A total of $40 million of the funding for the $56-million Foxhall Elementary School proposed by D.C.’s mayor would come from building projects planned for Key and Stoddert elementary schools.

City budget officials said today that the new Foxhall school would serve 550 students and would be built on existing parking lot space and part of the Hardy Park recreation area. The Lab School of Washington, which operates its lower school in the old Hardy School building on the site at Q Street and Foxhall Road, would continue to occupy the location, said the mayor’s budget director, Jenny Reed.

Reed was responding to questions about the project from Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh during a City Council meeting on Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed budget for 2021.

Cheh, while pleased with the targeting of $56 million, said she did not think that the proposed new school would solve “overcrowding” in the area. “If you build it, they will come,” Cheh said. “We’re perhaps just creating greater pressure for our middle and high schools.”

Reed confirmed that Key and Stoddert “are not going to get those additions” and called the Foxhall school “one of the steps we are taking.”

“We had wanted to go much bigger,” Reed said. “But the revenues are what they are.”

Reed said that DCPS planners, looking at enrollment patterns, felt that the Foxhall school would be a “good first investment.”

The proposal jolts an already unsettled school landscape in the Palisades, where Georgetown Day School plans this summer to leave its MacArthur Boulevard PK-8 campus in a move to its expanded campus at Tenleytown.

(Archive) Ward 3 School Board Rep.: From Here, What?

NEW SCHOOL PROPOSED: Parking areas and recreation space at the old Hardy School and recreation site at Q Street and Foxhall Road are targeted by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration for construction of a 550-seat elementary school. Photos Credit: John Bray