Our outstanding neighborhood school must remain in the community
Top-Lines
- John Burroughs Elementary is slated for full modernization starting in the summer of 2025.
- The modernization will make the current building unusable for two school years: SY25–26 and SY26–27, during which time students will occupy a temporary facility (“swing space”).
- It’s important to the community that a swing space be in the neighborhood to avoid disruption, departures, and transportation cost/hardship, which will injure the large gains in neighborhood engagement and academic achievement having been made.
- Meyer Elementary School–nearly 3.5 miles from Burroughs in Columbia Heights–is the currently presumed swing space, per at least two years of official modernization planning documents.
- DCPS has been noncommittal on working with the community on the swing space, or making a more public announcement until the swing space decision has been finalized.
- This is an equity issue. Burdens related to the disruption of swinging into Meyer will be disproportionately shouldered by those in the Burroughs community who already are facing the greatest hardships.
- After investigating various alternatives, the John Burroughs community unified behind high-quality modular classrooms on the school’s own field. After exploring alternatives as well as concerns of cost and space, this is now the highest preference of PTO, school, and Ward 5 elected leaders.
- Further advocacy is necessary to push the Council and DCPS to act as needed to secure funding and procurement towards that end.
- We need community members to complete our survey, to provide their input on these critical issues.
Burroughs background and upcoming modernization
The John Burroughs Elementary School (JBES) community is tight-knit and full of pride. Academic achievement is high; grade-level teachers are amazing; specials programming and instructors are top-notch; and administrators foster a strong sense of connection among students, staff, and parents and caregivers. Yet, the community is experiencing problems with Burroughs’s physical infrastructure.
These issues revealed themselves in two dramatic, likely related, incidents early in 2023:
- On January 5, 2023, a water meter cracked; this caused flooding of the boiler room, multiple early childhood education classrooms, and the occupational therapist’s office, disabled one of the building’s boilers, and resulted in student dismissal at 11 AM. On this occasion, only herculean efforts by the Department of General Services (DGS) resulted in the school reopening the following day.
- On February 2, a gas leak occurred in the boiler room. Washington Gas and DGS determined that malfunctioning boilers were the cause of the gas leak, and it seems likely that the flood affected the boilers. The incident created a chaotic scene. The leak was discovered early in the school day, and this meant that parents and caregivers were arriving at JBES to drop off students as the call was being made to close the building. It is difficult for the school community to understand how we got to this emergency. Indeed, the incident exposed staff members to carbon monoxide, resulted in a building closure and loss of in-person instruction for two consecutive days, and instilled fear in students and staff members around the safety of their school. Ongoing preventative maintenance and additional work after the flood likely could have prevented this incident.
For these reasons and related needs, parents and caregivers, teachers, and administrators are relieved and grateful that the school building is due to be modernized during the 2025/2026 and 2026/2027 school years.
Unfortunately, however, the best information that the JBES community has at this time is that DC Public Schools plans to relocate our school to a site, Meyer Elementary School, nearly three-and-a-half miles from the Burroughs campus during the modernization. This “swing space” is unacceptable. Our school community needs an adequate, appropriate space in the neighborhood to relocate to during modernization.
Rejecting the Meyer site
Despite the fact that modernization seems so far away, decisions about where our kids will be attending school for two years are being made now. For numerous reasons, the proposed swing space at Meyer cannot be allowed.
Because of the distance between Burroughs and Meyer, DCPS likely would provide busing. However, this option is not adequate to mitigate the potential extreme disruption to how students, staff, and administrators travel to and from school. Key concerns include:
- Staggered arrival times: Burroughs students currently can arrive at school any time between 8:15 AM and 8:45 AM, and parents and caregivers take advantage of this flexibility to accommodate their scheduling needs. Busing would require parents and caregivers to drop off students at one designated time, to put children on buses before they depart.
- Breakfast services: Students who arrive at the Burroughs campus early can receive a school-provided breakfast. We do not know whether students who ride the bus to the Meyer site will arrive in time to take advantage of breakfast programming or if they will need to arrive early. If they need to arrive early, this would require parents and caregivers to travel across town to drop off students.
- Busing our youngest learners: The Burroughs community includes pre-K-3 and pre-K-4 students, and parents and caregivers will be unlikely to send students who are three and four years old on the bus across town.
- Aftercare: Busing will not work in the evenings for the many students enrolled in aftercare programming. For aftercare, parents and caregivers pick up students at their convenience, rather than at a designated time, so busing aftercare students back to JBES will not be possible. This would require parents and caregivers to drive or take public transit between Brookland and Columbia Heights.
- Burden of travel time between Brookland and Columbia Heights: Approximate travel times for this commute for parents and caregivers arriving by the latest aftercare pickup time at 6 PM: by car — 10–20 minutes from Burroughs to Meyer and 10–24 minutes from Meyer to Burroughs; by public transit 45 minutes from Burroughs to Meyer and 50 minutes from Meyer to Burroughs.
- Equity issues: Burroughs community members that do not own or cannot afford a car will be put at additional disadvantage with the Meyer space. Parents and caregivers rely on Burroughs’s close proximity to their homes, places of work, and convenient mass transit stops. The Meyer location could be a catastrophic inconvenience to their lives and livelihoods, uprooting predictability on which work schedules and other major life routines are built.
- Enrollment and budget: Moving JBES to the Meyer space will be a long-term detriment to the strength of the Burroughs community. It will cause currently enrolled families to play the lottery for closer schools, and it will be an incentive for families and caregivers considering Burroughs not to enroll their children there. Enrollment in the school could be drastically reduced, and this will have a severe negative impact on JBES’s classroom culture and budget. It would be a cruel twist to have a beautiful new school building with a community that has to rebound from enrollment and budget problems.
Alternatives to the Meyer site
The JBES PTO Advocacy Committee is clear that Meyer ES is not a viable option for our school community; students, staff, and administrators must remain in the neighborhood. This leaves the task of finding other viable options for JBES’s swing space.
Preference 1:
The Taft Building, currently home to three public charter schools (Perry Street Prep, Latin American Montessori Bilingual (LAMB), and Sojourner Truth Montessori) and one private school (St. Jerome Institute).
Feasibility: This DCPS-owned building is just .3 miles from the Burroughs campus; however, DCPS is leasing the property to Perry Street Prep for $1.15 million per year, and there is no space in the building for the Burroughs community to occupy during the 2025/26 and 2026/27 school years.
Preference 2:
High-quality modular units on the JBES field, which would keep the Burroughs community at Burroughs.
Feasibility: There appears to be plenty of space on the JBES field for the necessary accommodations, while also preserving a good portion of the field space that currently exists. Burroughs already controls use of the field, and, thus, DCPS would not need to go through the process of renting the land. Questions about price remain, but a rough estimate, calculated by the Burroughs PTO Advocacy Committee based on costs associated with modular swing spaces for other schools undergoing modernization, is $3–4 million to set up and operate modulars. This would be approximately five percent of the $71 million modernization fund for Burroughs. Finally, elected leaders in Ward 5, including Councilmember Zachary Parker, have endorsed this idea.
Preference 3: High-quality modular units at Howard University Divinity School (HUDS).
Feasibility: HUDS is sitting vacant, and Howard University is open to a modular complex on their land. This would require the District government to rent the land from Howard and would pose a practical burden, though not a financial burden, as we understand the fee would be nominal. We assume costs for setup and operation would be very similar to those associated with a modular complex at Burroughs. The space poses practical problems. It’s just far enough from the Burroughs campus to make walking difficult, but HUDS is also too close to Burroughs for DCPS to offer busing. If Burroughs students attend school at the HUDS property for two years, we will require pedestrian access at the gate at 17th and Randolph Streets NE.
–Modular classrooms on the field at Burroughs are the preferred, feasible option to keep our school community in the neighborhood–
Other schools’ success stories
Recent history shows that school communities can remain in their neighborhoods during modernizations. Assigned swing spaces even have been changed over the course of DCPS’s planning in the years leading up to a building’s modernization, as in the case of Truesdell.
Eaton Elementary School and Ben Murch Elementary School: Both Eaton ES and Murch ES used a modular swing space on the campus of the University of the District of Columbia, which allowed their school communities to remain within a mile of their educational campuses.
Jefferson Middle School Academy: Jefferson operated in modular units and portions of the school building that were modernized during the summer before the school year started. This allowed the students, staff, and administrators to remain on-campus and in the community.
Truesdell Elementary School: Truesdell was slated to swing into Garnet-Patterson or the K.C. Lewis building, both nearly three miles from the Truesdell campus. Through advocacy efforts, Truesdell’s swing space was changed to Sharpe Health School, only one mile away from Truesdell.
What you can do
The Burroughs PTO is organizing now to ensure that our swing space is as close as possible to JBES campus. To support these efforts:
- Join the PTO Advocacy Committee by emailing Micah Haskell-Hoehl.
- Complete our swing space survey.
- Communicate in conversations with elected or appointed officials (e.g., Councilmembers, the Mayor, Deputy Mayor for Education, DCPS Chancellor) that you believe the Burroughs community should remain in the neighborhood during modernization.
