On Tuesday night, the Anacostia Indians and McKinley Technology High School Football went toe to toe during a much-delayed homecoming game on the field of Anacostia High School in Southeast. The Indians defeated McKinley Tech 20-6.
The celebratory scrimmage came just hours after students, faculty and staff returned to their school for the first time in a week. After sewage backup flooded the cafeteria last week, the school community relocated to nearby Kramer Middle School.
As a result, Spirit Week activities and the homecoming game, scheduled for Nov. 1, were cancelled.
“It’s devastating when you put that amount of energy into an event, just to have it go down the drain,” Antwan Jordan, an executive board member of the Anacostia Alumni Group, told The Informer.
“The weather for the day of the homecoming game was great,” Jordan said. “Also, just thinking about the kids— how they were excited, pumped, energized for the week’s activities. For them not to be able to indulge in the activities that they themselves agreed and wanted to do is terrible.”
In the days and weeks leading up to Homecoming Week (Oct. 27-Nov. 1), Jordan met with school administrators and homecoming planning committee members, developed promotional material, solicited musical acts, and conducted alumni outreach. He accomplished these feats while encouraging neighbors to take part in festivities that ultimately wouldn’t come to fruition. As he and Anacostia community members would find out, DC Water and Fort Myer Construction were conducting an underground pipe repair project near the high school that triggered sewage backup.
Well before Anacostia’s malady, at least seven homeowners in the Fairlawn community reported a similar experience stemming from the months-long structural repair project on the 1600 block of Fairlawn Avenue.
“You could see it from the school.. on the next block where the private homes are,” Jordan, a veteran D.C. firefighter and 1995 Anacostia graduate, told The Informer. “They’ve been over there for about two weeks, but it wasn’t until about a week ago when there was an issue of the sewage backup. It seems like the problem shifted from the homes to the school.”
Solutions and Dialogue at the End of a Trying Period
During a Monday evening community meeting at Anacostia Neighborhood Library, D.C. Councilmember Trayon White (D-Ward 8) announced students’ return to school grounds. He then implored the adults in the space to create the best make-up homecoming experience possible for the young ones.
“I’m going to say this: they are in need of donations,” White told community members. “They had a lot of stuff planned [that was] just delayed [and] hurt them in the festivities they had all week. They’re in the process of planning, trying to get the kids’ morale up, [and] keep their spirits up. For some of them, this is their last year of high school and we don’t want this to damper their high school experience.”
Upon their return to Anacostia on Tuesday, students learned about their current Term 1 grades and opportunities to make up missed work. In recognition of the transition between Anacostia and Kramer, Anacostia teachers also secured an extra day to finalize grades.
Amid a 20 percentage point decline in attendance last week, DCPS central office personnel and school administrators encouraged more consistency among students. During Monday night’s meeting, D.C. Public Schools Chief Integrity Officer Cinthia Ruiz congratulated students, teachers and staff for their efforts during an unconventional week.
“We saw…students who are really trying to make it back to school to make sure they’re there every day,” Ruiz told community members. “Thank you to the staff for doing such a good job.”
On Monday, Ruiz sat at the front of a meeting room on the first floor of the library alongside White and D.C. Water Chief Financial Officer and Interim Chief Operating Officer Matthew Brown, Chief Administrative Officer and Executive Vice President Kirsten B. Williams, and Fort Myers Construction utilities division general manager Paulo Baptista.
In her remarks, Ruiz outlined strategies that DCPS central office and Anacostia administrators are executing to engage students, including: an airpods raffle, a currently operating truancy pilot program, a Friday attendance celebration, and a club created for students with a 90% attendance rate.
“There are a lot of things that the Anacostia school team is doing to ensure that our students are engaged, that they’re motivated and they’re coming to school every day,” Ruiz. “This is just a little bit of that [and] we’re excited to welcome our students back into the building tomorrow.”
By the time homeowners started reporting sewage backup, DC Water and Fort Myers Construction were three months into a multimillion dollar pipe repair project involving the stabilization of a sinkhole and the removal of debris from a pipe that collapsed two years prior. In a statement, the D.C. Department of General Services, the agency that’s responsible for construction and maintenance of DCPS buildings, said SaLUT, its emergency cleanup contractor, worked with DC Water vendor ServPro in assessing and cleaning the areas of the school affected by the sewage backup.
A DC Water spokesperson later confirmed the cleanup of Anacostia High School and the affected homes. They also alluded to a pre-existing problem affecting the school field and external structure. Later, during the community meeting, Brown recounted how, in the aftermath of the backup, DC Water and Fort Myer Construction collaborated, installing cameras at every pump station, along with auto dialers and a triple charge intended to mitigate future situations.
“As soon as the backup occurred… we were on the scene,” Brown said. “We had representatives from engineering on the scene. I was on the scene. Community affairs people were on the scene. The water supply contractor was on the scene. And we wanted to do everything we could that day in order to assess the situation.”
Community members in attendance on Monday evening included: Anacostia High School Principal Kenneth Walker; Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners Jamila White, Tom Donahue, and Anthony Foreman, Fairlawn Civic Association President Grace Pressbury, and D.C. State Board of Education Representative LaJoy Johnson-Law (Ward 8). With Powerpoint presentation slides in hand, they listened as representatives of DC Water explained how the mid-October sewage backup stemmed from the failure of Fort Myer Construction’s bypass pumping system.
In his remarks, Brown spoke about the long-term priority of updating more than a century-old pipage.
“We’ve got a lot of really old infrastructure here at DC Water, and we want to continue to invest in it, because we want to prevent failures from happening,” Brown said on Monday. “We want to make sure that when you turn on the tap, the water comes out. We want to make sure we flush the toilet or take a shower, that all goes away and it comes down to the [Blue] Plains for us to treat.”
Foreman said he walked away content with the information provided. He commended DC Water and Fort Myers Construction for their transparency, as well as White, chair of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 8A Chair, for, as he described it, exhibiting leadership during such a trying time.
“She stepped in there,” Foreman, a first-term commissioner representing Single-Member District 8A02, said about Advisory Neighborhood Commission Chair White. “She stepped right in there and provided all the things to do, knew exactly what questions to ask and everything like that.”
On Tuesday night, as Anacostia and McKinley Technology High School engaged in their match-up, ANC 8A conducted its monthly meeting. Foreman, whose single-member district includes Anacostia High School, told The Informer that he’s compelled to explore various means of connecting Anacostia High School students with the greater Fairlawn community.
“We used to have the bands that marched around days before or the day of the homecoming throughout the neighborhood, and that woke a lot of people up to what was going on,” Foreman said. “From what I understand, they need uniforms and instruments but [it’s about] the cost of maintenance.”
The Ongoing Fight to Help and Connect with Anacostia Students
During the week of Oct. 27, Anacostia students, faculty and staff ended the school day early. They later attended school at Kramer, entering one door while their younger counterparts entered another on the other side of the middle school.
That week, Anacostia students received modified schedules to ensure uninterrupted instruction in English and Language Arts, math, science, social studies, and college and career preparedness.
Administrators split each grade level into two classrooms, each of which had at least two staff members in rotation throughout the day. Elective teachers also provided small group instruction.
An Anacostia staff member who requested anonymity said the week showed students a bit more of their teachers’ creative side.
“Teachers are working really hard to try to create spaces where…the circumstance does not impede students’ access to a learning environment,” the staff member said. “Teachers are working really, really hard to still push the content. They’re utilizing the digital platforms to upload work so students can access that from their computers, phones and home. It’s just finding innovative ways for students to have access to the curriculum.”
As the staff member recounted, they spent much of last week comforting students perturbed about the circumstances surrounding cancelled homecoming activities. They told The Informer that, without a homecoming, students, especially those coming from challenging backgrounds, might not have much else to encourage them this holiday season.
“We rely on these moments to help students remain connected and remain feeling a sense of joy as it relates to school,” the staff member said. “That has been taken from students. There are also some senior students who are senior athletes, whether they’re cheerleaders or band members or football players who rely on footage from the game from the homecoming game to be utilized for their senior profile for colleges. That has been compromised as well.”
Despite concerns about enrollment in recent years, Anacostia still elicits pride among students, teachers, staff and alumni. These days, students at Anacostia High School can graduate after navigating either National Academy Foundation (NAF) academies in civil engineering and architecture or public leadership. They can also enroll in an early college academy hosted in collaboration with the University of the District of Columbia. With events, like a recent on-campus literacy night, Anacostia community members remain committed to supporting students and equipping them for the future.
Jordan, a lifelong Ward 7 resident, recounted a similar experience in the early 1990s when he and several of his classmates at Kramer followed their principal, Zavalia Willis, over to Anacostia when she assumed the helm of the high school. At Anacostia, Jordan participated in JROTC and marching band, all while gaining experience in the school’s public service academy.
Years later, as a fire and emergency medical services professional, Jordan credits Anacostia as an incremental part of his career trajectory.
“I remember delivering a baby in Anacostia,” Jordan told The Informer. “I was an EMT at the age of 17. I was a volunteer firefighter in Prince George’s County before that.”
In his role as an Anacostia Alumni Group executive board member, Jordan attends school events, including literacy night which attracted hundreds of people. As students continue to graduate from Anacostia, Jordan counts among those pushing for more alumni involvement.
“I would like to see the alumni be allowed to be more involved with the kids — meaning college application preparation, letting them know about how things are being available for them,” Jordan told The Informer. “To ask those questions about how the world is after graduation. Last year, when graduation time was coming, the kids had a question mark as to what’s going to happen now after high school. You’re celebrated, but what happens after that? They have no security [if they’re] not in college or to a career that’s ready for them.”