Nearly 50 people rallied Saturday against Mayor Muriel Bowser’s plan to move the Benjamin Banneker Academic High School to the site of the former Shaw Junior High School, instead of the neighborhood middle school they say the city promised them.
The rally, which took place in the amphitheater in front of the vacant Shaw school at 925 Rhode Island Ave. NW, came a little over a week after the Bowser administration announced plans for Banneker to relocate to the Shaw site from its current location about a mile north. Acting Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn told reporters Oct. 26 that moving Banneker to the Rhode Island Avenue site will satisfy a need for expanded, modernized facilities for the application high school, enabling enrollment to rise from about 500 students to 800.
But the 10-year wait for a new middle school in Shaw continues to frustrate local residents, community leaders from neighborhood associations, and parent-teacher organizations (PTOs) representing the elementary schools that would feed into it. The site was vacated in 2008 when the city merged the former Shaw Junior High program with nearby Garnet-Patterson.
On Saturday, elected officials joined community members in the call for a neighborhood middle school.
“At the end of the day, the mayor proposed this, but we make the final decisions,” Ward 2 DC Council member Jack Evans told the crowd, “and on this one, I feel very strongly about it. We need a middle school here.”
Evans said he stressed to Bowser the importance of a neighborhood middle school in Shaw as “this whole Banneker idea just fell out of the sky.”
A 2014 recommendation from the DC Advisory Committee on Student Assignment called for a new middle school in Shaw to serve students moving on from Seaton, Thomson, Ross, Garrison and Cleveland elementary schools in wards 1, 2 and 6. 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 eighth grade.
A “universe of children” in the neighborhood could attend a Shaw middle school, Evans said, disputing claims that there aren’t enough potential students to warrant another school. “If there’s no place to go to school and you’ve got kids, you start looking around,” Evans said.
Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen said he’s seeing just that: parents deciding to abandon the public school system as a lack of middle schools leaves unclear pathways to high school. Allen and Evans said they will work together to get money budgeted for a Shaw middle school.
“Nobody here is against Banneker. What we are for is a Shaw middle school,” Allen said. “I look forward to the fight.”
Alex Padro, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Shaw, said the response from residents, elected officials, council members and leaders of parent-teacher organizations is heartening.
“Everyone does see a great injustice is being done,” Padro said. “It is possible to fight city hall, especially when you’ve got people in city hall helping you.”
DC officials said the plan is to tear down the existing Shaw Junior High School building and replace it with a campus designed specifically for Banneker, with opportunities to be available for community input on the design and development through advisory neighborhood commission meetings and public forums.
The $144 million available for Banneker’s renovation in DC’s proposed fiscal year 2019 budget is sufficient to pay for the modernization of the existing Banneker building and fund a Shaw middle school, the 21st Century School Fund wrote in a Nov. 1 blog post. The 21st Century School Fund is a nonprofit advocacy organization focused on improving the quality of urban education and school facilities.
Using the $143 million modernization of Theodore Roosevelt High School in 2015 as a comparison, the 21st Century School Fund said modernization of the much smaller Banneker campus to accommodate an enrollment of roughly 700 students could cost about $70 million, including an allowance of 10 percent for inflation. That would leave roughly $73 million to cover the costs of modernizing and downsizing the existing Shaw building for use as a middle school for 600 students.
Modernizing the existing Banneker building would be a faster and more sustainable option than starting from scratch at the Shaw site, the group wrote in a blog post analyzing the city’s Aug. 15 feasibility study on Banneker’s modernization. A team of engineers and architects prepared tne for the DC Department of General Services and DC Public Schools.
The Department of General Services anticipates the construction costs for the new Banneker will be $115 million, which will be confirmed during the solicitation process, according to the agency’s Nov. 1 formal request for information from contractors. The document also says the 164,000-square-foot campus must be “substantially complete” by July 2021.
One option under consideration by the Bowser administration would establish a new middle school at the current Banneker location at 800 Euclid St. NW., which would become available once the new Banneker opens at the Shaw site, Kihn said.
Kihn said Banneker’s principal was involved in the planning that led to the decision to use the Shaw site. Officials also discussed the idea at Banneker School Improvement Team meetings.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education described the Oct. 26 announcement as the beginning of ongoing engagement with the Banneker and Shaw communities about the high school’s move to the Shaw site. The spokesperson said that six public meetings so far have engaged the citywide Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators as well as PTOs, principals and local school advisory teams at several of the affected elementary schools.
Officials held initial discussions with community groups on Monday as part of fulfilling the mayor’s commitment to engage stakeholders — including ANC 6E and principals from the elementary schools in the feeder pattern — about options for a new middle school at a location other than the Rhode Island Avenue site but in the same general area, the spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to comment on the 21st Century School Fund’s post.
Suki Lucier, the PTO president at Seaton Elementary in Shaw, told The DC Line that neighborhood middle schools help create a cohort of children. A stand-alone school would alleviate some parents’ worries about having their 11-year-olds around teenagers at an education campus that spans middle and high school grade levels, said Lucier, whose child is a second-grader at Seaton. “Every child in this city deserves a quality path to high school,” she said.
EmpowerEd DC announced in a Nov. 7 tweet its Teacher Council Executive Committee voted to endorse a middle school in Shaw. “The district promised the Shaw neighborhood a middle school and they should deliver,” the tweet said.
Saturday’s event launched a petition drive in support of a new Shaw middle school and renovation of the existing Banneker. Allen and Evans urged participants to sign up to testify at the DC Council’s upcoming Education Committee hearing on Nov. 15 about the city’s plans.
“It’s not every day that we actually hold a hearing on specifically one school siting decision,” Allen said. “Let’s take advantage of that opportunity.”
This really should not be a zero sum game. We’re one city and we’re working toward positive outcomes for all students in the DCPS system. If the students in Shaw do academically well enough, they can be accepted to Banneker. So in the end, the students around Shaw will benefit. I realize the pathway to our high performing high-schools isn’t clear due to our lack of good middle schools. Banneker Academic High School is one of the last of the city schools to actually get its modernization through. Honestly, this is just really backwards because of all the schools in the city, Banneker (and Walls) are nationally recognized for its academic excellence and rigorous programs. The city should be bending backwards to ensure the school has what it needs to help its students move forward. Increasing the number of students can only benefit the entire city as it’s an application only high school. Granted, the families wanted a Shaw Middle School there; but let’s be real, most families of means are abandoning the school system by the fifth grade for the charters. Having a Shaw isn’t going to stop that for several years but you are going to be stymieing the progress to push Banneker forward (which the Shaw children can benefit from). Additionally, there have been rumors about a Banneker Middle School, which can push the same rigorous standards to prepare the kids for a Banneker or other school. I’m not sure where you all want the 500 plus Banneker students to go to while the school does a renovation on its current site? I’ve seen where schools like Watkins Elementary and Maury Elementary set up shop in a separate village near Eliot Hine Middle School. Is that what you’ll have happen? Why are you interested in disrupting the students’ very important high school years because you think you are owed a middle school right now (which you’re not guaranteed to attend because if it’s set up like the other middle schools then you’re not going.) But check on Stuart Hobson, Jefferson Middle, Eliot Hine, of course Alice Deal, Hardy Middle. You can attend there and let the city focus on the students in an excellent high school. Don’t disrupt the children’s lives what might be.