Over a decade, Maury Elementary School transformed from a low-performing school into one of the highest achieving and most desirable elementaries here through a rare alchemy: a high-flying principal, a dedicated and well-resourced parent community, and rapid-fire gentrification.
Paige Kowalski, who sent both her kids to the school, toured Maury in 2009, the spring before her now-college-aged son started kindergarten.
“It was an ugly little school. Very outdated. Like a 1970’s kitchen,” recalled Kowalski, now the executive vice-president of the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit focused on improving data use in education. There was no clear vision for academic improvement. “I wasn’t impressed by anything,” Kowalski said.
With limited options, she enrolled her son anyway, assuming it would be for a year or two. The family planned to move to the suburbs for stronger schools.
That fall, a new principal arrived: Carolyn Albert Garvey. She was, Kowalski said, “the actual greatest thing since sliced bread.” Garvey stayed at Maury for nearly a decade, earning accolades for her leadership. She recruited young, talented teachers. Academic growth soared.
Middle-income, college-educated families, like Kowalski’s, chose to stay. They poured energy—and money—into Maury. Word of the school’s turnaround spread. Soon, families were buying homes just to be in its attendance zone.
“It became this sought-after school,” Kowalski said.
When Kowalski’s older son entered kindergarten, about a quarter of kids his age were white. Seven years later, when her younger son left, about three-quarters of children in his cohort were white, and the school had shed its Title I status.
Just three blocks away, Miner Elementary did not share Maury’s trajectory.
As Maury became whiter, wealthier, and higher performing, Miner stayed majority Black, majority low-income, and struggled academically. In fact, by the 2022-23 school year, there was a 52 percentage point gap between the two schools in the share of students designated as “at-risk” of academic failure, essentially a poverty measure.
Between 2019 and 2023, Miner cycled through about a half-dozen principals or interim administrators. It retained 70 percent of teachers in the 2023-24 academic school year, compared to 92 percent at Maury.
The perfect place for merged schools?
Twice in the past decade, Washington officials have pitched pairing these neighboring schools into two grade-band campuses, with one school serving prekindergarten through 1st or 2nd grade and the other the remainder of elementary school. More recently, the pairing was suggested as part of an explicit, district-wide effort to desegregate and balance enrollment.
Combining schools this way—a popular approach following the landmark Brown v. Board U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding school desegregation—is emotionally and logistically draining. Recent attempts fell flat in Richmond, Va., and suburban Illinois.
But the strategy succeeded in ruby red, rural northern Louisiana, when a district superintendent emphasized the positives for all children and got substantial buy-in from school leaders and teachers. Those educators, in turn, helped get parents on board.
On paper, Capitol Hill is an ideal place to give the approach a shot. The neighborhood’s tony row houses are just around the corner from public housing projects. It leans politically left. Most parents are highly educated. Maury’s parent organization has an equity-focused position on its executive board.
But the proposal exposed ugly racial and socioeconomic biases many hadn’t realized existed. It’s tempting to chalk up that resistance to nothing more than liberal hypocrisy—and plenty did.
But the story of how a proposed Maury-Miner stumbled holds lessons about what it takes to make merged schools—or any earthshaking change in the name of equity—a reality.
Around 2017, as Kowalski’s youngest headed to a high-performing charter middle/high school, Maury underwent a renovation to meet growing demand. But district planners underestimated enrollment, Kowalski said.
The new building is “phenomenal,” Kowalski said. But “it was overcrowded from the day they opened the door, and they had no way to fix it,” she said.
Meanwhile, Miner, which has plenty of extra room, didn’t have nearly as many parents who are able to dole out additional financial resources for the school and advocate for it in the community, though the schools serve essentially the same neighborhood.
Even many wealthier families active in Miner’s vibrant parent teacher organization continued to use the lottery process to transfer to one of the higher-performing elementary schools nearby.
By the 2022-23 school year, only 26 percent of the PK-5 students living in Miner’s boundary attended the school, compared to 64 percent of Maury’s.
After Maury’s renovation, district officials briefly considered combining the schools by grade band, to create what D.C. officials called a “cluster,” to accommodate rising enrollment. Many in the community shut it down.
The idea resurfaced in 2023, when Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn launched the district’s second-ever “boundary study”—a review of attendance zones and feeder patterns that D.C. has committed to revisiting every 10 years.
A guiding principle of the effort: creating “racially and socioeconomically diverse schools.”
Working with a 27-member community advisory committee, Kihn’s team examined school boundaries with that goal in mind. But they also considered pairing nearby schools and splitting students up across two campuses by grade.
Maury and Miner were clear candidates: three blocks apart, but serving radically different populations.
Crucially, Kihn and his team took care not to frame the proposal as their preference.
Instead, their message would be: “This is an idea that lives in the world that has been tried and tested elsewhere. It’s had some good results,” Kihn said. “This could be a good place for us to pursue this as a community, if we want to do it together. We’re not here to force it on you.”
Kihn’s team reached out to both schools to set up conversations. Then, Miner’s principal, Lawrence Dance, was abruptly removed for reasons never made clear, according to school staff and parents.
Kera Tyler, a spokeswoman for the District of Columbia Public Schools, confirmed that Dance is still employed by the school system. She did not provide further details, citing the need for confidentiality in personnel matters.
In retrospect, supporters of a Maury-Miner pairing saw the timing of Dance’s departure as disastrous.
Backlash at Maury
As Miner families reeled from Dance’s exit, Kihn’s team kicked off its first meeting on the potential pairing, deluging Maury parents with data depicting demographic disparities.
“Having our schools meet the needs of all of our kids and reflect our values is very important,” Jennifer Comey, the director of planning and analysis in the deputy mayor’s office, said in a virtual meeting with parents. “I know, as you all live in Capitol Hill, that this is also very important to you.”
She did not mention the stark achievement gap. At Maury, nearly three-quarters of students were proficient in reading. At Miner, it was fewer than one in ten.
Parents had a flood of concerns.
They worried about walking farther with small kids. They doubted that a merged school would match Maury’s performance.
“We paid a premium to live in the Maury district,” one mom said during the virtual meeting. The plan would mean “combining a school with about 7% proficiency with a school that has 70% proficiency. I have reasonable concerns about what that’s going to mean for the quality of the educational environment for my son.”
Some parents suggested families might abandon Maury if it merged with Miner.
“What makes you think that people of higher socioeconomic abilities will stay?” one father asked. He pointed to the smorgasbord of schooling options in D.C.: Charters, private schools, other public schools that could be accessed through the lottery.
“I just think that people of a higher [socio]economic background will leave, and you’ll end up with two bad schools, not just one failing school,” he said.
Another mom wanted to know: Had Kihn’s staff talked to teachers? Would they be willing to teach in a paired model? Kihn’s team hadn’t asked teachers.
At least two Maury parents voiced support. The school thrived in part because affluent families invested in it, one dad argued.
“If the same resources were afforded to Miner, it would be very different” than it is now, he said. “I think we need to seriously consider this if we want to put our money where our mouth is about diversity and equity.”
Mistrust at Miner
Meanwhile, the Miner PTO and much of the school’s staff, according to parents, only learned about the proposal when Maury’s parent organization called them. Some Miner parents assumed the city cared more about wealthier families’ opinion of the proposal.
Kihn said both schools were contacted at the same time. But Dance’s departure made scheduling with Miner difficult.
By the time a meeting with Miner families happened—about three weeks after Maury’s—Miner parents were already on edge after seeing vitriolic comments on community listservs and social media.
“The Miner community feels really attacked,” one mom said during a virtual meeting. It was as if Kihn’s office said, “let’s pit advantaged white families and disadvantaged Black families against each other on the internet and see what happens.”
The delay between when Maury and Miner families learned about the proposal gave opponents time to organize before supporters could mobilize, said Jeff Giertz, a Miner parent who circulated a pro-pairing petition that garnered 338 signatures.
An opposing petition with about 260 signatures said too many questions were unanswered. What would happen to teachers? Would Miner retain its Title I status ? Would the facilities need to be upgraded?
Answers didn’t come.
D.C.’s divided process was a big stumbling block to securing family support, parents say.
Kihn’s office was responsible for initial outreach on the proposal and tasked with drafting a recommendation based on community feedback.
But his staff couldn’t say what would happen to teachers, to class sizes, to Miner’s status as a Title I school and the extra resources that come with it. That would be handled in an implementation plan, crafted by the district, only after the mayor signed off on the pairing.
Kihn believes people would have been just as upset if his team had put forward a fully baked plan, without seeking their input first.
“Some of the criticisms I heard involved, ‘you haven’t thought about X, you haven’t thought about Y,’” Kihn said. “And I guarantee you, if we had shown up and said, ‘Well, here’s what we do about X or Y, then it would have been the exact opposite,’” meaning parents would have complained the district came up with a plan without their input. “That’s just how this dynamic plays out.”
No clear incentive
The structure of the process also made it complicated for Kihn’s team to tout tangible advantages for Maury families under the plan, beyond more early childhood slots and heading off a looming overcrowding. (Maury was at about 86 percent capacity in the 2022-23 school year, compared to 62 percent at Miner).
“There wasn’t an incentive offered and asking people to live their values will often backfire,” said Jessica Sutter, who represented Capitol Hill on the District of Columbia State Board of Education from 2019 to 2022.
Arguably, there might have been more visible benefits for Maury families beyond increased diversity. Maury recently nixed its position for a Spanish teacher—and with it, all foreign language instruction—due to budget constraints.
Miner receives roughly $40,000 per student, nearly double Maury’s per-pupil spending. Kihn’s team could have also considered giving the merged schools a popular educational twist: bilingual education or a STEM focus, parents suggested.
Kihn said his office didn’t want to make assurances they might not be able to deliver on.
“We try not to engage in that kind of promise making, because we have no idea,” he said. “It’s not clear what the benefits are for a model that hasn’t yet been developed, apart from the fundamental motivation, which is, kids are going to do better both academically and socially” in more diverse schools.
Without clarity from the deputy mayor’s office, rumors flew. Parents heard that teachers at both schools would be fired, and told to reapply for their jobs, something Kihn’s team never said or implied, according to Kihn.
Charles Allen, the city councilman who represents parts of the neighborhood, came out against the proposal, citing parents’ unanswered questions.
Meanwhile, DCPS—which would be responsible for filling in the many blanks in the plan if the mayor accepted a recommendation to pair the schools—was missing from the conversation entirely.
District officials never reached out to school staff to find out what they thought about the proposal, said a Miner teacher who asked not to be identified.
DCPS largely declined to participate in this story, answering two factual questions about Miner’s leadership, but turning down Education Week’s multiple requests to interview Chancellor Lewis Ferebee and teachers and administrators at both schools.
Maury parents’ resistance to the proposal was entirely predictable, supporters said. But Kihn’s office didn’t have anything to counter it with.
“It didn’t seem like anyone from [the mayor’s office] was prepared for the opposition,” said Allison Merchant, a Maury parent who generally supported the plan. “So much of the justification for this came down to race, ethnicity, and [academic] performance. While that’s absolutely important, there was nothing beyond that in terms of like ‘here’s how this will make for a stronger school,’ ‘here’s how this will make for a stronger educational experience.”
Hitting the pause button
Ultimately, the boundary study committee didn’t recommend going ahead with a pairing, but didn’t drop the idea, either.
Instead, it directed the district to work with leadership of both schools “to determine how to structure a community working group that could explore a potential Maury-Miner pairing,” by March of 2027. That will allow for “two years of consistent leadership” at both schools, according to the recommendation.
Politically, that timeline also punts discussion of the pairing proposal until just after the 2026 mayoral election, parents who supported the proposal noted. It’s unclear if Kihn’s boss—Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat serving her third term—will seek re-election.
In the meantime, Maury has already implemented another boundary study recommendation: Giving low-income families living within the school’s boundary a leg up in securing a spot in its early childhood program through the lottery process.
Should DCPS pursue the pairing proposal, a panel of parents and teachers from both schools will be able to do the kind of deep community engagement, problem-solving, and advocacy that wasn’t feasible—or appropriate—in the broader boundary study, Kihn said.
“Clearly, this is an idea that has incredibly strong support and incredibly strong opposition, and it needs to be approached as a dedicated body of work,” Kihn said. “It needs to be owned by DCPS, because these are their schools.”
That leaves parents wondering why the process wasn’t just handled that way in the first place.
“It’s like they kicked up this hornets’ nest of deeply held feeling and bias” only to say “Whoops, sorry! Never mind! We’ll come back to you in a few years.’” Merchant said. “It leaves so much unresolved.”
For Kihn, though, the boundary committee accomplished what it set out to do on the pairing.
“These are really, really hard conversations to have in any context,” Kihn said. “We were not starting with an idea that we were trying to get implemented. We were starting with an idea that we wanted to assess. And I think we did assess it, and I think we found the place of the city where one might pursue it. I think we heard voices on all sides, and I think we ended up recommending a reasoned approach that might lead to success in the future.”
Lasting sting
Two years later, some Miner parents see signs the district is serious about improving the school. Recently, a new principal took over—Carrie Broquard, who led one of the district’s highest performing elementaries, Lafayette, in the city’s wealthy upper northwest area, for about a decade.
Her appointment “reflects DCPS’s deep commitment” to Miner, Tyler said. “She’s a passionate, proven leader with a strong track record of closing achievement gaps, most recently as the principal of a National Blue Ribbon School.”
But raw feelings remain.
“It poisoned the well of what we thought was this tight-knit Capitol Hill community,” said RuthAnn Clark, whose children attend Miner and who is active in its PTO. She had thought it was a positive thing that she was investing in her local school, the way parents like Kowalski had invested in Maury over a decade ago.
It was hard to hear her neighbors say that “we were making this awful parenting choice by sending our kids to a Title I school, our neighborhood school,” Clark said.
Meredith Parnell, a Maury parent, agreed that the mayor’s office—and the district—left a lot of open questions. But that wasn’t reason enough to tank a proposal that would benefit both schools, she said.
“Maury parents have it pretty good and are scared to lose it,” Parnell said. She believes “liberal hypocrisy” was at the heart of much of the opposition.
Black and white parents said they believe racism played a part in how some in the Maury community responded to the proposal. But the stakes felt much higher to Black parents, who worried their children won’t feel welcome in a potential paired school.
LaNae McMillan, who lives in the Miner boundary, was intrigued by the pairing when she first heard about it at an open house for prospective families. But she was put off by the reactions of some Maury parents to the proposal.
“It felt very NIMBY for people you see every day” at parks and playgrounds, said McMillan, who is Black. “There was an attitude that we would be bringing down the achievement of Maury students.”
McMillan, who grew up on Capitol Hill, ultimately decided to avoid neighborhood schools altogether. She used the district’s lottery process to send her daughter to a school near her office that felt welcoming.
Not because the pairing isn’t happening, McMillan said. In part, because it still could.
“I didn’t feel comfortable putting my kid in that situation,” McMillan said. “It was an ‘I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted sort of thing.’” She was mostly concerned about teacher interactions, how Maury educators would treat her daughter if the schools merged.
Two other Black parents who spoke to a reporter outside the school expressed similar sentiments.
Some parents say it didn’t have to be this way. They believe Kihn’s team’s directive to float the pairing idea without filling in the details turned off even Maury parents who might have otherwise been supportive.
“They could do it in a way where I think there’d be buy-in,” said Jennifer Bendery, a Maury mother who was open to the pairing. “You have to have community leaders bring everyone together to go through how it will work, and answer every last question, and ideally get parents to be into it and then help with the process of doing it.”
Giertz, the Miner parent who circulated the petition in favor of the change, sees the possibility too.
“The story is unfinished,” he said. “It’s going to take leadership to get this across the finish line.”
Given what he’s seen, he doesn’t believe that will come from the mayor’s office or the school district. They were “allergic to controversy,” he said.
Parents at both schools who believe diversity can go hand-in-hand with educational quality could step into that void, Giertz said.
“This idea could be driven forward by the community.”
