Plan to blend predominantly Black and White DC schools leads to tense debate in liberal neighborhood

A plan to integrate two nearby Washington, D.C., schools with vastly different racial backgrounds is sparking fierce debate among parents in the predominantly liberal community.

Nearly 6 in 10 of the 500 children at Maury Elementary School are White. At Miner Elementary School, 80% of the kids are Black, many of whom are in foster care, receive public assistance or are homeless. Enrollment at the school has been declining, according to The Washington Post.

District officials have put together a plan where children would spend their early education at one school and later transfer to the other. Their goal is to improve diversity at both institutions by pairing previously separate demographics together.

"From my perspective, there’s a lot of unknowns about what the quality of the school would look like," Jonathan Rothwell, who has two children enrolled at Maury, said.

He also worried that teachers would leave the school because of the integration, an issue brought up during a tense town hall meeting with Maury families back in November.

"A lot of parents are already satisfied with Maury, and this jeopardizes that satisfaction," he added.

Maury parent-teacher association co-president Shavanna Miller was one of the people who spoke up at the town hall and said children can "fall through the cracks" when they move from one school to another.

"I think it’s not just because the children have to adjust their environment. I think it’s because a whole new set of adults needs to understand the kids, understand their family, understand their needs and how to best support them," she said.

Some Maury parents admitted that they would consider leaving the area if the plan goes through.

White liberal kids will get beaten, robbed, raped and killed.

My middle son was recruited to a "magnet school" offering marine biology as a "sweetener". We had to deliver him to the bus stop at 5:30 AM and he didn't get dropped off until 5:30 PM. The school was located in a minority neighborhood with 90% black and hispanic students.

After a couple months, my son was very disappointed. The reward for doing well in class was getting beaten up on the playground. There is no virtue in being the top fly on the manure pile. On closer examination, the "marine biology" magnet was happening for 30 minutes on alternate Thursdays. What a farce. It was a babysitting/feeding operation masquerading as a school. One afternoon a shooting occurred two blocks from the school. Enough. We removed my son from that circus.

Upon returning to our local neighborhood school, my son discovered he was WEEKS behind the standard syllabus for his grade. He pressed hard and caught up in 2 weeks. Even the neighborhood school was substandard by my measure, so I set about doing extra tutoring and correcting the abysmally "corrected" papers returned by his "teacher". By the time he graduated from high school, he had multiple AP classes completed (and tutored his fellow students), a 4.33 GPA and reasonable fluency in Spanish.

With that as background, I have a very poor view of forced integration. It's instant culture clash and often introduces a disruptive element the destroys the value of the education in a classroom. There is no such thing as improving academic results by osmosis. It takes actual effort. When the students in a classroom have not been screened to ensure readiness at a minimum standard, those who aren't ready get screwed and left behind OR everyone else in the room gets screwed when the pace of the class slows to the poorest performer.

I live three blocks from Maury.

Maury Elementary School profile

Miner Elementary School profile

Both Maury and Miner have been recently rebuilt. Both are in excellent physical condition. We have lived through the Capitol Hill gentrification miracle, and Maury is in a part of the Hill that is almost completely gentrified. Miner is a half mile northeast. The area around Miner is also gentrifying rapidly, but it is not quite as far along and the further north and east you go, the rougher it gets. In this context, however, "rougher" gets tricky fast. "Rougher" today is a lot softer than "rougher" 10 or 20 years ago, let alone when I got here in 1979. If you look at GoogleMaps, you will see Carver Langston just northeast of Miner, across the infamous "starburst" intersection (Maryland Avenue, 15th street, Benning Road, Bladensburg Road, Florida Avenue, and H Street N.E., and if there was ever a spot that screamed out for a traffic circle and didn't get one, that's it).

If you are curious, check Google Maps. A lot of the area north and east of Miner is being rebuilt. The H Street renaissance is amazing but incomplete. Trinidad is flipping. The Hechinger mall monument to wasted space has a comprehensive rebuild projected; the covid shutdowns and now Bidenomics have slowed that down, but it will come as it is too close in not to be redeveloped. Rosedale and Langston Terrace are flipping. The whole RFK Stadium area with its vast expanses of parking lots will soon be redeveloped and will be huge. Carver Langston has a lot of assisted housing, which means problems, but there are also private rowhomes and duplexes, and they are flipping. Carver Langston borders the National Arboretum to the north, and plans are afoot to reopen the Maryland Avenue entrance to the Arboretum. If the city got rid of the housing projects, even Carver Langston -- for decades a code word for "run for your life" would be golden. I don't hesitate to ride my bike through it, and I've seen my indicator species (young white women pushing baby strollers) from time to time.

There are also a couple of other, relatively small housing projects within the Miner school boundary, but the whole area north and east of Miner will be a different world in 20 years.

If you look at the profiles I linked, you will see that Miner is 80 percent black -- but it is also 13 percent white, which is notable in DCPS and an indicator of a school that is starting to trend middle class. Maury, in the fully gentrified part of the Hill, is 58 percent white, 21 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian and 9 percent mixed race. And remember that on Capitol Hill, black does not mean poor. Maury is one of the several DC Public Schools that have turned the corner. It is now a magnet; people are paying a huge premium to buy tiny little rowhouses within bounds for Maury -- and now DCPS is planning to change the boundaries and sandbag their investment. That's what the fuss is about.

FWIW, 20 years ago, Maury was as bad as the rest of the DCPS. Middle class families regarded it as a non-starter. Lots of young people move to DC, many to the Hill, for their jobs. They grow to like the walkable, bikeable, centrally located historic neighborhood, and they love not living in suburban commute hell. They settle down, meet someone, get married, and sooner or later a little bundle of joy arrives. Until 20 years ago, when the kids approached school age, some sucked it up and paid for private schools (on the Hill, St. Peters and Capitol Hill Day), a handful homeschooled, some chose the "Capitol Hill Cluster" (considered as one school on three campuses, an interesting DCPS option too complicated to explain here), and most fled to the suburbs.

About 20 years ago, with suburban commutes becoming increasingly brutal, they started staying. Capitol Hill Day (expensive) and St. Peters (relatively affordable and downright cheap back then) went to capacity. I can remember the shock that went around the local playgrounds -- already mostly full of little white kids by that time -- when word swept through that St. Peters had a waiting list. St. Peters had always been the affordable middle class option and was always scrambling for students. It was also the only really integrated school on Capitol Hill. Now there was a waiting list, and within five years, despite a valiant effort to expand, St. Peters was forced to start turning away in-parish Catholics, with easy availability for non-Catholic families gone. Our open and affordable middle class option had become a tough ticket. People panicked. The charter schools took off; there are as many kids in DC charter schools as there are in regular DCPS, and that is new.

What happened next was that a group of parents -- whose kids had grown up together on the Hill, were all playground buddies, and were all in the same daycares -- got together and decided to see if they could reclaim the neighborhood public schools. Brent Elementary School was the first to flip. Maury was next. They all agreed to do it together. They talked to the principal and staff at Maury. They worked out some clear deliverables with a clear understanding on both sides that since the Hill was changing, Maury needed to change. They started in pre-K and because PTA fanatics. They kept it together, the nucleus grew, and within five or six years, Maury flipped.

The same thing will happen to Miner, but the projects in the draw area are a complication. I don't have a sense of how large that cohort of students may be, but that's where the problem is concentrated.

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