After three years of fractious controversy, spending for construction of a $56-million, 550-seat public elementary school at Hardy Park at the east end of Palisades has been cut from Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2023 budget proposal.

The school would have landed in the middle of the Foxhall area, where Bob Avery is president of the community association.

Avery said city officials ignored too many red flags flying around the building project. He called the city’s process “a poster child for the wrong way to do things.” “The Mayor did the right thing in the end,” Avery said Friday. “It should not have taken this long or taken this much effort.”

In a letter dated March 22, 2023 and addressed to “Foxhall and Ward 3 Communities”, Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn says the “Foxhall modernization timeline” has been changed to “now start design in Fiscal Year 2029.” The letter provides no explanation for the change.

Kihn says the Mayor “announced in March 2022 that Foxhall Elementary will open as a PK4-5 elementary school, based on recommendations of the Foxhall and MacArthur Community Working Group transmitted in June 2021.” But the project was already on the books, appearing in early 2020 as part of the Mayor’s budget proposal for 2021.

It sparked stiff opposition from nearby residents. They challenged the logic of a building that would claim newly renovated playground and green space and sit right beside a public school facility designated surplus but under long-term lease to a private school. They also questioned whether enrollment trends justified construction at the site, located at the intersection of Foxhall Road and Q Street. Protest signs sprouted in yards.

Ward 3 Council Member Matthew Frumin said Bowser stated at a recent budget hearing that her action on Foxhall Elementary was to rethink, not abandon the proposal.

A Matter of Scale

“I have long believed that adding elementary school capacity in this part of the Ward made sense, ideally in the building now occupied by the Lab School,” Frumin said, referring to the private school leasing the old Hardy School building. But Frumin said he had reservations about the scale of the school proposed building.

Frumin said he will look forward to what new data from student assignment, school boundary and facilities reviews show and “trying to bring the community together around an approach to this project that can fully serve our community without unduly sacrificing precious park space.”

The Mayor’s early 2020 proposal for an 80,000-square-foot, 550-seat Foxhall school came at a time when Georgetown Day School was engaged in a multi-year effort to sell its elementary school campus, located a block away and with nearly the same size and enrollment numbers. But the city had expressed no interest in buying the property.

With consummation of a contract with an unnamed buyer in doubt and a rising din urging that the city buy the property, the city in March 2021 paid $45 million to acquire the GDS campus. DC Public Schools is now working to develop a high school on the site on MacArthur Boulevard.

Meanwhile, DC’s planning for a Foxhall Elementary kept rolling. In June 2021, recommendations from the DCPS Community Working Group for Foxhall and MacArthur proposed a Grades PK4-5 school, as option one for Foxhall, and a Grades 3-5 school, as option 2. Both options posed pros and cons focused on impacts for Key, Stoddert and Mann elementaries.

Momentum Stop and Go

On October 17, 2022, DC General Services Department issued a request for proposals to design and build the Foxhall school, extended the November 21 deadline to November 30, and then cancelled the request on March 16, 2023. Kihn’s letter came a week later.

ANC 3D Chair Tricia Duncan, speaking for herself, said that “post-pandemic it’s probably wise to make timing decisions around Foxhall ES based on student enrollment data and trends. By next year our local schools will have a better sense on where enrollment numbers are. The current boundary study will also shed light on enrollment.”

Duncan added: “It should be noted that Key Elementary is going on twelve years with classrooms in trailers. At this point, it’s a policy decision to educate students in this manner.”

Tom Wolfe of Friends of Hardy took a dim view of the city’s handling of the project. “Foxhall ES was never a well thought out and vetted project,” Wolfe said. “No one in the ‘Save Hardy Park’ opposition objects to better schools. We did object to the destruction of one very valuable community asset in the thoughtless hurried effort to secure another.”

Wolfe criticized what he called a lack of involvement by “true education infrastructure professionals” in the project plan, absence of public hearings, reliance on deficient enrollment data and the failure to take stock of site access and traffic congestion.

“All of this became apparent when political expedience had to give way to the need for fiscal responsibility,” Wolfe said. “I have counseled my neighbors that we must be vigilant in the days ahead to avert such near travesties before they build momentum.”