Public schools in the District’s Upper Northwest are thriving, thanks to the building modernization programs and education reforms begun under the Fenty Administration. This is swell for the residents of Upper Caucasia, where the white folks reside. But as schools west of Rock Creek thrive, families in the rest of the city, in primarily black neighborhoods, are asking: Why not us?
In a recent column I prognosticated that D.C.’s wedge issues were more about economics and class than race. I am about to eat those words. In investigating seismic changes affecting our public schools, I see the chance for a nasty era of conflict over race and class in the public schools.
Let’s begin with Janney Elementary School in Tenleytown, which opened its renovated building this school season. It’s already at capacity and about to burst its seams.
Janney’s graduating class will have the option of crossing Wisconsin Avenue and attending Alice Deal Middle School, also the beneficiary of a recent renovation. In decades past, the white and mostly middle-class families who make up Janney might have sent their offspring to a private middle school or moved to Maryland, where the public schools offered a better education. Now they are shipping their kids to Alice Deal en masse.
Deal, which has for years accepted students from across the city, is jammed. When my daughter attended it five years ago, half of her classmates were black. Now Deal is turning vanilla.
Woodrow Wilson Senior High, a few hundred yards west, is the city’s largest public high school. It opened its doors on a fabulous renovation in August. Built for 1,500, it is already overenrolled by more than 150 students. For decades it has taken students from Northwest to Southwest, across town by the Anacostia River.
Meanwhile, many public schools in the city’s eastern wards are half empty — and not renovated. Not one of the open-enrollment high schools is even close to full. Many black parents want to send their kids across the park to Deal and Wilson, and in years past, they could.
Those days are o-v-e-r, because white families have returned to the neighborhood schools.
“I have a sense we’re not confronting this,” says Mary Cheh, who represents Ward 3 where the schools are jammed. “We have to start now; it’s going to take time.”
It’s going to take political fortitude and cause severe pain. More schools in black neighborhoods must be closed. “No question about it,” agrees Council Chair Kwame Brown. But will the school system and Brown’s colleagues face the wrath of residents opposed to the closings? Brown wants to build new schools in eastern wards that have “parity” with the Northwest schools, where he is able to send his children.
Cheh presented public school Chancellor Kaya Henderson with a boundary map that showed kids from Southwest traveling eight miles to Wilson. Why not move boundaries and send them to the renovated Eastern High, two miles away?
Easy to ask; difficult to achieve.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
