Save Our Schools DC

By Petula Dvorak
The Washington Post
May 7, 2006

Reprinted with permission from Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Company and The Washington Post

The residents of Kingman Park have a well-earned reputation for keeping their quiet Northeast Washington neighborhood, with its impressive canopy of willow oaks, just the way it is. Since the 1970s, they have soundly deflected a Metro stop, a theme park and Jack Kent Cooke and his entire Redskins football team. They even kept the Grand Prix from returning after one year. But now they may have met their match.

The School for Educational Evolution and Development -- the SEED school -- is poised to build a second facility on one corner of federally owned land near RFK Stadium. The school boasts the academics and facilities of an upper-class boarding school, but it is public and free to students who win admission through a lottery. And thanks to land-use legislation passed by Congress with wording so specific that only the SEED school meets the description, there appears to be little the neighbors can do to block it.

The conflict over the school pits a small but energetic group of citizens who have been models of grass-roots activism for decades against a project with a formidable array of well-connected supporters -- Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), Harvard University officials, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Prince Charles, members of Congress, and the first lady and President Bush.

"It's very unnerving to see our local officials bypassed like this. . . . It's really just a land grab," said Frazer Walton, an attorney and head of the Kingman Park Civic Association. "Why us again?"

Kingman Park is a neighborhood of mostly brick rowhouses with large porches and well-tended front yards. Many residents are teachers, librarians, federal workers and retirees who have lived in their houses for decades.

The intensity of residents' opposition has stunned the founders of the eight-year-old SEED school. Until now, SEED has enjoyed broad and consistent praise for its educational experiment for seventh through 12th grades. Forty-one students have graduated, all of whom have gone on to college. "I have never been engaged in a conversation that's so vehement," said Rajiv Vinnakota, one of the school's founders, who left a high-paying corporate job to become an urban do-gooder.

Protesters have gathered outside the SEED offices questioning the premise of charter schools and the story of SEED's success. Some activists have bemoaned the trampling of home rule. Others say they simply want to preserve the green space where they once raced skate cars as kids and now exercise their aching bones as retirees.

"It's not about what I dislike or like about the SEED school, I think it's an excellent program," said Esther Clemons, 69. "But good grief, when are you going to give this neighborhood a break? We had to contend with the baseball, then the football, then the race cars. Now this?"

The 75 acres they have been protecting is not a Shangri-La. It is a scrubby field south of Benning Road and north of RFK Stadium. Where World War II-era office buildings once sat, the field is now dotted with parking lots for stadium-goers. Part of it is used as a practice field by the D.C. United soccer team, which walled off the section it uses with an impenetrable green fabric fence. But for all its raffish appearance, it is one of the only expanses of open land in the East Capitol area, and residents do their best to maintain it. Most days, children play catch there, women walk laps, dogs play fetch and retirees chip golf balls.

The SEED founders considered it the perfect site to expand. The school has one location in Southeast, where 320 public school students live from Sunday night to Friday night. Prince Charles, Camilla and Laura Bush toured the campus last year and praised it. Winfrey honored the school on her talk show and donated computers, dormitory furniture and bed linens. The facility received Harvard's Innovations in American Government award last year.

The mayor liked the program so much that he approached the founders and asked them to establish a second campus, Vinnakota said. It was Williams who suggested that they look at Kingman Park, and he initiated the congressional action, the school founder said. Williams's office confirmed Vinnakota's characterization of the mayor's role.

After D.C. Council member Vincent C. Gray (D-Ward 7) asked Williams to oppose the SEED school's expansion into his ward, Williams issued a statement last month explaining that if he had not acted as he had, the land there "would likely become a parking lot or a federal mail-sorting facility."

The legislation passed by Congress in December specifies that 15 of the 75 acres of federal land in Kingman Park be conveyed to a public boarding school. SEED appears to be the only institution in the city that meets the criteria to be a beneficiary. The deadline for other proposals is May 24.

Local civic associations said they were not consulted before the legislation was written, and the D.C. Council was not allowed to have a hearing. "This is the first time we've seen something like this go all the way around everyone local, even the city council," said Veronica Ragland, a real estate agent who grew up in Kingman Park and represents the community as an advisory neighborhood commissioner. "Even all those other things -- the racetrack, the stadium -- all of those had hearings in the city council," Ragland said.

Many opponents say the school is unnecessary, inappropriate and detrimental to the neighborhood. They say 14 schools are within walking distance, and they believe the traffic, noise and pollution generated by 600 students and 75 full-time faculty members would completely alter their neighborhood.

"I don't think we have enough space now for all the children in the neighborhood to play safely," said Leroy Spencer, 64, a retired government printer who has lived in Kingman Park for 18 years. "This mayor, God bless his soul, I even voted for him, but why is he trying to put everything in Northeast? When do we get a break?"

For years, the community had hopes that the land would become part of the proposed Kingman Island Nature Interpretive Center, a teaching nature preserve that would have benefited schoolchildren from across the city. "Then thousands of children could enjoy this land by the [Anacostia] River, not just the ones that get admitted to the SEED school," Walton said.

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