After a long absence, childrenโ€™s voices are set to return to the former South Boulevard Elementary campus in downtown Baton Rouge thanks to a newly approved charter school that plans to move in this summer.

Harvest Commons Charter School is scheduled to open a K-5 school in August with between 150 and 180 students and is already accepting applicationsย .

It plans to make its home at 804 Mayflower Street, the former campus of South Boulevard Elementary School. It joins two other downtown Baton Rouge schools: Helix Mentorship & Maritime Academy and St. James Episcopal Day School.

In addition to filling classrooms, the new charter school plans to start a small farm on the nearly 3-acre property, which it will weave into its educational operations.

โ€œThe campus is important to us for our project-based learning model,โ€ said founder Sarah Schnauder. โ€We are close to downtown, close to LSU, close to Southern (University).โ€

The parish school board voted to approve the new charter school in January, despite a negative evaluation from an outside evaluator. Charter schools are public schools run privately via charters or contracts with the school district.

Last week, the board voted unanimously preliminarily to enter into ย โ€” a final vote is scheduled for April 16.

The lease is much longer than the more common 10-year lease that the school system has struck with charter schools in the past. Itโ€™s also different in that the charter school would take over almost all of the property's upkeep costs.

โ€œThis long-term agreement allows us to secure more favorable financing, reduce interest costs, most importantly, direct more resources back into our classrooms and students,โ€ Schnauder told the board.

As part of the lease, which has yet to be finalized, the school would pay the school system $1,200 a year in rent. The school is seeking to lease only the building; the property is owned by the Baton Rouge city-parish government.

Harvest Commons plans to make about $4.3 million in repairs and renovations to the 30,958 square-foot campus over its first two years there. However, no major structural changes or new construction are planned.

โ€œWe are bringing it up to a usable physical state,โ€ Schnauder said. โ€œWe are not looking to make this a modern building.โ€

A plaque in the building shows it was built in 1949, but Schnauder said the property was previously home to a school known as the Asia Street School, built in 1907 and later demolished.

โ€œWe are looking to really talk about that history,โ€ she said.

The new school garden will also serve as a community garden. To that end, Harvest Commons has reached out to the Beauregard Town Civic Association to recruit neighborhood volunteers to help maintain the garden.

Schnauderโ€™s first experience with education was in 2015, when she founded a summer camp at Jefferson United Methodist Church called Kid-Possible, which continues to this day. She soon became a pre-k teacher at that churchโ€™s preschool.

In 2023, Schnauder founded a still-running private school,ย , which operates in leased space at Broadmoor United Methodist Church. That small school, which is the model for Harvest Commons, has a farm with crops, goats and chickens. She said she stepped away from The Link School in August and is no longer involved in its operations.

Harvest Commons plans to add students over time, growing to between 320 and 385 K-5 students by fall 2030. Its charter, though, would allow it to enroll as many as 462 students.

Thatโ€™s larger than the buildingโ€™s historic enrollment. When it was last occupied in 2018 by BR FLAIM, a foreign language-oriented magnet school, it had about 300 students on that campus.

Schnauder said that although the property is small, there is room for additional modular buildings to house more students, which she said will likely be needed by its third year of operation.

In the eight years since BR FLAIM left, the old elementary school facility has housed an administrative site and, later, the districtโ€™s virtual school. The Baton Rouge school system has no plans to reuse the facility. Leasing the building would save money not just on building upkeep, but also on the potential cost of demolishing it in the future.

The proposed lease includes several ways it could be canceled. For instance, if the school district decided not to renew Harvest Commons' charter, Schnauder said the district could terminate the lease.

Email Charles Lussier at clussier@theadvocate.com.

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