Two years ago, leaders at Center City Public Charter School’s Congress Heights campus in D.C. decided to offer more advanced math classes to some of their oldest students.

The choice was complicated, and some educators wondered whether the kids would be ready.

To prepare for the possible change, Principal Niya White and her team visited high schools, both nearby and farther away, to see how algebra was being taught.

In some classrooms, White would see former students sleeping in the back. They were bored or had already finished their work.

For White, that made the choice clear — in order to set students up for success, they needed to expand their offerings so kids felt challenged and engaged by the time they reached high school.

“I’m born and raised here,” White said. “I was given the option of whether to leave Southeast D.C., leave D.C., go off to do things and come back. There are a lot of folks and a lot of students or a lot of families that don’t ever get that option. They’ve got to have it.”

Now, the Southeast D.C. campus is offering pre-algebra to seventh graders and algebra to eighth graders. In the 2024-25 school year, 70% of eighth graders at the school either met or exceeded expectations on the citywide standardized math test.

Education news outlet The 74 first reported that’s a stronger mark than the 64% of eighth graders who met or exceeded expectations in Ward 3. Only one-fourth of all D.C. students did the same.

Jessi Mericola, who teaches seventh and eighth grade math, was one of the educators who considered whether students were ready to make such a significant leap.

Initially, half of the rising eighth graders did an accelerated seventh grade curriculum, and then attended summer school to finish the curriculum so they could take algebra in eighth grade.

This year, for the first time, all of seventh grade is being accelerated so next year, “all of our students will be doing algebra,” Mericola said.

“We found that if we tell them they’re ready for it, they believe you, and they want to meet that expectation,” Mericola said.

Each class has about 20 students, with the largest in the school at 26, she said. Classes are divided into sections. There’s an individual review on a recently learned concept, a small group review on something from earlier in the year and then a full group lesson.

Mericola co-teaches with a colleague, and even if a student is struggling to grasp an idea, “we come back and reteach things from before that maybe you missed it the first time, but you catch it the second time; and if you miss it the second time, you catch it the third time.”

It’s an approach, White said, comes from avoiding the assumption that “we can’t move a child forward because of something or one of the things they haven’t mastered yet.”

Eighth grader Kennedy Morse said math was a struggle before she got to the Congress Heights campus, but now, it’s become one of her strongest subjects.

She’s gained confidence from tutoring help and being able to ask questions without judgment.

“It was really shocking for me to be on a higher level,” Morse said. “It was hard. It was hard at first.”

Leonard White had a similar experience.

“I’m actually glad that they can believe in me to do the harder work in these classes,” White said.

While getting access to more advanced math classes at a younger age could help students take more rigorous courses in high school and college, Principal White said with any change, the focus is helping “show them all the possibilities and help them make the choice for themselves, versus it being forced upon them.”

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The former owners of the Washington Commanders will pay the District of Columbia $1 million to resolve a 2022 lawsuit that alleged the NFL franchise misled its fans regarding the team’s toxic and abusive workplace culture in order to protect the its brand.

Dan Snyder still owned the team at the time, and as D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb announced the settlement Monday, he praised the new owners for rectifying internal issues, including accusations of rampant sexual assault and harassment.

“The Commanders’ current owners have commendably opened a new chapter in the team’s history, committing to ensure all employees are protected from abuse and treated with dignity,” Schwalb said. “I want to thank the victims for coming forward to tell their stories — without their bravery, none of this would have come to light.”

A group led by Josh Harris purchased the Commanders in 2023 from Snyder, who had faced pressure to sell the team after a series of scandals and decades of perceivable mediocrity on the field.

Since then, new ownership has strengthened the team’s human resources department and implemented an anti-harassment policy and an investigation protocol for complaints of misconduct, Schwalb’s office said in a news release.

Under the agreement, the team will maintain those reforms, along with paying $1 million to D.C.

The NFL separately fined Snyder $60 million in 2023 after its own investigation concluded that he personally engaged in multiple forms of misconduct, including sexual harassment.

D.C.’s suit accused Snyder and the team of misleading the public about what they knew regarding the hostile work environment and Snyder’s role in creating it.

The Commanders and Snyder deny all the allegations and are not admitting wrongdoing by reaching a resolution, according to the terms of the settlement.

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Developing a regional solution to enable all local water companies to share drinking water in the event of a future Potomac River emergency remains a long-term challenge facing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But the Corps is leaning-in to near term solutions, for now, because current issues “are quite, quite dire.”

In an interview with WTOP, Trevor Cyran, Chief of the Civil Works project management office of the Baltimore District Corps of Engineers, elaborated on the Corps’ ongoing three-year feasibility study funded by Congress and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

Last week, during a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing, lawmakers pressed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to explain what’s being done to secure solid backup options for the D.C. region’s drinking water.

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton challenged the Corps after learning that the study that Congress authorized to identify a secondary water source for the region was being narrowed to only expanding the current Dalecarlia Reservoir, adjacent to the Washington Aqueduct, which remains the only source of drinking water for D.C., Arlington, and parts of Fairfax County, Virginia.

“Expansion of the reservoir is not a secondary water source,” Norton said. “With only a one day of backup water supply, human-made or natural events that make the river unusable would put residents, the District government and the regional economy at risk.”

Cyran said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doesn’t disagree.

“We’re trying to find a quick win that addresses some of the near-term issues, because they are quite, quite dire,” Cyran said. “The Dalecarlia expansion would add approximately 12 hours of water storage into the system,” he said. “So, while we know that doesn’t fix the problem, it improves the situation.”

Recently, drinking water in D.C., Northern Virginia and Maryland has remained safe because the January collapse of a portion of the aging Potomac Interceptor regional sewer line happened downstream of the main Potomac River water intake serving the Washington Aqueduct.

“We’ve moved forward with the Dalecarlia expansion, as our most probable recommendation,” said Cyran. “The Corps is laser focused on delivering something right here, right now that can actually help with the issue, while still exploring some of those long term solutions.”

Cyran said the dangers to public health and the economy are substantial, with the Potomac as the sole drinking water source. “It’s not a great situation — we’ve seen a very real risk come to fruition recently, with the spill.”

While drinking water has been unaffected by the spill, the advisory for the public to avoid contact with the Potomac River remains in effect in the District and Montgomery County, where the Potomac Interceptor spill happened, along the Clara Barton Parkway.

The advisory is expected to be lifted Monday, by the D.C. Department of Health, as E. coli levels have recently returned to the typical range for D.C.’s rivers.  The District’s Department of Energy and Environment is now doing daily testing of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.

How would increased storage at Dalecarlia Reservoir look?

According to the Army Corps, expanding the Reservoir over 54 available acres would provide approximately 70 million gallons per day, doubling the capacity at Dalecarlia. Since the land is already owned by the Washington Aqueduct, it would not require acquiring any land.

Cyran said it’s not yet certain whether the expansion would provide an extra 12 hours of storage of raw water from the Potomac, or finished water, after it had gone through the Washington Aqueduct’s water purification process.

Regardless, either option would result in the Aqueduct having more water on hand, if drawing water from the Potomac was suddenly unsafe.

Another near-term option that wouldn’t require land acquisition would be advanced treatment, Cyran said.

“We could implement something that allows us to treat for a wider array of contaminants, if you had a spill,” said Cyran, although noting the recent spill from the Potomac Interceptor, which poured approximately 240 millions of raw sewage into the Potomac, “might not be a good example” of how the technology would work.

The Army Corps list of possible solutions includes reusing water. In November 2025, DC Water outlined its own plans to recycle water from the utility’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest of its kind in the world.

Quarry storage cannot happen quickly

During its ongoing study, the Army Corps has identified possible long term regional solutions, including the potential use of the Travilah Quarry in Montgomery County, Maryland, and two quarries in Loudoun County, Virginia, owned by Luck Stone.

10 years ago, in December 2016, WTOP first reported that the Travilah Quarry, located on Piney Meetinghouse Road in Rockville, was quietly being considered by DC Water, WSSC Water, and Fairfax Water, as an alternative source of water, if the Potomac River were unavailable.

“The three utilities, and the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, along with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments have been working over the last several years to look at alternatives to get better interdependencies, to have more resilience in our system,” said Tom Jacobus in 2016, while he was general manager of the Aqueduct.

Now, a decade later, the logistical, real estate, and financial challenges of obtaining a quarry which could be interconnected between DC Water, WSSC Water, and Fairfax Water remain.

“We’re not saying they can never happen, we’re just saying they cannot, in any way, shape, or form, happen quickly,” said Cyran. “Travilah is still an active quarry, so that can’t even be considered for storage until they’re done mining, which might be 30 years from now.”

The Dalecarlia Reservoir expansion would not be regional solution, Cyran said.

“That would only benefit folks who are tied directly to the Aqueduct at this time,” he said. “However, while we’re going to be looking at other alternatives that we could potentially spin off and continue to look at, that would address some of those more regional issues.”

‘We can’t hand half-baked ideas to Congress’

While an interconnected, resilient system, that could provide additional water sources and storage to DC Water, WSSC Water, and Fairfax Water would be optimal, Cyran said the Corps is limited by a Congressional paradigm that limits its feasibility study to four years and five million dollars.

“We can’t hand half-baked ideas to Congress,” Cyran said.

With the Corps’ current focus of implementing near-term improvements, quickly, the agency will continue to use its expertise to envision a more resilient, long term solution.

“We are committed to looking at this issue and try to explore some regional solutions, within the paradigms of the legislation that we have to operate within,” said Cyran. “If Congress wants to consider something else to expand our authority, we could maybe look at a bigger solution, with more time and money.”

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