John Settles Jr., Natalie Hopkinson and Lee Granados: Build Banneker in Shaw as a living monument to black excellence

As DC residents and parents of students at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, we are urging DC Council members to vote Tuesday to fund Mayor Muriel Bowser’s plan to build a new, expanded campus for Banneker at the site of the long-vacant Shaw Middle School.

We share the concerns raised by our neighbors in Shaw about the legacy of disinvestment from the neighborhood schools. Like them, we have long been advocates of public education, and we fiercely defend not just the neighborhood system in Shaw but also those in all parts of the city east of Rock Creek Park — all of which continue to be devastated by budget cuts, amid unchecked funding of privately operated charter schools.

However, we fear that the opposition against the new Banneker plan is yet another example of how addressing these citywide education issues in a whack-a-mole, piecemeal fashion simply continues the pattern of politicizing these decisions at the expense of the least powerful Washingtonians. While reversing former DC Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s 2012 decision to close Shaw Middle School might help some residents, it would do nothing to address the citywide crisis of neighborhood school disinvestment and the general chaos wreaked by privatization.  

Here is the good news: Building a new state-of-the-art Banneker, named for a pioneering black scientist who helped design our city and located in a high-profile corridor in the heart of Shaw, would be a living monument to black excellence. Each day, Benjamin Banneker Academic High School defies the lies told about the potential and abilities of black and brown children in our city. U.S. News & World Report recently named Banneker the top-performing high school in the city. A third of our students come from wards 7 and 8. More than 80 percent are black and from working-class families. Building the school across the street from a statue of Carter G. Woodson, the father of black history, would be a powerful symbol of the city’s commitment to black excellence.

Each morning, Banneker children wake up early, sometimes catching multiple buses to get to school — you’ll never come across a harder-working group of young people. Many of our parents hold multiple jobs and make enormous sacrifices to prepare our children to qualify for admission to Banneker and send them to school each day. Our families lack the free time and resources to mount the kind of aggressive lobbying campaign that we have seen from the Shaw community. We don’t have slick Facebook pages or lawn signs. We don’t have the juice to command meetings with top officials. We don’t have PowerPoints filled with enrollment projections — just nearly four decades of excellence.

We see the opposition to the plan to build a new Banneker as continuing a troubling pattern in our city. Since the first waves of white flight occurred after court-ordered integration, our city’s education policy has focused on chasing families who have left, as opposed to serving the children we have. This was one of the aims of flawed privatization schemes initiated in the mid-1990s. More recently, DC Public Schools continued this pattern at Eastern Senior High School, a treasured community institution that education leaders emptied and then reopened in 2011 in an attempt to attract wealthy Capitol Hill families. Ultimately, those families made other choices.

It also should be said that, due to some of the most aggressive gentrification in the country, dwindling numbers of black families are able to afford to live in Shaw, a once majority-black community named for a Civil War hero. Critics of the Banneker plan are asking DC officials to bank on the notion that new Shaw families might come back to the neighborhood system, as opposed to investing in Banneker families who have proved their commitment and are enrolled now.

We support proposals to rebuild a standalone middle school in Shaw once the school system has concretized its enrollment. (The city’s own projections showed that it is not there yet.) But more important, we hope this debate prompts the DC Council to demand better citywide planning and to reconsider school privatization schemes that have disrupted feeder patterns and disinvested historically black neighborhoods in DC such as Shaw, and that continue to devastate wards 7 and 8.

With the DC Council’s vote on Tuesday, our city has an opportunity to do something very important in our history: to invest in a state-of-the-art space that can advance inclusion in technology and sustainability. This monument would be open to any and all Washingtonians, including our neighbors in Shaw. In this prominent location, the new Banneker can be a beacon for academic excellence for generations to come.

John Settles Jr. is the president of Benjamin Banneker Academic High School Parent-Teacher Organization; Natalie Hopkinson is a DC cultural scholar and the parent of a Banneker ninth-grader; and Lee Granados is the parent of a Banneker ninth-grader, a former public school teacher and a national consultant for the Center for Applied Linguistics. This commentary is based on a letter that the authors sent to DC Council members on May 10 and published on Medium.com.

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