They started after the Kettering school board in late 2022 voted to tear down the 3750 Far Hills Ave. site, saying the district didn’t think it cost effective to spend taxpayer money for its upkeep. A study done last year estimated the cost of saving the original part of the building at $16 million.
“We do not have an agreement or plan yet with the private donors for Barnes,” Kettering business services Director Jeff Johnson told the Dayton Daily News.
“We are still in discussions with” the Schiewetz Foundation and “the demolition has been postponed until we have future discussions,” Johnson added.
The district hopes to have answers about the future of Barnes in the next few months, he said.
A handful of meetings have occurred in the past year between the two parties, said Brady Kress, who has represented the foundation in the talks with the school district.
“Everything is still being discussed,” said Kress, president and CEO of Dayton History. “There are lot of different areas that could be possibilities, but none of those are gelled yet. We keep trying to encourage them to look at all the different options from full preservation to adaptive re-use.
“We’re trying to maintain as much of the original building as possible for different uses,” he added.
The school board’s decision to demolish Barnes prompted a letter from Preservation Dayton Inc., which suggested that the building may be a good candidate for a National Register of Historic Places designation.
The foundation has met with Preservation Dayton officials in the past year and “they’re certainly willing to help when the time is necessary,” Kress said.
The Kettering City Schools Forward Foundation has also been part of the discussions, he added.
Fundraising for the preservation effort is on hold, Kress said, “because we really don’t know what the end product will be. So, no one’s out raising a bunch of money for something that may or may not happen.”
Kettering’s school board nearly a year ago signed off on seeking bids for Barnes’ environmental abatement, a requirement regardless of the building’s fate, officials on both sides said.
The board this month approved a $245,000 contract with Midwest Environmental Inc. of suburban Toledo for hazardous materials removal.
“We don’t have a schedule for this work to start yet,” Johnson said.
Under the timeline included in last year’s study, abatement was projected to run from August through October, according to district records. That schedule called for demolition to start in December and end before April.
Preserving the section built in 1929 is among five options outlined in the study. The others include projected costs ranging from $2.5 million to $28.6 million with complete demolition being the least expensive, Kettering records show.
Additions to Barnes were built in 1938, 1951 and 1968, records show.
It later became a junior high school and — after school district consolidation — was used for decades as the district’s central office before Kettering’s administration moved to Lincoln Park Boulevard in recent years.
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