Surplussing the old Hardy School
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Anonymous
| Guess Mary will be out of office if this deal goes down? |
Anonymous
|
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that this building is way too big for what Lab needs. The building is 17,000 square feet, it has zoning approval for 200 students but that's probably pushing it, 170 would be comfortable. Lab currently has about 75 kids there, one of the selling points to their neighbors is that they will keep enrollment under 80. What Lab really needs is a building in the 7500-8,000 SF range. There are lots of buildings in that size range nearby. If the city really wants to do a give-away to Lab, everyone would be better off if they just bought a smaller building and gave it to them, and used the Hardy building for a public school.
With an enrollment of only 75 to 80 students, of which "almost 21%" are from DCPS, that building is only serving 15 or 16 DCPS students. If it were recommissioned as a public school and updated it could serve 400. |
Anonymous
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I just learned the Council is scheduled to vote tomorrow.
Contact your councilmembers! |
Anonymous
| The vote was today-what happened? |
Anonymous
The vote was postponed until December 17. Several councilmembers expressed concern that while it had been claimed that DCPS didn't need the property, there was nothing in the record to support that claim. Muriel Bowser asked that someone make that claim for the record before the next vote. It should be interesting to see what sacrificial lamb they find. Observing the history of this, it's been clear that no one wants to take ownership of the idea. Everyone claims it's someone else's idea. Anyone who does certify for the record that the school is unneeded faces a real career risk of the redistricting report coming out in six months and suddenly we need more schools. |
Anonymous
| Article on this in today's DuPont current. Not yet available online. |
Anonymous
She's fine either way. If Lab goes ahead as is, she can claim supporting special education and community preference. If Lab gets blocked, she can claim supporting expanding public schools and community preference. The very vocal, hardcore anti-Lab at Foxhall group is not necessarily representative of the community. Like the Tea Party among Republicans, lots of heat and only occasionally light. Cheh can flip flop on Lab all she wants depending on whose living room she's in, but the tougher issue in our Ward is secondary school options. In the previous school year, Key sent about 15 fifth graders from the overly crowded school to Hardy Middle School. Key has a focus group on how to make the current Hardy school a MS "of choice" as well as by right. Blocking The Lab School building on Foxhall, which hasn't been used by DCPS in over 15 years and nobody refers to as "Hardy" these days, is only a priority for a vocal few who seemed more concerned with elementary than secondary. |
Anonymous
We're the 5th graders just using space at Hardy or mixed in with the 6th graders? |
Anonymous
You have no idea what you're talking about. Every PTA president at Key since 2003 just signed a letter to Mary Cheh opposing any action on Hardy until the boundary review is completed, along with every LSAT rep since 2006. Twenty four people total, all with extensive volunteer experience. No one who hears about this deal who is not a Lab insider thinks it's a good idea. It's not "anti-Lab" sentiment, it's a realization that public land is scarce and needs to be reserved for public use. Cheh's response to the PTA presidents was that DCPS has said they don't need the school. Which isn't actually true, nobody at DCPS has been willing to put their name publicly on that claim. With good reason: everyone knows the school is actually needed, and there's going to be hell to pay when the boundary revision comes out and people realize the city just gave away the only possible answer to elementary crowding. Which, incidentally, is why this disposal has been on the legislative rocket docket: everyone on the inside knows this needs to be done in a hurry. Clearly Cheh is setting herself up to claim that she only relied on what DCPS told her. Whether people are more concerned with middle school or elementary is largely a function of how old their kids are. For parents with kids in elementary, crowding is a huge issue, at Key, Mann, Stoddert and Janney. Those are the schools that would benefit most from a new elementary school at Hardy, and all of those schools are over capacity and have essentially stopped taking out of boundary kids. As for your stats on Key and Hardy Middle School, you're way off there too. If Key had sent 15 to Hardy last year it would have been hailed as a raging success, considering the graduating class of fifth graders was only 29, that would be more than half. The actual number was two. |
Anonymous
| so kids in fact do go to Hardy from Key, and there was only one 5th grade class there this year, not 2 or 3?? I know at least prior to this year (not sure about this year) that Mann had not sent any graduating 5th grade students to Hardy for a good 6 years. They have one graduating 5th grade class every year, of about 23-25 students. This year's 5th grade class is 24 students I believe. |
Anonymous
This statement is factually false. My neighbor's two children went to Hardy. One is now in Wilson, in 11th grade, and the other is still in Hardy. So that's at least one in the last three years. Yes, the exception largely proves the rule here, I acknowledge, but your statement is factually incorrect. |
Anonymous
| Key has two classes of fifth graders of roughly 15 each. The fifth grade that graduated last year sent two kids to Hardy. What you have to keep in mind is that many families are bailing for charters, privates or the suburbs after third and fourth grade. This cohort was four classes of 25 when they were in kindergarten. Of the 100 kids who entered kindergarten at Key in September 2007, 71 left key by September 2012 and two went on to Hardy. |
Anonymous
| I still find it completely baffling that DCPS cannot find a way to improve Hardy sufficiently quickly to keep these students. It is just such a low-hanging fruit, relative to the other Sisyphean tasks they hope to accomplish. |
Anonymous
+1 new management please |
Anonymous
As others have implied -- at least with respect to overcrowded middle schools -- the elephant in the room is the current Hardy. Feeder-school parents won't send their kids there, because academics aren't challenging enough. But if all the in-boundary kids went, en masse, it would immediately become a primarily in-boundary shool (as opposed to its current majority OOB population), with the academic rigor the in-boundary families desire. It sounds like a simple solution, but with DCPS fiddling with the current Hardy's boundaries right now, no once can make a decision until the boundary process is done. Focusing solely on the overcrowded elementary school situation avoids any uncomfortable debate over demographics: no one disagrees that Ward 3 elementaries can't handle the number of new students from the local population. A new school where Lab currently sits would certainly help. But there's another problem: what would the new school's boundaries be? There are already several DCPS elementaries in close proximity to Lab. It would make more sense (with geography taken into account) to devote public funds to build more classroom space where those schools already exist. Though there probably isn't a budget for that, either. That's why the elementary principals are discussing adding more trailers to their campuses, and no one over at DCPS or the Council is doing anything to create a better solution because it's less headache for them. |