How quiet this sum­mer was. Really. August passed with no “emer­gency leg­is­la­tion” at City Coun­cil and no new dis­arm­ing emer­gency ref­er­en­dums bestow­ing pub­lic prop­erty on favored devel­op­ers. For once, FB/WE was antic­i­pat­ing a sched­uled announce­ment— the win­ning pro­posal from among the three final­ists’ vying to develop Stevens School—from DC’s Office of Plan­ning and Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment (OPED), but it seems to be in a per­ma­nent state of delay.

Sites Unseen
In Novem­ber 2007, when then-newly-appointed Chan­cel­lor Michelle Rhee, never hav­ing set foot in the build­ing, uncer­e­mo­ni­ously announced the clo­sure of Stevens School, any pro­to­col seems to have been put aside. After 149 years of con­tin­u­ous oper­a­tion, Stevens—begun as a school for freed black slaves by PA Con­gress­man Thad­deus Stevens—closed with the city demean­ing the par­ents, the prin­ci­pal and teach­ers, dis­tin­guished grad­u­ates, and our com­mu­nity, all of whom fought long and hard to reverse the decision.

For a decade the Dis­trict had no funds for rou­tine main­te­nance, much less repair, of this beloved and his­toric school. Once Stevens closed for good in June 2008, “mirac­u­lously,” money appeared to replace EVERY win­dow in the build­ing and new light fix­tures in the ceil­ings. The new win­dows were cheap replace­ments and, pre­dictably, do not meet the stan­dards of Stevens’ his­toric land­mark sta­tus. Had this been done to a pri­vate build­ing, the owner would have been fined.

From Insult to Injury
In a sop to those folks who hinted at impro­pri­eties in the process, offi­cials added Stevens (at the 11th hour) to the list of schools that were included in a Request for Pro­pos­als requir­ing a char­ter school. One appli­cant was the District’s own highly-lauded Liv­ing Class­room Foun­da­tion (LCF). LCF’s grant-making suc­cesses enabled 20,000 Dis­trict youth to par­tic­i­pate in the foundation’s own award­win­ning after-school and voca­tional train­ing pro­grams. In Bal­ti­more, its char­ter high school’s track record eas­ily exceeds across the board most of the District’s pub­lic schools. But LCF, along with the other Stevens’ appli­cants, received rejec­tion let­ters, that and no more. After being repeat­edly ignored and dis­heart­ened, the neigh­bor­hood deferred to the Dis­trict. Who knew that the com­mu­nity would rally behind a pro­posal from Pee­bles Cor­po­ra­tion, one of OPED’s final­ists, with solid back­ing from both the FBA and the ANC? So here we are full cir­cle. We offered up our pas­sion, came back with excel­lence, and were rebuffed. With Pee­bles, we again chose excel­lence, and OPED is silent. Is the “other shoe” poised to drop?