Demolition of former Archbishop Curley High paves way for elite NY school in Miami
The former Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame High School is being demolished, paving the way for an elite Manhattan private school in Buena Vista, a neighborhood on the cusp of the Miami Design District where longtime residents have been reeling from rising rents due to gentrification.
Avenues: The World School, which has campuses in Manhattan, São Paulo, and Shenzhen, China, across from Hong Kong, and whose annual tuition tops $62,000 at its school in Chelsea, plans to open a Miami campus in the fall of 2024, school officials confirmed to the Herald Tuesday. It’s planning to open a school in Silicon Valley next year, for students in grades 6-9, according to its website.
While it remains unclear when construction would begin — designs for the campus need to be finalized and are subject to the city of Miami’s approval — Avenues is projecting to open for students from pre-K through ninth grade in its inaugural year with a capacity of about 1,000 students, spokesperson Tara Powers said in an email. Overall enrollment is expected to grow to up to 2,400 students in the following years, she said.
The school bills itself as a “transformative global education.” At its online school, “students interact daily with peers in over 25 countries, including France, Kenya, Korea, Mexico, Uruguay, Spain, South Africa and the United States,” according to its website.
Tuition has yet to be finalized, Powers said, but annual costs are expected to be lower than the school’s New York Chelsea campus, which come in at $62,700 annually for students in the nursery through 12th grade, according to its website. (Ransom Everglades, a long-established private middle and high school in Coconut Grove costs $43,420 annually in tuition, while Gulliver Prep in Pinecrest costs $39,830 for grades 6-12.)
The transition from Curley to Avenues began in 2018 when the New York-based school purchased the 15-acre property at 4949 NE Second Ave. for $60 million from the Archdiocese of Miami, Miami-Dade property records show.
The purchase came about a year after the decades-old Catholic school closed in 2017 because of declining enrollment — 226 students in grades 6 through 12 attended the school in its final year — and a campus that was “quite aged and needed multiple updates and repairs,” according to Mary Ross Agosta, a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese.
The majority of the proceeds from the property sale went into an endowment for the seminary and seminarian students, while some funds went to schools that needed additional resources, she said.
Gentrification of Miami neighborhoods
For Sandy Dorsainvil, a Curley alum and managing director of the Little Haiti Cultural Center, the purchase and demolition underscore just how much the Buena Vista neighborhood, which is south of Little Haiti along Second Avenue, has changed in recent years.
That’s why she hopes the new school and the city will ensure opportunities exist for area children “who wouldn’t necessarily be able to afford that school, just like Curley did,” said Dorsainvil, who graduated in 1994. It doesn’t make sense for a good opportunity to exist in the area if those who live there are unable to benefit from it, she added.
The Miami metro area, in a study published last year by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, had the fourth-highest “intensity” of gentrification in the country from 2013 to 2017, with much of that stemming from the steep rise in real estate values in the Design District, Buena Vista and parts of Little Haiti.
For its part, Avenues asserts it “seeks to build a student body that reflects the diversity of each community it serves,” according to its website. Moreover, in the 2021-22 school year, the New York campus awarded nearly $15 million in financial aid to qualifying families.
“(Curley) is so much a part of Miami Shores, Little Haiti and El Portal,” Dorsainvil said. “It really did shape the community in so many ways.”
