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Eastern Senior High School, built in 1923, is the focus of an academic and physical overhaul

Instead of trying to wipe the proverbial slate clean at Eastern Senior High School, a top-to-bottom building and academic curriculum renovation will throw away the old slate entirely in the name of relaunching the school as an educational and community beacon.

Work began in earnest on the project shortly after the school year ended. When the 2010-2011 school year begins, Eastern students will walk into the doors at a vastly different, and hopefully improved, building at 1700 East Capitol St. NE.

As with many aspects of DC school reform in general, the planned changes at Eastern are not without their opponents, but stakeholders agree that the current state of Eastern is unacceptable. A look at the Eastern of today and previous years indicates why.

History 101: An 86-year-old building has a lot of roots in the community   
The school is not on an official historic registry, but it is widely regarded as an anchor of Capitol Hill because of its architectural beauty and decades of operation in the community. Eastern has witnessed school racial integration happen right in its own halls, and the faded fallout shelter signs on the building’s exterior hearken back to an era of nuclear warfare worry.

Eastern’s history goes as far back as 1890, when the school’s first building was completed. A flagpole memorial along East Capitol Street now honors the Eastern alumni who “died for humanity” in the Spanish-American War and World War.

In 1923, Eastern relocated to its current 288,000-square-foot building. The enormous school is still quite a sight from the outside, with two towers poking above the rooftop and a large sundial and ornate rose limestone carvings dotting the school front.

In addition to being one of DC’s biggest schools, the school also has 8 acres of land at its disposal.

“You can’t build a building like this anymore,” Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells said.

In spite of the school’s historical role in the community, Wells is hopeful that the changes at Eastern will create a new path for the school.

“I would be incredibly disappointed if Eastern goes back to how it had been functioning, which was at a low level,” he said.

Construction 101: Reuse what you can
Mayor Adrian Fenty chose Allen Lew to create and manage the DC Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization (OPEFM) in 2007. Lew had led several other large DC projects, including the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and Nationals Park.

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for the District of Columbia. This is where the stars aligned,” he said. “I think generally the public realizes that the school system has been somewhere between paralysis and neglect.”

Lew stepped into a mess, inheriting a disorganized school modernization effort that had often missed the mark. Among the first steps he took were to pay outstanding bills to contractors and to launch a “blitz” operation to ensure every school had working heat and other basic utilities.

The OPEFM is turning its gaze to Eastern on the heels of finishing up major rebuilds at a few other schools, including Phelps Architecture, Construction and Engineering High School. The remodeling project began in mid-June and will wrap up by early August next year.

Eastern will continue to operate during work on the building, although the schooling will technically take place next to the school. “Student learning complexes,” or mobile classrooms, are being installed on school property just east of the gymnasium. These buildings will be installed together to create a larger building with covered hallways so some amount of normalcy can be retained during the transition.

Fans of Eastern’s current appearance can rest easy, because the nearly $60 million renovation of the school should leave the exterior largely intact. The only major changes lined up are to widen the driveway and to replace the windows and remove their security “cages,” which block most of the possible natural light from entering the school.

The dilapidated interior will be almost completely gutted and rebuilt with an adaptive reuse philosophy kept in mind. The school’s gems, such as the grand staircase and paintings by the front door, will be restored and retained, while everything else will get the wrecking crew treatment.

In addition to a new look for the rooms and hallways, all the systems in the school will be upgraded to better fit a modern educational environment. Eastern will receive its first HVAC system, be equipped for modern computers and classroom technology and brought into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Lew said the OPEFM is striving for a “standard of excellence” in all its projects. “We’re not looking to reinforce mediocrity,” he said.

Education 101: The effects of class size and enrollment
After the rebuild process is completed next summer, Eastern will gradually reopen its doors to students.

Only seniors and freshmen will attend Eastern in the 2010-2011 school year. A new class of freshmen will join the school each year until all four grades are enrolled starting in the 2013-2014 school year.

Justin Cohen of the Office of Portfolio Management at DC Public Schools is responsible for overhauling Eastern’s curriculum. He admitted that it isn’t ideal to temporarily run a school with just seniors and freshmen, but said that the school system wanted to ensure that students currently attending Eastern are able to finish up their education at their home school.

In that first year, the freshmen class will launch Eastern’s new academic curriculum, which should be finalized early next year, and the seniors will complete their high school career under the old curriculum.

By many measures, now’s the time to make a dramatic change in the way students are taught at Eastern. The graduation rate was only 55.8 percent in 2008, students have consistently missed the No Child Left Behind testing targets, and enrollment has suffered a steady decline from a peak of more than 2,000 students largely because of school safety and academic quality concerns. When classes wrapped up in early June, enrollment hovered around the 450 mark.

On top of these facts, Wells said that the school suffered for years from student behavior problems and a somewhat dysfunctional staff. However, he added that the declining enrollment at the school has eased some of those problems, at least for now.

“There may not be enough students there to have a full array of extracurricular activities, but the core mission of educating those children in a safe learning environment has been met,” he said.

Francis Campbell, a lifetime resident of DC and a 1969 Eastern graduate, has lived within a few blocks of the school for most of his life. He said that he went to the school during a different time with different issues at the forefront, such as dealing with the aftermath of racial segregation.

“But Eastern didn’t have the most savory reputation when I went to school. It’s never had one,” he said.

A general outline of the new academic program is beginning to emerge. Cohen said the program should be broad enough to give students a background in both vocational fields and college preparation.

It seems that a student learning community structure is likely for the school as well. Under this system, students would be split up into several different learning communities. An often-mentioned example is a freshmen academy.

Ultimately, school officials want Eastern to have about 1,100 kids roaming the halls each year. In order to reach this figure, the revamped school will have to hit the ground running and change its public image.