Report calls for new Northwest schools to address overcrowding as council faces issue over old Hardy site

In a new report Northwest parents are calling for the creation of at least four new public schools to address severe overcrowding at Woodrow Wilson High School and many of its feeder schools.

After spending two years studying solutions for Wilson and its 14 feeder schools, a working group of parents said the city needs to begin long-term plans for at least two new elementary schools, a new middle school and a new high school in Northwest DC.

“Given the long lags in planning and construction for new schools, it is imperative that the city begins the planning for these new schools now,” Brian Doyle and Melody Molinoff, co-chairs of the Ward 3-Wilson Feeder Education Network, wrote in a Feb. 8 letter to city leaders on behalf of the parent and community members of the working group.

The group released its report at the same time, sharing results of a four-month 2017 community survey and offering long-term planning suggestions. DC Public Schools convened the working group in May 2017, with participation from school leaders as well as parents and other community members.

To lower the cost of founding new schools, the report suggests the city prioritize using publicly owned space, with the only specific location named having ramifications for an issue newly pending before the DC Council.

In what may be the working group’s most contentious proposal, the report suggests opening a new public school at the old Hardy School, a city-owned site on Foxhall Road at 45th Street NW. The District operated a public school in the two-story building from 1933 to 1996, before leasing it to a series of private schools — currently the Lab School. Doyle and Molinoff argue in their letter it would be “fiscally irresponsible in the extreme” to not use the District-owned building for a new school.

On Feb. 28, however, Mayor Muriel Bowser introduced legislation to extend the Lab School’s lease beyond 2023, the terms of which are being currently negotiated. The Lab School, which serves students with language-based learning differences, has used the old Hardy School for its elementary division since 2008.

Amid the District’s population growth of nearly 1,000 residents a month, the working group’s report finds that eight schools in Wilson’s feeder pattern are considered “exceeding permanent capacity.” Over the next decade, the DC Office of Planning projects that the Northwest neighborhoods within the Wilson attendance zone, which includes parts of wards 1, 2, 3 and 4, will see a roughly 20 percent increase in elementary and middle school-aged children and a nearly 10 percent increase in high school-aged children, the report notes.

One strategy the group proposes is to help fund campus expansions by levying a fee on developers building in areas with overcrowded schools. The report also puts forward short-term fixes, such as more trailers on campuses, and the ambitious idea of merging Tenleytown’s overcrowded Alice Deal Middle School with upper Georgetown’s Hardy Middle School, which has excess space, to create a two-campus school.

In a statement to The DC Line, DCPS said: “We recognize that we have an overcrowding issue in Ward 3 schools. … In partnership with the Deputy Mayor [for] Education’s office, we will use the information gathered by the Community Working Group, along with the data from the Master Facilities Plan, to establish an implementation plan that will address current and projected overcrowding in the Wilson feeder pattern schools,” the statement continued.

When asked if the public will have the chance to comment on the plan, DCPS said in a statement: “There will certainly be more opportunity to engage the community about specific policies and programs aimed at addressing the overcrowding.”

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson is scheduled to attend the the Ward 3-Wilson Feeder Education Network’s next meeting March 11 at 7 p.m. at the Tenley-Friendship Library, with the report on overcrowding expected to be a point of discussion. And tonight, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3D will discuss Ward 3 school overcrowding and use of the old Hardy school, with a presentation and Q&A with Ward 3 Council member Mary Cheh also on the agenda; the meeting will begin at 7 in the Kresge Building at Wesley Theological Seminary.

Wesley Heights’ Horace Mann Elementary School is at 108 percent of capacity, as are Deal and Wilson, according to the report’s statistics.

At 137 percent utilization is Stoddert Elementary in Glover Park, where the strain might ease once Hyde-Addison Elementary in Georgetown is modernized. The project is due to be completed this summer, and the working group report says the expanded school will be large enough to accept 40 to 50 students who live in Burleith, which has been within Stoddert’s attendance zone since the 1970s.

In Cleveland Park, John Eaton Elementary, which is slated to be modernized by the 2021-22 school year, is operating at 123 percent of capacity, the report said.

Campaign for old Hardy School

DC has not so far warmed to the idea of establishing a new public school at the old Hardy School building, despite widespread community activism.

“Although a consensus of parents in the group felt strongly about [using the old Hardy School], DCPS did not engage substantially on this option and did not to commit to pursuing this option further,” the report says. (Hardy Middle School kept its name when it moved from Foxhall Road to its current site on Wisconsin Avenue, which is why the old campus is known as “old Hardy.”)

A new campaign by Ward 3 residents, dubbed “Keep Old Hardy Public,” urges the District to use the space as a new school amid strains on Key, Stoddert and Horace Mann elementary schools. “Old Hardy School is located within a neighborhood that is increasingly dense with families not served today by an elementary school in walking distance,” the campaign’s new website says.

The group is now focusing its efforts on the property disposition and lease extension legislation pending before the DC Council. “We are watching @councilofdc to see who supports or opposes this bill. @marycheh we will see you Wednesday at the ANC3D to discuss! #KeepOldHardyPublic,” the group tweeted Tuesday night.

Upon submitting the legislation, Bowser wrote in a letter to Mendelson that she wants the DC Council to approve the property as surplus. “There exists an immediate need to dispose” of the building, the mayor’s legislation reads. “The Property needs continued investment which includes capital improvements. In order to invest funds into the Property and make such capital improvements, Lessee requires a longer term lease.”

The DC Council approved a similar emergency bill in 2016, but Bowser did not sign it, citing procedural concerns about “overreach” by legislators. Despite supporting the thrust of the council’s legislation, Bowser wrote in her letter to Mendelson that the “Executive is the proper body to initiate District property dispositions, not the legislative branch.”

Policy fixes

One short-term fix suggested in the working group’s report would be a policy tweak — to stop requiring overcrowded schools to make waitlist offers if the campus doesn’t meet enrollment projections. That change would help schools “right-size enrollment over time,” the group writes. To that same end, another recommendation is to eliminate the policy of reducing resources at overcrowded schools that enroll fewer students than projected, saying that it doesn’t make sense to “penalize overcapacity schools.”

Despite the overcrowding issues, the working group said they opposed reducing out-of-boundary access to schools in the Wilson feeder pattern. The report noted that the diversity of this feeder area is one of its top strengths. With a total enrollment of 9,770 in the 2017-18 school year, the feeder pattern had 2,174 black students, 1,989 Hispanic students and 4,473 white students, according to DCPS figures the report cites.

“The group emphasized throughout the process the importance of maintaining and supporting diversity within the feeder pattern and rejected any option that would significantly reduce out-of-boundary access to schools within the feeder pattern,” the report said.

The community survey that informed the group’s report was administered from May to September 2017, yielding 2,386 responses; 89 percent of the respondents were parents and 63 percent were from Ward 3. The survey was available in English and Spanish. The report did not explain why it was not released sooner after the surveys.