Annual tuition at Emerson Preparatory School was $29,000, yet Jackson Janney’s last year at the struggling private high school began in the basement of a downtown Washington hotel.
There were no desks or whiteboards. His music teacher would bring out an iPad and an easel to teach lessons. Guests walked by as he prepared for the SAT in the lobby.
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Janney, who graduated in 2020, was one of the last students at Emerson Preparatory School, a venerated, 168-year-old D.C. institution that educated those who didn’t fit in elsewhere. After developing a reputation as a refuge for generations of troubled teens trying turn their lives around, the school closed at the end of this past school year — a victim of the District’s white-hot real estate market and the pressures of the pandemic.
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Those most recently in charge of Emerson, Janney said, didn’t understand what made it so special. New leadership failed to re-create the school’s unique learning environment as it endured serial moves from the townhouse it had occupied since 1937 to the U Street corridor to a Massachusetts Avenue hotel.
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Janney and his classmates spent about two months at the hotel before relocating to the fourth floor of a Dupont Circle building — raw office space with tiny rooms, Janney said. There was no furniture, no paintings or decorations, and no common areas for students to gather.
“It didn’t look like a school. It didn’t feel like a school,” said Janney, who came to Emerson in the second semester of his freshman year. “And it didn’t feel like what the school was like before.”
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A few months later, the pandemic hit, and school was out forever.
Anthony Muehlberger, who worked at Emerson as a teacher and administrator for more than two decades before it closed, said its staff was informed in June 2020 that the school would move online. Teachers were invited to apply for entry-level, part-time positions as online tutors.
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An institution that had delivered personalized education in classes with an average size of seven would no longer have full-time employees or in-person contact. Instead, Emerson offered distance courses through the University of Nebraska High School, a onetime correspondence school.
“There was a collective feeling of frustration that stemmed from the idea that this amazing little place, with its deep, weird roots, seemed like it had been treated at the end like a business model that simply hadn’t worked out,” Muehlberger wrote in an email.
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In a June 2020 email obtained from a former teacher, head of school Peri-Anne Chobot wrote that “if we did not restructure our model Emerson would be forced to close.” The school wanted to keep “class sizes small while consciously addressing affordability in a post-pandemic climate,” the email said.
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Chobot did not respond to phone or email requests for comment. An auto-reply from her Emerson email address said the school closed because of “the global and local economic impact related to the COVID-19 pandemic, together with other conditions that were not conducive to operating.”
“In the event Emerson is able to reopen an announcement will be posted,” the email said.
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In a recent interview, former Emerson board chair Annette Rossi, whose daughter attended the school, said its undoing was “decades in the making.”
The school never had an endowment, she said. In 2017, it left its townhouse. Rossi said the building’s landlord “pushed us out,” but the landlord said the school was in search of a larger space.
Unlike other D.C. private schools, the school had no alumni association, according to Rossi. Emerson was paid about $12,000 by the city for each special education student it accepted — about 20 of 40 students enrolled at one point, Rossi said — but it cost more than $25,000 to educate each one.
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Still, Rossi said, Emerson was “turning a curve” when the pandemic struck. The school had hired Chobot — a veteran administrator — for her understanding of education finance. Chobot would turn out to be Emerson’s last president.
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“We had applied for grants,” Rossi said. “We had big plans to expand. Our numbers were growing … We were just crushed by the pandemic and urban renewal.” She added: “We were gentrified out of our neighborhood like other family-run businesses.”
Rossi said Chobot did the best she could: “She was in an unenviable position … The school was on the brink of closing.”
George Barrell Emerson — a progressive educator and cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson — founded the school that bore his name in 1852 to prepare male students for Harvard, according to Emerson’s now-defunct website. The school became Washington’s first coed prep school in 1920 and moved to a townhouse at 1324 18th Street NW in 1937.
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Alumni include luminaries such as Watergate-era judge John Sirica and Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto. In an email, acclaimed science fiction author William Gibson — who attended the school from 1969 to 1970 — said an Emerson English teacher “profoundly contributed to my sense of how science fiction should be written.”
Forrest Malone, a former Emerson student, graduated in 2005 only to start working there in 2010, teaching American history and other subjects.
“The best teachers I ever had in my life were at Emerson,” he said. “The most unique conversations — conversations that I never imagined happening as a 15-year-old or 16-year-old — happened at Emerson.”
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Malone said he came to Emerson in ninth grade to avoid a “psychotically competitive environment” in D.C.’s private schools. He was engaged by the school’s offbeat curriculum, which included a class called “Advanced Topics in Space Exploration” — referred to as “Advanced Space Ships.”
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Emerson was supposed to be a quick way through high school for Brendan Canty, a young musician who would become the drummer for D.C. punk bands Rites of Spring and Fugazi. Before he found fame, Canty was just another student struggling at Woodrow Wilson High School because he kept skipping classes.
Things were different at Emerson, Canty said. He actually enjoyed it. Canty was surrounded by quirky, creative people — artists, photographers and musicians.
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“It was an interesting bunch of kids who I would say were kind of like the island of misfit toys a little bit,” said Canty, 55. “It was a great alternative.”
Muehlberger said Emerson offered this alternative education even though it “called itself a prep school.”
“It seemed very formal but was definitely a place where kids were coming who were having issues with other schools,” he said. “Kids with anxiety. Kids with drug problems who were just not making it in the big environment of a public school. Kids who just needed something else.”
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Student enrollment in grades nine through 12 was kept under 60. There were no sports or class rankings. Courses included screenwriting and “Western and Non-Western Medicine” alongside traditional English, math and science. Tuition was $29,000 annually compared with, for example, Sidwell Friends, which charges students in its upper school around $48,000.
As the District gentrified, however, Emerson could no longer afford to be weird. First, the family who owned Emerson’s Dupont Circle home — the descendants John Julian Humphrey Sr., the school’s head for more than five decades — sold it for $2.3 million in 2001 after his death to fund his widow’s retirement.
Carol Humphrey — the dean’s daughter who worked at the school from 1988 until 2009, eventually becoming its associate director — said the family sold the building to a parent at the school, who, according to public records, flipped the property in 2006 for $4.1 million.
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Small schools in the D.C. region battle high real estate prices and salaries, Humphrey said, but the school helped kids who “probably never would have finished school.”
As Emerson migrated around downtown Washington, it lost sight of its purpose, Muehlberger said. Forced to compete for students with private-school powerhouses like Georgetown Day School, it flailed.
Malone said Emerson’s move to the hotel — a move made at the last minute after the start of the 2019 academic year was delayed — was out of character.
Part of the school’s appeal was the Emerson’s townhouse, he said. Teaching in the hotel was okay — Malone preferred the large conference table even if, occasionally, there was no paper or whiteboard — but the vibe was different.
Rossi, the former board member, said the school was “very lucky” to secure its temporary lodgings. The hotel was happy to have the students, she said, and parents were able to come and go.
Even before the pandemic, Malone said, Emerson was fading. It had a few famous alumni, but they weren’t very engaged. Perhaps a school like Emerson was no longer needed.
“There is not really room for niche private schools the way there once was because so many schools are becoming accommodating to all kinds of different students,” Malone said. “Everybody is sort of accepting everybody.”
Now, the townhouse at 1324 18th Street NW, with a transom that reads “Emerson Institute,” is vacant. The advocacy organization that owned the building relocated to a shared workspace and sold the building in September.
In May, Emerson graduated its remaining 12 seniors, and the school helped place its younger students elsewhere. No more are coming.
Muehlberger said those who studied and worked at Emerson will keep the hope it once offered misfits alive.
“Emerson may have closed, but it is not dead — it lives on in us,” he wrote. “It was ridiculous and special.”
Ellie Silverman and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.