- DC Council Delays Vote on Hardy Lease
DC Council Delays Vote on Hardy Lease
The Northwest Current, pg. 7
By Elizabeth Wiener
December 4, 2013
The D.C. Council abruptly postponed declaring the former Hardy School in Foxhall as surplus property yesterday, also delaying approval of a 25-year lease to the private Lab School of Washington.
Council members said they want more assurance that the city won’t need the old school to help handle overcrowding, and that the property would immediately revert to the District if the Lab School were to leave. They will now vote Dec. 17.
Lab has been renting the closed school at 1550 Foxhall Road since 2008, and school leaders asked for a long-term lease to help them get financing for major capital improvements, including heading and air-conditioning systems. The proposed lease would continue the current annual base rent of $80,000 through 2017, with a 2 percent annual increase thereafter, and would be renewable for another 25 years.
City officials say they wanted to keep Lab’s costs down because it must offer small classes to serve students with learning disabilities, limiting enrollment and tuition revenue. Roughly one-fifth of the students come from the District public school system.
Recently, parent leaders from nearby Key Elementary have protested, arguing that it makes little sense for the city to surrender a public school building in light of recent overcrowding in many Ward 3 schools and an ongoing effort to reconsider boundaries and feeder patterns citywide.
Public school officials have insisted they have “no viable alternative use” for the building, which is “too small to be a viable public school,” according to Ward 5 Council member Kenyan McDuffie, whose committee handled the surplusing bill.
Lab rents the old Hardy, which hasn’t been used as a public school since 1998, to house its 80-student elementary program. After the council action, head of school Katherine Schantz said in a statement that she is “confident Lab will have full support of the council members when they vote later this month.