The aerial photo gives you a sense of current conditions at Janney. The site plan below it shows LCOR's RFP submission -- the only plan they've submitted, despite being asked twice to revise the project. LCOR refused both times (while other developers complied), but LCOR was chosen nonetheless.
Given that history, now is not the time to suspend judgment until we see LCOR's "new plan." We're not at the beginning of this process -- depending on whether you start the clock at the point when the design was originally submitted or wait until it was universally condemned, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development has had 5 -7 months to negotiate with LCOR on this project and they've gotten nowhere.
So let's look at what happens under LCOR's current proposal.
The first thing to notice is that LCOR's site plan for the school does not include the land that currently provides the school's soccer field and the eastern corner of the teacher's parking lot. All that land (draw a straight line down from the sidewalk along the school building's eastern edge, all the way to the property line) will now become a nine-story apartment building and the driveway to its 200+ space garage. Not only is that land lost to the school forever, but the eastern edge of Janney's historic building loses its natural light.
Natural light is further compromised by the design of the additions, which you can see on the site plan. The kitchen covers the windows on the first floor classroom on the SE corner of the building, while the cafeteria/library annex blocks out the south facing windows of classroms on the second floor (the ground floor is bathrooms). The cafeteria itself will presumably be windowless; the library will have windows only on the east side (in the shadow of the apartment building).
The new classroom wing creates a 30-40 foot courtyard between the southwest wing of the historic building and its own northern facade. That courtyard is envisioned as a hardscape playground. Enclosed on three sides by two- and three-story buildings, it's not going to get much sun either. Janney's third floor classroms on this wing will probably not be compromised, but natural light may be an issue for the other classrooms that face the courtyard, especially in the new building.
Noise also looks like an issue in that courtyard. Imagine trying to teach while the hardscape area is filled with kids at play. The classrooms on the south side of the new wing face similar problems -- especially the two whose windows are about seven feet from the basketball court.
The other hardscape area, east of the gym, will require its own playground supervisor -- it is completely cut off from sightlines otherwise and it abuts a driveway and loading dock. I wouldn't want to be teaching in one of the classrooms next to the driveway/loading dock either. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP every time a truck backs up.
This is the kind of design you get when the goal is to extract revenue from public land. The for-profit component of the project gets the prime real estate and the school has to make do with the leftovers. This is certainly not the campus that would be designed for Janney if DCPS could use all the land and focus exclusively on educational needs.
