D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser announced Wednesday that she wants to build a stand-alone middle school to serve students living in the Shaw area, the latest twist in a years-long debate that has ignited conversations about gentrification, race and the future of neighborhood schools in the District.
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The announcement arrived in Bowser’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, which also includes a five-year spending plan, and allocates $113 million to build a middle school just north of the Shaw neighborhood in Northwest Washington. The new campus would not be built until 2026 and would be located at the site of the recently vacated Banneker High School near Howard University’s campus.
The announcement follows years of advocacy from Shaw parents who have argued that a new middle school is necessary to keep children in their local neighborhood schools beyond elementary grades. The Bowser administration has contended that there is insufficient demand to build a middle school serving students from just this area that would have a large enough enrollment to offer the academic courses and extracurriculars that parents would want. Instead, the proposed school — which Bowser (D) called Center City Middle School in her spending plan — would reserve seats for students across the city who could apply through the school lottery placement system.
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The D.C. Council must approve Bowser’s budget proposal.
Council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1), whose ward includes the proposed site for the school, said she would field feedback from parents on the location of the middle school, which is north of Shaw.
“This is something I’ve been fighting for since before I was on the council,” Nadeau said. “I want to hear from parents,” she said. “We’ll be listening very hard to those families.”
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The fight over whether to build a stand-alone middle school to serve Shaw intensified in 2018.
Shaw Junior High — which had been located in the heart of the historically Black neighborhood of Shaw on the 900 block of Rhode Island Avenue — closed more than a decade ago amid declining enrollment. The neighborhood has since gentrified, and scores of residents in Shaw had hoped the mayor would resurrect the stand-alone middle school. Middle-school-age students in Shaw are currently zoned to attend Cardozo Education Campus, which serves students in middle and high school.
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Many of the neighborhood’s newer, wealthier families still have elementary-age children or have opted out of Cardozo Education Campus for middle school, instead turning to private or other public school options. The middle-schoolers who attend Cardozo Education Campus are overwhelmingly from low-income families.
Under the mayor’s proposal, the middle-school grades at Cardozo would close and move to the new middle school.
In 2018, Bowser proposed moving Benjamin Banneker Academic High — a top-performing application high school that serves mostly Black and Hispanic students — to the site of the old Shaw Junior High. She said a new building on the more expansive site would allow the high school’s enrollment to increase by 300 students.
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Bowser framed the fight as the latest gentrification battle in the city, pitting long-term residents who send their children to Banneker against more-recent arrivals in the city’s Shaw neighborhood.
The D.C. Council narrowly voted to move Banneker to the coveted Shaw site. The council’s 7-to-6 vote to move Banneker fell largely along racial lines. Six of the seven votes in favor of the move came from Black council members. The six who voted to modernize Banneker on its existing site, paving the way for a stand-alone middle school in Shaw, are White. If the vote had failed, Banneker would have been renovated on its existing site.
Bowser’s budget proposal Wednesday also included an expected $45 million to build a second high school in Ward 3 that would alleviate overcrowding from Wilson High, the city’s largest high school, located in a wealthy corner of the city. The new thousand-student high school on a campus formerly owned by Georgetown Day School along MacArthur Boulevard would enroll students who are zoned for Hardy Middle School in Georgetown.
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Hardy currently feeds into Wilson High. The new high school is set to open for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Banneker and Shaw: Was the fight really about gentrification?
Last week, the D.C. Council held a hearing on the future of a possible stand-alone middle school serving Shaw students. At the time, Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn did not commit to a new Shaw middle school. He pointed to multiple family engagement sessions and studies, which he said pointed to insufficient potential enrollment for a stand-alone middle school.
“The citywide elementary school enrollment swell that was growing before the pandemic has moved into the middle-school grades. This is good news,” Kihn said at the hearing. “Even so, as in [school year] 2018-19, the Center City area of the city continues to be home to a relatively modest number of children.”
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Parents testified at the hearing in favor of the stand-alone school, arguing that Cardozo Education Campus was not designed for middle-schoolers and a stand-alone campus would offer more opportunities for their children.
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“Our Center City community has been asking the city for 12 years to find a permanent home for the middle-school students in the Cardozo feeder pattern," testified Anne Louise Taylor, a mother of two young students at Seaton Elementary, which feeds into Cardozo Education Campus. "It’s time for D.C. to seize the opportunity it has with the vacant Banneker building and fulfill its responsibility to these students.”