Shaker Square and the Shaker Schools
Related Exhibits

At the time of the 1912 agreement, what would become the Shaker Square area was in Newburg City. Under an arrangement made in 1905. Newburg City children attended Cleveland schools. Newburg City paid tuition for its children.

Newburg City was moving to being annexed to Cleveland. It would be approved in the November 1912 election with 90 percent voting for annexation. That made the Shaker Square area part of Cleveland.

Harvey Rice Elementary School

Source: a picture postcard at Cleveland Memory CSU

Cleveland's Harvey Rice Elementary School opened in December 1904 at East 116th Street and Buckeye Road, which was then nearly a mile east of the city border. It had only eight rooms. one per grade level. The school was enlarged twice because of the rapid growth in Cleveland's population and in 1905 taking on the education of Newburg City's children. By 1912 it was within Cleveland's city limits and could enroll more than 1,000 students.

The old Rice Elementary was demolished in 2007. In 2009 a new Rice Elementary School opened at East 116th and Shaker Boulevard (CMSD website)

The school's name honors Harvey Rice (1800 - 1891) who helped create Ohio's public education system.
 

Source: Google book

In 1916 the Cleveland Foundation published a study of the Cleveland public schools, directed by Leonard Ayres Ph.D. The table shows Rice Elementary School, whose 1,060 students made it one of Cleveland's largest, with nearly 80 percent of its students from homes where English was not the primary language. Bohemian (Czech) and Hungarian (Magyar) were the leading languages spoken. Our pages of 1910 US Census data for the western end of Shaker Village confirm this finding for the parental country of origin. 

On September 4, 1912, five days before it approved the resolution exchanging school areas with Cleveland, the Shaker Heights Board of Education met. Mr. John L. Cannon, a Village trustee who was also an attorney for the Van Sweringens, reported that the tax valuation of the area the Shaker Heights schools would be giving to the Cleveland school district was $308,200. Though the Shaker Square area was farmland, there must have been developments nearby, as he also reported that the tax valuation of the area they would get from the Cleveland school district was $309,790. Thus, neither district's tax valuation would be affected by the exchange.

The minutes also recorded the hiring of the Shaker Heights Village school's teachers for 1912-13:

      - May Chapman, Principal, teacher of grades seven and eight, $1,000
      - Mary A. Litzel, teacher of grades five and six, $700
      - Suzie V. Sweeney, teacher of grades three and four, $750
      - Nellie Holt, teacher of grades one and two, $850

September 9, 1912
The agreement between the school districts

"Shaker Square and the Shaker Schools" by Virginia Dawson, PhD, explains what led to the agreement made on September 9, 1912 between the Shaker Heights Board of Education and the Board of Education of the Cleveland City School District. She has furnished the text of that agreement, which we display below. Source: Archives of the Shaker Heights Board of Education.
 

November 8, 1912 Plain Dealer

This story appeared two days after election day in 1912. Already the nation's sixth-largest city, Cleveland was growing rapidly. It had good schools, good government (Mayor Tom L. Johnson, followed by Newton D. Baker), many street-car lines, a municipal water system, and the financial strength to sell bonds to fund road building and sewers. Smaller suburbs adjacent to Cleveland were voting to annex themselves to Cleveland. In Newburgh City the vote was 90 percent in favor of annexation.
 

1953  John W Main's letter about the 1912 agreement

John W. Main had been Clerk-Treasurer of the Shaker Heights Schools since 1920. Though the exchange of school areas was eight years before he joined the Shaker Schools, in 1953 he was asked by School Board members how the arrangement had come about  He replied in a letter dated January 30, 1953.

This previously unpublished memorandum, which explains the essence of the 1912 agreement, was found by Virginia Dawson in the course of her research.

We show his paragraph that describes what led to the 1912 agreement. "Allotted" refers to the division of land into smaller plots for sale. Rice Elementary School, built in 1904, was being expanded to enroll more than a thousand students. His comment that the Shaker Schools were getting "cow pasture" is not supported by the September 4, 1912 Board of Education minutes (above) showing that the areas being exchanged were of equal valuation. The New York University study he mentions was published by the Cleveland Foundation in 1916, four years after the agreement. The study director, Leonard P Ayres, had been affiliated with NYU.

Source: local history collection of the Shaker Heights Public Library

Source: City of Shaker Heights

See a map on the Shaker Heights Schools website