The Current
Charter school gets former Clark Elementary Building
By Katie Pearce
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Succeeding where many other charter schools have failed, E.L. Haynes Public Charter School has secured a former D.C. Public Schools building for its new home. During summer 2010, Haynes will begin its move into the former Clark Elementary School in Petworth.
The D.C. Council yesterday passed legislation that authorizes up to $13.35 million in revenue bonds to help finance Haynes’ transition into the school building, at 4501 Kansas Ave. NW.
Haynes founder Jennie Niles said the school is negotiating a 25- year lease for the Clark building, with the option of a 25-year renewal.
Clark Elementary was one of 23 public schools that Chancellor Michelle Rhee shut down in 2008. Though charter schools have collectively offered 33 bids for 11 separate empty school buildings, only three negotiations have moved forward, according to Barnaby Towns, spokesperson for the nonprofit Friends of Choice in Urban Schools.
Haynes put bids on a few other school buildings before landing Clark, Niles said. The charter school plans to use the new building as a second campus, housing both its youngest and oldest students. Clark is less than a mile away from Haynes’ current location at 3600 Georgia Ave. NW.
The charter school, founded in 2004, today serves 460 students from pre-kindergarten through seventh grades. Haynes grows incrementally each year with its student population, and it will begin offering a high school curriculum (to its current seventh-graders) in 2011 in the Clark building.
The high-schoolers will share the space with pre-kindergartners through second-graders, while third- through eighth-graders will remain at the Georgia Avenue cam- pus.
Some extensive renovations must take place before students can move into the Clark building, Niles said. Haynes plans to add a regulation-size gym, a cafeteria for high-schoolers, and new science, music and art classrooms. And though the building functioned as an elementary school recently, its mechanical engineering and plumbing systems have degraded and need to be replaced, she said.
She said the school is funding both its lease and renovations through debt, the council-approved revenue bonds and a grant from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
Niles, a former teacher, headed the Charter School Office for the Connecticut State Department of Education before she completed the urban principal training program New Leaders for New Schools in 2003.
Towns said Friends of Choice in Urban Schools is “extremely pleased” about Haynes’ pending move, but lamented that most charter schools don’t enjoy the same fate.
“While we would like to believe that the city’s decision ... was recognition of [Haynes’] status as one of the city’s highest-performing public schools, the city has prevented many high-performing charter schools from acquiring surplus school buildings while seeking bids from developers of luxury condos and hotels,” Towns wrote in an e- mail.
Aside from Clark, only two other former school buildings are under negotiation for future charter school use. YouthBuild Public School is negotiating for the J.F. Cook Elementary School building on Q Street NW near North Capitol Street, while Hyde Public Charter School and the AppleTree Institute are jointly negotiating for the Taft Special Education Center in Northeast, according to Towns.
Of the 28,000 schoolchildren now enrolled in D.C. public charter schools, “there are just over 9,000 in former [D.C. Public School] buildings,” Towns said. Only about 800 of that number were moved into school buildings because Mayor Adrian Fenty took office, he added.
Niles said she believes Haynes was successful in securing Clark because “we were a compelling school with good results” and also due to its plans to operate two campuses in close proximity.
Haynes operates on a year-round schedule, with eight- to 12-week academic sessions punctuated by breaks. Its Web site notes significant strides in test scores over three years: By 2009, the school had gone up 50 percentage points in math and 29 percentage points in reading.