Community support is gathering behind Save Shaw Middle School, a group advocating for DC to fulfill its previous commitments to create a new neighborhood middle school at 925 Rhode Island Ave. NW.
The group’s Change.org petition surpassed 1,500 signatures on Tuesday evening, and over two dozen community members showed up to a Jan. 16 meeting to rally behind the cause with support from Ward 2 DC Council member Jack Evans. With a town hall on the issue scheduled tonight in Logan Circle, members of Garrison Elementary’s Parent Teacher Organization are planning to enter en masse all decked in school colors “to show our strength.”
At the Jan. 16 meeting, Evans told the crowd he is “committed to getting Shaw Middle School built on that site,” which housed Shaw Junior High School until it closed in 2008. But Evans acknowledged it would be an uphill battle to change the mind of Mayor Muriel Bowser, who announced last fall that an expanded Benjamin Banneker Academic High School would be relocating to the site.
Under the city’s current plans, Banneker, a magnet high school now located at 801 Euclid St. NW, is slated to open to students at the Shaw site by fall 2021.
“At three o’clock this afternoon, I met with the mayor,” Evans told the crowd. “The meeting was going very well until I brought up Shaw Middle School. … [T]he mayor is very much committed to building Banneker on this site.”
Many local parents and community members have objected to the Banneker plans, criticizing the city for walking back its previous commitment. In 2011, the city allocated $54 million to rebuild the middle school as part of its Capital Improvements Plan, but Bowser transferred those funds to renovate MacFarland Middle School in 2015.
A 2014 recommendation from the DC Advisory Committee on Student Assignment also called for a new central middle school in Shaw to serve students moving on from multiple elementary schools in wards 1, 2 and 6.
In addition to Evans, Ward 1 Council member Brianne Nadeau and Ward 6 member Charles Allen have co-signed the Save Shaw Middle School petition, which also includes the signatures of over 20 local community organizations and seven current and former members of the DC State Board of Education.
At a DC Public Schools meeting on Jan. 24, DCPS official Claudia Lujan said that the Banneker project is moving forward as scheduled, but that the city has not ruled out the option of building a middle school on the Shaw Junior High School site in addition to a new Banneker.
Banneker — one of seven high schools in DC open to students citywide by application — offers a structured college preparatory curriculum including Advanced Placement and honors courses and an International Baccalaureate program. The school’s current facility was built in 1939, with only minor renovations since then. In recent years parents have complained about the facility’s dilapidation and delayed modernization efforts.
“It’s pretty devastating to walk in, and demoralizing for these kids. My daughter came home the other day [and there had been] cockroaches coming out of her locker, teachers seeing mice,” said one Banneker parent at the community meeting. “It’s really unacceptable that these kids at a Title I school who are working so hard have to go into this environment every day.”
At its new campus in Shaw, Banneker will be able to accommodate 800 students, increasing the high school’s capacity by 300, according to DC officials. The modernization project — which the DC Department of General Services estimates will cost $115 million — will involve a complete teardown and rebuild of the existing Shaw Junior High School building.
Save Shaw Middle School organizers said they asked at-large Council member David Grosso, who chairs the Committee on Education, to send a public letter to Bowser asking about the decision-making process to relocate Banneker — but he declined, they said.
In a statement to The DC Line, Grosso expressed support for a standalone middle school, but said he did not want to slow down the Banneker project.
“I support both the modernization and expansion of Banneker, the best high school in the District of Columbia, as well as the creation of a standalone middle school for the Cardozo Feeder Pattern in the Shaw community. However, I do not support any action where the pursuit of the latter will impede the completion of the former,” he wrote in an email on Jan. 25. “I have asked the Deputy Mayor for Education to engage with the Shaw community on the creation of a standalone middle school and those engagement events [have begun]. The result may very well be that the best option is a co-location at the Shaw Jr. High site or it may be another appropriate location in the area.”
At the Jan. 16 meeting, community members stressed that they support a new facility for Banneker — but not on the Shaw Junior High School site. Many felt that city officials were pitting local parents against each other.
“I don’t want to see Banneker not get what they want either,” said one attendee. “They should never have pitted us against anybody, with ‘one loses’ and ‘one wins.’ It should be, ‘Both figure out a way to win.‘”
Alex Padro, a member of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6E, expressed the same concern in a tweet prior to the meeting:
The Save Shaw Middle School group presented data illustrating growing enrollment at five elementary schools in the surrounding area: Cleveland, Garrison, Ross, Seaton and Thomson. Combined enrollment has increased by more than 100 students from 2014 to 2017 and continues to rise, according to the group’s data. The current school feeder pattern sends those students to one of two merged campuses: the Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus at 1200 Clifton St. NW (which serves grades six through 12) or School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens at 2425 N St. NW (which serves pre-K through eighth grade).
Save Shaw Middle School also presented arguments for modernizing Banneker at its current location, citing environmental, scheduling and fiscal advantages to keeping the high school on Euclid Street.
Both Banneker and Shaw Junior High are surrounded by city-owned public space. Tennis courts, a baseball diamond and other recreation facilities controlled by the DC Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) surround Banneker; a dog park and a skate park occupy the remainder of the Shaw site.
Maggie Koziol, an organizer with Save Shaw Middle School, rebuffed arguments that Banneker can’t expand at its current site because “DPR wouldn’t give up the space” adjacent to the school. She and other advocates brought up the issue when they met with Grosso the morning of the group’s town hall, she said.
“The response that he gave us was, ‘The community in Ward 1 will not stand for losing its green space,’” Koziol said. “And I was sort of like, ‘I’m sorry, the community in Shaw will?’”
While the current proposal for Banneker’s new facility on Rhode Island Avenue in Shaw does not eliminate the skate park or dog park, meeting attendees were concerned that the project could eventually swallow both spaces as the design progresses — and that the same issue will arise if DC officials ultimately decide to locate both a standalone middle school and Banneker at the site.
Harrison Rodriguez, an organizer for the skate park, said the community at large — not just skateboarders — benefits from the existing facility: “We’ve [had] a collaborative format … doing Halloween contests and things like that, giving out free merchandise to the kids in the area, taking pictures, giving them something to look forward to for the years coming forward,” he said.
Evans encouraged dog park and skate park users to join organizing efforts around Save Shaw Middle School.
“We’re not just fighting for the school — we’re fighting for the dog park, and we’re fighting for the skate park,” Evans said. “Those things will be gone if they build that Banneker school, you know they will. But if we build the middle school, they won’t.”
Tonight, Logan Circle’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2F will convene a town hall with Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, at 7 p.m. at National City Christian Church, 5 Thomas Circle NW. Organizers have asked him to discuss education initiatives throughout the District as well as plans for the Shaw site.
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