Missing paperwork creates another delay in drawn-out Moore Street School transfer
A Richmond Public Schools official says the division is supportive of efforts by a Carver nonprofit to acquire the division’s 137-year-old Moore Street School but is having difficulty tracking down the paperwork needed for the transfer to move forward with the city.
“I am not able to find that the resolution was ever actually drafted,” RPS Chief Operating Officer Dana Fox told the School Board Monday night. “We had a different School Board clerk, we had a different council. I am still working to kind of dig through this.”
While Fox told the body the division could draft a new resolution, the revelation that the transfer was not a done deal sparked surprise from several board members.
“This board did approve a quitclaim deed. We also approved the transfer of Moore Street,” said 2nd District member Mariah White. “I’m not sure what the holdup is.”
Seventh District member Cheryl Burke said she was “very disappointed, because I thought it was done.”
“I’m 99.9% sure that it’s somewhere in the universe or in the clouds, I guess,” she said. “I know that it was done. Why it can’t be found I don’t know, but I don’t want to hold the process up.”
The Moore Street School, which is located at 1113 West Moore Street, is a historic property controlled by the school division that is connected to Carver Elementary but has sat unused for years. Built in 1887, it is the city’s earliest surviving school built intentionally for Black students.
After a 2020 deal with Virginia Commonwealth University to transform the school into a child care center fell apart, the Moore Street School Foundation emerged with the goal of saving the property and repurposing it into a facility that would offer arts and education programs as well as serve as a local archives for the historically Black and working-class Carver neighborhood.
Jerome Legions, executive director of the foundation, warned the School Board Monday night that even though the school is on the state and national historic registers, “it can still be torn down if the right people don’t get their hands on the building.”
The School Board began the formal process of offloading the property from its books in 2020, when the VCU deal was still on the table. On Feb. 3 of that year, the board passed a resolution on an 8-1 vote endorsing the issuance of a quitclaim deed, a legal instrument that relinquishes a party’s claim to a property. Video of the meeting indicates a formal resolution did exist, with members discussing its wording.
However, Fox said that while it’s clear the resolution vote was taken, the resolution itself can’t be found and “we do not have a quitclaim deed.”
“I can say that with confidence, because the city drafts the quitclaim deed, and the city has indicated that they never did that because they were not in receipt of the resolution and some other things that were going on with the survey,” she said Monday.
Sarah Vogelsong
A 2022 letter from architecture and engineering firm Wiley Wilson listed seven steps that would need to be taken for the Carver Elementary and Moore Street School lots to be subdivided, a task that’s especially complicated because the buildings are physically connected.
Given issues such as the building separation, as well as zoning, setbacks and parking that will need to be formally resolved, Fox said the Moore Street School Foundation would need to jump “several hurdles” with the city before a quitclaim deed could be drafted for the School Board’s approval.
“There are a lot of things that have to be checked off of the list, but none of them are being led by RPS,” she said. “However, we’re leaning in to support where we can.”
