President's Message

By Eric Langenbacher, president@burleith.org

It’s finally happening—Burleith children are moving from Stoddert Elementary School to Hyde-Addison. Last week I spoke to representatives at Hyde-Addison, and at the February 4 ANC 2E meeting representatives from DCPS and the project team made a presentation about the progress of the renovation. It does seem that they will finish the renovation as planned for an August 2019 opening and that Burleith children will attend Hyde-Addison as their in-boundary school—unless they are already at Stoddert (or have siblings there).

(Click for FAQs about the boundary change that DCPS distributed at the ANC meeting, the Hyde-Addison modernization web page, and info on registration for new families (which is happening now).

I was a Stoddert parent to two boys (Adam and Max) who attended from 2002–12. My wife, Kay, was the Stoddert PTA co-president for two years (before it became a PTO) back in the day. She also worked in the aftercare program until 2017. We were involved in various ways with Stoddert for 15 years and vividly remember the “old Stoddert”—in fact, I still have several plants in my yard that were once part of the Stoddert garden near the current playground. We lived through the big renovation, and there are several commemorative bricks near the entrance to the school that we had donated in conjunction with that effort.

I bring this up because Burleith families have sent their children to Stoddert since the 1970s—about 45 years. In fact, after the local school here was closed and after an experiment with a six-school complex, Burleith chose to be exclusively in Stoddert’s boundary in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

I'm sure many other families have similar fond memories of this great school that was the first to educate their children. My wife and I met our best friends through our kids who attended the school—and our boys also have life-long friends from the school. I would also add that a large majority of Burleith neighbors wanted to stay in the Stoddert boundary—and we also advocated for this in front of DCPS actors as much as we could.

That said, we are now looking to the future and the state-of-the-art facilities that we will have at Hyde-Addison. I think we in Burleith are really excited about the new Hyde-Addison and forging a community school with our great neighbors in Georgetown.

But, at this moment, many families in Burleith are nostalgic about this rather big change given our neighborhood's long history and investment with Stoddert. Many of us are wistful, perhaps even a bit emotional about all of this.

Please feel free to use the comment section below to share your family's memories of Stoddert and what it has meant to you. (Comments may be made anonymously and without an email address.)