School asks city to annex property for expansion
The Columbus City Council on Monday will consider a request from fast-growing charter school KIPP Columbus to annex into the city more than 24 acres in Mifflin Township west of its existing campus on Agler Road in Linden.
“This expansion will nearly double the size of the existing KIPP Columbus campus with the construction of two new buildings — a primary school for grades Kindergarten through 1st grade, and a secondary school for the 2nd through 5th grades,” according to a project description on the website of Mccarthy Consulting LLC, which lists itself as the school’s representative on the 270,000-square-foot building expansion project.
“The new buildings will follow with the same award-winning architecture as the existing buildings ... (and) significant road improvements along Agler Road,” reports Mccarthy Consulting, which is working on the expansion project with Moody Nolan, the largest African American-owned architecture firm, and Smoot Construction, both of which are located in Greater Columbus.
“We are overjoyed to share that in the years ahead, KIPP Columbus will nearly double in size,” Hannah D. Powell, KIPP Columbus executive director, according to a “family update” the school put out in May.
A program that began with 50 fifthgrade students in 2008 and graduated its first class of seniors last year, KIPP Columbus reported an enrollment of 1,775 students on its latest state report card.
A doubling of the program would put it at nearly 3,600 students. The school has said that it has a waiting list of more than 2,400 potential students.
The KIPP Columbus campus now sits on 124 rolling acres of a former golf course purchased by the charter school in 2013 from Columbus State Community College and is situated about a mile and a half from Easton Town Center.
Property records on the Franklin County auditor’s website show that the school has been quietly buying up 21 parcels in Mifflin Township totaling 24plus acres. Some of the land transfers involved single-family homes that were purchased by the school over the last year.
KIPP Columbus’ project site plan on the Mccarthy website shows a large new K-1 primary building on the site that is planned to open in the fall of 2023, and a planned elementary building that would accommodate grades 2-5 with a projected completion date of fall 2024. Renderings of the buildings indicate they will be similar to the white barn with lots of large glass windows design used elsewhere on the campus.
The elementary building is on about 14 acres of land that county records show is not yet owned by the school, but which is part of a planned campus expansion Mccarthy reports would total about 38 acres.
Annexation of the more than 24 acres KIPP has in hand into Columbus “is sought to obtain city services to facilitate future development,” according to a background sheet attached to the ordinance being presented to the city council.
The city Public Safety Department requested in a “service statement” attached to the ordinance package that city officials use discretion in approving whatever building development is requested by KIPP Columbus to ensure that it can be “adequately accommodated.”
KIPP, which stands for “Knowledge is Power Program,” is part of a nationwide network of open-enrollment charter schools in low-income communities that focus on character and on turning students’ expectations toward attending college through college-prep academics.
Philanthropist Abigail Wexner, chairman, CEO and founder of Whitebarn Associates, LLC, a private investment company, was a founding member of the KIPP Columbus school board and is currently vice chairwoman. She is the wife of L Brands founder and former CEO and president Les Wexner, a New Albany billionaire whom Forbes lists as the richest person in Ohio wbush@gannett.com @Reporterbush