Folwell to reopen in 2013

BY ED FELIEN

When I went to Folwell in the early 1950s, it was a seventh through ninth grade junior high school. It was a feeder school to Central High School, South and Roosevelt. It was full to over-crowding, with a student population of at least 2,000. And it was at least 99% white. That school closed in 2010.

Starting in 2013 Folwell will re-open as the new home for the Ramsey Fine Arts Magnet, a K- 8 that will offer dance, theater, music and arts training normally not available in elementary schools. The Ramsey Magnet has been at 50th and Nicollet, in the Ramsey Junior High School building. The arts magnet will move, and the building will go back to being a middle school feeding students into Washburn High School, just across the football field.

The arts magnet program at Folwell seems, to many, a natural fit. In the Powderhorn community, which goes from Lake Street to 42nd Street and from 35W over to Hiawatha Avenue and includes the Central, Powderhorn, Corcoran, Standish, Bancroft and Bryant neighborhoods, there is a heavy concentration of cultural centers and resident artists. From In the Heart of the Beast on Lake Street, to Powderhorn Park and the MayDay Festival, to the Pillsbury Theatre on 35th and Chicago to the Fire Arts Studio on 38th and Chicago (and there are many others), there’s a lot happening in the local arts scene. And mostly that’s created by local artists, and a lot of those artists have children.

The school should find a warm welcome when it opens in 2013, but there’s one thing you could probably bet on: The student population won’t be monochromatically white. There will also probably be a welcome rainbow of different ethnic cultural identities.