Since early 2023, the deputy mayor for education (DME) has been heading up work on the master facilities plan (MFP) and on school boundaries. Both sets of work have progressed—and one will have town halls this month.

MFP

Registration is here for the MFP town halls on July 12 (12 pm) and July 13 (6 pm).

The DME has touted the town halls as part of the MFP process that “will provide strategic, data-informed recommendations to ensure more students have access to modern, well-maintained facilities that meet their needs.”

Irony abounds:

As many existing DCPS schools have serious and longstanding facilities concerns, at this point it probably would be faster and cheaper to achieve the DME’s stated goal above just by ensuring DGS (the city agency in charge of DCPS facilities) does its job.

After all, even with recent updates to the PACE Act, the city’s wealthiest ward continues to be the only place where all schools have been modernized while schools elsewhere go without. (See here for the PACE legislation.)

This is no hyperbole: The stuff many DCPS schools go without is basic to the point of threatening health and safety.

(Don’t believe me? See what DCPS staff had to say on the subject of missing and nonworking door locks at a recent SHAPPE meeting. Really: how is something as basic as door locks STILL an issue?)

As this is DC, however, where love of money for education privatizing goes in many directions (including campaign coffers), expect a DME slide presentation heavy on unused space in DCPS schools of right EOTR and “access” issues for charters without a word about the many neighborhoods with schools of right that are frankly decrepit—or neighborhoods that lack any school of right.

Boundaries

The DME had intended to hold town halls for the boundaries work this month, on July 25 and July 27—but that isn’t coming to pass. Instead, town halls will be held at an as yet unspecified time in September.

That delay is not a bad thing, however.

The change of course was prompted by objections of advisory committee members during their last meeting (on June 21) to the proposed July town halls, mention of which appeared on the following slide at about the 2 hour mark of the June 21 meeting video:

It soon became apparent that the entire idea of July town halls originated with DME staff and not the advisory committee.

Not surprisingly, some committee members objected to having July town halls around issues that were not yet formulated well or completely. In fact, that June 21 advisory committee meeting made very clear a widening gulf between the DME’s priorities and those of the advisory committee.

For instance, at about the 1 hour 10 minute mark, DME planners presented data on horrible segregation in DCPS neighborhood schools—without talking about the rest of the city’s publicly funded schools, which are also notably segregated.

Later in the June 21 meeting, the same planners talked about families choosing schools that “suit their family,” implying that school choice in DC is segregation-neutral when it is hardly that.

That DME-sponsored bait and switch stood in sharp contrast to statements by some advisory committee members, who raised important but otherwise officially ignored issues, such as inequities of inputs in schools of right and the reality that schools with few white students are often judged harshly and unfairly.

Indeed, thanks to the work of the advisory committee, that group’s revised guiding principles for its boundary work resemble, well, reality!

Those revised principles linked above stand in sharp contrast to the initial guiding principles, which were created wholesale by DME staff. (See the first set of guiding principles on slide 12 of the May DME presentation here; and see here for an analysis of them.)

The next meeting of the boundaries advisory committee is July 19 at 6 pm; see here for more information.

And now a coda on DME projects in 2023:

Besides the boundaries study and the MFP, the DME is also embarked on an adequacy study, to determine adequate levels of funding for our publicly funded schools going forward. The contractors for the study recently solicited DC teachers and school administrators to serve on an advisory panel that would meet just one day, in August. (Yeah.) The same company was hired in 2019 by the DME for a study of the uniform per student funding formula, which was released in 2020.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the company doing the adequacy study had a website in 2019 that mentioned nothing about education rights. Also unsurprising: Funding for DC’s schools has not ever met the targets outlined the last time an adequacy study was conducted, 10 years ago.