Mayor Muriel Bowser and her top education officials announced plans today to modernize Banneker Academic High School by relocating it to a new location a few blocks south: the former Shaw Junior High School site.
The news is likely to upset many local parents who had hoped the long-vacant Shaw property, at 925 Rhode Island Ave. NW, would become home to a new middle school instead. The city now intends to build a new Banneker campus at the Shaw site to offer more room for students and programming for the magnet high school now located at 800 Euclid St. NW.
The new Banneker High is slated to open in 2021. Its site in Shaw will be able to accommodate 800 students, increasing Banneker’s capacity by 300 students, acting DC deputy mayor for education Paul Kihn told reporters today.
“Banneker is one of the most successful academic programs in the city, and we really want to build on what we know is working for our students with this model,” said interim DC Public Schools chancellor Amanda Alexander.
Banneker — which debuted as a magnet program in 1981 and is now one of seven application high schools with citywide enrollment — offers a structured college preparatory curriculum, which includes AP and honors courses and an International Baccalaureate program. Banneker students scored well above the city averages on last year’s Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exams, with 92 percent of students meeting proficiency standards in English Language Arts and 70 percent in math — the second-highest marks among DCPS high schools.
Many community members have been troubled by the lack of transparency and engagement from DCPS leading up to this week’s decision. A large contingent of parents believed the Shaw site offered the best option to create a new stand-alone public middle school to serve students from five elementary schools in wards 1, 2 and 6.
City officials addressed that issue today, saying they’re committed to working with community members to open a new middle school in the Shaw area — though Kihn was not able to say how soon that might happen.
“We don’t need Banneker here,” said Alex Padro, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Shaw. “We need a middle school here. If we don’t have a middle school in this area, we’re going to end up being a second-class neighborhood.”
ANC 6E passed a resolution last month urging the city to reserve the Shaw Junior High site for construction of a new “Center City Middle School” and opposing Banneker’s use of the property.
“The assumption in our city is we have a right to a neighborhood school,” said Joe Weedon, the Ward 6 representative on the State Board of Education. “The community doesn’t feel there is a high-quality option for them” for a middle school in the area, he said.
The former Shaw Junior High closed in 2008, leaving the site vacant as the city merged its program with nearby Garnet-Patterson. Five years later, the city also shut down that consolidated school, citing low enrollment.
A 2014 recommendation from the DC Advisory Committee on Student Assignment called for a new middle school in this area to serve students moving on from Seaton, Thomson, Ross, Garrison and Cleveland elementaries. The current school feeder pattern sends those students to one of two merged campuses: the Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus, which serves grades six through 12, or School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens, which serves pre-K through eight.
A new Shaw middle school, Padro said, would address parents’ concerns about travel distance and about their middle schoolers interacting with older students at Cardozo.
Becky Reina, parent of two students at Cleveland Elementary, said that while Banneker deserves a better facility, a stand-alone middle school is the best option for the vacant Shaw site. “This shouldn’t be pitting parents against each other,” she said.
Community members had also previously discussed the idea of accommodating both a middle school and the new Banneker on the site, which ANC 6E suggested last month. But Kihn today said that option isn’t on the table. While the city expects middle school enrollment to rise, “it would not be feasible to both keep the Cardozo middle school and have a stand-alone middle school, if you look at the enrollment in that part of the city,” he said.
One option under consideration would put a new middle school at the current Banneker location near Howard University, which would become available once Banneker moves in 2021.
For Banneker parents, opinions have been on mixed on moving to the Shaw site, according to the school’s PTO president John Settles. He said some prefer the current location’s history and proximity to Howard, while others like that the Shaw site offers room for the school’s growth.
“For us, the priority is the renovation staying on track and on schedule,” Settles said. “It should be a top-notch facility.”
Banneker’s current facility dates to 1939, with no major modernizations other than a 1951 addition and a 2017-18 upgrade to its library facilities. Banneker parents have complained in recent years as plans for the school’s renovations got pushed back repeatedly as the city opened rebuilt facilities for high schools across the District.
The city is planning a complete teardown and rebuild of the existing Shaw Junior High School building, seeking community input throughout the development process through ANC meetings and other forums, officials said. The current Shaw facility was built in 1977 with an open-space layout criticized as creating a less-than-ideal learning environment.
An upcoming hearing scheduled by the DC Council’s Education Committee for Nov. 15 will also give community members a chance to testify on the plans.
Many community members are pointing to the city’s need for a comprehensive plan for middle school-programming. Weedon of the State Board of Education said he wants priority attention on opening a middle school in a central location like Shaw.
Kihn today agreed that “it is extremely important to residents of this city to feel like there is a vision for where the city is going in terms of education, and we share that belief.”
He said the city’s Master Facilities Plan — now in the planning stages, with a round of community meetings held earlier this month — will help address that goal. The planning process will examine neighborhood-level growth and enrollment patterns, he said.
This post has been updated to correct a reference to the year that Banneker Academic High School opened and the spelling of Thomson Elementary School, and to correctly identify Paul Kihn as acting deputy mayor for education.
There’s no Thompson Elementary, it’s Thomson.
Thanks for pointing that out — we’ve corrected the text.
Thanks for this excellent review and context for the mayor’s announcement about Banneker.
As a Shaw resident I completely disagree that moving Banneker is needed for its modernization and enlargement to educate more students. And the way the DC government is treating Shaw neighbors, especially parents, in this proposal is just atrocious!
Why, if as Mr. Kihn says, there is a Master Facilities Plan under discussion, would any proposal of this magnitude even come up before that plan is complete? What it tells me is that to Mayor Bowser exercising her “control” of DCPS is about power, not what is in the best interests of DCPS as a whole or the neighborhoods in which its schools sit or the safety and other issues children face in having to go outside their neighborhood to obtain their free public education. And I can not help but wonder how this proposal is related to one or another construction firm that Ms. Bowser is so fond of taking campaign donations from? Does one of them need a job and this is her response?
I mean what happened to her campaign promise in 2014 of an “Alice Deal MIDDLE School for All!”? Not to mention the recommendations of the Boundary Review Committee which called for a rebuild of Shaw’s middle school to provide for the continuing education of the elementary students in the area and which she accepted upon inauguration?
How can Mr. Kihn possibly be telling the truth that “we share that belief ” that residents of the city want “to feel like there is a vision for where the city is going in terms of education” with piece-meal, one-off ideas like this made entirely outside of even a MFP, let alone a “vision”?