What was once the building for the Reichert House Youth Academy is now home to Baxter’s Place.
In May 2023, the City of Gainesville pulled its funding for the Reichert House after-school program.
For the next 14 months, the building at 1704 SE 2nd Ave. largely sat empty. But last month, Baxter’s Place held its first open house following a summer school program. About a dozen students took part in the summer program, a preview of what the people behind the charter school hope to offer starting in fall 2025.
Two of those stakeholders — Tony Jones and Darry Lloyd — saw what Reichert House offered, from start to finish, and now they’re ushering in a new beginning with Baxter’s.
Reichert House history
Reichert House didn’t always have computers, recording equipment, or its own building.
The former nonprofit organization, named after a donor, was an after-school program that worked with at-risk youth in Gainesville using a military structure to help keep them out of trouble and reach adulthood. The Black on Black Crime Task Force started it in 1987 with the Gainesville Housing Authority in an effort to reach affected minority youth.
According to Jones, the former Gainesville police chief, they wanted to give them something to do. Many of the challenges these children faced then still pose challenges to children today.
“Our job was to provide academic remediation and try to replace the risk factors with protective factors,” Jones said.
Jones was a police corporal at the time he became involved with the effort. Many of the risk factors Jones mentioned included exposure to gangs, violence and drugs — in the 1980s it was the crack cocaine epidemic.
Lloyd was one of those young men who benefited from after school involvement. He served as director of Reichert House for a year in the 2000s and is currently the chief investigating officer for the 8th Circuit State Attorney’s Office.
“We can bring kids to our campus and it's great, but then at the end of the day we're taking them back home and they're going to be reintroduced to all the negative things we're trying to discourage,” Lloyd said.
He said some kids were able to overcome these challenges. Others could not. Jones noted that he has been to funerals for boys who were involved with the Reichert House, and most of them had been victims of homicide.
Zouzouko Doualehi and Devondrick Slater are Reichert House alumni. They became involved with the program in the late 1980s.
“Back then there was a lot going on. Not as much as it is now. But, you know, it was a safe place,” Slater said.
Slater and Doualehi attended the open house for Baxter’s Place in July. They both continue to support the program and are a part of the Black on Black Crime Task Force.
“Anytime they call on us, we're going to come through for them because they came through for us,” Slater said.
City funding cutoff
After more than a decade of volunteerism and donation-run programming, the City of Gainesville stepped in during the late 1990s and helped support the organization financially.
It then expanded, and what started with about 20 boys became a program that was working with around 100 at any given time.
Doualehi said when he was in the Reichert House program, there were about 15 kids who could all fit in one building and one van.
The city offered full-time employees, more vehicles to transport students from school and their homes and money. The city provided this assistance for close to 20 years.
However, it was not just the city providing money and not all who worked at Reichert House were city-officials either. This led to complications in the management of staff and funds.
Toward the final 10 years of Reichert House’s partnership with the city, internal investigations revealed possible nepotism and issues with employee hours and compensation. A state audit in 2022 revealed even more concerns about poor management and financial responsibility.
City Manager Cynthia Curry said during a 2023 city budget workshop when the city pulled its $1.25 million funding that it could not get past the audit findings.
After 31 years, the City of Gainesville decided to stop funding the Reichert House Youth Academy.
Charter school switchover
The decision to transition from youth academy to charter school happened slowly, then all at once.
“It wasn't a major just, ‘Oh, let's go over to school now.’ This was years in the making,” said Jones, now a part-time investigator with the State Attorney’s Office.
He said for Reichert House to evolve, transitioning to the school system was always in sight.
When the city pulled its funding, Reichert House went from serving around 100 boys to around 50. Although the program was in limbo while waiting for the fate of the charter school application, Lloyd said he, some students and alumni continued to care for the building.
Palm Breeze Youth Services, a non-profit organization that Lloyd leads, submitted an application last year to the Alachua County School Board to create a charter school. The board in May approved Reichert House as a charter school.
Lloyd presented the application to the school board. He noted during that May hearing that the name would change, which is why it opened as Baxter’s Place.
Under Florida law, charter schools must follow a specific timeline for approval of their charter. These timelines proved to be a hurdle. Kay Abbitt, who voted against the charter application, was among the members who expressed concerns about the school’s proposed budget.
Lloyd said he and others behind the charter school push preferred not to have to restart the application process, which would have meant potentially delaying the opening until 2026. In a 4-1 vote, the board approved the application in good faith that Lloyd and Palm Breeze would meet the district’s budgetary requirements in future evaluations.
Reichert House, which in the past decade has had concerns about transparency and budgetary management, was given a new start.
“In the school district, you're responsible for reporting what you're doing. You're also responsible for making gains. The disparity gap in this district is highest in the population we're targeting. So we're taking that on and we're moving forward with it,” Lloyd said.
Baxter’s Place begins
With a year until the school accepts its first class of students, the focus is on developing a curriculum and working with students already enrolled in summer and part-time programs.
“Once we can elevate that education piece of it, I think we'll start to see a reduction of some of the violence,’ William Halvosa said.
Halvosa was the Disproportionate Minority Contact Coordinator for the Gainesville Police Department for seven years. Although he never worked directly for Reichert House, he worked with a lot of the youth who attended the program.
As a former police officer and current Chief Investigator with the Public Defender’s Office, Halvosa said, “we shouldn't be in schools to arrest kids….”
Part of what Doualehi said Reichert offered him was to see officers as “real men,” and beyond the negative perception of them in his neighborhood.
“I would say that care, that respect and that level of structure that they provide to us kind of gave us a responsibility to make sure that the next generation has the same,” he said.
The school is named after the late Richard Baxter, a mental health counselor who with Jones and local activist Rosa B. Williams helped create Reichert House.
After the school board approved the application, Baxter’s Place began in June with a summer program. There were no signs on the building to indicate that it had once been home to Reichert House.
Christopher Reed is a teacher at Williams Elementary and spent the summer as a coordinator for Baxter’s Place.
He said, “We choose to not always take the right path because it looks more fun. It's a lot more flashy. There's a lot more, ‘I can get this the quick way if I do it like this.’ So, I try to show that we can go the long route because the long route ends in better results.”
The summer session ended July 25 for Baxter’s Place. Students and family came together to celebrate and show what the program has done so far.
Baxter’s Place is expected to take on as many as 30 full-time students in the fall of 2025. For now, Lloyd, Jones and others are focused on recruiting the initial class and offering enrichment programs.