The sign was quietly pawposted earlier this week: A beloved city dog park would close April 1 and remain off-limits to the pawpublic until fall 2021.

This was no early April Fool’s prank. The Shaw Dog Park, one of D.C.’s largest and busiest, will be shut down for roughly a year and half to accommodate construction on the new Banneker High School campus being built on the adjacent land, the District’s parks department confirms to DCist.

At 15,000 square feet, the fenced-in dog park occupies less than 15 percent of the 108,000-square-foot city-owned site on 11th Street NW between Rhode Island Avenue NW and R Street NW where the school will go. But in the minds of its patrons, the dog park is more important than its relative size may suggest. They say it’s a community space—a prized asset amid a developing city—for humans and canines alike.

How the closure was announced has vexed some of these park-goers, including members of the nonprofit group that keeps the park clean with volunteers and donations. The group says they were shocked by the sign and by an earlier email from a parks department staffer first notifying them of the impending shut down, which was then slated for only about a year. The email was sent Feb. 19, a day before the nonprofit’s annual meeting, notes board member Steve Oatmeyer.

It “was like a bombshell,” says Oatmeyer, who lives nearby in Logan Circle and visits the dog park a few times per week with his five-year old dog, Rumpus, a mixed-breed rescue. He adds that the group was anticipating at least part of the dog park to be temporarily closed during the school’s construction, but not for as long as a year.

Dog parks are a third tail rail of hyperlocal Washington politics. In recent years, proposed changes to existing dog parks in Columbia Heights and Chevy Chase, for example, have sparked public outrage, often with dog owners scolding local officials at community meetings. As far as the D.C. area goes, taking away someone’s dog park can be approximately as rage-inducing as taking away their parking.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation verified the authenticity of the sign, which was first reported by Popville, and said DPR was preparing a direct written response to the group. The agency manages a dozen dog parks across the city, and all of them are located west of the Anacostia River.

Oatmeyer says his group spends up to $4,000 a year to maintain the one in Shaw. (The city removes the trash.) A small fenced-in dog run that’s also situated in the neighborhood, Bundy Dog Park, is about half a mile away.

Last year, D.C. lawmakers approved moving Banneker High School from its current location in Pleasant Plains to the Shaw site. That decision came with its own controversy, including fierce debates between advocates for a Shaw middle school, who said the location was promised to them years ago, and Banneker families, who said a renovation of their well-regarded high school was long needed. More recently, there was debate about the kinds of athletic fields that would be built around the future Banneker school.

After learning of the dog park’s planned closure, the non-profit group says it asked the city to do it in phases instead of all at once, to no avail. Now, it’s calling for the District government to provide a temporary dog park nearby during the Banneker construction and to hold a “long promised” community meeting about the design of the whole site, which also includes recreation space, a skate park, and basketball courts. (Those latter two features “will remain open until further notice,” according to the posted sign.)

“We don’t know what we can do,” Oatmeyer says. “We just want to know why, if they can say ‘this is the reason why we’re going to close April 1’ and they’ll start [needing the park space] April 2. … Just let us know so we can be prepared.”

In a statement after this story was originally published, DPR Director Delano Hunter said his department “has identified a temporary dog park” at the intersection of 11th and Q streets NW, south of the skate park and basketball courts. “The site will be available starting on April 1st, when the current dog park will be temporarily closed,” he said, noting that the ad hoc dog park will be fenced and have a double-gate entrance, as the contemporary one does. DPR also is planning to host community meetings to discuss improvements for the existing dog park, Hunter added.

This story has been updated with comment from the Department of Parks and Recreation.