Capitol Hill families at Maury, left, and Miner elementary schools are at odds over a recommendation to merge their campuses. Maury and Miner elementary schools are within walking distance of one another and in some ways a world apart — with lopsided demographics that mirror the racial and economic segregation surrounding them on D.C.’s Capitol Hill.
District officials see an opportunity: improve diversity at both schools by wiping the boundary that divides them and pairing them together. Under the proposal, children would spend their early grades at one school and later years at the other., the once-a-decade process that reexamines the invisible lines that often define so much, such as whether a student can study a foreign language or what kind of college counseling they’ll get.
“From my perspective, there’s a lot of unknowns about what the quality of the school would look like,” Jonathan Rothwell, who has two children enrolled at Maury, said in an interview. He also wonders if teachers would leave and who would lead the school — concerns that were raised during a tense town hall meeting with Maury families in November. “A lot of parents are already satisfied with Maury, and this jeopardizes that satisfaction.
“Instead of just making one school better and one school more diverse, we can offer that to both,” said Kiki Fox, a Miner parent who supports the proposal. “It’s surprising to some of us that people aren’t able to think of the bigger picture, which is the fact that, yes, this could be disruptive for a lot of people for some time. I definitely understand that, but the benefits are going to be much further reaching for much longer.
Shavanna Miller, co-president of Maury’s parent-teacher association, worries the change is too disruptive and that uprooting children in the middle of elementary school could be stressful. During the November town hall, she said children can “fall through the cracks” when they transition from one school to another, as they often do between middle and high school.“I think it’s not just because the children have to adjust their environment.