Written by Tanya Terry
Flint Community Schools recently accepted a $750,000 grant from the C.S. Mott Foundation to develop a state-of-the-art high school on the former Flint Central High School campus.
The grant is to pay for the planning and design of the school, and the school board unanimously approve the grant at its Feb. 19 meeting.
Discussions are being held about preserving some original design elements of the historic school, and community input will be welcome before the board makes its final decisions.
A two-month programming phase will be staged by the Flint Center of Educational Excellence beginning in March of this year and will involve discussion with area residents.
Afterwards, the schematic design phase will focus on site analysis, preliminary building layouts and conceptual renderings.
Flint Central High School was forced to be closed due in part to declining enrollment, in addition to districtwide budget cuts.
However, this year the district is already making notable progress.
On February 20, Flint Community Schools students, staff, families, partners, and neighbors lifted the last beam of a $40M investment at the PreK-8 Brownell-Holmes Campus expansion, on the north side of Flint. For the project, a Mott Foundation grant supported a 5,000-square-foot community hub, renovations to the early childhood wind, developments of early childhood playgrounds and a new elementary playground, replacement of the running track, installation of basketball courts, rerouting of the parking lot to support traffic flow and upgrading the façade on each building.
As of publication time, the district had not announced a time line for the new school at the Central site to be developed or opened.
