I went on the tour of Cornerstone this weekend, April 12th.
Is it in good shape, is it in bad shape?
It is both.
This tour was not my first.
My daughter goes to Cornerstone, I am in the building occasionally.
I took my older daughter on the tour, now a senior in high school, to see the parts that she didn’t get to see as a student.
I did not take any pictures, this time.
What I have included are pictures I took from the tour I took in November of 2023, after the previous levy failed.
They are a mixed bag, both artistically and emotionally.

They show the truth of Cornerstone:
Lasting Beauty
Accumulated Damage
Soul-full History
Deferred Maintenance
A Legacy of Painful Compromises

Members of the community feel very strongly about this building.
They are divided strongly on what its fate should be.
I don’t speak for them, I speak for me.

The tour for me was bittersweet.
The joy of seeing my daughter enjoying her old school again contrasted against the growing pain and resolve I felt building in my own heart.
My conclusion: If the school district keep Cornerstone as a school it will slowly kill the building and its beauty.
The school district has to, it has no choice.
It is charged with not spending public money quickly or irresponsibly.
I am glad it is mindful of this sometimes.
But I have watched as the district has not replaced the roof for many, many years while my daughters went to school in a building that constantly leaked.

The worst part is that the district is perfectly rational for doing this.
The district has planned to move Cornerstone off its books for those long years to save the community money, to better financially tend public funds.
Time after time the community has rejected those plans but still it made no sense to spend a great amount of money to replace a roof on the building, better to just patch it.
And patch the roof the the district did do, again, and again, and again.
And the roof of my daughter’s school sprung a leak again, and again, and again.
My point: The school district is not designed to preserve an historic building because it cannot just spend public money to fix things.
It is my opinion that it makes bad choices because it is stuck between different responsibilities.
My opinion on this will please no one on either side.
I am here to speak it anyway.

Here is the resolve that grew and gnawed at me during the tour:
If Cornerstone is to be preserved it must be taken away from the school district, we as a community have to save it ourselves.

If the levy passes the district has been putting work into getting Cornerstone to Wooster Growth.
Its fate will be determined from there.
It will take us as a community to advocate and guide and do the hard work to preserve Cornerstone as it deserves.
But it will be our work to do, not the school district’s.
This is a risk, Cornerstone will sink or survive on its own terms.
As a community we will need to fight keep a community service function there for our southern neighborhoods or to preserve the inspiring architecture or whatever else we want to see happen.

If the levy fails Cornerstone will remain a school.
And it will die, slowly, the death of an historic building mismatched with the priorities of system that really just needs an education box to put students in.
But there will continue to be a community presence near there the core of downtown and it will continue to serve our children, just like it was designed to.

There is no good answer here.
There is no right side.
There is only us, the community, and the bittersweet burden of history.