Reply to Why is the Foxhall Community Citizens Association scared of public school children?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

The Community Working Group members who examined this for months and solicited hours of testimony and hundreds of pages of written submissions are nobody? Families in Foxhall who will finally have the neighborhood public school that every other neighborhood in DC has are nobody? Elementary school kids who walk 1.5 miles to get to school are nobody? 4th and 5th graders at Key being taught in “modular classrooms” are nobody? Kids who are forbidden to talk when eating lunch because their cafeteria is too small are nobody? Families across the city who would like to send their children to one of the high-performing Ward 3 elementaries but can’t because there are no out-of-boundary slots available are nobody? Families in Ward 3 who would like to send their 3 and 4 year olds to pre-K at a DCPS school but can’t because, again, there isn’t enough space to accommodate them are nobody? All of these people took this “idea” rather seriously. But to you, apparently, they are “nobody”.

You can claim you are being taken out of context but the context makes the same point less succinctly. The Foxhall ES building may not be the most aesthetically pleasing addition to the Foxhall neighborhood but it is the only proposal with funding, a timeline, and mayoral support that promises to solve the above problems (which maybe you don’t think are worth addressing). We all realize that projecting oneself as having a Midas touch that can magically achieve miraculous solutions to intractable problems is part and parcel with running for office, but your stance on the issue opens up a can of worms that threatens to derail the only chance on the horizon of resolving the worsening  overcrowding in our local schools.[/quote]

I don't mean this first part to be insulting, but did the CWG really think they did a good job? Didn't the members go to the community meetings, or read the comments submitted, or interact with anyone outside the Palisades?  I commend everyone who serves on these sorts of committees, but doing a job does not mean doing a good job.

It's not pandering to actually weigh trade-offs, which the CWG failed to do.  Ward 3 needs more schools, agreed.  If you live in the Palisades and are presented with the option of Foxhall you will support Foxhall.  I don't blame you.  But enough of the thinking your motives are high and pure.  Building a school at Foxhall with few kids nearby, then having to reach around the Ward to find kids to fill it is nonsensical.

Since you bring up having to walk 1.5 miles to school, check the CWG working group's estimate of the distance of the new school (via the only catchment that make sense to DCPS):
https://ibb.co/DQq60tn
The majority of the kids will be traveling a farther distance (186 &gt; 155)!  And this is with the CWG's dishonest estimate that Glover Park is a simple hike through the slop of Glover-Archbold Park.  The actual distance, via walkable roads (with no bus line), is 2.0 miles, not the 1.2 reported in that table.  Does your compassion extend to those children?  As I said, you have to confront trade-offs, not simply take what's best for your own children.  Frumin's suggestion of a small school at Foxhall, to serve those kids who are currently traveling far distances makes sense: it minimizes the kids who will have a much longer walk.

I realize this is a topic to make deserved fun of the FCCA, but shouldn't we laugh at the Palisades forcing out their grocery store?  Safeway wanted to build a nice mixed-use building on the spot with housing and a new grocery store, but the Palisades couldn't imagine that.  Now everyone has to drive for groceries.  Maybe everyone in the Palisades has a car and loves driving.  Some of us in other parts of the Ward don't.  To the extent we ignore the FCCA's complaints, we should ignore the Palisades praise.[/quote]

It's a sad fact that, over the course of the past year, certain FCCA affiliates have saw fight to drum up opposition to the new schools by spreading misinformation and outright falsehoods. We saw an example of this just a few days ago when an FCCA affiliate sent messages to the Glover Park, Palisades, and FCCA listservs claiming that Hardy sends only 90 students per year to Wilson when the actual number is 90 students [b]per year[/b] and will, in all probability, rise rapidly given the rapid growth in Hardy's student population in the past two years. I will heartily support any candidate that calls such scaremongering out for what it is. Thus far, no one has stepped up.

That Foxhall ES can only be filled by denying students from Glover Park access to their excellent neighborhood school is yet another example of scaremongering fomented by those with vested interests. If I lived in Glover Park and I was told that my kids were going to be sent to Foxhall ES, I would do all I could to oppose the creation of that new school too. However, logic dictates that this is very unlikely to happen because it just doesn't make any sense. It's even less likely to happen now that Stoddert ES won the money that it was seeking for the mayor for its extension. And, regardless, the grandfathering provisions that the chancellor has promised would ensure that no current students (and their siblings) would be affected.

There are blocks in Burleith (south of Whitehaven Parkway and north of Reservoir Rd) - Hillendale is a good example - that are equidistant to the Foxhall ES site than they are to Stoddert ES. I can imagine some contention on whether these neighborhoods would be zoned to Foxhall ES or Stoddert ES. But any proposals to zone neighborhoods in Glover Park proper to Foxhall ES are indefensible, even for proponents of Foxhall ES.

Also, there similarly seems to be a lot of misunderstandings around the proposition of how large Foxhall ES would be. Some people would like others to believe that it will be 550 students on day one (and that this will be achieved by dragging students from Glover Park, A.U. Park, Georgetown, and goodness knows where else). Of course, it won't be. It could well open with just a couple of hundred students. But, given the demographic projections and given that schools in the area have found themselves without sufficient space even after massive new additions (Hyde-Addison being the most recent example), it would be irresponsible to plan for a school that the projections strongly suggest would already be too small by the time it opened (with or without PK).

There are feasible ways in which the footprint of the school could be much smaller than what the schematics shared by DCPS suggest (while still keeping it big enough to accommodate the projected demand). For instance, the city can exercise the clause in the existing contract with LAB to reclaim the parking lot on the southwest side of Old Hardy and build the new school as an annex to the existing building (and, potentially, by reclaiming the currently-unused first floor of the Old Hardy building). Matt could propose that and he'd have my full support. But the serious ES overcrowding issues that plague Ward 3 cannot - in all likelihood - be solved without some kind of new building and the most logical (and only practical) place for that is next to Old Hardy. It would become someone who aspires to lead the Ward to be upfront about this.[/quote]

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