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An occasional feature in which esteemed D.C. rapper Head-Roc shares what’s on his mind.
Bruce-Monroe Elementary School, located at Georgia Avenue and Irving Street NW, is now rubble. A school that once educated Chocolate City’s young minds, even in an extremely deteriorated state after decades of legislative neglect, even after a recent $3 million renovation, is now nothing more than a dozen or more mountains of concrete, brick, and steel debris.
DCPS is under attack!/By the same discrimination from way, way back!
Bruce-Monroe was loved by the neighborhood where it used to be located. At a rally I attended organized by parents who had been promised a new Bruce-Monroe would be built on the same site, I heard endearing testimony from three generations of Petworth residents that attended the school.
They don’t like what we affirm when we act/So ever since integration, public education is way off track/Derailed by political acts…
Bruce-Monroe is the victim of a broken promise that was never intended to be kept.
City officials thought they could outfox the very involved parents of a school strategically located along one of Chocolate City’s grandest avenues. How I understand it, and I’m paraphrasing, several years ago the Adrian Fenty administration announced it wanted to close Bruce-Monroe along with a slew of other D.C. public schools. The parents at Bruce-Monroe immediately organized and fought to keep their school open. The city told the parents it would only close Bruce-Monroe to demolish it, and then build a new Bruce-Monroe on the same site. The parents weren’t going for it, and so they fought to keep their recently renovated and badly needed community-serving elementary school from being bulldozed. They were unsuccessful.
