Perry School Community Services Center Inc

The Perry School Community Services Center (PSCSC) envisions building a community of people residing in decent housing, receiving living wage incomes, and living in clean, safe and caring communities that can provide a model of community transformation for the future. PSCSC, Inc., through a collaborative, comprehensive and integrated approach to social services, economic empowerment and youth development, eradicates poverty, its causes and consequences, resulting in positive outcomes for youth, adults and families, within the Washington, DC metropolitan area, with particular preference to its defined service area.

The Perry School was last used as a school in 1973. It was used for a while for social services by Peoples Involvement Corporation. A group from Luther Place Church also proposed to use it as a women’s shelter. The Police Boys and Girls Club had leased the school’s former gym as Boys and Girls Club No. 2. Under the urban renewal plan, the school would be demolished with open space between New York Ave. and Terrell Junior High School. One school, Simmons, was demolished. Lead by Sursum Corda, Inc. Council and John Wilson, and the ANC 2C and Religious of the Sacred Heart, and Myles Glasgow of the University Legal Services and Bill Butler, who worked at the Boys and Girls Club, people in the community sought and secured historic status for the building under the National and D.C. Registers of Historic Places as probably the first high school in the country built with public funds for African American students in 1891-92.