These 18 CMSD buildings will close. Your memories can live on

As Cleveland prepares to say goodbye to 18 school buildings that close at the end of this month, we wanted to find a way to acknowledge that the places hold more than classrooms. They hold personal memories for generations of Clevelanders — students, educators and neighbors.  

We’ve spent time documenting some basic facts on when buildings opened, who they were named for and how they evolved over time. And, with the help of district historian John Basalla, we’ve assembled short stories on some of the schools, noting everything from Jesse Owens’ early days at Bolton School to the long history of Collinwood High to small neighborhood schools like Alcott that families fought to protect. (Read them all below.)

Those details only tell part of the story.

We want you to help preserve what can’t be found in archives and news clippings: memories. We’re inviting students, families, educators and neighbors to share their stories and photos. Together, these contributions will create a virtual time capsule — honoring what these schools have meant and ensuring those experiences live on even as the buildings close.

Share your memories

Bolton School: One of the Cleveland’s oldest elementary schools

When Bolton School merges with Harvey Rice next school year, it will be the end of one of the oldest elementary schools in Cleveland.

Named for prominent Cleveland attorney Thomas Bolton, who became a city councilman, judge and patriarch of the Bolton political clan, the earliest mention of the school on East 90th Street is 1875, although The Plain Dealer’s historical archives have the school opening in 1858. 

The great Olympian James Cleveland Owens, better known as Jesse, got his nickname as a sixth grader at the school. Owens was called J.C. at home, but his Bolton teacher thought his name was Jesse because reportedly she couldn’t understand his Southern drawl. He enrolled at the Fairfax neighborhood school in 1926, after his family left behind Alabama sharecropping.

It was there that Owens met Charles Riley, a playground supervisor, who recognized  his athletic talent and guided his track and field career. In 1936, in Berlin, Owens became the first American to win four gold medals in a single Olympics – and he did so as Adolf Hitler boasted about white superiority. 

By 1958, Bolton was hailed as the one of oldest and largest elementary schools in the city with 1,352 students, rife with additions to accommodate its huge enrollment, according to The Plain Dealer. In 1971, the school district built a new French-inspired two-story building on Quebec Street, a block away from the original school. 

The new construction was much needed, according to a Plain Dealer writer, who called it “one of the oldest, most inadequate and expensive to maintain school buildings in the city.” 

Last year, the district said Bolton is steadily losing students, leading to a merger with Harvey Rice, which is about two miles away.

Louisa May Alcott: The ‘little red’ school

It took a mother of 10 children to convince the school district to build the tiny Louisa M. (sometimes spelled Mae or May)  Alcott school in 1926.  Mrs. Amos P. Miller was so disturbed by the busy traffic that her children faced trying to get to and from school in the Edgewater neighborhood (youngsters went home for lunch in those days) that she convinced the Cleveland school district to build another school in a safer area.

The Plain Dealer described the new school on Baltic Road, named after the famous author of “Little Women,” as a “beautiful little red brick school of four classrooms, office and dispensary.” 

That tiny footprint bedeviled the school for years.  By 1970, the school had run out of room. It held kindergarten through second grade classes in four rooms, while third graders were taught in a rented church. Students in fourth, fifth and sixth grade went to two other schools, Landon and Fruitland, which both closed long ago. The school district decided to replace the outdated building with a new school some time in the 1970s.  

But the new school didn’t last. Alcott became a vocational opportunity center for special education students in 1981. It  reopened as a K-5th grade school in 1997.  

The school was once noted for its excellent teaching.  In 2010, Thomas B. Fordham Institute called the economically disadvantaged school one of its top performing schools for teaching reading and math. The following year, then-CMSD CEO Eric Gordon hailed the school for its excellent state ratings. 

In December of 2025, over the protests of students and teachers who said the small school culture created a family environment, the school board voted to close the school, citing the small structure and student body.

Alfred A. Benesch School: Started as Outhwaite School for Boys

Alfred A. Benesch School has had many missions and name changes over its long life as a school in the Central neighborhood.

According to Cleveland Metropolitan School District records, Benesch was first named Outhwaite in 1880. It was originally called Outhwaite School for Boys, and it served primarily Jewish children.

In 1926, Outhwaite became an alternative school for underachieving youngsters who needed to catch up with their peers, according to the Western Reserve Historical Society. 

Its name change didn’t come until 1963, when the Cleveland board of education unanimously voted to rename the school in honor of Alfred Benesch, a longtime Cleveland school board member and founding partner of the Benesch law firm, who graduated from Outhwaite in 1891, according to a brief history by the late Benesch’s international Cleveland-based law firm.

Several years after that vote, a new Benesch was built at East 55th and Quincy, a block away from the old school. A school district consolidation in 2013 sent students from Carl and Louis Stokes Central Academy to Benesch. This time it was Benesch’s turn to close. The district said school enrollment had fallen and the school needed major repairs. The school board voted in December 2025 to close the building and encouraged students to attend George Washington Carver school about a half mile away.

Tremont Montessori: A school at the heart of a neighborhood

It’s obvious from news clippings that Tremont Elementary School, first built in the 1870s, was central to the busy Tremont neighborhood.  

Newspaper stories chronicled the failure of a Tremont teacher to report that his two daughters (!) were sick with the highly contagious scarlet fever (1889), extensively covered the murder of Maggie Thompson, an eight-year-old Tremont student who was killed on her way home from school (1889), and always included status reports on the school’s building projects, including 12 rooms and a “cozy” office built for the principal in 1890.

By 1917, the school district faced the population boom head on and built a new brick school that local newspapers deemed the largest elementary school building in the state. Student enrollment was still high in 1930. 

Still, as Cleveland lost residents, so did Tremont. By 2005, the school adopted a Montessori model in hopes of attracting more students from throughout Cleveland. Five years later, talk of closing Tremont Montessori hovered in the air despite the school’s high marks in the Ohio school performance ratings, modest student growth and vigorous advocacy from the Friends of Tremont School. 

Promises to rebuild or renovate the aging school slid off the table as the district ran out of construction funds in 2019. Though the district voted to close the building, which sits in the heart of the Tremont neighborhood, it agreed to continue supporting a Montessori school on the West Side by moving the school to the newer Waverly Elementary building in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood.

Collinwood High School: Once the largest high school in the state, it has a storied history

Collinwood High School’s first principal was so excited about the brand new school building in 1926 that he insisted on becoming its leader, even though it meant giving up his higher-paid deputy superintendent position with the Cleveland public schools. 

Principal Frank P. Whitney envisioned a cosmopolitan school where boys destined to work in factories learned alongside boys heading to college.

“I want to see if in our polyglot society we can’t teach each group to respect the other…,” he told The Plain Dealer as the school opened.

Whitney couldn’t know it, but respecting “the other” would be a significant challenge for this high school as, in later years, the district’s racial integration program would bring Black students into this mostly white school. 

Still, Whitney’s dream job came with a dream school. It was the biggest junior high and high school in the state, able to seat 4,000 students. It had more than 80 classrooms, a library of 2,000 books, and wood, machine and auto shops, according to Windows into The Past, a 1984 history pamphlet written by Collinwood’s Advanced Placement English class. 

The auditorium was so grand that the Cleveland Orchestra played at its dedication. 

And some of its graduates became well-known public servants, including the late U.S. Rep.  Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the late George Voinovich, who served as U.S. senator, Ohio governor and Cleveland mayor, and current Cleveland City Council Member Michael Polensek.

The school was roiled by mob violence beginning in 1965 as Black students were bused into the primarily white high school as part of the school district’s desegregation plan. White students and neighborhood youths chased the new students, yelling slurs and threats. Violence surged at the school and in the neighborhood off and on for the next 10 years. Police patrols were a common sight, and, at one point, the Ohio National Guard was put on alert.

Over the years, racial issues eased as the student body became more integrated, though the neighborhood has struggled to keep families. When the district announced last fall that the Collinwood school would close, it said a new school for both Collinwood and Glenville High School would be built by 2031. 

Adlai Stevenson School 

Location: 18300 Woda Ave. 
Built or opened: The school opened in 1967 to serve the Lee-Harvard community. The current building opened in 2010. 

Adlai Stevenson School opened in 1967 to serve the Lee-Harvard neighborhood. It was named after Adlai Stevenson II, a diplomat, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and two-time Democratic nominee for president. The original building was demolished and rebuilt, reopening in 2010. Next year, the school will merge with Whitney M. Young Leadership Academy. 

Charles Dickens School

Location: 3522 E. 131st St.
Built or opened: Original building constructed in 1927. 

Charles Dickens School opened in 1927 and was designed by the architect George Martin Hopkinson. The district commissioned the original building in 1926 to alleviate overcrowding at a nearby elementary school, Corlett. The school was named after the English novelist Charles Dickens — part of a long tradition in the district of naming schools after literary figures. In 2010, a new Charles Dickens building opened to neighborhood fanfare.
Next year, the school will merge with Andrew J. Rickoff. 

Charles A. Mooney School

Built or opened: Originally opened as a junior high in 1964, the school later housed grade K-8
Location: 3202 W. 30th St.

Charles A. Mooney opened in 1964, as a junior high school. At the time it was the first school to open in the area in more than 20 years, according to a commemorative edition of the school’s newspaper, the Mooney Monitor. It was likely named for Charles A. Mooney, who served nearly 20 years on Cleveland’s school board and died while vice president of the board in 1961, according to the district’s archivist. Next year, Mooney will merge with the nearby Denison school. 

Dike School

Location: 2501 E. 61st St.
Built or opened: Likely before 1900. 

When the Dike School opened isn’t known for certain, though the first payroll entry for the school is around 1884, according to Basalla. It was likely named for the street where it was previously located. District records show the school has been located at its current address since 1971.

In the 1990s, the building was Dike Montessori, serving students in kindergarten through third grade. In 2006, it became an arts-focused campus considered a feeder school for Cleveland School of the Arts. Next year, it will move into the Mound Elementary Building but keep its arts focus.   

Euclid Park Elementary School

Location: 17914 Euclid Ave.
Built or opened: Annexed by Cleveland school district in 1914. 

Euclid Park Elementary School was incorporated into Cleveland Public Schools, by a unanimous school board vote, in 1914 after Cleveland annexed the part of Euclid Village the school stood in. The school was named for the nearby Euclid Beach Park. It is set to merge into East Clark School next year. 

Hannah Gibbons-Nottingham Elementary 

Location: 1401 Larchmont Road
Built or opened: 1960 

Hannah Gibbons opened in 1960 after the original Nottingham School closed due to the construction of a freeway. The school was named after a Cleveland teacher who retired in 1938 after teaching for 50 years. In the late 1970s, Gibbons was closed along with three other schools and reopened in the late 1990s. It will merge into Memorial School next year. 

Mary Church Terrell

Location: 3595 Bosworth Road
Built or opened: 1929 

The school has been in operation since 1929. Next year, it will merge with Wilbur Wright. The school was previously named Louis Agassiz but renamed in 2022 after the CMSD board decided to strip the names of enslavers and white supremacists from its schools (Agassiz was a famous biologist whose reputation was tarnished because of his belief in scientific racism.) Mary Church Terrell was a national civil rights leader, founding member of the NAACP, advocate for allowing women to vote, and a teacher at the first public high school for Black children in the nation. 

Mary B. Martin School
Building closing, name moving to new location

Location:8200 Brookline Ave.
Built or opened: 1963

The school was opened in 1963. It was named after Mary B. Martin, the first Black woman elected to Cleveland’s school board. Martin attended Central High School, taught in Cleveland public schools and was active in the women’s suffrage movement. She served on the board of education from 1930 until her death in 1939. 

Miles School

Location: 11918 Miles Ave.
Built or opened: 1835

Miles School was a one-room red school house on Miles Avenue when it opened in 1835. It was rebuilt in 1912 as Cleveland schools began to see an influx of students. For years, the school had a garden tended by students learning horticulture; a 1963 Plain Dealer article described its over 600 garden plots as having “superb crops.” The current building was opened in 2014.

Valley View Elementary School

Location: 17200 Valleyview Ave.
Built or opened: 1929 

Valley View Elementary School first opened in 1929, serving grades one to three, as a “relief” school for the nearby Puritas school. It was named for Valleyview Avenue, where it’s located. The school became a single-gender all boys’ school in 2007. Next year, it will merge with Kenneth W. Clement School Boys’ leadership academy into the current Mary M. Bethune building. 

Kenneth W. Clement School
Building closing, school moving to new location

Location: 14311 Woodworth Road
Built or opened: Opened in 1976

The school, which opened in 1976, was named after Dr. Kenneth Clement, who had died two years prior. Clement was a civil rights leader, surgeon and adviser to Cleveland’s first Black mayor, Carl Stokes. In 2007, the school opened as a single-gender academy as part of an effort to give families more choices. Next year, the school will move into the Mary M. Bethune building. 

Stonebrook-White Montessori

Location: 1000 E. 92nd St.
Built or opened: 2015 

Stonebrook-White Montessori opened as a charter school in 2015 and became a CMSD school after merging with Michael R. White Elementary in 2020. Its current building, which is owned by the Montessori Development Partnership, dates back to 1877, when it was known as the Amasa Stone House and served as a “home for aged women.” Next year, it will move into the Stephanie Tubbs Jones building and be renamed Michael R. White Montessori. White was mayor of Cleveland from 1990 to 2002.

New Technology West

Location: 11801 Worthington Ave.
Built or opened: 2015 

New Tech West moved into the Brooklawn Elementary building in 2015. Brooklawn has been in operation as a district school since 1957. At the time that New Tech West moved in, the school was one of three in the district using the national New Tech model, which focused on project-based learning.

The school first opened in the old Max Hayes campus on Detroit Avenue before moving to the school at Worthington Avenue. Next year, it will merge into the Rhodes High School Campus.