Just a couple of weeks ago, two filmmakers slipped into the historic and huge (225,000-square-foot) Spingarn High School, located off Benning Road in Washington’s northeast quadrant. They recorded on video the decay of a building that the city government has let rot for seven long years.
Built in 1952 as a segregated school for African American children two years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the building was shuttered by the city government in 2013, citing declining enrollment and plans for a vocational school that never materialized. Seven long years later, the plan came to nothing.
Named for Joel Elias Spingarn, a civil rights activist who served variously as board chair, treasurer, and president of the NAACP, 1913-39, the once-state-of-the-art schoolhouse now sadly sits a hollow shell and tempting target for vandalism, theft, and other illicit activities. Yet the derelict building has its champions who wish to repurpose it for the benefit rather than the detriment of the community. Residents active in the Spingarn High School alumni association would like at least some of the vast space to be used as a library and community center.
Many of the city’s public charter schools, some with oversubscribed campuses nearby, are unable to accommodate students because of shortages of space and would seize the opportunity to restore the building to its former glory as a center of learning in this historically underserved community. Spingarn is so vast it also could easily ease other education-related problems by providing low-cost housing for teachers, further benefiting any new educational provision as well as the community at large.
Shockingly, while nearly 12,000 Washington charter students languish on waitlists, Spingarn is one of only 10 school buildings the traditional public school system lacks students to fill. Charters, which educate nearly half of all Washington public school students, have proved excellent stewards of city property elsewhere — restoring and renovating formerly run-down buildings, turning neighborhood liabilities into community assets while also providing a world-class public education to disadvantaged students. In the ward where Spingarn is located, when it comes to students meeting citywide college and career readiness benchmarks, charters significantly outperform city-run schools that are also nonselective.
In total, an estimated 1.4 million square feet of vacant and underutilized school space is owned by the city but not made available for charters to acquire despite the financial benefits to the city of leasing the space. That is irrespective of the citywide good created by using the space to educate waitlisted students.
In fact, this administration only has plans to release one of the 10 public schoolhouses not being used for educational purposes to a charter school. This compares with 13, 12, and 14 abandoned city schoolhouses that were released to public charters by Mayors Anthony Williams, Adrian Fenty, and Vince Gray, respectively. Yet, like those reform-minded predecessors, Mayor Muriel Bowser prides herself on a more businesslike and pro-education reform approach than that which held sway when scores of such buildings lay fallow.
The failure to keep up even basic maintenance at buildings such as Spingarn sends a terrible message to already marginalized communities that come up short for the types of amenities, including grocery stores and table-service restaurants, that more affluent Washington communities enjoy.
This neglect is all the more surprising when one considers that public charter schools that struggle to find suitable school space in the district’s expensive, overheated real estate market educate a higher share of children growing up in economically disadvantaged families than do D.C. Public Schools.
But perhaps more surprising still is that the district government is required by its own law to provide its public charter schools a “first right of offer” to buy or lease excess school properties before developers can — five surplus buildings currently await private development despite the law.
Oddly, city officials defend the failure to release the building by claiming the grounds may be used for modular classrooms as temporary “swing space” while other school properties are renovated. But this is hardly a sensible long-term use of a property built to high-level specifications and comes after the city failed to provide such space for a charter school it displaced.
District residents rightly expect better stewardship from their government — and for precious community assets to be used for neighborhood improvement, not left to become ruins. Will the government step up and allow mixed-use opportunities at the Spingarn space and elsewhere for educational and civic needs that lift up community feeling and spirit, rather than diminishing them?
Dr. Ramona Edelin is executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools.
