De facto segregation at Capitol Hill preschool

 Capitol Hill resident and presidential candidate Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) sends his oldest daughter Grace to Peabody, a highly-regarded preschool that’s part of the Capitol Hill Cluster School. 

“It’s a great school,” said Dodd after Grace performed songs with her class in Eastern Market’s North Hall on May 16. “We love it.”

There are actually two different schools at the Peabody campus on C Street NE. Dodd’s daughter’s class is part of what is called the School-Within-School at Peabody. A floor below, other children attend Peabody proper. Both the “upstairs” and “downstairs” programs, as they’re called, are public schools that serve the surrounding community. Both have good reputations.

But the upstairs is mostly white kids, with none eligible for a free lunch, while the downstairs is mostly black kids, with dozens eligible for the discount meal. Official data from the National Center for Education Statistics for the 2004-05 school year (the latest available), had downstairs at 84 percent black and upstairs 60 percent white. Since then, teachers say, both programs have gotten whiter, but the basic picture remains the same: Upstairs and downstairs have nearly the opposite racial makeup.

The disparate demographics have long made some adults squirm, even though there has never been an open allegation of discriminatory admissions. Most say the situation simply reflects the continuing gentrification of the neighborhood, particularly in Peabody’s small boundary area.

Five years ago, school administrators say the upstairs program — which uses an arts-and-community-based educational method called Reggio Emilia — was inundated with applications from wealthy whites living within the school’s boundary area. Those who couldn’t get their kids in through the lottery program generally shied away from the downstairs program, which continued to absorb lots of out-of-boundary students. Some speculate that black parents with slightly lower incomes living outside the school’s small boundary area more eagerly embrace the traditional, literacy-oriented program used downstairs.

Other Hill schools with out-of-sync demographics have not escaped parental ire. In 2004, a parent organization called Save Our Schools filed a major lawsuit against the Two Rivers Public Charter School, currently located on Florida Avenue NE. The complaint alleges discriminatory admissions, stating that parents founded Two Rivers “specifically with the objective of not having a school that was ‘too black.’”

The Two Rivers student body was initially 45 percent white and 40 percent black — not a reflection of the District’s student population. Two Rivers administrators, who were not discussing the lawsuit itself, said that this merely reflects the random outcome of a District-mandated lottery from a given pool of applicants.

A judge dismissed most of the complaint’s claims, but in coming months Save Our Schools will present evidence for the claim that District support of Two Rivers amounts to discrimination.

Save Our Schools and Two Rivers officials are averse to talking about the lawsuit. And more broadly, Hill residents shy away from talking about anything so touchy as a topic intersecting race, class, and schools. These conversations are generally carried out anonymously — and viciously — on the Internet, where people with screen names such as “mom,” “hillmom,” and “citymom” accuse each other of victimizing the children.

Dodd is fortunate that he gets to leave town and deal with the comparatively civil politics of a presidential election.

Emergency preparedness is for the dogs

The District’s Emergency Preparedness Agency proudly announced on Dec. 14 that “Emergency management and health officials signed a plan that puts the District of Columbia in an elite field among jurisdictions across the country — cities and counties that have formally adopted plans to include pets in disaster planning.”
But the emergency agency’s site also says that in the event of an evacuation, “no smoking, alcoholic beverages, weapons or pets are allowed in public shelters.”
Emergency Preparedness Agency spokeswoman Jo’Ellen Countee says the “no pets” message is out of date and that the family preparedness guide is being revised.
“There are provisions for pets in emergency shelters,” she says.

Pottery not out of the fire

At first, it appeared that the April 30 fire had spared the Eastern Market Pottery studio in the center of the building. When fire officials escorted pottery teacher Susan Jacobs into the studio that day, as the building continued to smolder, she was relieved to find no damage at all other than a crowbar-opened door and a puddle of water on the floor.

But last week, pottery manager Chuck Brome learned that municipal honchos had deemed the studio unfit for use after all.
The workshop is in a hard-hat area and there’s no running water. The ceramics crowd would be allowed into the building only to remove items they wanted to keep.

Now Brome fears that pottery may never return to the market. The bad news didn’t arrive soon enough for the studio to be included in plans for the temporary merchant space going up across the street. Unless the District can help the pottery crowd find its own temporary location, a full retreat may be necessary.

“If I were a betting man I wouldn’t give myself good odds,” Brome says. He and a number of pottery teachers spent last week cleaning out the studio as workers removed ruined junk from the burned-out South Hall. Amid massive amounts of clay dust, Brome and his team recovered student work, old pottery items, fans, frying pans and some other memorabilia.
Storage shelves were lined with newspapers from 1985.

“An old photo,” said Jacobs, holding a picture of hands shaping clay on a spinning wheel. “This is gonna make me cry.”

Brome has a few other things going for him: good health, retirement benefits, and another pottery business in Virginia. Jacobs is less fortunate — without a pottery studio, she’s out a livelihood.

HillScape encountered a distraught Jacobs at the intersection of 4th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue on May 14. She had just learned that the studio may be closed for good and was on her way to the Church of the Brethren Soup Kitchen.
“To serve,” she said. “Not to eat.”

Actually, Jacobs isn’t too gloomy about the situation; she notes that the city has been very helpful already.

“I am hopeful,” she says. “I would assume that in this wonderful neighborhood, someone’s going to find something.”

Lewis Perry, please stand down

On May 2, HillScape reported that Hill resident Lewis Perry was the subject of a paternity investigation by the Virginia Division of Child Support Enforcement. Or, at least, they had found his name in a phone book and told him to drive to their office and give them a DNA sample. His lawyer, Steve Mercer, suspected Perry had been caught up in a dragnet of everybody in the region named “Lewis Perry,” which the child support people denied.

That day Mercer received a voicemail from the Virginia office indicating that Perry’s case had been closed.

“If you have any questions you can call us,” Mercer recalls the message saying, “but we have no authorization to talk to you.”