Cleveland is weighing a plan to move its fire and EMS administration into the closed Miles School on the city’s Southeast Side, giving a shuttered school building a second life as a public safety headquarters. The proposal got its first hearing before Cleveland City Council’s safety committee on Wednesday, November 11, and committee members held it for further discussion rather than advancing it, according to reporting by Ideastream Public Media.
Under the plan, the city would take over Miles School and spend an estimated $4.5 million on upgrades to the building, Ideastream Public Media reported. Cleveland’s EMS administration would relocate from its current offices at 1701 Lakeside Avenue downtown, bringing the EMS commissioner and the division’s employees to the Southeast Side campus.
Some staff from Cleveland Fire Department headquarters at 1645 Superior Avenue would move as well. That building is crowded, and the department has resorted to parking in the rear of the fire station — a squeeze the Miles School move is meant to relieve, according to Ideastream Public Media’s reporting on the committee hearing.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District would not leave the building entirely. CMSD would lease two classrooms at Miles School for public safety career training, keeping a school presence inside a building the district closed and tying the site to the pipeline of future firefighters, EMTs and paramedics, Ideastream Public Media reported.
Miles School is one of 18 Cleveland school buildings that closed at the end of the last school year, as the district shrank its footprint. That wave of closures left the city and the district with a string of empty buildings to sell, lease, demolish or reuse, and the Miles proposal is one of the first tests of what Cleveland does with them.
Not everyone on council is sold on the location. Councilmember Nikki Hudson raised concerns that the Miles School site sits about 21 minutes from the city center, and questioned what that distance could mean for an EMS administration that coordinates response across the whole city, according to Ideastream Public Media.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on. We know the city’s estimated price tag for upgrades, $4.5 million; the offices that would move; and that the committee chose to hold the proposal rather than approve or reject it this week. What has not been specified yet is where the $4.5 million would come from — the funding source for the upgrades remains unidentified, and that answer will likely decide how quickly the plan can move.
For Southeast Side residents, a revived Miles School would put a visible city workforce back into a building that has sat empty since the school year ended, along with the training classrooms CMSD would operate there. For downtown staff, the move would trade a central location for space — and a longer distance from the center of the city they serve.
The debate comes during a busy stretch for Cleveland institutions. This week NewsForce247 also covered the Cleveland Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center winning a $21.1 million federal grant renewal and Mayor Justin Bibb’s selection to address American University’s December commencement — reminders of how much of the city’s civic business runs through buildings and institutions like the ones council is now rearranging.
What happens next is a return trip to the safety committee. The proposal was held for further discussion, which means the administration will need to answer the open questions — above all the funding source and the response-time concerns Hudson raised — before council takes any vote on taking over the school.
If the plan advances, Miles School would join the list of closed Ohio school buildings finding a second act in public service. If it stalls, Cleveland will still have 18 empty school buildings to account for, a crowded fire headquarters on Superior Avenue, and an EMS administration still working out of Lakeside Avenue.
Photo: Erik Drost, CC BY