A School Too Far?

(Wednesday) July 21, 2010

The City Council and the School Board met in June to discuss the redevelopment of the Jefferson Houston–Durant Center site. The vision offered by Dr. Morton Sherman, our Superintendent of Schools, is for a public-private partnership to redevelop the 10.3 acre site into a mixed use site that would include a new elementary school to replace Jefferson Houston and Head Start, an office block to house school administration now in rented space, public space to replace the Durant Center, and a rooftop pool and athletic field to replace the pool and field now there. In addition, the private developer would construct hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space and/or residential space for lease or for sale supported by underground parking.

Public-private partnerships are really nothing new and school boards in Alexandria have looked at such arrangements for at least the past dozen years. The reason is simple. Alexandria, like most local jurisdictions, has limited money for large capital projects. Putting a new elementary school and a school administration building in the capital budget would be consigning those ideas to the distant future. Scarce dollars must be husbanded for maintaining what the city already has.

Enter the private sector which can make a generous profit on the residential and office space and use a part of that to subsidize a new school and administrative offices. The site will accommodate a development of from a million to a million and a quarter square feet.

There is really little argument that Jefferson Houston needs to be rebuilt. It was originally built on the quickly discredited open classroom model and is a challenge for the staff to operate. Studies to partition the rooms in the 40-year-old school have shown that it is expensive. Likewise, it would be good to avoid paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual rent for administration. Dr. Sherman has reduced rental space by shifting some of his staff to underused areas of George Washington Middle School but the rental bill is still large and a split staff is not efficient.

If the City could actually gain a new school and new administrative headquarters at no cost that would indeed be a major coup.

Unfortunately, the devil will be in the details and, underlying everything, will be a major philosophical battle for the soul of our little city. For the past 50 years Alexandria has been torn between urban and suburban. The central question is are we a densely developed city or are we really mostly leafy neighborhoods of moderate density. The rebuild of Jefferson Houston puts this question front and center.

Remaining open space in Alexandria has been dedicated to increasingly dense development over the past 20 years. Each City Council has believed that it must increase the tax base and the density at the Patent and Trademark Office, BRAC at Mark Center, and the new denser plan for Potomac Yards are all examples. Now this thinking is being applied by the schools to a small athletic field, a school and a rec center very close to Metro but in a very residential area of small scale homes.

There are also major questions. Can a pool operate efficiently on a roof or will it be a maintenance nightmare?   What would the new elementary school look like and would people actually want to send their kids to it with its rooftop athletic field? Can the neighborhood use the field like it does now? What will the extra traffic do to the neighborhood? How high will the building be and how much of the site will it really cover? What will become of the Section 8 project known as Jefferson Village that ARHA operates just north of the site? Is this a BRAC in old town or just a clever plan?

City Council, rightly in our view, was very cautious in embracing this plan. If the schools wish to pursue it they have a lot work to do. First the plan needs to be made real so the details are clear. Second there must be many meetings with the communities surrounding the site. These meetings must be more then one sided attempts to sell the plan. Community concerns must be uncovered and must be successfully addressed. This will not be an easy task. Third the various groups that use the site must be involved. If this were just a school site the task would be far easier. All the different functions create a complexity that will task even the most creative planners and architects.

At some point we must ask ourselves is it worth losing every bit of green space in our city to dense development? At some point all the green will be gone.What will we do then? Perhaps we should start to think about doing that right now and keeping some green around.Alexandria has never been Manhattan on the Potomac. Is that a vision we really want to embrace?