BY S. TRINTER | FOGGY BOTTOM NEWS

WASH DC—The mantra of the DC Office of the Deputy Mayor for Plan­ning and Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment is “eco­nomic devel­op­ment,” as one would expect. (Plan­ning gets lost in the shuf­fle.) DMPED touts “job cre­ation” and “tax rev­enues” as it has “dis­posed” of many choice, large pub­lic assets, pub­lic school cam­puses included. The con­cept of Pub­lic Good—where a good or ser­vice for which the ben­e­fit received by any one party does not dimin­ish the avail­abil­ity of the ben­e­fits to oth­ers, and where access to the good can­not be restricted—seems to be off the radar screen of the Mayor’s office as well. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, con­struc­tion jobs last for a cou­ple years max­i­mum, the prop­er­ties go for fire-sale prices, and the builders often return to the till to ask for, and receive, years of tax for­give­ness. We see nei­ther “eco­nomic devel­op­ment” nor “pub­lic good” with this approach.

Stevens, for exam­ple, had con­tin­u­ously oper­ated for 139 years. It was the first school opened in the Dis­trict for freed black slaves, and at the time of Fenty’s elec­tion to office ful­filled EVERY cri­te­ria he laid out in his play book for opti­mal DC pub­lic schools— size of classes, teacher, par­ent, stu­dent par­tic­i­pa­tion, safety—something he must have over­looked. Despite resound­ing pub­lic sup­port rang­ing from full teacher, par­ent, stu­dent, FBA, ANC, busi­ness com­mu­nity, and res­i­dents to sus­tain it, Fenty’s new Chan­cel­lor Rhee basi­cally thumbed her nose at the community.

At the 11th hour, Stevens was added to the RFP (request for pro­posal) cov­er­ing pub­lic schools prop­er­ties for devel­op­ment led by a char­ter school, a pub­lic law. Remark­ably, a white knight, Liv­ing Class­room Foun­da­tion (LCF), entered the com­pe­ti­tion for Stevens on short notice and, in less than a month, attempted to put together finan­cials for the prop­erty with noth­ing but an ini­tial walk-through to assess costs like asbestos reme­di­a­tion mat­ters. There was no basis for val­u­a­tion and none the city shared. LCF had already proven itself in the Dis­trict serv­ing at that time over 20,000 under­served stu­dents with award-winning after school pro­grams and had been selected by the Kel­logg Foun­da­tion to develop more work­force programs.

The Cross­roads School is a pub­lic, tuition-free char­ter mid­dle school oper­ated by Liv­ing Class­rooms Foun­da­tion on its East Har­bor Cam­pus through a con­tract with the Bal­ti­more City Pub­lic School Sys­tem. The cur­ricu­lum focuses on the fun­da­men­tals of read­ing, writ­ing, and math with a hands-on, inter­dis­ci­pli­nary approach. Tech­nol­ogy, coop­er­a­tive learn­ing, crit­i­cal think­ing, and real-world appli­ca­tion of knowl­edge are also con­sid­ered to be fun­da­men­tal to the core cur­ricu­lum. LCF fur­ther­more hon­ors the black his­tory of the Bal­ti­more neigh­bor­hood while teach­ing impor­tant skills and trades, and has achieved a top record with its stu­dents. Pub­lic good incarnate.

The Stevens plan LCF prof­fered included an adja­cent mixed-use project with office rental devel­op­ment, an off street play­ground and a design that would mesh the WE neigh­bor­hood with the K Street cor­ri­dor. The mixe­duse was essen­tial to sus­tain­ing the cost of ren­o­va­tion and upgrade of Stevens. It also included a “zero-to-four” pro­gram in sup­port of the K-Street work­force. LCF would build, oper­ate and trans­fer the upgraded and oper­at­ing devel­op­ment to the Dis­trict after an agreed upon num­ber of years: a dream deal pro­vid­ing real eco­nomic devel­op­ment for the com­mu­nity and the city. In clas­sic DC fash­ion, LCF received a pro forma let­ter of rejec­tion. No call, no dis­cus­sion, no inter­est, no nothing.

Stevens is now being held hostage while DMPED con­tin­ues to oper­ate in the shad­ows and to ignore com­mu­nity wishes –per­haps with the hope that we, the tax­pay­ers and advo­cates of impor­tant his­tory will for­get and our poten­tial dream become a night­mare (see let­ter from FBA Pres­i­dent in this issue). The plight of Stevens is sym­bolic of the larger shell game and dou­ble­s­peak Dis­trict gov­ern­ment perpetuates—and we per­pet­u­ate by not speak­ing up.

For fur­ther back­ground and his­tory on Stevens School see FBN archives for arti­cles dated: 2/13/08, 2/11/09, 2/18/09, 2/25/09 and peruse His­toric STEVENS Coali­tion (on the menu bar) all at www.savefoggybottom.com