Just a quickie-
Thankfully, yesterday, the DC Council voted against Mayor Muriel Bowser’s plan to use the Shaw Middle School site for Benjamin Banneker High School. Parents of the elementary schools that surround the empty Shaw Middle School want it to be the stand alone feeder middle school. Currently, the Cardozo Educational Campus is the feeder middle and high school, and parents have said no to that, by voting with their feet.
You could make this about gentrification, but it isn’t. Banneker is a fine school. In fact it is a school one has to qualify for, like Duke Ellington. It is also predominately African American, so that’s where the weak gentrification thing comes in. Thing is, Banneker is currently up near the northern end of the Howard University campus….. not in Shaw. Actually, I’m not sure what neighborhood it is in, as it is too far east to be Columbia Heights and on the wrong side of Howard to be LeDroit. The Shaw Middle School building would theoretically be an in-boundary school for Shaw middle schoolers, should their parents decide to send them there. Banneker would not be an in-boundary school for Shaw high schoolers. No, the in-boundary high schools are Cardozo and Dunbar.
Okay, so for the time being, Shaw Middle School as a concept has been saved.
Yay. There wasn’t anything guaranteeing that Shaw would get renovated though, just that it wasn’t going to get handed over to a selective school.
Now if the city is just itching to fix up a school somewhere, there is a building on the unit block of P Street NW, across from Mundo Verde I’d like fixed up or torn down.