Posts about Kenilworth-Parkside

The group gathered to start their walk at the Kenilworth School Building. They walked through the neighborhood's public housing and across a highway...

... through a tunnel, out of the Kenilworth community, and into another neighborhood.

Once in the Deanwood neighborhood, they walked past a bus bay, across a field, pass a recreation center and middle school, all to arrive at their new school, Houston Elementary.

The distance totaled 0.8 miles, almost one-tenth the width of the District.

DC Public Schools' consolidation plan, beginning this fall, assigns students from Kenilworth Elementary to attend either Houston Elementary or Thomas Elementary. There's transportation for students traveling to Thomas School, but not for those students traveling to Houston Elementary. These students would have to take the same journey as Nasir, a 9 year old who shared his thoughts on what would be his new school.

Nasir is the star of an interview which gives his perspective on the consequences for, and causes of, his neighborhood school closing. Normally, the suggestion to walk a mile in someone else's shoes is a figurative one. Nasir and the Georgetown students afford others the opportunity to participate in the call to action with their video and the community walk.

Over the last few years, Kenilworth has partnered with Georgetown to provide tutoring for 1st through 3rd grade students reading below grade level. The program seeks to combat educational inequalities by tutoring, mentoring, and engaging students in challenging environments. In doing so, DC Reads fosters relationships among elementary youth, college students, families and community members through increasing knowledge of the larger social justice issues that surround education. As a result, these college students have become a part of the Kenilworth School community.

The walk's organizers hoped to continue the community dialogue about the future of Kenilworth School, highlight the potential consequences of the school closures, and demonstrate the challenges the students will face walking to Houston Elementary, their newly-assigned school. They consider themselves concerned community members representing an unheard perspective. This perspective comes from the students, their fellow young people and the most affected community members.

A community is not just the people who live in it. Most communities exist before any of its current residents were born and are likely to continue to exist after its residents have passed on. It is something beyond the individuals or components—the residents, buildings, and community members. Members can and often include individuals living elsewhere but with remaining connections. Rather than physical boundaries, the demarcation of a community is often one of a common interest.

One community member was grateful for the support of the students but disappointed at the dismal numbers of Kenilworth parents and residents who joined the walk. One of only a handful of residents in attendance, he apologized to the organizers on behalf of the community. However, it seemed unnecessary, since at that moment, all of those in attendance were the community.

Despite not being parents, everyone in the group shared a common interest with the families who send their children to Kenilworth School everyday. They care for and want the best for the children of Kenilworth, and undeterred, they planned to walk again to show their support.

Their showing of support demonstrates the promise to share in a vibrant community, not a deficit in community spirit. It means no matter how physically isolated, the Kenilworth community has a common interest worth sharing and investment. All of these persist despite currently suffering the potential loss of another institution and much needed service in a community where the school is the only remaining public investment. Still, sometimes it takes welcoming in someone who is seemingly an outsider and following their lead, allowing a change in perspective.

A community is healthy when the members show love and concern for one another. Hopefully, with the community walk, the organizers have accomplished their goal of placing their community's interest at the forefront in the conversation on school closures—educating and caring for children.

You can watch the full video below.

Completing this trail network is exciting for a lot of different reasons.

It connects DC and Maryland, uniting our communities. Once complete, the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail will connect 16 different waterfront communities in DC and Maryland.

Not only will the continuous trail create recreation opportunities, but it creates a potential bike commuter route. For example, if a cyclist wants to bike from the Sousa Bridge (at Pennsylvania Ave SE) to the Bladensburg Waterfront today it would require a daunting excursion through local roads, including biking on Bladensburg Road.

It advances local and regional transportation goals. In anticipation of the transportation challenges that come with the DC region's expected population and job growth, local and regional governments have developed aggressive goals to facilitate alternative modes of transportation. For example, the Region Forward Plan seeks to create a "transportation system that maximizes community connectivity and walkability, and minimizes ecological harm to the Region and world beyond." Completing the ART system creates a safe environment for pedestrians and cyclists, which moves the Region Forward Plan closer to fruition.

It gives some Ward 7 neighborhoods access to parkland. As exciting as it is to think that people from all over the metro area will rediscover the Anacostia River, one of the best outcomes of this new trail segment is the access it will provide for the Ward 7 communities east of the river, but west of DC-295, to park lands and the river. (Note: the Kingman Park neighborhood of Ward 7 is west of the river).

Ironically, the National Park Service ownership along the Anacostia effectively "walls off" the river for communities like Mayfair Mansions and Kenilworth-Parkside. The new trail will provide new access routes into the park lands from the communities that surround them. Residents who have suffered living along a polluted Anacostia should certainly be among the first to reap the rewards of a clean river.

One challenge that still remains is connecting the remaining local communities east of 295 to the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. Even once completed, 295 still cuts of access to the majority of residents living in Ward 7 and Ward 8.

It provides access to a beautiful section of the Anacostia River that is currently reachable only from the water. The biggest challenge facing the Anacostia River restoration is countering widely held beliefs that the river is a dirty place to avoid.

Make no mistake, there's a lot of work left to be done before we have an Anacostia River that is safe for swimming and fishing. But even now it is a place of surprising beauty where people can walk, see wildlife, and seek solace in the heart of the city. This final trail segment will make these recreational uses possible in the most natural and hardest to access portion of the river.

Right now, at most a few hundred people enjoy this section of the river in any given year—rowers, kayakers, and others who can access the river by water. The new trail segment will take the number of people exposed to the beauty of the Anacostia River to tens of thousands yearly. More people that see and know the river means more people who care about its restoration.

The last several years have been unprecedented in terms of restoration progress, and we can consolidate and build on that momentum. We'll need to if we are to reach DDOE's goal of a swimmable and fishable river by 2032.

USDOT announced this morning about $500 million in multimodal "TIGER" grants in 47 locations around the US. A combined DC/MD/VA regional application that would have funded $20 million worth of bike/ped projects near Metro stations, as well as bikesharing expansions in Montgomery and Arlington, was not funded. However, DC and MD worked together on one that was.

The winning application received $10 million in federal funds to help pay for a 4-mile extension of the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. The project will extend the trail along the east shore of the river, from Benning Road NE, through Kenilworth Gardens, to just shy of Bladensburg Road in Prince George's County. It will include 5 bridge segments, and some raised sections.

At its northern end, it will connect to the already-completed Anacostia River Trail. That trail currently ends just south of Bladensburg, and links to a network of trails in the Anacostia watershed, stretching up the Northeast Branch, Northwest Branch, Indian Creek, Paint Branch, and Sligo Creek.

Bridging this gap will give easier access to cyclists traveling between DC and points in the northeastern part of the region, including College Park and Wheaton.

AnacostiaWaterfront.org has a press release with additional information.

Jefferson County, WV is also a winner

The TIGER grant process stipulated that some percentage of winners had to be in rural areas. One of those rural awards went to Jefferson County, WV, which is the next county west from Loudoun, and is only about 60 miles from DC. They received $5 million in federal funds to help pay for a $24 million project to convert Fairfax Boulevard through the town of Ranson into a complete street, extend Fairfax Boulevard to a retail area on the edge of town, and build a transit center in downtown Charles Town that when complete will be the transfer location for bus service to nearby MARC stations in Harper's Ferry, WV and Brunswick, MD.

The Town of Ranson's project fact sheet gives additional details, and this map shows the location of the projects.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

In addition, parents pushing for a children's playground downtown are a lot closer to getting their wish. The new budget allocates $500,000 to plan and build a playground, which should be enough to get it built. The National Park Service still has to select a site and give DC jurisdiction to build the playground.

For many years, few to no people lived downtown, so DC's many downtown parks only served office workers eating lunch, the homeless, and otherwise little more than decorative backgrounds to drivers on major thoroughfares. Now, more people want to use the parks at all times of the day.

NCPC just released a a video about an effort by federal and DC agencies to renovate Edmund Burke Park, where 10th and L Streets NW meet Massachusetts Avenue.

Franklin Square represents the largest opportunity for downtown parks. It covers an entire city block, yet doesn't see the kind of use and programming as similar spaces in other cities, like New York's Bryant Park. DPR will get $300,000 to work with the Office of Planning to plan a renovation for Frankline. Since NPS controls this park as well, they will need to give DC jurisdiction here as well before any actual changes can come.

Most of the money for these priorities comes out of a $16 million project ($8 million in the next fiscal year) to create a new DPR and DYRS headquarters at Gibbs School. The committee doesn't think that's such an urgent need, as DPR just moved into offices on U Street. The budget retains $550,000 for them to continue planning for their office needs. The 4 staff working on parks will come out of 60 existing vacant positions at DPR.

The committee also assigned $500,000 out of $5 million which Mayor Gray had set aside to implement the sustainability plan. Parks and recreation are a key part of the sustainability plan, so this money will still contribute to fulfilling the plan, only in a specific way the Council chose.

Kenilworth-Parkside residents are hanging in limbo after DC tore down their old recreation center only to find out that contamination on the site prevents building a new one. It'll likely take 7-10 years, say committee staff, for NPS to finish its environmental study, for DC and NPS to negotiate over who has to pay for remediation, and then design and build a facility. The Council instructed DPR to use some of the money it already has budgeted for Kenilworth-Parkside to find a short-term option for residents.

For a neighborhood that has been the recipient of two of the Obama Administration's most celebrated community development efforts, there's been little fanfare in the city outside this small patch of Ward 7. Fortunately, that's not holding the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) back.

DCPNI is a new 501(c)3 organization led by Irasema Salcido, founder and CEO of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, which has a Parkside campus. DCPNI organized a permanent Board of Directors in October 2011 and has been working since to pursue its goals for 2012. A January 2012 report by the Urban Institute outlines in great detail how DCPNI plans to transform the neighborhood.

Kenilworth-Parkside sits squeezed between the Anacostia River and DC-295 to the east and west, and a sprawling decommissioned Pepco plant and the District border to its north and south. The disadvantageous geography and years of disinvestment left Kenilworth-Parkside sinking further and further into disrepair.

Despite having Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens and its acres of green space in the neighborhood, Kenilworth-Parkside still shows all of the typical indicators of urban blight.

Statistics on the residents in the DCPNI footprint are dire. Median household incomes are barely half of the city's median. Rates of teenage births are some of the highest in the nation. Single females head 90% of families.

Yet, at least until now, it's lacked any kind of investment which many of DC's now "up-and-coming" neighborhoods have received.

Enter DCPNI. In 2008, Salcido launched the Initiative based on the principles of Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. DCPNI launched their efforts after winning funding from the US Department of Education.

The 2012 plan is ambitious. DCPNI is proposing home visits to pregnant women and mothers of young children. They want to build a community library of children's books. For the neighborhood's school children, they will launching an experiential learning program to visits to local museums and monuments with directed classroom instruction.

DCPNI, which holds tours of the neighborhood on the fourth Thursday of every month, is perhaps the city's foremost example of a place-making initiative. They are taking all of the most current research on comprehensive, services-based community development and applying it to one unique geographic area.

DC should keep its eye on Kenilworth-Parkside. Stakeholders of the Choice planning grant will inevitably apply for implementation funding when it becomes available in an effort to revitalize more than 300 units of dilapidated public housing. In June, Educare, a brand-new early childhood education center serving 175 Headstart-eligible children, will open its doors.

Victory Square, a new senior affordable apartment building built by Victory Housing, began accepting applications this week and will open in the spring. And all the while, DCPNI continues to establish partnerships with local businesses and organizations and organize programs that aim to strike at the core of Kenilworth-Parkside's ills in just the way that Canada tackled a swath of Harlem.

Over the next few years, as the 21 Promise Neighborhoods get to work across the country, community development advocates will learn whether or not federal money can be applied to local community development initiatives successfully and efficiently to improve public health, housing and education outcomes.

Lucky for the DC region, there's a site right in our backyard to follow, support, and learn more about. You just have to know where to look.