Reply to DCPS students shafted again - sign petition to keep Jelleff field public

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The DCline article - and the beautiful analysis of the very ugly field situation on page 56 - underscores that this issue is much bigger than Jelleff and probably bigger than DPR. You have GU at Mason, Maret at Hardy, Howard at Banneker, far too many baseball fields, and also the mayor trying to use “emergency” powers to give away vital DCPS buildings to a wealthy and connected private school. All of these issues have not each themselves pissed enough people off for the mayor and others to care about, but if we roll them together, the equation starts to become more encouraging.[/quote]

The long-term view: in 1968, the height of the baby boom, the city had 148,000 DCPS students. Enrollment dropped every single year for 40 years and hit bottom in 2008 at less than half of that. The city had way too many school buildings and rec centers for the youth population, for decades. It didn't know what to do with those properties, it literally had trouble giving them away. For years they were happy to turn them over to anyone who could find a use for them. It's only in the past ten years that the youth population has started rebounding, and all of those deals are proving incredibly hard to unwind.

The short-term view: DPR permitting is a mess. They have over 100 fields and rec centers to allocate. They don't have the resources or the vision to do any sort of thoughtful allocation. The most they can do is just day "everyone gets what they got last year" and even that is a struggle. From DPR's perspective, if Maret goes then they have to figure out who gets Jelleff, which means weighing competing claims from Jelleff B&GC, Hardy, Walls, and perhaps others. Status quo is less work for them.[/quote]

Your analysis deserves credit, but I don't understand why these deals are proving so hard to unwind. Very few of the current council were around in the late 1990s (when the Old Hardy deal was done, for instance) and wouldn't owe anyone anything were it not for the need to pay back campaign contributors. They seem to think they can get away with extending these deals because the public at large won't notice. Hopefully, we're proving them wrong.[/quote]

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