I have a new job. At 3 p.m. each Friday, I don a reflective yellow vest and help another volunteer move plastic barricades into place at one end of the block in front of Bancroft Elementary, our neighborhood public school. Two more volunteers manage barricades at the other end. With neighbors taking shifts, we close the block to traffic for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon each weekday so that parents can walk their children to and from school. Known as Bancroft Safe Streets, it’s a collaboration between the DC Department of Transportation, Bancroft’s parent-teacher organization, and Mt. Pleasant Village, our neighborhood association.
Families love it. Twice a day, the space in front of the school becomes a pop-up plaza where they can mingle while dropping off and picking up their children. In the afternoon, a school staffer with a walkie-talkie relays the names of children to be sent out to waiting parents: “Benjy Fuentes! Isabel Hernández! Byron González!” and so forth. Meanwhile, we stand in front of the barriers, trying to look official, and move them aside if a school bus needs to exit the block. Sometimes a city crossing guard is posted at my intersection; sometimes not. When no guard is there, I make sure cars stop so people can cross.
I used to live in a house overlooking this intersection, and I can tell you that dropoff and pickup times were chaotic. Newton Street is a commuter shortcut, and traffic would plow through crowds of parents, grandparents, and children walking to and from school. “It was an accident waiting to happen,” says John Guzmán, operations director at the school. “We had a couple of near misses.” For the volunteers – most of us close neighbors of Bancroft – it feels good to be helping the school. And we like doing something that, in a small way, helps draw this diverse and changing neighborhood together.
Cultural richness, economic inequality
Built in the nineteenth century to house federal workers, Mt. Pleasant started out almost all white and became majority Black after the Second World War. People from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and South America began arriving in that era as well, joined in the 1980s by Central Americans fleeing US-fueled wars. The 1960s and ’70s also saw young single adults, mostly white, form group houses for cooperative living. When I moved to Mt. Pleasant in 1978, it was a lively mix of Black, white, and Latino families.
Over the next few decades, the neighborhood’s brick rowhouses increasingly attracted middle-class professionals looking for close-in urban living. In 2003 a new Metro station opened a few blocks away, and property values soared. Many Black and Latino families, along with most of the group houses, were priced out. Mt. Pleasant has kept its progressive, activist, multicultural vibe, but those who can afford to buy homes here now are disproportionately white. Apartment buildings along the main arteries still house many working-class renters, some of whom have organized to acquire title to their buildings. So the neighborhood remains diverse, but economic and language differences limit interactions between the disparate communities that live here. Efforts to bring people together can and do happen, but they need to be intentional and they take work.
Bancroft Elementary is one such project. A bilingual school where all children learn in both Spanish and English, with students and teachers from many countries, Bancroft is proud of its cultural mosaic. A majority of the students are native Spanish speakers, but as the neighborhood changes, the school is attracting more and more English-speaking families who want their children to learn Spanish. This year, for the first time, Bancroft no longer qualifies for Title 1 assistance to low-income schools. (In addition to a more affluent student body, changes in how the DC school system measures eligibility for the grants were a factor.)
Schools are not immune to, and indeed reproduce, the economic and racial inequality that pervades the society. I don’t have a child at Bancroft so I can’t say what happens there, but I have no doubt that the school community is grappling with these issues. Still, there’s much to celebrate. Kids from different cultural and economic backgrounds are learning and playing together, and they’re all on a path to becoming bilingual. The other day I paused outside the schoolyard to watch Latino, Black, and white kids kick a soccer ball around, laughing and roughhousing, and I thought: there’s hope yet.
Politics is local
In Bancroft Safe Streets, our volunteer pool includes parents of children at the school as well as other neighborhood residents. There’s a mix of ages and backgrounds, but our group skews middle-class. It’s easy to see why: those of us who are retired or work from home can take time off during the day to volunteer, while house cleaners, landscapers, and construction workers cannot. Spanish speakers may perceive the Safe Streets project, which organizes through an English-language WhatsApp group, as not for them, though they’d be welcome. So the underlying divide is still there.
Still: you have to start somewhere. I can’t fix the inequalities in the neighborhood or the country, but I can help kids and parents cross the street. We get “thanks” and “gracias.” Other neighborhood residents have been tutoring Bancroft students, something I may yet try, though the kids’ arithmetic skills probably exceed my own.
Many people say volunteering is the best part of retirement, and I expect that will be true for me. My political work, such as canvassing, aims at the bigger picture, though my part is minuscule and our gains incremental. But sometimes a smaller scale feels right. If I want to work for justice and connect across cultures, where better to start than my neighborhood? To the barricades!
Watch a short video of Bancroft Safe Streets’ first day here. Thanks to Mark Simon, Rick Reinhard, Bill Emmet, and Monica Foss for photos.
Fantastic, Cathy!! I love it Local is perfect So nice you stayed in the same neighborhood ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Great blog Cathy. Thanks