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

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The rest of us who can look at this objectively realize that adding these schools strengthens public education in DC and support them accordingly.[/quote]

Sure, but the equity issue for this particular school at this particular location is appallingly bad. Just own it.[/quote]m

There are many modest apartment buildings along the lower McArthur. Children from there will attend the new school, thus making school access more equitable. Schools serve primarily their neighborhoods. Students from other wards are usually the exception rather than the rule so their concerns should not be primary drivers of the new schools planning.

Also, Key hosts 6 trailers for its 4th and 5th graders and Stoddert will build an addition, but the pace of its growth, who knows, it may become overcrowded again soon.

The new Foxhall ES resolves the overcrowding problem at Key. That needs a solution, not everything has to revolve around equity! It will probably also ensure that families will have another family friendly neighborhood besides Glover Park, and help reduce or prevent future overcrowding at Stoddert.[/quote]

OK but there is no additional development/population coming to the Palisades/McArthur corridor and sure Key is overcrowded but it is a small school relative to Janney, Murch & Lafayette.  The population density is coming to the Wisconsin Avenue corridor and it is Hearst and Janney that are going to get a flood of new students and no amount of tinkering around the edges is going to move seats around to create capacity at those two schools. [/quote]

Good job making sweeping statements about future development patterns that have little factual basis. You also apparently are oblivious to the fact that families with children can replace those without in the existing housing stock.

The fact that more schools are needed in other places as well does not mean that it Foxhall ES is not needed. And, per the DME, the city is looking for new properties that it can acquire to build schools to serve the JML communities.[/quote]

Again another area where I have some expertise - where is new development coming to Foxhall?  The entire area is zoned for single family and none of it was changed in the recent Comp Plan update and there are no un-developed parcels but even if there were the underlying zoning is all for low and moderate density.

Yes there is always housing turnover but that turnover has already happened in a lot of neighborhoods and doesn't happen indefinitely.

Since you are ignorantly flailing around on here the Wisconsin Avenue corridor was just upzoned to high density AND has a bunch of lots that are primed for re-development and in fact two projects which are going to deliver almost 1000 new units in the next year.

But hey lets spend money on school capacity in a part of DC where no new housing is being built.[/quote]

They are spending money on school capacity in a part of DC which has a chronically overcrowded local public school (with students in Pre-K and very scarce PK4 spots) that is up to 1.5 miles from some of the families it serves. [/quote]

Every single ES WOTP is bursting at the seams (or were pre-Covid) - Janney and Lafayette have already reduced Pre-K and have no PK4 spots at all - not sure it makes sense to scratch all of these various itches instead of first requiring Key to also reduce Pre-K.

But whatever - the ES isn't really a big deal one way or the other - not sure how they will fill it without also going OOB but it isn't that much money or students - it only becomes an issue outside of this narrow slice of DC if ES boundaries have to start being radically re-drawn to fill the seats.  If I lived in Glover Park I'd be very concerned my walk to Stoddert is about to be replaced by a drive to this new school and all the sitting in traffic that would go with it.[/quote]

Every glover park family affected will airbnb an apartment or hotel room for a month to stay IB (and get some renovations done). [/quote]

The GP families will never be sent to Foxhall ES. That's been well-established.[/quote]

So DCPS is building an entire new school because Key has a couple of trailers?[/quote]

6[/quote]

That doesn't really bolster your argument though if the class sizes are also intolerably large it might but a new school to deal with just 6 trailers is not a compelling argument.  Now if it was relieving 6 trailers at Key and another 6 at Stoddert that would change things but someone keeps insisting Stoddert does not factor into filling this school.[/quote]

Meant to ask what is the PK situation at Key?  If Key has a full slate of PK classes and could solve the trailer problem by reducing a class or two (as other schools have done) that also undermines the case for the sensibility of this new school.[/quote]

No PK3.  No school west of the park has PK3. Key has a couple of PK4 classes that are heavily oversubscribed. [/quote]

Since PK4 is not universal I believe DC limits all of them to 20 kids so they should not be heavily oversubscribed.  But Key could gain back a couple of classrooms if they dropped PK - I presume Key's enrollment has dropped under Covid too? [/quote]

What schools have dropped PK4? Not Janney. Not Lafayette. Not Stoddert. Why would be an acceptable solution for overcrowding at Key when it is not at the other NW schools?

PK4 is de facto guaranteed in most of the city due to schools having sufficient space to accommodate their IBs. This is not the case in Ward 3.

If enrollment is still down due to COVID in 2026-7 when Foxhall ES is scheduled to open, DCPS will have had other problems. Suffice to say, it wouldn’t be wise for the city to plan on the basis of those kind of wild hypotheticals.

Anyway, this is degenerating into a Key vs. Stoddert / Janney / Lafayette overcrowding pissing match, which is stupid. It’s not that all schools don’t have overcrowding issues. The point is that the city has a viable plan to relieve overcrowding in part of Ward 3. This will have a domino effect in relieving overcrowding across the Ward (and in absorbing pressures for Ward 3 schools to have OOB spots). It does not preclude investments in other schools to help them deal with their issues - hence the $20.5 million allocation for Stoddert. But if the Foxhall NIMBYs are successful in blocking this school, the NIMBYs elsewhere will certainly draw succor.[/quote]

Actually in response to overcrowding other ES have reduced their PK4 offerings because it is not universal.  Key apparently has done the opposite and added a PK4 class.

The only way there is domino effect is if students from other ES get moved to this new school or Key.  But that important detail is unanswered.  Hence parents in Glover Park looking at this new school with a great deal of concern.

The NIMBY's can go pound sand - their objections are not a reason to not move forward with this school.[/quote]

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