Announcing Creative City’s Location!
We are absolutely thrilled to announce Creative City Public Charter School’s official location: 2810 Shirley Avenue in Southern Park Heights, near Druid Hill Park. The facility, and the Park Heights neighborhood, will provide such an ideal environment for carrying out Creative City’s unique mission.
Creative City will be Baltimore’s first school dedicated to Place-Based Education: using Baltimore’s natural and built environment, history and culture to teach through group projects. This site is located in a fantastic green space, with fields on either side of the adjacent Towanda Rec Center, and an urban garden that can serve as the beginnings of Creative City Farm. We are within walking distance of Baltimore’s 750-acre, 150-year-old Druid Hill Park, so we will be able to do a lot of dynamic field work (without breaking the bank on transportation costs).
Park Heights is rich in history, so we won’t have to travel farther than Park Circle to teach our children about great achievements in the history of African American business, or about several waves of American immigration that have passed through Park Heights over the decades. As a Community School, Creative City will strive to create a mix of resources and services for the whole family, working in partnership with community groups, building on community assets, and filling gaps that students’ families are experiencing.
Park Heights is a community rich in community groups and nonprofits that we can reach out to for providing adult education or services on school grounds that every Creative City family can benefit from. We have been working to build partnerships with families in Park Heights and Park Heights Renaissance Development Corporation for the past several months, and are excited to get started with joint work. Our friends at Park Heights Renaissance also operate the Towanda Rec Center, and have let us know that we can have daytime access to the facility, which greatly expands the number of innovative activities teachers can incorporate into their projects. The facility has the exact number of classrooms we will need at full capacity. More excitingly, there is a large multipurpose space that is perfect for our arts integration work, and could be flexibly configured for theatre, visual arts, dance, and music. This was a must, due to our dedication to teaching through the arts. Several extra offices will allow for us to comfortably offer the high level of individualized special education services that we hope to create.
Creative City offers our enthusiastic thanks to those who have made this vision a reality, including the Baltimore City Department of General Services, the Baltimore City Office of Real Estate, Councilwoman Sharon Middleton, Julius Colon and Cheo Hurley at Park Heights Renaissance, the Office of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake, and Walter Skayhan and Associates.