Original Research by School Decision on Friendship Pcs - Collegiate Academy
Friendship PCS - Collegiate Academy sits on Minnesota Avenue in Northeast Washington, serving grades nine through twelve as part of the Friendship Public Charter School network. The school's enrollment is relatively small for a DC high school, and its student body is almost entirely Black, reflecting the surrounding Ward 7 community. The school operates as a regular charter campus under Friendship PCS, which the DC Public Charter School Board unanimously renewed in mid-2023 after a mandatory review, with an amended charter agreement executed the following spring. That decision gives families some assurance that the network's fifteen campuses, including this one, will continue operating into the next charter term.
The academic picture for Collegiate Academy is unfortunately thin in the data available here. State assessment results were not provided, and no multi-year trend data was available either. A nationally standardized academic context was not included. There is no graduation rate on file. Without these measures, it is not possible to characterize how students are performing on tested subjects or how the school compares to others in the city on standard academic benchmarks. A parent considering this school would want to ask directly for recent PARCC or alternative assessment results and the school's most recent graduation and college-enrollment figures. The absence of reported results in this dataset does not by itself indicate anything about performance; it simply means the data was not available to us.
The same gap extends to several other areas a family might ask about. Free and reduced-price lunch counts were missing, so the reported economic profile of the student body is unknown. Special population data, including students with individualized education programs and English learners, was not reported. Course access information, including any AP, IB, dual-credit, or career and technical education offerings, was absent. Staffing figures, attendance patterns, and discipline data were not provided. Civil rights and outcomes data was empty as well. These are the kinds of details a parent should request from the school directly, since they shape day-to-day experience as much as test scores do.
What is available is the broader network context. Friendship PCS has gone through some structural changes in recent years. The network acquired the former Hope Community PCS campus in the 2021-22 school year and absorbed its students into Friendship's Ideal Elementary campus. Around the same period, Friendship closed its Technology Preparatory Middle campus, consolidating those students into other campuses. These shifts do not directly affect Collegiate Academy, but they speak to a network that has been actively reshaping its footprint, which can matter for families thinking about long-term stability and feeder patterns.
The housing market around the school tells its own story. Home values in the 20019 zip code, based on the available housing data, sit well below the District of Columbia benchmark and are roughly in line with national figures. That gap reflects the broader pattern of east-of-the-river neighborhoods, where housing has historically been more affordable than in Northwest DC or the downtown core. Recent values have declined year over year, a steeper drop than the citywide trend, which has softened more modestly. Rents in the area have edged up slightly, remaining far below what families would pay in much of the city. For families weighing where to live relative to the school, the area offers a meaningfully more affordable entry point than most of DC, though the recent value decline is worth noting.
Washington itself is, of course, the federal capital, a city built around government, international institutions, and a vast network of associations and lobbying firms concentrated on K Street. The monumental core stretches from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, and the city's L'Enfant Plan, with its diagonal avenues and traffic circles, creates a distinctive urban fabric across its many neighborhoods. Ward 7, where Collegiate Academy sits, sits east of the Anacostia River and has a different feel from the downtown core, with more residential blocks and less of the monumental density that defines central DC. The school's location places it in a part of the city that has historically had fewer amenities and lower housing costs than areas west of the river, but one with deep community ties.
For a family weighing this school, the honest summary is that the available data does not go very far. We know it is a small, nearly entirely Black charter high school in a network that has secured its charter for the coming term, in a part of DC where housing is relatively affordable. What we do not know from this dataset, the school itself can and should supply.
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