T-L Photo/GAGE VOTA After more than 150 years of being a fixture in the Bellaire community, St. John Central Academy is closing its doors for good.

BELLAIRE — St. John Central Academy will close its doors for good this time after being revived in 2019.

The school’s board of directors announced on its social media that financial hardship led to the decision.

“The decision was not made lightly, as the board and school leadership exhausted every possible avenue to secure financial stability for the Academy,” the post states. “Unfortunately, despite these efforts, dwindling enrollment numbers and increasing operational costs made it impossible to sustain the institution. St. John Central High School and St. John Central Academy have been a cornerstone of the Bellaire community, fostering education and values for generations of students.”

The historic school has been a fixture in the Bellaire community for over 150 years. It opened as St. John Central High School in 1857 as part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Steubenville and operated until 2019, when the diocese announced it would close. A private committee established St. John Central Academy in the fall of 2019 and operated the school until this month.

St. John Central Academy Chairperson of the Board Johnetta Leonard said the determining factor for the school’s closure was its main financial donor pulling funding from the school.

“There were two termination letters that were given to two employees (Principal John Rose and Athletic Director Robert ‘Bubba’ Kapral), and it caused an upheaval at the school. It sprouted a gigantic ball of fierce lies, disparaging comments, rumors, and a lot of these things were directed at me, but they were also directed at our major donor. So, when that happened, he said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’ so those people decided to make a bunch of things public that were literally just a bunch of embellished statements and lies,” she said. “They started trying to turn all of their lies into the truth and saying a bunch of things that just went too far in his mind. They took it way too far, and so he had already mentioned to me that to put it in his way, this man gave these people 4 million reasons to be kind and they weren’t.”

When asked to identify the donor, Leonard declined, saying that he specifically asked her to not tell the media his name.

She also declined to provide reasons for the firing of Rose and Kapral, claiming that due to the school’s at-will contracts it is against the law for her to disclose that information.

“We have at-will contracts. We could not disclose any information about their contracts or why they were fired or anything, and that infuriated the crowd even worse,” Leonard said. “We tried to explain to them that even if these people walked in this room right now and told us to give you that information, they are not allowed to waive their own rights under Ohio law.”

She added that a lot of the discourse regarding her personally is the fact that she lives in Nashville, Tennessee, full-time despite being the chairperson of the board of St. John Central Academy.

“I don’t run the day-to-day operations, but everything from insurance policies to materials ordered to running fundraisers. I mean, it’s just one thing after another. I never stop. I never, ever stop. I’ve worked non-stop at that school, and the parents had my phone number, and so did the teachers. They could call me from any time, night or day. I always answer the phone,” Leonard said. “For the first three and a half years, I was there every single day. I know all of the kids by name. I know their parents by name. I know their grandparents by name. I know what school they came from. I know what problems they’re having, what they might have been struggling with at home and in school. I’ve known these students, and I know them well. And it just breaks my heart, it really does. But, you know, when the funding is gone, then what are you going to do? You can’t keep running a school that takes almost $2 million a year to run and operate without a donor like that.”

She added that the future of the building is uncertain due and that a lot of decisions are still up in the air.

She added that she was willing to try to secure a new donor to support the school but those efforts did not come to fruition.

“The people who opened the school were dedicated to the end. I mean, we were ready for year seven, but when people decided that they were just going to say anything they wanted, it made our major donor pull out. He left, so that’s why we’re closing. We cannot stay open without that money,” Leonard said. “This is a very heartbreaking time for the members of our school. When the school was under the diocese, they announced that the St. John Central was going to be closing. To those people who love the school, it felt like there was a death in the family. It was so crushing to hear those words, and now here we are back there again.”

She added that when the school’s major donor said that he was going to be withdrawing his funding, she contacted two potential donor groups who said they wanted the opportunity to try to keep the school open. She said she gave them from Memorial Day until June 15 to determine if they could come to an agreement and keep the school in operation.

She said the potential donors wanted her to provide detailed financial reports, which she declined to do.

“I gave them a generic financial report, but I told them they’re not board members and the school has all of the people who work in the school sign NDAs saying that they can’t talk about our company affairs outside of school,” Leonard said. “I told them we can’t give you a contract of a teacher to let you see what a teacher’s contract looks like. And I can’t give you their salary values, it’s none of your business. It’s illegal for me to do that. But I can give you a generic report of what the utilities, cost of the salaries, cost of the health care is. And they were like, ‘OK, we’ll take that.’ So I sent that to them yesterday morning and immediately got a response saying that our donors fell through and we cannot continue the school. So there was an effort made, and truly, if there’s anybody out there in the Ohio Valley or elsewhere who wants to step up and try to take it on, they’re welcome to do it. They’re welcome to do it. I offer my full help and anything I could help them with whatever they need.”

She added that she also saw residents commenting that over 20 students were leaving, which she refuted, saying that students always will say that they’re leaving a school if something doesn’t go the way they want, but their parents may have a different opinion.

“You’ll have students say, you know, ‘I’m leaving because this person got fired’ or ‘I’m leaving.’ And it’s like these, their parents were like, ‘no, you’re not leaving,'” Leonard said.

Attempts to contact former principal Rose as well as an individual believed to be a major donor were unsuccessful Thursday. Former athletic director Kapral was contacted but declined to comment.