December ANC6A01 Neighborhood News

Happy Holidays!

We are approaching the shortest day of the year and I’m so grateful to all our neighbors for keeping our community festive and light through the darkness!

This is my last newsletter of 2023 and I want to link to Councilmember Allen’s last newsletter too, which has a lot of important information.

Our Schools

There is a discussion underway about school boundary redrawing and you can listen to a forum on that here.

Also, MySchoolDC is now open for the next school year. This lottery system should be used by all parents to match with a PK3 program (even at your inboundary school), and by middle and high school parents who are looking to attend any school other than our inboundary schools. We are blessed with an abundance of great schools!

Thank you to our Community Outreach Committee for hosting some of our inboundary schools last month! As a reminder, our inboundary schools are JO Wilson Elementary, Stuart-Hobson Middle, and Eastern High, and they are used by most 6A01 families with school-aged kids! Eastern High School is the only inboundary school in all of DC that has the IB middle years and IB diploma program, and the only school at all where the IB program is available to all interested students. All three schools are Title 1 schools, and you can donate to their programs at the links above for your end-of-year giving. You can also watch the video of the Principals of Eastern and Stuart-Hobson here! Shoutout to our COC representatives from 6A01 Gail Sullivan and Paul Spires for the great work of the committee, which is also accepting grant applications now!

H Street NE and Public Safety

Our neighborhood has had some bad press lately and some sad closures of beloved small businesses as well, and concerns about public safety remain high. But we now also have the X2 running 24/7, and lots of great business still in our community!

ABCA

One of the recent legislative changes that will affect H Street NE is a pair of new laws that mean moving forward cannabis shops should be 400 feet from each other and not near schools or daycares. For H Street NE, I believe what this means is that the current ‘gifting shops’ will eventually close and any shop will have a license through the agency now named the Alcohol Beverage and Cannabis Administration (ABCA). Our ANC views have ‘great weight’ with ABCA and ABCA is also the agency that enforces our current settlement agreements. Huge shout out to our Alcohol Beverage Licensing Committee for all their work in negotiating and getting those agreements in place so that we have standing as a community when and if issues arise. Thank you so much to Joe Kirsch for serving on ABL for 6A01!

Small Businesses

There are so many great opportunities for neighbors to support our small businesses. There are holiday special meals at lots of restaurants on H St NE, including Stable, Sticky Fingers, and more! Solid State Books has an event tomorrow night to swap books. They are struggling and also have a new membership program for neighbors who want to play a role in trying to keep a neighborhood bookstore on H Street NE! Our family became members!

Community Building

There are a lot of opportunities to increase public safety through community building and support our small businesses and I’m excited to see you doing just that!

Shout out to Paul Spires for gathering community members to talk about public safety at Ocean Lounge on H St NE through his Turn the Lights On initiative!

Shout out to Lauren and Joal Mendonsa (also our EDZ representative for 6A01!) for engaging kids in some supervised tagging— a great way to keep our kids out of trouble and doing productive activities. If you have a wall or fence you’d be willing to have painted by kids please email me or make a note in the comments so I can connect you!

Engaging our kids in productive activities and supporting our schools and rec centers is one of the best things we can do to support public safety. We were able to have a productive conversation with the Sherwood Rec Center and DPR about this after hearing that a child was kicked out of summer programming. We learned that the request to leave was only for a day and requested that in the future if a kid becomes a handful we have an opportunity as community volunteers to support that child in self-regulation skills and taking a break from a group as needed. If you’d like to volunteer at the Rec Center, you can email dpr.partnerships@dc.gov. Also there is yoga, line dancing, and lots of kids programming available at Sherwood Rec Center if you want to sign up for the winter session that’s already started!

Do you have great programming you are putting on to enhance public safety in and around H Street NE? If so, please plug into the efforts around H Street NE that Councilmember Allen will be leading in the New Year! Let’s pull in the same direction together!

THANK YOU to everyone I see volunteering, tutoring, gathering neighbors to go visit H Street, and otherwise helping out in our community!

Transportation Equity and Safety

Florida Ave NE

The last year of Washington Gas work on Florida Ave NE has led to a great deal of damage to homes on neighbors on Florida Ave NE, and to our commutes. ANC6A voted unanimously to support a resolution opposing ‘Project Pipes,’ which is responsible for much of the damage.

That said, the next year is still going to be tough. We now are experiencing the actual DDOT project to make Florida Ave NE safer, and we have a year left. I continue to do monthly and sometimes weekly or more frequent walks along Florida Avenue to make sure that safety violations are remedied quickly.

Huge shoutout to Pamela Hill for keeping on top of DC Water to fix a water leak that lasted nearly five days on Florida Ave NE!

Please continue to flag all dangerous issues and public space issues on Florida Ave NE here: https://floridaavene-streetscape.ddot.dc.gov/

K St NE

The bike lanes on K Street NE that we’ve been advocating for since 2019 are now in place! These are an important connection going east-west in DC and now connect to the lanes on West Virginia Ave NE. It’s particularly exciting that it will be safer to get to and from JO Wilson for all our neighbors, whether you are walking, biking, or driving, since it will calm traffic along the corridor. A handful of community members have been opposed to this project for many years due to concerns about their need to use public space for their cars due to not feeling safe parking their cars in the lots behind their homes that they access via alleys, so we will also be engaging DC agencies to improve safety in those alleys as needed.

We will also have a Transportation and Public Space Committee meeting tonight to discuss the intersection of 12th and K and Florida, which has been a safety issue for pedestrians and is also the path we have seen carjacking and gun violence assailants escape to after committing crimes.

Please hop on Zoom tonight at 7pm if you have thoughts about 12th and Florida NE and how it can be safer AND/OR want to talk about Florida Ave NE! (One tap mobile: +13017158592,,84641882316#) 

THANK YOU to everyone in our community for all that you are doing! I hope that you have a great holiday season and winter break. Get some rest, because 2024 here we come!