On May 25, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) was joined by D.C. Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson, D.C. Council members David Grosso (I-At Large) and Trayon White (D-Ward 8), Ward 8 D.C. State Board of Education member Markus Batchelor, Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer Niles, and Director of General Services Greer Johnson Gillis to break ground on the new Benjamin Orr Elementary School in Southeast Washington. “My administration is committed to accelerating school reforms that gives all children, in every ward the opportunity to reach their full potential,” the mayor said. “Today’s groundbreaking marks the beginning of a great new chapter for the entire Orr community, including its incredible students, teachers, and families.”

The projected design of the new Benjamin Orr Elementary school in Southeast D.C. (Courtesy Photo)

The existing Orr Elementary school is an open space school built in 1974. Batchelor told the AFRO the open space concept is outdated and he is excited about the school’s new look.

Orr is located in Ward 8 on Minnesota Avenue, S.E. and borders Ward 7 in a predominantly Black and working-class Fairlawn neighborhood. The school has 412 students and is 98.1 percent Black with less than a handful of Latinos and no White students according to District public school data.

StartClass.com, a public school rating service, reports that 100 percent of Orr’s students are eligible for free lunch.

That is in contrast with Janney Elementary School in predominantly White Ward 3 which is 74 percent White and seven percent Black with only three percent of its student body eligible for free lunch, according to the web site ElementarySchools.org.

For decades, there have been news reports and complaints from Orr’s faculty and staff and community leaders that the school is uncomfortably hot in the spring and fall and extremely cold in the winter. There have also been complaints about rodents in the facility.

Since the school modernization program began under D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty in 2007, Fairlawn activists and every Ward 8 D.C. council member since then has called for Orr’s building upgrade. It is not clear why the beginning of Orr’s modernization started a decade later, but Bowser told the AFRO not to blame her.

“I can only speak for the past two years,” the mayor said.  “We have been working on this for the past two years and the great thing is that the students don’t have to move to a new site.”

Grosso concurred on the point of students going to school at the same site. “You will have a new building right here on the property,” he said. “That’s not true around the city.”

The new school will feature 26 individual but flexible classrooms for students in pre-K through 5th grade. In addition to these teaching spaces, the new building will include a parent resource center, a dedicated suite for special education, a new library with an adjacent laptop lab and maker space, a music room, an art room with kiln, and an outdoor learning space.

Wilson visited Orr a few months ago and was impressed with the instruction but not the facility.

“I said ‘this school needs a new building’,” he said. “Bringing a new, world-class facility to the Orr Elementary School community so that our Ward 8 students can get high-quality teaching and learning in a high-quality building is a great achievement for our city.”

The existing school will remain operational while the new building is under construction. Once the new school building opens in the Fall of 2018, the old building will be demolished. The project is slated to cost $47 million.

The building will also have green, environmental sensitive features such as photovoltaic panels, onsite storm water retention, permeable paving, energy efficient equipment, daylight harvesting, and HVAC energy recovery.

Carolyn Jackson-King, principal at Orr, said the modernization is just one of the “great” things that are happening at her school. “Orr has one of the largest pre-K populations in D.C.,” the principal said. “We believe in building relationships and every adult in the building makes a point of mentoring a student or a few students. We have an Emerging Males of Color grant for boys and for the girls, we formed the Pearls of Southeast. We are working under a $250,000 blending learning program. We are winning at Orr.”