As District of Columbia students dive into the new academic year, a new public education campaign is gearing up. It calls for renovating abandoned buildings that blight their neighborhoods, ending the waitlist for successful public charter schools, and allowing the city to tap revenues while achieving these improvements. This potential win-win-win isn’t too good to be true. And it is sitting ready to be implemented by the District government.
DC charter schools have proved enormously popular with families and, as a result, educate nearly half of all public school students here. Charters have led the way in raising graduation rates, delivering improved standardized test scores and enriching curricula. Receiving taxpayer dollars to provide a tuition-free public education, these unique public schools are free to innovate while being held accountable for high standards. Yet almost 12,000 students are on waitlists because the schools of their choice are unable to accommodate them, according to the DC Public Charter School Board.
All the while, six former school buildings — all of which could provide ideal homes to high-performing charters — currently lie vacant, according to data in the DC Public Education Master Facilities Plan 2018. That amounts to nearly 1 million square feet of surplus space, but even more could be available if other excess DC government property were included.
The “End the List” campaign by the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools aims to get the government to use these properties in the best interests of some of the city’s most underserved children, for whom a high-quality public education provides a lifeline to college and careers. While the recent decision to open up the Ferebee-Hope Elementary School building in Southeast is welcome, it also is inadequate.
Shockingly, for decades the city has decided to break its own law, which provides charters a “first right of offer” to buy or lease surplus schoolhouses before private developers can bid for them. Instead, dozens of school buildings have been sold for luxury condominiums or simply left vacant to deteriorate — a blight on their neighborhoods and a missed opportunity for the city’s children.
As recently as last year, the city announced that five historic schoolhouses would be turned over for non-school development including high-end office, retail and residential uses, which are hardly in short supply in the District’s red-hot property market.
Since then, AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School — a nationally recognized program that specializes in closing the achievement gap between economically disadvantaged students and their peers — learned that it had to find a new home for its Southwest campus. This is a constant challenge for charters, which unlike city-run schools must locate space to educate their students. AppleTree ended up running its program out of portable classrooms on a city-run school site, while searching for permanent space. The school was unable to find a location in time for the start of the 2019-20 school year, leading to the temporary closure of this highly effective program. While AppleTree worked to enroll its remaining families at other sites, others went to their second or third school choices. For the 2020-21 school year, AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School will reopen in an office building at 475 School St. SW near L’Enfant Plaza.
Surplus and under-utilized school property has long been a feature of the city’s vast property portfolio — a mix of the legacy of segregation, which required two buildings where one would have been sufficient, and the almost terminal decline of the traditional public school system before the arrival of charters. But the city’s charter school students — and the nearly 12,000 who would like to join them — have struggled to compete for the government’s attention against deep-pocketed private developers.
This state of affairs is not only illegal under District law, but also a great social injustice. The city’s charters have extended quality public education options to some of its most vulnerable children. In wards 7 and 8, the District’s poorest, charter students are nearly twice as likely to meet citywide college and career benchmarks as their counterparts in traditional public schools.
While charters struggle to find space in which students can benefit from their diverse, specialized and college-prep-focused programs, the city government provides only $1 per charter student in facilities funds for every $3 it spends on these for the traditional system.
This unfairness, combined with the hoarding and sale of school property, forces charters into DC’s highly competitive real estate market. This wastes precious dollars that could be used for educational purposes and frequently necessitates the expensive conversion of unsuitable industrial or retail space for school use. And that often means charters lack school basics such as playgrounds and playing fields or adequate auditorium, library, cafeteria and gymnasium space — or must expensively create it.
The new campaign to get our lawmakers’ attention to this injustice has taken to the airwaves with radio ads in English and Spanish, and an online video titled “Open Doors, Open Minds.” By releasing vacant buildings and underused space, the city would allow thousands of students to access high-quality public education.
Opening doors to surplus space would also direct charters’ facilities funds into city-owned properties, allow the city to tap charter rental revenues, and renovate long-neglected city-owned buildings. Ending the charter school waitlist means everyone wins.
Ramona Edelin is executive director of the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools.
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