The Current
LETTER: D.C. puts developers in front of students
By Sam Broeksmit
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The District has just issued a request to redevelop the Franklin School building on 13th and K streets NW. Wouldn’t you think the best use of the “school” is as a school? The District thinks not.
Earlier in the year, the District followed the letter of the law that requires surplus school buildings like this to first be offered to public charter schools. Two charter schools, including the one my child attends, worked hard and spent a lot of money to develop a proposal for Franklin, only to have it rejected because it did not include a large enough budget for renovations.
Yet our school was allowed to be in the building for only one hour and had no way to fully evaluate the property. The District withheld information from studies it had commissioned to estimate those renovation costs, and then officials used that information to reject the charter school proposals and declare them “nonviable.”
Now we are hearing that developers are being “begged” to bid.
This continues a disturbing trend of favoritism of developers over students, as evidenced by a similar fiasco over the rejection of charter school applications for the Grimke School at 10th Street and Vermont Avenue NW.
Shouldn’t schools be used as schools? Why should city tax dollars that fund charter schools be spent to buy private property when excess city school properties abound? Shouldn’t the city support students over developers? The law says they should. Their actions say they don’t.
Sam Broeksmit
Mount Pleasant