Kent City School District

The Kent City School District is a public school district based in Kent, Ohio, United States. It serves approximately 3,300 students living in Kent, Franklin Township, Brady Lake, and Sugar Bush Knolls, as well as a small portion of southern Streetsboro. The district has seven schools including four elementary schools housing kindergarten through fifth grade with preschool housed at one elementary school; Stanton Middle School for grades 6–8; and Theodore Roosevelt High School, which houses grades 9–12. The superintendent is George Joseph, who began his tenure in July 2014 after working as Executive Director of Administrative Services for the Worthington City School District in Worthington, Ohio. The district offices are located in the historic and former DePeyster School on North DePeyster Street in Kent.HistoryThe district was formed around 1860 by merging several smaller one-room school house districts into one centralized district for the village. As Kent was still known as Franklin Mills, the district was originally known as the "Franklin Union School District". The district would continue to be known as a "Franklin Union" district even after residents voted to change the name of the village from Franklin Mills to Kent in 1864. During the 1860s, the district began to divide the students in the school houses by grade level. As a result of the curriculum and management changes, the district elected to close the schoolhouses and erect a centralized building for all grades. Although initially planned for 1868, construction delays prevented the building from opening until March 1869. During the school year leading up to the opening of the new building, which would initially be known as the "Union School" and later as "Central School," students in the high school grades were housed at the Franklin Township Hall in Kent while all other grades remained at their respective school house. The building would serve as the home of all students until growth in the community necessitated the construction of two additional elementary schools: South School in 1880 and DePeyster School in 1888. Even with the new schools, the original Union/Central building would be the home of Kent High School until 1922.