Original Research by School Decision on Washington Latin Pcs - Upper School
WashingtonLatin PCS Upper School is a public charter high school serving grades nine through twelve in the Brightwood area of Northwest Washington, D.C. It is the upper-grade arm of Washington Latin Public Charter School, a network built around a classical, liberal-arts model that the organization describes as blending classical traditions with a modern approach. The upper school campus sits on Second Street NW, inside the zip code that spans the upper northwest corner of the District.
The school is small for a high school, with an enrollment that fills roughly evenly across the four grade levels. Its student body reflects a degree of racial balance that is uncommon in D.C. schools: white students and Black students each make up close to two-fifths of enrollment, with Hispanic students and students of two or more races accounting for most of the remainder. A small share of students are Asian. Whether the school reports free-or-reduced-price lunch data, special-education enrollment through individualized education programs, or English-learner counts, those figures were not available in the data we received, so we cannot characterize the school's economic composition or its served special populations from the information at hand. A parent may want to ask the school directly for these details.
Academic performance data was not available. State assessment results, multi-year academic trends, and graduation rate figures were all missing from the data provided. The same is true for program offerings, course access, staffing levels, attendance patterns, and discipline records. We looked for the school's strategic priorities and found little, so we left that out rather than guess. Civil-rights and outcomes data was also empty. This means a parent would need to go directly to the school and to the D.C. Public Charter School Board for current test results, graduation outcomes, and program specifics.
What the data does show clearly is the school's growth context. Washington Latin opened its second campus, the Anna Julia Cooper Campus, in 2022, expanding from a single-campus operation to a two-campus network. The Cooper Campus is growing one grade per year and will reach a full grades five-through-twelve configuration by the 2028-29 school year. This expansion roughly doubles the number of seats available through the MySchoolDC lottery for families seeking a classical charter education, and it created a second geographic access point in Ward 5. The DC Public Charter School Board unanimously approved a charter amendment designating a permanent site for the Cooper Campus, with occupancy beginning in the 2025-2026 school year. The campus moved from a temporary location in the Edgewood neighborhood to a reimagined permanent campus on the grounds of a former monastery and the former Kirov Academy of Ballet. For families considering the upper school on Second Street NW, this network growth signals an organization in an active expansion phase, with long-term site commitments now in place for the newer campus.
The housing market around the upper school reflects the broader D.C. context. Home values in the school's zip code sit above the District's median and well above the national median, with a modest year-over-year decline. Rents in the area are also above the national benchmark and have risen slightly over the past year. The broader economic environment includes a thirty-year fixed mortgage rate that has been hovering in the mid-six-percent range, which shapes affordability for families considering buying in the area. The national unemployment rate has remained in the low-four-percent range, and real median household income has been climbing gradually.
Washington, D.C. itself is a federally driven city where government employment dominates the labor market, supplemented by embassies, international organizations, think tanks, and lobbying firms. The city is built on the L'Enfant Plan, with broad diagonal avenues radiating from circles and squares across a grid, and the National Mall serving as a central pedestrian axis. Schools and local institutions are distributed across the city's neighborhoods rather than concentrated in a single downtown core. The upper school's location in Northwest D.C. places it in a residential part of the city with access to the broader transit network.
For a parent weighing this school, the available data paints a picture of a small, racially diverse charter high school within a growing two-campus network committed to a classical liberal-arts mission. The gaps in publicly available academic and program data are substantial, though, and a family would want to fill them by contacting the school and reviewing DC PCSB reports before making a decision.
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