Following Jelleff fight, Burleith bristles over District’s plans to upgrade a nearby field to regulation-size

A turf war raged this fall over access to the public Jelleff Recreation Center in Georgetown, with some parents and lawmakers rallying unsuccessfully against private Maret School renewing a deal with the District for exclusive rights to the center’s field.

Meanwhile, five blocks away in Burleith sits the underused Ellington Field, which has until now escaped a high-profile firestorm over the District’s plans. 

To alleviate a citywide crunch for precious field space, the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) plans to upgrade that field upon taking control of it from DC Public Schools. 

That transfer was set to take place last Saturday, at the end of a 30-day public comment period that residents wanted extended. The department on Wednesday afternoon, after this article was originally posted, wrote to residents that the deadline had been extended to Feb. 12. 

When the field is upgraded, DPR pledges that Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Hardy Middle School, and School Without Walls will have priority access, unlike at Jelleff. 

But many Burleith residents and Ward 2 DC Council member Jack Evans bristle at transforming Ellington Field from what’s mostly a casually used park into a full-size athletic field able to serve as an alternative to Jelleff. Heavily attended games, opponents say, would mean cars and school buses clogging traffic and taking parking spaces around 38th and R streets NW.

“For those folks who live close by,” said Ed Solomon, Burleith’s former advisory neighborhood commissioner, at an October meeting, “they all [may] wake up one morning and say, ‘What the hell happened to my street?’”

In the aftermath of allowing Maret exclusive access to Jelleff, some are also skeptical that DPR would honor its promise to prioritize the new field for public schools.

In announcing the deadline extension on Wednesday — first reported by Washington City Paper — the department also said a community meeting about the field will take place during the week of Jan. 13. 

For now, the field is in such poor condition that a recent flag football game required shoveling out dog feces for hours, Evans said at a community meeting in October. Despite that, Evans opposed transfer of the site to DPR for renovations.

Nearly three out of four residents surveyed by the Burleith Citizens Association said they are satisfied with the current state of the field. The survey received 186 responses, and a summary of its findings was released this month. 

“Several said not to fix what isn’t broke, less change the better,” the citizens associations said, summarizing additional survey responses.

In particular, 62% of those surveyed opposed the elimination of up to 12 parking spaces to make room for school buses. Meanwhile, 76% of respondents also said that DCPS should have priority access to the field.

“Ellington Field, which features an unimproved and largely unmaintained grass field, once improved and activated, will be better suited to accommodate multiple uses for residents,” DPR director Delano Hunter said in a statement. “The activation of the Ellington Field will result in increased community access to this facility, while also providing top priority to local schools including Duke Ellington, Hardy Middle School and School Without Walls to host after-school athletic activities.”

After taking control of the field, DPR plans to open a new public comment period about the design of the new field by hosting a community meeting in January. 

But there is frustration over how DPR has handled community outreach. Jevelle Branch, the director of operations of the Ellington School, said at a recent meeting that DPR hadn’t even contacted the school about its plans to take charge of the field. 

“At this point, I kind of, sort of have been managing the field myself,” Branch said at a Dec. 2 advisory neighborhood commission meeting in Georgetown.

The department’s chief of staff, Ely Ross, said at the meeting that DCPS administration supported the decision to transfer the field to DPR. He added that DPR plans to reprogram city funds to the renovation project.

For months, Evans billed himself as the guarantor, saying that nothing new would happen to the field. But then DPR confirmed in November that it would move on upgrading the field.

“When people started making a lot of noise about Jelleff, all of a sudden people started looking at Ellington like, ‘We’ve got a field here that’s underused, why is that?’ … That’s unfortunate,” Evans told the Burleith Citizens Association in early October.

“Nothing will happen at Ellington Field for the foreseeable future,” Evans said then, assuring residents that he had received promises from Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration. “Nothing.”

His office didn’t return requests for comment.

Amid the uncertainty over the field, Eric Langenbacher, president of the Burleith Citizens Association, has questioned whether DPR will honor its promise that public schools will have first priority on the field.

“We’ve been burned before in the community by these sweetheart deals for private schools,” Langenbacher told Ross at the ANC meeting. 

Georgetown University also has an agreement to use the running track on the perimeter of the field until 2023. The use by the university’s track team dates back nearly two decades, when the university paid to upgrade the track.  

Evans backed the deal between Maret and the District, in which the private school has rights to its turf field for the next decade in exchange for spending nearly $1 million on improvements. The arrangement is in effect at peak hours on school days, from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the fall and spring. 

There are proponents of upgrading Ellington Field. Bowser’s chief of staff, John Falcicchio, tweeted in September that the project would be a “win-win-win.”

His words were condemned by Evans and others, such as Burleith advisory neighborhood commissioner Kishan Putta, who is running for Evans’ Ward 2 council seat. “I almost faint — or vomit at the same time” in reaction, Putta said at the Burleith Citizens Association’s October meeting. 

Falcicchio had tweeted: “Improve Jelleff Field with a contribution from Maret, expand Jelleff Field House with already budgeted resources and a future allocation, [and] create a regulation sized field at Ellington.”

Putta said that his constituents need more time to understand the details and ramifications of the Ellington project.

At-large DC Council member Elissa Silverman, a fierce critic of the Jelleff deal for Maret, said in an October interview that Hardy Middle School and users of Jelleff’s field would benefit from an upgraded Ellington. 

“Is it a green space that’s not maintained and could be at a higher and better use? Yes,” Silverman said. But she also is mindful that the community currently uses it informally, with some walking their dogs and playing ball on the weekends. One resident is campaigning for the site to include a dog park. 

Some residents worry drastic changes may be made to the field before they can weigh in on issues related to parking and the potential removal of heritage trees that surround parts of the field. 

“I’m not going to minimize the neighborhood’s concerns,” Silverman said. “Change is always hard.”

This post has been updated to include the Department of Parks and Recreation’s announcement on Wednesday afternoon that it has extended the public notice period and plans to hold a community meeting in January.