Their architect’s plans for a new Wilson figured into the actual renovation.Some lament that Wilson, in white Ward 3, gets special treatment, along with other neighborhood schools.Back in 2004, Koczela and many others, such as Ginny Callanen, started to draw up Wilson renovation plans.Why shouldn’t middle-class residents in Upper Caucasia — who contribute by far the most taxes to D. ”We hope it will be a monument for the next 50 years,” he says. With the magnificent new structure, totally worth the $124 million, Wilson is poised to become one of the best high schools in the region. Wilson is fully integrated, with more blacks than whites. Balderdash.com.It took a community to create the new Wilson.
Among the grinning politicians walking and talking Thursday, you might have seen Wilson alum Jack Koczela, a retired real estate executive whose full-time, volunteer job has been to rehabilitate Wilson, where he sent his two children.Memo to middle-class families struggling to afford private school at $30,000 a year: Take a YouTube tour of the new Wilson. Consider switching Suzy or Jamal from Sidwell Friends School to Wilson. Better yet, visit the campus. Koczela also spent years lobbying and testifying before Congress to get the feds to pay for new schools across the District.Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. high schools that opened to fresh construction this week. If you had been in the old gym, with its filthy lockers, wobbly aluminum pipe floors and fluorescent bulbs that beamed green light, you might understand their glee, or relief.C. Principal Pete Cahall is in control. Wilson came after Eastern, Phelps, McKinley, Woodson and Luke Moore. Yes, we have great elementary schools, too. So they raised funds, formed the Wilson Management Corporation, studied options and floated the idea of turning Wilson into a charter school. Our kids took the wild but rewarding ride through the city’s largest public high school, which this fall might accept 1,700 students. Same for the nearby, rebuilt Alice Deal Middle School, which matches up against the best in the region, public or private. That squeezed an agreement to rebuild from the city, along with some money. Talk to Cahall. Parent activists have been lobbying for a better school for decades.As the bevy of politicians and activists toured the brand new Wilson High Thursday aluminum deep-processing morning — from the glass-topped atrium, through the pitch-perfect auditorium to the world-class gym — students in the gym broke into applause.