Number of vacant schools in Detroit to grow with new wave of closures in struggling district

Detroit Schools slow to tear down vacant buildings

DETROIT — Owen Elementary, which closed in 2006, stands open to any who dare to take on its dark, winding hallways and shadowy classrooms on Detroit’s southwest side.

A weathered upright piano sits in one classroom. Chairs and cabinets lay tumbled, helter-skelter inside others. Ceiling fixtures hang, their wiring long pulled out and taken. Massive holes in interior walls reveal where pipes once trailed throughout the building.

Vacant Detroit schools, like the city’s more than 33,000 empty houses, are treasure troves for thieves seeking metal piping and copper wire to illegally sell as scrap. To get to the booty, plywood boards and bolted metal grates are ripped away; interior tiled and brick walls smashed with sledgehammers.

Now, a drastic plan to shutter a quarter of Detroit’s public schools in June will add 45 more empty buildings to the dozens of district-owned properties dominating already blight-ravaged neighborhoods.

Owen is just one of many easily accessible to vandals and criminals, targets for arson and a danger to passing children.

“They took the windows, the aluminum around the windows,” said Bertha Sieg, who has lived across from Owen since the mid-1960s. “They damaged it bad. There is a big hole in the roof.”

Owen is on a list of the district’s 14 most derelict schools. Emergency financial manager Robert Bobb said in December that demolition on some would start in January, but they are still standing, an Associated Press review found.

Detroit police have investigated arson and copper theft complaints at two of the closed schools, according to reports prompted by a Freedom of Information Act request.

“We have to secure these buildings,” Bobb said this week in announcing the next wave of school closures coming in June, and another 13 by June 2012 as the district tries to save money and address dwindling enrollment.

Demolition bids on six of the 14 “worst of the worst” schools were expected to be submitted Thursday. Bids on the largest — the 7-story, 830,000-square-foot old Cass Tech High School — are to be submitted next month, Bobb said.

Bond money will be used to pay for the demolitions.

But the longer the schools stand empty, the greater a threat and more of an eyesore they are to the community.

It hadn’t always been that way around Owen. When houses still lined 14th and 15th streets, there were enough children to keep the school open. Sieg’s wood frame home is one of only a few still standing.

“All of my nine kids, and five grandkids attended Owen,” she said. “There really are no kids in the neighborhood, now. It’s like a cemetery. This neighborhood is dead.”

Across town sits the 82,000-square-foot former Frederick Douglass Academy. It’s not on the list of 14, but like Owen it’s a wreck. Metal grates designed to keep trespassers out have been ripped away.

“They actually used pickup trucks and chained them up to our stuff and pulled the wall out,” said Tim McMahon, director of U.S. operations for Chicago-based Vacant Property Security, Inc.

Smashed furniture shares floor space with empty liquor bottles in the school’s corridors. One red and white, size 13 basketball shoe sits in a hallway; its mate in an adjacent office. A crescent-shaped, deflated basketball rests near the library.

Six feet of standing water had been sitting in an easily accessible basement boiler room.

“It’s a liability issue, trying to keep people out of it and protect the asset so it can be resold,” McMahon said. “Every possible opening that anyone can think of we’re securing.

“You’ve got nooks and crannies where they can work all night on one screen. What we find is they’ll chop a hole in the roof and get in that way.”

Detroit police report only two arrests at schools on the demolition list. Bobb said district police, which is a separate entity, have arrested 30 to 40 people — including two from Canada — caught trespassing or stealing from closed schools.

“It’s criminal when you have a couple of people from Canada coming into Detroit to steal copper,” Bobb said.

But metal thieves targeting schools are aggressive and highly organized, McMahon said.

They’re also bold, work in groups and even take things out during daylight hours, said Sieg, who believes Bobb’s decision to close additional schools will give thieves just that much more to steal.

“They are going to strip them down. They are going to look like this one here,” she said of Owen. “Mr. Bobb, let him go around and see these schools they’ve abandoned.”