Preteen and adolescent students sit on desk chairs and toilets designed for kids half their size in Ward 5, the only area of the District without a standalone middle school. And many of these D.C. middle schoolers don’t have access to a wide range of extracurriculars, like music and art and athletics, because there aren’t enough students to draw big dollars under the city’s per-pupil budget formula. Most attend elementary schools refurbished into pre-K-8 campuses.
Now, almost a year after the community gathered 1,000 signatures for a middle school, D.C. Public Schools officials are starting the Ward 5 Great Schools Initiative at a meeting Thursday evening at Luke C. Moore High School.
Education advocates in Ward 5 say they’re done with “lip service and rehashing,” and want school officials to come ready with a plan to build a state-of-the-art middle school.
“Everywhere I turn in Brookland there are kids in strollers, and we lose them to charter schools, or we lose them to other schools in the city,” said Raenelle Zapata, president of the Ward 5 Education Council. “It’s like ‘Field of Dreams’: If you build it, they will come. If you have a great school, who would drive their kids across town?”
The seven other wards in D.C. have middle schools, with varying levels of success. The Washington Examiner first reported that Ward 3 D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh is proposing a new middle school in the Palisades, because Alice Deal in Tenleytown is severely overcrowded. But enrollment in most of the city’s middle schools has been declining over the past several years, with proficiency rates on standardized tests entrenched below the 50 percent mark in math and reading.
In Ward 5, leaders are worried that they can’t address quality until they have facilities and basic offerings.
“They need to have full cafeterias, they need to have full gymnasiums, so they can have full athletic programs and physical education programs,” said Mark Jones, the Ward 5 member of D.C. school board.
“We lack so much. We’re told we have music in all our schools, but that’s not accurate at all,” Jones said. He pointed to Hardy Middle School in Georgetown, and other standalone middle schools with chess and debate clubs, and several foreign language options.
Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson committed to revitalizing Ward 5 schools at a hearing on the schools budget, after Ward 5 Councilman Harry Thomas Jr. said his community felt DCPS failed to invest in them.
A spokesman for Henderson said DCPS hopes to present a final plan early in 2012.
“I expect more out of you on this than anybody,” Thomas told Henderson, a Ward 5 resident.
