Mayor Muriel Bowser and a team of local dignitaries cut the ribbon Friday, August 19th, 2016 on the totally transformed Roosevelt High School in the heart of Petworth (Photographs can be seen at 21csf’s Facebook page).
Scores of alumni and neighbors, as well as representatives from the architects, project managers and contractors, cheered from the school’s neo-colonial portico on 13th Street. The crowd entered through the main formal lobby at the front of the school – – an entrance that the mayor noted has been shuttered for the past decades before the three-year, $140,000,000 modernization.
They were greeted by a totally transformed educational institution that opens from the marble-faced 1932 lobby (with a new bust of Theodore Roosevelt) onto a huge new light-filled and flag-draped atrium that is the heart of the school. Three floors of academic classrooms surround the atrium. The grand atrium staircase leads directly to the media center flanked by the cafeteria (with an outside “waterworks” courtyard and amphitheater), and career facilities, including a spacious culinary arts teaching kitchen.
In the south wing, Roosevelt’s gym and Olympic-size pool have added banks of windows which show off these sports exhibition spaces (the pool was planned to be open to the public) with attendant fitness training and dance/wrestling venues.
The north wing is devoted to the arts. Roosevelt’s gorgeous auditorium has been completely restored and the old open-plan north bunker now includes banks of windows and a large sky-lit exhibition space, a blank slate for student artwork. Individual and small-group music practice rooms (wired for recording) lead to the choral and instrumental music classrooms.
At the back of the school is a secondary entrance with an inviting street-scape and new glassy entrance pavilion that welcomes students along the football field from the direction of the Petworth Metro and the Petworth Library. This is the main public entrance for the pool and for the large and long-standing Roosevelt STAY program which provides intensive evening study for over-age students returning to earn full high school diplomas.
DCPS last year began planning for its Global Studies program at Roosevelt which incorporates a new, dual-language middle school (opening this year with 6th graders at the adjacent MacFarland Middle School) to accommodate the system’s numerous dual-language elementary school programs. When its modernization is complete (2018), MacFarland will also be the feeder for Truesdell, Barnard and West elementary schools.
MacFarland feeds into the new Global Studies focus at Roosevelt, being developed under Roosevelt’s new principal, Aqueelha James, who has engaged Georgetown University as a partner in this initiative. Incorporating an accelerated international ESL program for English new-comers, Roosevelt and MacFarland will coordinate this global focus along with a full complement of general comprehensive high school course offerings.
An interesting account of historic changes around the Petworth school and neighborhood over the past half-century was aired on NPR’s WAMU yesterday: “Diane Rehm And Isabel Wilkerson Remember Roosevelt High Over The Years.”
No Comments