KLA’s Brickell kindergarten, pre-K remain closed as court fight continues on safety

The exclusive KLA kindergarten and daycare center in Miami’s Brickell Avenue remains closed during a court fight over whether a dry cleaner next door is really causing air-quality issues or just giving the new owner an excuse to clear out the prime development site off the Miami River.

In a tale of Miami high-end real estate deals overlapping with Miami high-end childcare, the private school went to court over the holiday weekend to try and oust the armed security guards deployed to close down KLA’s rented premises on an L-shaped waterfront lot between Miami Avenue and the river.

A holding company linked to developer Harvey Hernández purchased the property for an undisclosed price Friday afternoon. It then immediately locked out KLA, posted security guards and told the school the building wasn’t safe due to alleged air-quality hazards from the dry cleaner next door. A KLA school for older children, which sits across the street on property owned by a different company, remains open.

The Hernandez company — named after the property’s official address, 99 SW 7 Holdings LLC — said a confidentiality agreement required by seller Benzol Properties kept it from sharing air-quality reports with KLA’s owners. Those reports remained secret Tuesday afternoon as the various lawyers circulated drafts of an order requested by Circuit Court Judge Antonio Arzola to unseal the case and make public the environmental assessments filed with the pleadings.

“These materials are of extreme public importance,” Arzola said at the online hearing. “I’d like the parents to ... make their own decisions as to whether or not they want to keep their kids at that school.”

Parents learned over the weekend their children at the kindergarten and daycare program couldn’t return to school after Labor Day, switching to online classes Tuesday for about 200 children of kindergarten age and younger. That’s left parents paying a premium while having to stay home with children to help with the online sessions.

The for-profit school, with locations across the country and a franchising arm, charges about $16,500 a year for its pre-kindergarten program, according to a pricing list obtained by the Miami Herald. For part-time pre-K, the cost is about $8,300. The tuition doesn’t include yearly fees of about $1,600 for registration and materials.

KLA is building a new school nearby it hopes to open later this year before its lease expires at the end of 2021. For now, the landlord ownership change and court fight over air quality have left the existing building empty of children.

Arzola asked all sides to work out an agreement where adults could return to the premises to manage online programs while the underlying dispute over air quality continues. A KLA lawyer said the school wants to end its lockout immediately but isn’t asking the court to order the doors reopened to children.

“We’re not going to do that until we are 100% sure there is zero danger, and that it can be independently verified,” KLA lawyer Michael Tein told Arzola. “We want to be able to have access to our building ... without having to ask for permission.”

Each side in the fight — the buyer, the seller and the school renting the premises — hired their own environmental expert to see if the building was safe. KLA said the environmental expert it rushed into the building over the weekend saw no health hazards, while the new owner insists it won’t allow children back inside without a court order given the risks it discovered in the run-up to purchasing the site.

Todd Legon, lawyer for Benzol, the school’s longtime landlord until Friday’s sale, accused 99 SW 7 of using made-up health hazards as a way to make the site fronting the Miami River easier to quickly develop.

“They think there’s some great health hazard here, which doesn’t exist at all,” he said. “This was a ploy, in my view, by the new purchaser to try and get rid of this tenant because of some development deal they want to do down the road.”

Owner 99 SW 7 denied the allegation, and said the confidentiality agreement forced its hand because it barred the new owner from disclosing details of the health risks from the property to the company’s newly acquired tenants.

Rather than allow the risks to continue as they did under the prior owner, the buyer waited just “seconds” after purchasing the property to tell KLA the building was too dangerous to be occupied and locked it out of the facility after classes ended for the week.

“From the moment that our client took title to that property, to this very moment, there has never been a child in that school,” owner lawyer David Marko told Arzola. “We cannot agree to allowing people into that school. ... We would obey a court order, but we feel it is imperative for us to articulate it’s a risk we are not willing to take.”

Legon said Benzol does not have a separate confidentiality agreement with 99 SW 7, but only a standard clause that prevents disclosure of internal findings regarding the property. That clause would be waived by Arzola’s requested order allowing the health reports to become public. Legon said all of the documents in question will show there’s no need for KLA to stay out of the building.

“The underlying claim about health and safety is silly,” he said.

This story was originally published September 7, 2021 at 5:50 PM.