A charter school’s plan to put an upper school on Nelsonville’s Public Square has drawn crowds, questions and a brewing zoning fight in the Athens County city. Southeast Ohio Classical Academy (SOCA), which opened in Logan in 2024, wants to use the building at 10 W. Washington Street — the former Athens County Community Cares Resource Center — for many of its upper school students, according to the Athens County Independent.
SOCA currently provides free kindergarten through seventh grade education in Logan and will add eighth grade next school year, expanding one grade at a time until it serves grades K-12 by 2030. Principal Tim Allen said in an email to the Athens County Independent that the Nelsonville building “will also free up much needed space here on our lower school campus,” and that he hopes to see about 120 students attending classes at the location by 2030.
The building sits in Nelsonville’s downtown commercial district, so a school there requires a zoning variance. Jonathan Cozad, who purchased the building from the Athens County Board of Commissioners on September 30 for $776,000, according to the Athens Messenger, raised the variance request with city council on October 14. As Councilmember Gregg Clement clarified at council’s October 26 meeting, neither SOCA nor Cozad has yet filed a formal application for a zoning variance with the city, the Athens Messenger reported.
Residents have weighed in at two public meetings — the Planning and Development Committee meeting on October 20 and the regular council meeting on October 26. SOCA founder and treasurer Claire Green told the October 20 meeting that a Nelsonville presence would create more options for families, according to the Athens County Independent. The academy says its mission is to establish “moral character and civic virtue” in its students, according to its website, and it now serves more than 200 students from 13 regional school districts, up from under 70 when it opened in 2024, Allen explained, according to the Athens Messenger.
Opposition has come from several directions. Casey Cox, a Nelsonville teacher who spoke on behalf of the local school board, urged council to deny any future zoning variance, asking it to prioritize the long-term stability of Nelsonville-York City Schools, according to Citizen Portal’s account of the October 28 public comments. Because charter school funding follows the student, enrollment shifts carry state dollars with them. Downtown businesses with liquor permits have also raised concerns that a school could affect their ability to operate, a concern noted in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s November 2 summary of WOUB’s reporting.
The debate is playing out in a city that has been working to rebuild its Public Square as a commercial center, which is why a school — with its daytime foot traffic but its zoning and alcohol-distance complications — cuts both ways for downtown merchants.
What happens next: a formal zoning variance application must be filed before the city can act. Until then, the proposal remains a plan discussed at public meetings, and Nelsonville officials have signaled some of the legal questions will need input from an attorney. NewsForce247 will follow the application when it is filed.
Photo: USDA Forest Service photo by Kyle Brooks, CC BY-SA