Crumbling school facilities causing anxiety for parents - Washington Post
Benita Douglas has been looking forward to sending her son to the middle school in her Capitol Hill neighborhood so he could stay with friends he has known since kindergarten. But a planned renovation of Eliot-Hine Middle School recently got pushed back from a scheduled start next year to 2019. Now she is getting nervous about sending him to a building with broken bathroom doors, rusting pipes and overheated classrooms. The Eliot-Hine renovation is one of more than 40 school projects that were delayed in a $1. 3 billion, six-year school construction plan Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) proposed last month. The delays — a result of cost overruns and a slowdown in capital spending — have stoked parental anxiety in neighborhoods with still-crumbling schools and have prompted city leaders to call for an overhaul of the way capital projects are planned... He also was expected to propose new rules to govern school construction decisions, basing those decisions on criteria such as a school’s condition and enrollment. “The past six to eight years have been a real free-for-all when it comes to capital budgets in the schools,” Grosso said. Source: www.washingtonpost.com
