Achievement First buys former Katherine Gibbs College campus in Cranston for $16M

A FORMER KATHARINE GIBBS COLLEGE campus at 85 Garfield Ave. in Cranston was recently bought for $16 million by Achievement First RI Inc. / COURTESY PAOLINO PROPERTIES LP

CRANSTON – The former Cranston campus for Katharine Gibbs College recently sold for $16 million to a Rhode Island charter school company that’s been leasing the property for several years.

Part of the 85 Garfield Ave. campus owned by former Providence Mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr., managing partner of the real estate investment company Paolino Properties LP, was bought for $8 million by Achievement First RI Inc.

Another piece of the property owned by the Connecticut-based Brewery Parkade Inc., associated with Neil Ellis and First Hartford Realty Corp., also sold for $8 million to Achievement First, which was already using space on the Cranston campus to teach elementary and middle school students.

Achievement First said it decided to buy the property after leasing space at the former Gibbs College since 2019, establishing its Iluminar Mayoral Academy Middle School at the site and transferring its Iluminar Mayoral Academy Elementary School there from its previous location, the 370 Hartford Ave. school building in Providence that’s still used by the charter school organization.

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A spokesperson for the nonprofit charter school company, which operates a network of 41 public charter schools in Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island, said the organization plans to expand its footprint at the Cranston site.

Achievement First, which first opened a school in Rhode Island in 2013 on Hartford Ave., serves around 2,000 elementary, middle and high school students from the state but hopes to expand to serve 5,700 Rhode Island students by 2033.

“This acquisition is part of the organization’s plans to grow those two schools in a natural way, as they have been over the years,” said John Eddy, a spokesperson for Achievement First. “The school plans to grow in this base.”

The three-story, 60,000-square-foot brick office building at the center of the campus was constructed in 2003, according to city records.

“That building was built for a school,” Paolino said when asked about the property sale. “Achievement First is one of the top charter schools in the country.”

The Garfield Avenue property was a Gibbs College until 2009, when a company that owned the network of for-profit Gibbs-branded schools called Career Education Corp., began shutting down campuses following a failed effort to sell the Gibbs franchise.

Katherine Gibbs College was founded in Providence in 1911 as an institution of career education for young women, and it grew throughout the decades since to at least a dozen sites in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois.

After the Gibbs College closed in Cranston, the property became Sanford-Brown College, which is another division of the Career Education Corp. for-profit higher education organization. Sanford-Brown, however, then announced in late 2012 that it was shutting down as part of a companywide downsizing.

Prior to Achievement First coming to the site, the last tenant was a security and automation business called Alliance Security, which moved from Warwick into the Cranston property in 2015 following three years of vacancy. Alliance Security now has an office in Providence.

In 2019, the last year with a full assessment of the land and improvements to it, Cranston assessors valued the 85 Garfield Ave. property at $10.2 million, according to public records kept online by the city.

Marc Larocque is a PBN staff writer. Contact him at Larocque@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter @LaRockPBN.

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