Original Research by School Decision on Roosevelt Hs
Roosevelt High School sits on 13th Street NW in Washington, D.C., part of the District of Columbia Public Schools system. It is a regular public high school serving grades nine through twelve. The school's enrollment is substantial for a DCPS high school, and its student body is overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic, with only a handful of white or Asian students. This is a school where the great majority of students come from the surrounding neighborhoods of Upper Northwest and adjacent areas, and the demographic profile reflects that catchment. Data on free or reduced-price lunch eligibility was not reported, so we cannot characterize the economic mix of the student body from the available figures. The same gap exists for special-education and English-learner counts.
One pattern that stands out in the enrollment data is grade-level attrition. The ninth grade is the largest by far, and each subsequent grade shrinks, with the senior class roughly a third the size of the freshman class. This kind of decline from grade to grade can reflect transfers to other schools, students leaving the system, or retention patterns, but the data does not say which. A parent considering Roosevelt would want to ask the school directly what drives that trajectory and what supports exist to keep students enrolled through graduation.
State assessment results were not available in the data provided, so we cannot characterize how students are performing on standardized tests. Multi-year academic trend data was also absent. There is no graduation rate in the payload, no course-access catalog, no staffing breakdown, and no discipline or attendance information. These are meaningful gaps. A school with thin publicly reported data is harder to evaluate from the outside, and a family looking at Roosevelt should plan to visit and ask the school directly about academic outcomes, program offerings, and student support.
What we do know is the surrounding context. The school's zip code carries home values well above the national median and modestly above the D.C. state benchmark, with values having dipped recently. Renting is relatively more affordable than buying in this area, with monthly rents running meaningfully below what a monthly mortgage would cost at current rates. For families already in the neighborhood or those considering a move, the housing market here is expensive by national standards, though rents are less steep than purchase prices. The broader city is, as publicly reported, a federal-government-driven economy with major international institutions, a large professional workforce, and extensive transit and cultural resources. D.C.'s quadrant-based layout and neighborhood structure mean that civic life is distributed rather than concentrated in a single downtown, and schools serve as neighborhood anchors across the city.
At the district level, DCPS has implemented a new cell phone policy beginning in the 2025-2026 school year, tied to the Heads Up! Distraction-Free Learning Amendment Act, which restricts phone use during the school day across all schools. The district is also operating under a five-year strategic plan called A Capital Commitment, focused on academic success, student connectedness, and post-secondary readiness. These are district-wide initiatives that shape the environment at Roosevelt even though they are not specific to the school.
What we are left with is a large, predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood high school in an expensive part of a major city, with notable grade-to-grade attrition and a thin publicly available data profile. The school's academic performance, graduation outcomes, program offerings, and student support structures are not visible in the data we received. A parent or resident interested in Roosevelt should treat this as a starting point and go directly to the school for the information that matters most: how students are achieving, what courses and pathways are available, what keeps students enrolled through senior year, and what the school does to support the specific population it serves.
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