted that the school already has classrooms, a children's gymnasium and restrooms, so perhaps the new rec center can have more than it thought if it uses some of what is in the school.

Swore imagined the rec center using some of the school space with city staff being available to run the programming in a sharing relationship that would be cost-effective for both city and school district.

"My goodness, that's just a good use of tax dollars," Swore said.

Meisterling said the district is interested in building such sharing partnerships, particularly in the recreation area and especially at its elementary schools, most of which close now by the end of the afternoon. A rec center next to Harrison could mean open gym times after the school day is over, she said.

The school district, she added, has ample land at Harrison for a rec center that would still keep sufficient green space for children to play outdoors at the school.

The city's O'Hern said the city will immediately notify the Federal Emergency Management Agency about the council's Tuesday decision to build the city's replacement rec center at Harrison School. FEMA has set a deadline of April 1 for that notification.

O'Hern said the city then will ask FEMA, which is contributing disaster dollars to the project, to allow the city more time to actually get the center built.

The city has labored for some two years to pick a site for replacement rec center. Two different task forces worked to help find a site, and on Tuesday, the council rejected the task force's last pick and instead picked the Harrison site. Swore noted Wednesday that the task force talked about the Harrison site last week even as it recommended a site next to Ellis Park.

Linda Seger, president of the Northwest Neighbors Neighborhood Association and a member of both task forces, on Wednesday said, "Only time will tell." The Harrison school plan came in at the last hour, and so still has "many unknowns in play," she said.

In the end, Seger said she hopes there's a good rec center and that Harrison remains as a school for years to come. That's what residents in the flood-hit neighborhoods around Harrison would want, she said.