Arts-school delay vexes students
A group of Kensington High School students left yesterday's School Reform Commission meeting with a sense of disappointment and deja vu.
A group of Kensington High School students left yesterday's School Reform Commission meeting with a sense of disappointment and
deja vu
.
The students, all members of the group Youth United for Change, came to learn why school district officials had yet to fulfill a five-year-old promise to hire a developer to build Kensington High School for Creative and Performing Arts.
When commission Chairwoman Sandra Dungee Glenn said a developer will likely be approved during next month's meeting, the students shouted back that they'd heard that line before.
"They keep telling us the same thing over and over again," said senior Marcella Gibbs, 17, after leaving the meeting.
"I've been working on this since 9th grade, and I'm just ready for it to be done and my school to be built before I graduate," she said.
Saeda Washington, 17, also a senior, said: "It's been disappointing for five years. It feels like everything we've been working so hard for just didn't mean anything."
Several years ago, Kensington, at Cumberland Street near Coral, was converted to three smaller high schools. Students are protesting to have a new building constructed for one - the Creative and Performing Arts High School, which now shares a building with the business school.
Patrick Henwood, district senior vice president of capital programs, said the district had been negotiating with a developer from August 2006 to last March, when talks ended over money.
He said of two proposals now being reviewed by staff, one will be presented to the reform commission next month for its consideration.
The 90,000-square-foot school has been budgeted at $40 million and will be built within blocks of Kensington's main campus, on Cumberland Street near Coral, Henwood said.
Once the school is completed and the performing arts school moves to its new digs, a fourth school with a social justice theme will be housed with the business school.
Kensington has a culinary arts-themed school housed in its own building. *
