Ten zoned DCPS high schools, the feeder pyramids beneath them, and the District tool that settles any specific address — current as of August 2026.
District of Columbia Public Schools is the city's one geographically zoned public school system, and DCPS states that every home address has an assigned elementary school, middle school and high school, with a guaranteed right to enroll in grades K through 12. What that assignment is depends on the address, not on the neighbourhood name, the ZIP code or the school field on a listing sheet. This page names the schools as of August 2026 and says where the lines fall. It does not rate, rank or compare any of them. Which school serves an address is a fact a buyer needs; judging that school is not a broker's job.
Attendance boundaries change. The district's own locator is the authority — not a listing, and not this page.
DCPS — Find Your In-Boundary School (enter any DC address) →DCPS operates ten by-right high schools — ten high schools an address can be assigned to: Jackson-Reed, John R. Thompson Jr. (renamed from MacArthur in 2026), Coolidge, Roosevelt, Cardozo, Dunbar, Eastern, H.D. Woodson, Anacostia and Ballou. Each anchors a published feeder pattern. Deal Middle School feeds Jackson-Reed; Hardy feeds Thompson; Ida B. Wells feeds Coolidge; MacFarland feeds Roosevelt; Columbia Heights Education Campus and John Francis Education Campus feed Cardozo; Brookland and McKinley feed Dunbar; Eliot-Hine, Jefferson Middle School Academy and Stuart-Hobson feed Eastern; Kelly Miller feeds Woodson; Kramer and Sousa feed Anacostia; Hart and Johnson feed Ballou. Elementary schools sit beneath those. Janney, Lafayette, Murch, Hearst, Shepherd and Bancroft feed Deal, with Oyster-Adams running PK4 through 8 on its own; Eaton, Hyde-Addison, Key, Mann and Stoddert feed Hardy; Whittier, Brightwood, LaSalle-Backus and Takoma feed Ida B. Wells. The complete list, about seventy schools, is in the SY26-27 feeder pattern document dated 21 April 2026.
Three features do real work, and the District's own GIS boundary layer confirms them. Sixteenth Street NW is a genuine dividing line for much of its length: walking north, the high school assignment is Cardozo, then Roosevelt from about Newton Street NW, then Coolidge from about Madison Street NW, then Jackson-Reed again from about Alaska Avenue NW up through Shepherd Park. Georgia Avenue NW runs a similar sequence a mile east — Cardozo to roughly Lamont Street NW, Roosevelt to roughly Nicholson Street NW, Coolidge north of that. Rock Creek Park is the second, separating Jackson-Reed on the west from Roosevelt on the east at Beach Drive NW. But the park is not the whole story, and this is the detail a listing sheet will never carry: Mount Pleasant sits east of the park and is still Jackson-Reed, in a pocket bounded by the park, 16th Street NW and Piney Branch Parkway NW. Third, the Anacostia River divides Eastern, which holds Capitol Hill and Kingman Park on the west bank, from Woodson and Anacostia on the east. Elsewhere there is no landmark at all: the Jackson-Reed and Thompson line through Cleveland Park changes sides block by block around Quebec Street and Connecticut Avenue NW, and only the address answers the question.
Two separate things are in play. The in-boundary right attaches to the address and covers grades K through 12. A feeder right attaches instead to the school a student already attends, and operates only in transition years — fifth grade to middle school, eighth grade to high school, or the terminal grade of an education campus to high school. DCPS notes that geographic feeder rights extend to students who entered out-of-boundary through the lottery, but not to students who enrol in-boundary and then move away. Some patterns carry an explicit alternative: fifth graders at Leckie Education Campus may enrol at Hart Middle School, and eighth graders at Kelly Miller may enrol at Eastern rather than Woodson. Programme pathways run alongside. Dual language students at Bancroft, Bruce-Monroe, Cleveland, Houston, Marie Reed, Powell, Shirley Chisholm and Oyster-Adams continue through MacFarland or Columbia Heights Education Campus into the Roosevelt dual language programme. McKinley Middle School students have a right to H.D. Woodson through the STEM pathway. Langdon and Nalle Montessori students continue at Capitol Hill Montessori @ Logan. Everything else is application-only through the My School DC lottery: Banneker, School Without Walls, Duke Ellington, McKinley Technology, Phelps ACE, Bard Early College, Anacostia Early College, and the Early College Academy at Coolidge. Ron Brown College Preparatory is citywide with no boundary. Public charter schools are separate education agencies with no attendance boundaries at all, entered through the same lottery. PK3 and PK4 are not a right; an in-boundary applicant receives a preference, not a seat.
DCPS runs an address lookup at enrolldcps.dc.gov/node/41. Enter a street address and it returns the assigned elementary, middle and high school. My School DC operates a companion tool at find.myschooldc.org that searches by address, grade and programme type and covers charter schools as well. Both were checked in August 2026. Use them rather than any third-party map, this page included. Boundaries are redrawn, feeder patterns amended, schools renamed and grade configurations phased in and out; a page written in August 2026 begins ageing the day it is published. The locator is regenerated from the District's live boundary file. Where the two disagree, the locator is right.
The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education ran a boundary and student assignment study through 2023 and 2024, and the Mayor approved the recommendations in June 2024. Implementation began in 2025-26. The Amidon-Bowen and Van Ness elementary boundary shifted, as did the Malcolm X and Turner boundary. Ross and Thomson households now hold feeder rights solely to John Francis Education Campus, and Cleveland, Garrison and Seaton households hold a temporary right to Francis until a new middle school opens. That school is being built at 800 Euclid Street NW, scheduled to open in August 2028 with a sixth grade only in its first year. Cardozo is shedding its middle grades in step: it stopped taking a new sixth grade in 2025-26, is listed as an 8-12 school for 2026-27, and is to serve grades 9 through 12 from 2027-28. MacArthur High School reopened as John R. Thompson Jr. High School on the first day of school, 24 August 2026, after an expansion raising capacity to about 800 students. Three elementary schools carry new names older listing data will not have: Aiton is now Lorraine H. Whitlock, Tyler is now Shirley Chisholm and West is now John Lewis. DCPS calls the implementation plan a living document, updated on a rolling basis.
Check the specific address, not the neighbourhood. The Mount Pleasant pocket and the block-by-block line through Cleveland Park exist precisely because neighbourhood names do not track attendance zones. Run the address through the DCPS locator yourself, save the result, and run it again before you go under contract if time has passed. Treat the school field on a listing as unverified: it is entered by hand, warranted by no one, and often a year or more out of date, particularly after a rename or a boundary amendment. If a specific assignment is material to your decision, say so in writing early and confirm it with the DCPS enrolment team. One thing I will not do is tell you whether a school is any good. School ratings track neighbourhood demographics closely, and a licensed broker steering buyers by school quality is among the most documented fair-housing violations there is. Naming which school serves an address is factual and useful, so this page does that and stops there.
More on the area in the Washington, DC guide.
School assignment turns on the address, not the neighbourhood, and a listing's school field is unverified. Artur can confirm it against the district record before you write.
