Cleaveland, a small and tight-knit school, is the only magnet elementary up for closure

Cleaveland Traditional College and Career Readiness Magnet

Address: 3345 W. 33rd St. South, near 31st Street South and West Street

Enrollment: 296 — 40% Hispanic, 31% white, 13% Black

Opened: 1962

Cleaveland is a small school, with an enrollment of fewer than 300 and only two classrooms for each grade.

It’s also the only elementary magnet school on the district’s list of possible closures: Parents from any part of Wichita can apply for their children to attend the school, but students get in only if they’re chosen at random through a lottery system.

Cleaveland has always been small, and this isn’t the first time it’s been targeted for closure. The school, in extreme southwest Wichita, opened in September 1956 as a temporary, all-portable building. It opened with just 66 students and four teachers, and it even shared its principal with another elementary school.

But by 1960, enrollment had swelled to more than 300, and the district decided to build a permanent building. It was finished in 1962 and named for Cynthia W. Cleaveland, who taught in the Wichita school system for more than 40 years and had served as president of the Wichita City Teachers Association, which she helped organize.

The school underwent several improvements and enlargements over the years and hit its peak enrollment of 465 in the 1967-68 school year. But it gradually declined, and by the mid-1990s was back down to 226.

The school board voted to close Cleaveland once before — in 1996 — and all of its students were sent to other schools. The following year, though, it reopened as a magnet school.

Parents lucky enough to get their kids into Cleaveland consider it a privilege, said Megan Buettgenbach, whose 10-year-old autistic son Oscar is a fifth grader in the school’s Mixed Abilities program, which serves about two dozen special needs children. Oscar, who is non-verbal, has always been more than accepted by the school’s students and staff, she said.

“They have some of the kindest kids that I’ve ever met,” she said. “Those kids take the time to know him, take the time to say hello to him. ... They’ve taught the kids to be very inclusive and not to judge the kids who are different.”

Cleaveland is where former school board president Chip Gramke and nine of his family members, including his two brothers and his three daughters, all went to elementary school. It has an all-day pre-kindergarten program, and a latchkey program that affords working parents before-and-after school care.

Students at Cleaveland wear uniforms, and in a video posted on the school’s website, teachers and students praised its “big library, “great books,” “small classes,” “respectful students” and the fact that the school has “no worries about bullies.”

Maritza Andrade, a senior at Wichita North High School, attended Cleaveland, as have all of her sisters and cousins. One of her sisters is a pre-kindergarten student at Cleaveland now.

Andrade has started a change.org petition with the hope of preventing the closure of the school and has taken her crusade to social media.

She struggled with English as a kid and didn’t talk for her first two years of elementary school, she said, but her teachers helped her and made her feel safe. She has fond memories of movie nights where kids could wear their pajamas and of eating green eggs and ham during a Dr. Seuss lesson.

“The experience they gave me was so wonderful,” she said. “I want my little sister to have the same experience.”