A recently announced early college high school slated to open in either Ward 7 or 8 answers calls for improved, local educational opportunities east of the Anacostia River. The school’s impact on nearby high schools — a concern raised by some activists after the mayor’s announcement — will depend on its location and recruitment tactics, local community leaders said.
Starting in fall 2019, the partnership between DC Public Schools and Bard College, a private liberal arts school in New York, will allow students to acquire 60 college credits and an associate degree from Bard while earning their high school diploma, Mayor Muriel Bowser and DCPS officials announced Oct. 17. Bard operates similar programs in New York, Newark, Cleveland, New Orleans and Baltimore that together serve more than 2,850 students.
A high school for high-achieving students east of the river could potentially bring back talented students from wards 7 and 8 who travel out of their wards for school, while also attracting parents west of the river looking for a quality education, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 8A chair Troy Donte Prestwood told The DC Line.
“I see this as an opportunity east of the river for parents to have a high-quality high school option in their neighborhood,” he said. “If you have a quality program anywhere in the city, people will find it.”
Many families, educators and civic leaders from wards 7 and 8 expressed interest in an early college option during targeted community engagement last spring and summer, according to the announcement. “We are answering the community’s call for more early college options and building new pathways to college for our young people,” Bowser said in a statement.
Bard College and DCPS will jointly operate the tuition-free, four-year Bard High School Early College. The admissions process will be based on an essay and an interview, rather than test scores and grades.
Opening the Bard program east of the river is part of a larger plan by DCPS to offer three early college programs across the city, with one already in place at School Without Walls in Ward 2 and another planned at Coolidge High School in Ward 4.
Competition from the new early college option will force the public high schools east of the river — Anacostia, Ballou and H.D. Woodson — to reconfigure their academic programming by strengthening their specializations to “world-class” levels within the finite resources DCPS can provide, according to Prestwood. “We must make sure the other schools in wards 7 and 8 get the attention they need and deserve,” he said. “Their academic programs must be strengthened.”
Markus Batchelor, Ward 8 representative of the State Board of Education, told The DC Line that neighborhood schools deserve to get the same monetary and human resources as Bard receives, with a focus on retaining the best students in wards 7 and 8 that Bard will attract. “It’s not fair to say we want to bring this new school in without giving attention to neighborhood schools,” Batchelor said.
Cathy Reilly, executive director of the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators, said questions about the Bard program’s impact on students and public high schools east of the river still need answers. The lack of a comprehensive DCPS education plan leads to parental concerns about clear neighborhood routes from lower grades through high school, Reilly said.
“It’s not anti-Bard,” Reilly said. “It’s, ‘What is the larger picture?’”
Acting DC Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn told reporters Oct. 26 that the city’s Master Facilities Plan — now in the planning stages — will help answer that call, with close examination of neighborhood-level growth and enrollment patterns.
Eboni-Rose Thompson, chair of the Ward 7 Education Council, told The DC Line that the new Masters Facilities Plan will offer only limited help given its focus on population needs and building capacity rather than programming questions. “It’s not about, ‘Is this a single, good idea? What’s the goal we are trying to accomplish at large?’”
With the school system’s Benjamin Banneker and School Without Walls application high schools both located in Northwest, Thompson expects Bard to draw primarily students living in wards 7 and 8. “I think the best-case scenario is we see students who live in the neighborhood utilize this as an option that is closer — that [Bard] supplements instead of supplants as an option east of the river,” she said.
Scott Goldstein, executive director of EmpowerEd DC, said that while the Bard program is “a great education opportunity to offer high learners who feel like the current options don’t fit them,” programs that separate out high-achieving students can end up harming struggling students in comprehensive high schools.
“You need diversity in schools to be successful and need fellow students who can set an example,” Goldstein said.
If the Bard program attracts high-achieving students away from neighborhood schools, that could reduce enrollment at Anacostia, Ballou and H.D. Woodson and deepen racial, socioeconomic segregation, according to Goldstein. He noted that there’s no guarantee that most Bard students will come from wards 7 and 8, which means its location may not benefit local residents as much as proponents expect.
Laura Fuchs, a teacher at H.D. Woodson and member of the Ward 7 Education Council, said she’s unsure whether the Bard program will attract enough students who live and attend school in wards 7 and 8 to have a major effect on the schools they’re departing, or whether it would instead draw primarily from programs west of the river.
Either way, the program will serve the needs of high-performing students without helping those who are struggling, Fuchs said. That’s a particular concern, she added, given the lack of a comprehensive education plan that could provide community members with an understanding of the decision-making process, even if there were still no consensus.
“We still haven’t done anything to help the kids who need the most help,” Fuchs said. “It’s incredibly frustrating there’s no plan.”
Jeanne Contardo, a member of the Hillcrest Civic Association with a daughter in the fourth grade at Beers Elementary School, told The DC Line she doesn’t expect the Bard High School Early College to impact students currently in high schools east of the river. Instead she anticipates students will be siphoned from Banneker, McKinley Technology and School Without Walls high schools, which tend to enroll a more affluent set of students.
“My guess is the kind of students for a Bard program are probably not in Ward 8 high schools because most high-achieving students go west of the river,” Contardo said.
The location of the new school — and its convenience to transit routes — will determine how well it serves students, she said. “It’s actually pretty hard even within wards 7 and 8 to get around, especially [for] low-income people who don’t have access to a car or the resources to have ride-sharing options.”
Students living in wards 7 and 8, which have the highest concentration of black residents, had the longest school commutes in the city, according to an Urban Institute report issued last March. For a ninth-grader living in Anacostia, the average travel time is 24 minutes by car or 79 minutes by transit, while the commute is five minutes by car or 14 minutes by transit for a ninth-grader in Cleveland Park.
In its announcement of the program, DCPS said that it will seek community input in the coming months to determine the site location.
Transportation access within wards 7 and 8 is hampered by traffic congestion, recent changes to bus routes, and Metrorail service that was designed to funnel people downtown, Contardo said. She laid out some of the main options when selecting a site for the new school: using a DCPS-owned building in whole or in part, taking over a building DCPS does not own, or incubating with a temporary site for a few years while figuring out a permanent spot.
“The bottom line is, kids should not be forced to travel west to gain access to high-quality education,” Contardo said.
This post has been updated to correctly identify Paul Kihn as acting deputy mayor for education.
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