WASHINGTON, D.C. — District officials opened the newly modernized J.O. Wilson Elementary School in Ward 6 on Thursday, marking the first day of pre-K at D.C. Public Schools with a ribbon-cutting for the expanded campus.
The $90.9 million project nearly doubled the school’s size, transforming its original 55,000-square-foot building into a campus of almost 100,000 square feet, according to the official announcement from the Office of the Mayor. Construction began in January 2025 and was completed this summer on an accelerated 18-month schedule.
The modernized school has 28 classrooms, including two acoustically isolated music rooms and two art rooms. New facilities also include a gym and performance stage, a turf field, a running track, indoor and outdoor basketball courts, two playgrounds, and an outdoor classroom with a vegetable garden.
Officials said the campus also features 16 works commissioned through the Department of General Services’ Percent for Art Program. The initiative reserves 1% of the cost of large construction projects for site-specific public art.
J.O. Wilson operates one of the District’s largest early-learning programs, with three pre-K3 classes, three pre-K4 classes, a mixed-age class, and an early-learning support classroom for special education. The city’s fiscal 2027 budget includes $269 million for universal pre-K.
The District said its public pre-K programs served 82% of three-year-olds and 95% of four-year-olds citywide in the 2023-24 school year, the latest year for which figures were available. Since 2015, the city has invested nearly $5 billion in D.C. Public Schools facilities, including $770 million in Ward 6 modernization projects.
Featured image: A representative file photo of a school building in Washington, D.C.; it does not depict J.O. Wilson Elementary School. Photo by Dclemens1971 via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
The Washington Herald
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Washington, D.C.
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