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 Cleveland 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.
