The girls at Excel Academy in Anacostia weren’t sure whether they would have to change schools this year. But by the start of the school year last week, students navigated through a small crowd that cheered “Welcome back to school” and “Black girl magic” as they stepped through the doors of their school.
Excel Academy originally opened in 2008 as a charter school — and the first public all-girls school in the District, hosting pre-K through eighth grades. However, the DC Public Charter School Board voted in January to rescind Excel’s charter, citing below-standard outcomes for students. Excel reopened this fall as a traditional DC Public Schools campus
To celebrate the transition and encourage the students, Mayor Muriel Bowser and other DC officials, education advocates and community members attended the Aug. 20 kickoff of the Ward 8 school, located at 2501 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE.
After the majority of students entered the building, Excel’s new principal, Tenia Pritchard, shared some words. For Pritchard — who was honored as DCPS Principal of the Year in 2017, while at Ward 4’s Whittier Education Campus — Excel represents an attempt to counter educational inequity, institutional racism and gender imbalances.
“Today we fight for social justice in education by opening schools like Excel Academy,” Pritchard said. “Equality is giving every student the same thing, but equity is giving every student what he or she needs.”
Girls at Excel have the opportunity to take a wide variety of classes, including computer science, robotics, architecture, dance, music and art. Many of these courses are in fields in which women are traditionally underrepresented, with the school advertising a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) focus.
The lineup of speakers Monday consisted entirely of black women — including Bowser and interim DCPS Chancellor Amanda Alexander, who noted that showcasing leadership by women is a great way to show girls what’s possible.
“At Excel Academy, we will debunk the stereotypes that define what a woman is and who she will become,” Pritchard said.
Besides its diverse curriculum, the school will offer a mentoring program and is working closely with Bowser’s Reign Initiative, introduced in March 2017 to support women of color in DC schools through programming, mentoring and funding.
“When your child walks through those doors, they’ll be loved,” Bowser said. “The highest form of love we can show them is to have high standards.”
Prior to the event, Bowser stood beside officials at the busy intersection near Excel, holding signs and encouraging drivers to use caution around school zones as part of her Slow Down campaign.
After a year defined by scandals at DCPS, the kickoff offered a chance for speakers to highlight recent successes in the District, such as the nearly 500 students who studied abroad and 800 who held internships over the summer, as well as progress in PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) scores.
“DCPS is on the rise,” Bowser said.
Speakers were hopeful that the school system will be able to save a once-struggling school.
“We’re looking forward to changing the narrative of Excel Academy — to change it from a school that was traditionally failing into a high-performing school,” Pritchard said.
In an interview, the interim chancellor said that DCPS is “batting a thousand” when it comes to taking over charter schools, crediting the support of the school system’s “strong central office.” Access to resources such as educational experts make positive turnaround possible, Alexander said.
Single-sex public schools like Excel Academy and two DC all-boys campuses — the school system’s Ron Brown College Preparatory School on Meade Street NE, which debuted in 2016, and the Statesmen College Preparatory Public Charter School on Massachusetts Avenue SE, which opened this year — have been put under scrutiny by a number of critics, most notably the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU has filed complaints and lawsuits against other single-sex public schools in the country.
Supporters contend that single-sex education offers fewer distractions and a more-tailored educational style for students, the topic of an article this month in The Washington Times about the debate. Critics, however, question the validity of research that supports this view, and say that single-sex schools exclude trans and nonbinary students.
According to the article, the National Girls School Coalition is working on new research on the effects of single-sex education.
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