Annie R. Morgan Elementary had served students on Jacksonville’s Westside since 1916 before it closed. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on March 9, 2026 at 5:31 pm
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Ronnie King says people ask him all the time if he grew up in Jacksonville.
He didn’t (mostly Tampa’s suburbs, actually), but he did just buy one of the River City’s oldest schoolhouses: Public School No. 21, better known as Annie R. Morgan Elementary.
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King arrived in Jacksonville in 2006 after playing basketball for Billy Donovan’s Gators at the University of Florida.
In 2013, he founded Scratchwerk Tech — a research and development company that says it “uses the power of imagination to discover equitable applications for communities of color.”
He’s spent the last two decades serving on boards and helping grassroots organizations grow — all with the goal of building a strong community.
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Last week, the Duval County School Board agreed to sell the century-old Annie R. Morgan to King’s nonprofit, the MyVillage Project, for $1.25 million. King plans to restore the beloved building nestled into the heart of Jacksonville’s Woodstock neighborhood as a hub that serves its community.
When the board’s 7-0 vote in favor of the sale finally appeared on monitors around the room, supporters erupted in cheers — but they were soon quieted by an appeal from board Chair Charlotte Joyce to follow the rule prohibiting outbursts.
Planning ahead
The board approved sale agreements for two of the schools it closed last summer: Annie R. Morgan, and also Kings Trail Elementary. That school will go to Dream Finders Homes for $3.75 million.
Kings Trail sits on about 12.5 acres in San Jose, near the St. Johns River. The sale agreement says Dream Finders wants to raze the building and use the land to build a residential subdivision with about 100 single-family homes.
Annie R. Morgan, though, will find new life as a tech incubator for the community.
MyVillage Project is a community project that connects nonprofits, creators, investors and families to serve children in Jacksonville. It has received grants from all kinds of organizations, including the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation.
King says the organization has spent the last several years focused on building a team of nonprofit partners, educators and families dedicated to helping students learn vital tech skills like coding and robotics. He sees a coming shift toward artificial intelligence, too, and so MyVillage and the project at Annie R. Morgan will look for ways to integrate what King calls “the AI economy coming inside this work.”
The Coding in Color program — a partnership with the MyVillage Project, the 100 Black Men of Jacksonville and the city of Jacksonville — is an example of the kinds of endeavors Annie R. Morgan will provide space for. Teenagers and young adults involved in Coding in Color learn tech entrepreneurship skills.
King says about 300 students have been through the Coding in Color program so far, and many of them are now in college studying computer science and building their own businesses, which have collectively generated more than $1 million in revenue.
“We’ve been looking for a home to expand the idea of merging community with the latest technology,” King tells Jacksonville Today.
He says that when the space at Annie R. Morgan is up and running, MyVillage will have plenty of room for everything from office space for startups to after-school robotics programs to classes for adults, like classes that will help small-business owners learn AI skills that help them create tools for their businesses.
“One of the growing areas that we see is adults that are anxious or nervous, or really just trying to get their hands around this, this new concept of AI and all the things that come with that,” King says.
And so MyVillage wants to “make sure that small business owners and adults have a good concept — not just as consumer. Obviously, we want folks to know how to use ChatGPT and Claude and that kind of stuff, but we want them to be able to develop their own tools and and be able to build the things that they need.”
The real MVP
Duval Schools closed Annie R. Morgan last year. Once a school whose halls struggled to contain the post-war baby boom, Annie R. Morgan struggled in recent years to fill seats.
Enrollment dwindled to less than 200 in recent years, and Superintendent Chris Bernier said consolidating it with nearby Biltmore Elementary would help the district close a $100 million gap in its budget.
District estimates put the savings from Annie R. Morgan around $600,000, though the resulting loss of students makes the math murky — because state funding for schools is based on enrollment. A district analysis showed that half of its 192 students went to Biltmore and 20% more chose a different Duval traditional school. Thirty percent left the district’s schools for charters or other options.
Still, Annie R. Morgan remains woven into the fabric of its Woodstock neighborhood. The first of its three buildings was constructed 110 years ago and needs a lot of work. King wants to preserve it and says he isn’t intimidated by what that will take.
“We didn’t want the building to be torn down,” King says. “So we want to make sure that it stays up, and whatever repairs are needed, we’ll address it then.”
Jacksonville City Council member Tyrona Clark-Murray has lived around the corner from the school for two decades. She told the board Tuesday night that she misses hearing the sound of children in the school yard and morning announcements of each day’s lunch menu.
She tried unsuccessfully last year to have the building designated as a historic landmark.
On Tuesday, she told the board that the MyVillage Project has her full support and the support of the Woodstock community.
She tells Jacksonville Today that she’ll commit at least $200,000 of money from the Community Benefits Agreement — the agreement with the Jaguars on stadium renovation — to preserving and restoring Annie R. Morgan. She says the council will need to approve the expenditure, though.
“It is not an overnight project, obviously,” Clark-Murray says. “It is a commitment to repair various aspects of the building.”
