Reply to DC council giving away DCPS property to Lab School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I love LAB. It's  great school and a boon to our vibrant city that its located in DC. HOWEVER, it's a private entity. It charges 40,000 a year. It fundraises. I am positive that DC school children placed in LAB bring DC taxpayer funding with them. There are properties for sale--why didn't they jump on St. Anne's? Fannie Mae? 
When I read other threads about overcrowding at Janney, Murch, Eaton etc. it is clear DC should hang on to this property for an elementary, middle, or high school. Or for a charter of any stripe. it is outrageous when DC public school children are learning in overcrowded conditions to give away potential school real estate.
NO sweetheart deal![/quote]

No they should give it to the lab school. Even if that area gets crazy crowded(it will not because it is about maxed in term of families), the property is really limited. It is in a very low density area when compared to Key. You have Georgetown university, Georgetown student renters, the German embassy, the main Lab school, GDS, St pat, GW, Field School, etc taking up much if the land in the area. These places do not need an elementary school. [/quote]

I'm going to assume you're a Lab parent, which means it's also safe to assume you live in the suburbs. And I'm sure when you drive into school on Clara Barton or over Chain Bridge, and come up Reservoir Road, it looks like nobody lives here. And I'm sure when you get together with other Lab parents for coffee in Bethesda or McLean it's easy to gripe about the mean locals in Palisades who won't let you have what you want -- what you deserve!

But it may surprise you to learn there is actually a whole city around the school, and people live there, and they have kids, and they want the same things for their kids that you do. You probably don't know much about how DC is run, but there is a city government, and it has departments and agencies. One agency is called the Office of Planning. It is responsible for trying to predict what the city is going to look like in the future. For the purpose of planning the city is divided into things called "clusters." Each cluster represents about 15,000 people, and there's 39 of them. The Hardy building sits on Foxhall Road, which is the boundary between Cluster 13 and Cluster 14.

You can see the Office of Planning projections for years 2014-2020 here: https://dme.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dme/publication/attachments/2014%20Population%20Projections%20and%20Growth%20(between%202014%20to%202020).pdf

In 2014 there were 4750 kids under the age of 18 in the two clusters. OOP is projecting that by 2020 that will rise to 6350, an increase of 1600 kids and over 33%.  The pre-school population of the two clusters -- the kids who will be tomorrow's students -- will increase from 1500 to 1950.

You can read about their methodology on the OOP website, but for the most part short-term projections are based on houses that have already been built and babies that have already been born.

In DC there is also an agency called DCPS, for DC Public Schools, which runs the public schools (Public schools are a little bit like the private schools that you're used to, except the parents don't have to pay for their kids to go there and the school doesn't get to choose who attends). DCPS schools are organized around neighborhoods. There is one school in Cluster 13, called Key Elementary, and two schools in Cluster 14, Stoddert and Mann. Right now all three schools are overcrowded, they have hundreds more students than they were built for.  The idea that those three schools will have to absorb hundreds of kids in the next three years is very frightening to the people who live there.

The Office of Planning also does longer term projections. While they are less precise, they show hundreds of thousands of people moving into the city in the next 15 years. In the next ten years about 45,000 kids will move into the city. Each school in DCPS is going to have to take about 400 more kids. Nobody knows how they're going to do that.

So while from the safety of the suburbs it may look like DC giving away schools is a good idea, it really isn't.[/quote]

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