Reply to Surplussing the old Hardy School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Guess Mary will be out of office if this deal goes down?[/quote] 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 [u]current[/u]  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.

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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.[/quote]

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