Monday night’s good news is that BACA found out formally that City Hall has approved a plan for the Cook School building on P Street NW. The bad news is that it’s not the project we thought we were going to get.
The word was that KIPP was going to open another of its schools at Cook. KIPP reps spoke to BACA some months ago, they seemed confident that their proposal would get the nod. Neighborhood folks seemed happy at that prospect, given KIPP’s excellent academic record.
Instead, as Caryn posted previously, the Latin American Youth Center won approval for a school to include residential units for 40 of 200 (not sure of the latter number) students planned for the project.
I’m going to keep this as brief as possible.We’ll all be hearing/talking plenty about it in weeks to come, I think.
LAYC is aiming its program at young people aged 18-24, many of whom have aged out of foster care, but need diplomas and/or job training. Some of that training would be in construction, with coursework including building the school. Construction would start about one year from now.
The LAYC people aren’t fly-by-nighters. They’ve been operating in Columbia Heights for 35 years, Mai Fernandez, the organization’s legal and strategic director told the meeting (the organization’s name is a bit misleading, probably for historical reasons; its service population is 60 percent Hispanic and 40 percent African-American). Among other activities, it operates a charter school.
Jim Berry and others in attendance praised LAYC’s work. But Jim summed up what seemed to be the dominant feeling of the group – that the project isn’t suitable for our neighborhood. The major objection is that it would add a large number of young people to a zone that already sees far too many people from elsewhere accessing services here.
Plans to have more than three dozen of them living there gave rise to further worries about their off-hours activities, their visitors, and so on. Mary Ann expressed special concern on that aspect of the plan. Underlying these objections was the fact that the project was sprung upon BACA as a done deal.
Fernandez said she understood that bitterness, as well as the doubts about the program. On the latter points, she promised heavy staffing, including a live-in adviser for the project’s apartment-dwellers. LAYC’s considerable experience in residential programs grows out of a smaller one (for 24 young people) that it runs in Columbia Heights.
Nevertheless, anger and frustration have been simmering for some time over city government’s high-handed ways in our corner of DC. Given that record, as well as the clear indications that Cook would become a KIPP school, Jim said that despite his respect for LAYC, if he could undo the decision, he would.
How possible that is, I don’t know. But if LAYC does manage to keep its project here, it has its work cut out for it in the winning-hearts-and-minds department.
Bates Area Civic Association 
I found Mari’s original post about how someone from kipp came to speak about this school last year; http://www.inshaw.com/blog/2008/09/kipp-interested-in-jf-cook-school.html
Also found this blog post on Bloomingdale blog about a proposal for an Art Space in the school: http://bloomingdaleneighborhood.blogspot.com/2008/09/please-support-this-proposal-for-arts.html
I find the resistance to the Latin American Youth Center interesting and many reactions were emotional. A few more FACTS: This program originated in Harlem, NY. These 18-24 year old, are not ORDERED by the court to sign up for GED, high school or vocational school, these young adults ELECT to sign up. I don’t know how many of you worked your way through school, but when you’re a WORKING student, getting into trouble on weekends is not a high priority. The number of enrolled students expected is 150, out of which 40-50 may reside at the school. The school has a 24 hour living in manager that oversees activities and students on campus. For the construction training vocational program, those students participate in home and building renovations in the area where the school is located. Thought the name of the program is Latin American Youth Center, 40% of enrolled students are Black. On my emotional level, I wonder if such a big resistance would have been encountered if this was called the African-American Youth Center.
Geovani, I wasn’t at the meeting and hesitate to enter the debate, but wasn’t the resistance to the fact that the neighborhood was not consulted over the decision, and not over whether LAYC is a worthwhile program. And also the fact that it would service people outside of the community, whereas KIPP would have serviced community kids?
I should have mentioned that Geovani proposed a visit by interested neighborhood residents to LAYC’s projects in Columbia Heights. Mai Fernandez welcomed the idea, and it sounds like a good one to me.
I remain convinced that LAYC has a ways to go in winning hearts and minds, but I don’t see it as mission impossible.
There certainly was some emotion running through the meeting, but I’ve seen far more of that on other occasions. The bad history on these matters, as well as city government’s handling of this project, were the issues that people cited.
To the extent that I can read peoples’ inner feelings, Jim’s respect for LAYC’s work seemed heartfelt. To be sure, I had a question about LAYC’s name as well, which is why I mentioned the racial/ethnic breakdown of the population it serves.
I can also understand why Geovani wonders if LAYC’s name plays a role in all this.
Having grown up in New York, and lived a long time in Miami (and in Mexico City), I’m familiar with how these kinds of issues can take on a racial/ethnic character. My sense is that people on all sides are trying to avoid that in this case.
I agree that it would be a good idea for residents to visit LAYC’s Columbia Heights facility. I know nothing about LAYC but when I told my wife she was excited and said that it is a great and well-respected organization.
And yes, there were plenty of questions about the program and the organization, not just the process. By the end of the meeting, it seemed many folks had come around to acknowledge that the selection process was what was problematic, and that if this is now a done deal, the community would have to work closely with LAYC to ensure that the new organization positively impacts our neighborhood.
There was a knee-jerk reaction that this program would automatically be dumping 150 young adults into our neighborhood. Oddly, people acted as if we don’t have under- or unemployed 18-24 year olds living among us. Mai Fernandez was very straightforward about the fact that charter schools have to hold open lotteries for admission (i.e. they can’t exclude applicants from other neighborhoods) but we talked about doing “heavy recruitment” in the immediate neighborhood, to increase the likelihood that our community benefits from this.
I would have fully supported Kipp’s bid for the Cook School, but let’s be honest about the need for schools in our community. We’ve got a charter school occupying Armstrong now, that isn’t even close to meeting its target enrollment and is trying now to stay afloat by enlarging its pre-K program. And the number of kids I see walking to school there (as opposed to being dropped off by cars with Maryland plates) is shockingly low.
So if LAYC is indeed here to stay, then I hope people can come around and think about how we can make sure that LAYC improves its outreach to our community and becomes a positive force in the neighborhood.
And that doesn’t preclude anyone from pushing back on the city government regarding the lack of transparency on this deal.
I agree that most of the emotion was directed at the dysfunctional process of how the DC government arrived at its decision. The one thing I remember from the meetings where our input was sought was a strong desire across the community not to have a social services-type organization take over Cook (which LAYC in many ways is, especially the residential component). I think Jim Berry hit the nail on the head when he said that everyone in the community supports helping those in need, but that we are also one of the few neighborhoods that already carry more than their fair weight . I don’t think the reaction at the meeting had anything to do with the race or ethnicity of the proposed student body (although some people rightfully wondered how the local corner boys will react to more diversity in their own age group).
Bottom line: I personally don’t think that the neighborhood can continue to absorb large numbers of people in need to intensive social supports. But I guess nobody in charge at the DC government cares much, so we must focus on making the best of it.
I think we should press LAYC to have 24-hour security on the site (nost just a live-in-counselor), and it should be an explicit part of their job to monitor going ons on the eastern part of the Unit block of P St, NW. They should also commit to keeping the area well lit, help to pick up trash outside their immediate property boundaries, etc. They seem to have great reputation overall, so I’m hopeful they will be a good neighbor.
But the concerns of the neighbors are real, and they should not be dismissed as NIMBYism or simple animosity toward Latinos.
I just wanted to clarify what happened with the art center proposal for Cook School, since many people do not know what happened, and I worked on one of the many creative proposals submitted for Cook school.
When the city first released RFEI’s for the available school spaces, they reached out to creative organizations in an unexpected fashion, asking for interesting uses of the space that would benefit the neighborhood. The learning curve for many of the creative organizations was huge; we had to learn a lot in a very short amount of time about how to work with OPM and also to make sure that neighbors and local associations in the neighborhood were aware of our proposal. At the onset we received a lot of support, which was thrilling.
What the city was unaware of was a loophole in the lease agreements for buildings that were zoned for educational use; they had to give charter schools first right of refusal. We had raced to complete a full RFEI, including finding a development partner, querying our own lawyers constantly to make sure that we could even do this, and working closely with OPM on making sure we had done everything correctly; We did submit what I think was a very strong proposal.
Then the charter schools came out of nowhere identifying this loophole and all of the RFEIs submitted by the creative organizations were redacted, and we were only offered school buildings that were left after charter schools such as KIPP had come in and taken the spaces that needed less work. As a nonprofit arts organization, we just did not have the resources to renovate to the extent that a private or residential developer could – nor the no-how to adequately contest what had happened. We had planned to stage a variety of art opportunities such as public performances, a Sunday artist market, a graphic design studio, and an artist studio program with a community arts programming component that all would have been available to the residents of the neighborhood and the city at large(however, there were other arts organizations competing for the school as well, probably with similar proposals – I am sure there were other groups besides us who were disappointed about having their applications rejected without review). The experience of competing for the school was exhilarating but ultimately disappointing. I stumbled across this post when on the City paper website – I am surprised that occupancy of this building is still up in the air…? Regardless, it is a wonderful building that presents a variety of opportunities for whatever tenant it eventually houses, and I wish whatever future occupant there is the best.