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For years, Bancroft Elementary School has reaped the benefits that come with a pot of federal dollars reserved for low-income schools — on-site aftercare, money to pay certain teachers’ salaries, case workers and translation services for families.
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This year, things are different. The school now has too many higher-income families to qualify for the federal grant, known as Title I. The after-school program was scrapped, parents say, and budget documents show the $90,000 allocation was removed.
The shift comes after D.C. Public Schools changed the way it assesses Title I eligibility, but also reflects a transformation years in the making, which is familiar now to many longtime D.C. residents and natives — the neighborhood that surrounds Bancroft has become increasingly attractive to wealthier crowds in search of coveted rowhomes and lush public parks, pricing out lower-income families and reshaping local schools.
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The Northwest Washington community is tightknit, its members say, but they sometimes clash over how best to run a school that is getting wealthier, whiter and more English-dominant. Bancroft is an English and Spanish dual-language school, where students outperformed their peers across the city on standardized tests last year. Students later feed into the highly sought-after Jackson-Reed High School. Families spend upward of a million dollars on homes to guarantee their child a spot.
Mount Pleasant has resisted the kind of gentrification that has reconfigured other D.C. neighborhoods, but its demographics are still changing. Some parents and residents are worried about preserving Bancroft’s identity as a multiracial, bilingual school. Others have shared concerns about a potential underestimation of low-income children at Bancroft due to a large undocumented population in the surrounding neighborhoods. Many said they were surprised by the loss of Title I and that DCPS has not explained clearly how it is measuring poverty on the campus. The district did not answer questions from The Washington Post or say whether local funds will be used to sustain Title I-backed programs.
Fewer lower-income children are attending Bancroft now than they did a decade ago. In 2014, nearly 35 percent of Bancroft students were deemed “at-risk,” a broad category that includes children who are homeless, in the foster care system or reside in low-income households. Last school year, roughly 20 percent of children fell into that category. Meanwhile, census data shows 22 percent of households in Mount Pleasant earned at least $200,000 per year in 2021, compared to 9.5 percent in 2011.
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The proportion of students of color is smaller as well. The share of White children grew from 10 to 30 percent between the 2012-2013 and 2022-2023 school years. During the same time period, Latino enrollment fell from 74 to 63 percent and Black enrollment dropped from 8 to 3 percent, city data show.
“They’re not in our neighborhood. They can’t afford it,” Jessica Morales, the principal at Bancroft, said about Black families during a Georgetown University panel discussion about gentrification in September 2022. Morales did not respond to interview requests and D.C. Public Schools officials did not make her available for an interview.
The number of Latino residents in Mount Pleasant has grown by more than 50 percent over the last decade, census data show, but many families are barely getting by. “Families are coupling,” she said. “It’s like two families living in a studio because they can’t afford to go anywhere else.”
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To be eligible for Title I grants, at least 35 percent of students in a school must qualify for free and reduced lunch. Eighty-eight of D.C.’s 117 traditional public schools use the money — the largest source of federal education funding — to support instruction, host family engagement events and hire reading specialists.
Between the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years, the district changed how it decides whether a school should get the federal money. Instead of looking at the number of applications for free and reduced-cost meals, it now relies on a school’s “community eligibility provision” (CEP) rate that is derived using other metrics for poverty, such as whether a family uses others forms of public assistance. CEP is a national program that allows high-poverty schools to serve free meals.
DCPS officials declined to explain why the change was made or how it will affect the system’s 50,000 students. LaMonika Jones, director of D.C. Hunger Solutions, said officials could have made the decision because it’s an easier process. “If a family is already participating in SNAP or TANF, they can use that information to determine whether or not a school is eligible for Title I funding.”
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A decade ago, 77 percent of Bancroft’s student body received free and reduced-cost meals. During the 2022-2023 school year, roughly 25 percent of Bancroft’s students were eligible, school officials explained in March to a parent in a Freedom of Information Act request. Since it had Title I designation during the previous school year, the district provided a grace year to phase out the grant program.
Ahead of this school year, however, officials estimated 27 percent of children would be eligible, again below the 35 percent threshold — officially ending Title I services at Bancroft.
In a February meeting, members of Bancroft’s local school advisory team shared fears about the ramifications of losing the Title I designation. They worried teachers would leave because they would no longer receive Title I-funded bonuses or benefit from a federal student loan forgiveness program for educators who teach at high-poverty schools. A staff member whose salary was paid with Title I dollars “has done an extraordinary job this year and that loss will create a significant gap,” according to notes from the meeting. It is unclear if Bancroft was able to retain the staffer with other funds or if the role was eliminated.
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Bancroft actually received more money overall in its budget this school year, due in part to enrollment growth. School officials declined to say whether former Title I services might be continued using local dollars or detail the specific services that are being affected.
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Parents, some of whom decried a lack of transparency surrounding the change, said they are concerned because Bancroft still has low-income students who need the services the federal grant provided — even if their families have not sought federal assistance. “Our school has a lot of undocumented people and they depend on the school for a lot of resources,” said Joshua Louria, a Bancroft parent who bought his house in Mount Pleasant more than a decade ago. “People are afraid to apply for government programs if they’re undocumented.”
Morales described similar challenges during the Georgetown panel last year, saying some undocumented families may “refuse to go and ask for support because that puts the trajectory of getting their green card in jeopardy.”
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For now, a DCPS-run aftercare program for Title I schools is no longer on the menu of options at Bancroft, said Priya Cook, a parent of two Bancroft students. Low-income families can qualify for vouchers or financial aid to send their children to programs off-site, but spots are limited.
“As there’s a growing number of families less in need of Title I resources, there’s been a lot of discussion about how to make sure that the many, many families that still could benefit from those resources have access,” Cook said.
Tension at Bancroft
Morales, who is Latina, is from the same community as many of her students. She attended what is now Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in Woodley Park and, at the talk with Georgetown University, described a neighborhood that threw block parties. Families would dance to go-go, salsa and merengue music. “We were out on the corner drinking, okay fine,” she said. She suggested that newer residents in the early 1990s opposed the gatherings. The parties “didn’t fit into their perspective. Or, it didn’t look right.”
Similar tension has presented itself more recently at Bancroft, as well. Morales told a story about virtual learning during the pandemic, and some English-speaking families complained because their children were struggling through lessons taught in Spanish.
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“The kids were learning virtual and I’m getting all these emails like, ‘You need to change the program in kindergarten,’” she said. At that grade level, 80 percent of instruction happens in Spanish. She understood parents were anxious. “And the first question I asked them: ‘So should I change the English curriculum because my Spanish parents and my Latino parents don’t understand English?’ Do you hear yourself? It’s not the language, it’s the modality in which kids are learning that was very — it was hard.”
In another instance, affluent families wanted to hold lunchtime outdoors in cold weather. She worried the other families might feel uncomfortable letting their children eat in cold or wet conditions. She thought about those who could not afford thick coats or scarves.
“They were like, ‘We’ll buy the coats, we’ll buy the beanies,’” said Morales. “It’s not about buying it, but respecting the fact that this is how their culture is, this is how my culture is.”
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For Chido Obidegwu, it was that culture — along with schools and public parks — that brought him and his wife, Emily, to Mount Pleasant. “It was Mount Pleasant or bust for staying in the city for a home purchase,” said Obidegwu, 36. “We wanted to be in a place where we felt comfortable sending our kids to public school.”
The couple bought their home in March 2021, almost a full year before their daughter was born. They were already thinking about college. “Those kids are matriculating to places as good as kids that are going to private school,” he said about Jackson-Reed graduates.
Morales acknowledged the neighborhood is changing. But she does wield some control over who can attend prekindergarten at Bancroft. Unlike kindergarten through 12th grades, D.C. families are not guaranteed entry to neighborhood pre-K-3 and 4 classrooms — everyone must enter the lottery.
“At Bancroft, what I do is I have a 70/30 model,” she said last year. Seventy percent of families who make it through her waitlist must be Spanish speakers and the remaining 30 percent of spots go to English-dominant homes. Ahead of this school year, 401 English-dominant families were waitlisted for eight preK-3 and 4 seats, according to lottery data. By August, two had been offered spots. Eighty-eight Spanish-dominant families were waitlisted for 35 seats.
The 70/30 decision is one that has invited pushback, but Morales said she wants to take it further. “I want to change it to 80/20 because what ends up happening [is], families that can afford to live right across the street from me — those brownstone, beautiful houses that I cannot afford with my salary — they will have access to the school at kindergarten, right, because it’s a neighborhood school.”
There were more English-dominant children in Bancroft’s kindergarten classrooms than Spanish speakers, Morales told the Georgetown audience, a trend that continues into first and second grade. “That impacts the program,” she said about the dual-language offering.
For now, Bancroft remains a dual-language school, and first through fifth graders spend most of the day learning in Spanish. “You’re going in there because you want to be a part of it, not because you want to change it,” Morales said about Mount Pleasant. “And if you want to change it, you’re gonna hit a roadblock and it’s gonna be called Jessica Morales.”
The principal did, however, seem to acknowledge more change has yet to come.
“I do worry,” she said. “And, eventually, I don’t know what’s going to happen when I’m not there. Who will be placed at Bancroft?”
John D. Harden contributed to this report.
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