Reply to Greater Greater Washington story on school enrollment growth

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Reply to "Greater Greater Washington story on school enrollment growth"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Nick, did you even add in the vacant sites?  And what about the sites that are owned by DCPS and not officially vacant but in use as offices or swing space (Emery, Meyer, Bruce for example). Then there are buildings used by charters that closed, such as City Arts in Edgewood, that DCPS could potentially buy or rent.  And office buildings and warehouses can also be purchased and converted.  Yes city real estate is expensive, but if population grows enough, they will have the tax base to support it.

A lot of your "red" schools can cut back PK3 and PK4 as well and get 100-ish seats from that.

[/quote]

Nick here.

I only used what is in the Master Facilities Plan. (see https://dme.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dme/publication/attachments/DC_MFP_2019_Feb%2021_Final_compressed.pdf ). The capacities I listed for schools are what is listed in the plan. That includes all of the planned capital spending, which is listed in Appendix A.14. The spending plan goes through 2024, so presumably there will be more between 2024 and 2027.  The spending plan spends over $1.6 billion over the next six years, but only adds a few hundred seats of capacity, most of the spending is upgrading but not expanding existing schools.

DCPS and DC in general is limited in its ability to do capital spending. The city has to finance capital spending through debt, and it has to stay within a very tight debt cap. We're still paying off a billion-dollar convention center and a billion-dollar baseball stadium, which means there is very little room under the cap. Each year we can only spend what got freed up that year, either from old debt being paid off or the city economy growing. This is why modernizations are spread out over so many years, the city doesn't have the ability to spend a lot of money all at once. [/quote]

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