Tonight and tomorrow evening (November 7 and 8), the deputy mayor for education (DME) will hold public meetings for communities around Bancroft and HD Cooke elementaries. (See here and here for more information and to register for the virtual meetings.)

Just don’t expect to know any details beyond the fact of these meetings entailing something relating to the master facilities plan (MFP) and/or the boundary process. Moreover, while the DME’s website advertises these meetings as only for Bancroft, H.D. Cooke’s November 3 school newsletter indicates that the meetings are for both school communities.

Indeed, what the DME’s website doesn’t say about these school-specific meetings could fill a book:

–Despite announcing on multiple occasions that they would be meeting with specific schools around boundary and/or facilities issues, the DME’s people have not been open about the what, when, who, and why of those conversations. For instance, the website linked above (ostensibly on meetings with specific schools communities) mentions as of this blog post (see a screenshot here) only a meeting with Bancroft. In fact, it is unclear whether even members of the advisory committee on boundaries know all the details about these proposed meetings.

–That said, the first public inkling of some of those details came at the end of the October 24 boundary advisory committee meeting (specifically, at the 1 hour, 3 minute mark on the video here). That was when Jennifer Comey, the lead DME staffer on the MFP and boundary work, hurriedly said that the school-specific meetings would be with Bancroft, Cooke, Payne, Turner, Military Road, Cardozo, Brightwood, Malcolm X, and Peabody and Watkins. The stated reason was that these (and other, as yet publicly unidentified) schools are “facing specific challenges that we [the advisory committee] are trying to solve.” (Good luck parsing what that actually means.)

–But the first clue about all of this came a month earlier, at the September 14 boundary advisory committee meeting. At the 1 hour, 47 minute mark of that meeting’s video, during the reporting out of individual discussion groups, a committee member noted that their group had discussed revisiting “that Stuart-Hobson/Cluster boundary situation,” with the clear implication that this boundary is problematic in some way.

Since Peabody and Watkins (remember: both were mentioned at the October 24 meeting for boundary/facility meetings with specific school communities) are part of the Cluster and feed into Stuart-Hobson, it was apparent as early as September 14 that something about the Cluster boundary was problematic to advisory committee members.

–But what was problematic? That was not publicly revealed at any time!

In fact, the advisory group’s conclusion was based on information that had been given to individual advisory committee members ahead of their discussions at that September meeting. As you can hear at minute 36 of the September 14 recording linked above, the information advisory committee members were given was on capacities, feeders, and related data for the schools each group would be discussing.

Yet the only thing shown visibly on the video of the September 14 boundary advisory committee meeting was the DME’s slide presentation that mentioned none of that. Worse, none of the data and research passed to advisory committee members at that meeting is delineated publicly anywhere. (Believe me, I tried.)

All of this means that not only did the advisory committee arrive at conclusions based on publicly unknown (and potentially publicly unavailable) data and information, but that the DME is setting up meetings to act on those conclusions without informing the public that 1. it is setting up meetings with specific DCPS school communities based on 2. publicly unseen (and potentially publicly unknown) data for 3. publicly unstated reasons!

Notwithstanding that this withholding of rather basic information makes a mockery of public processes, it also means that the DME is literally hiding from public view every single data point and every single rationale for every single discussion about that data!

That in turn suggests that the DME already has a plan for both facilities as well as boundaries. It’s just that this plan isn’t being shared publicly (and possibly not even with the DME’s own boundary advisory committee) because it likely involves ugly things like DCPS closures.

A pathetic public track record

Yet squelching data and information around upcoming (and possibly already concluded) school meetings is hardly the first or only example of the manipulation of public process around the boundary and MFP work.

Consider that the DME held two town halls for the boundary process in September and two town halls for the MFP in October.

The feedback from the September boundary town halls (through public “mentimeter” reports) is as of this blog post publicly unavailable, though it can be viewed (quickly!) through the meeting recordings. Public feedback recorded for the October MFP town halls is also embedded in the recordings of the meetings and not separated out.

Despite what was promised on the DME’s own website about them, the October MFP town halls had no draft recommendations. Rather, three goals appeared to stand in for “recommendations” as well as a number of challenges, including over- and underutilization and lack of swing space—but only for DCPS.

By comparison, at this point in the boundaries work a decade ago, several iterations of draft boundaries were being circulated for public comment. But we have none right now—and will now have very little time to discuss any as the boundaries work is set to conclude in February.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the September 14 and October 24 boundary advisory committee meetings also obscured information from the public.

If you watch the videos of those meetings, for example, you know that stuff happens in the room(s) where members meet—but the videos don’t show any of it because the only thing that can be viewed in those videos is the DME’s slide presentations.

So it is that when DME staff mention in these meetings “this spreadsheet” or “these documents,” those things are invisible to anyone in the public who isn’t literally in that room. Not to mention that some committee members can hardly be heard on the recordings (although they are clearly heard in the room, because their comments are never restated by DME staff).

Then, too, speakers are not always identified, so unless you know who is speaking (or are in the room while they speak), you often cannot know who is saying what. At least the public can be in the room with the advisory committee—but the DME’s own website says that space is limited so it’s best to use the livestream. (Heads, we win; tails, you lose.)

The great charter silence

Perhaps the oddest part of all of the DME’s boundary and MFP work to date is how it ignores the schools that educate nearly 50% of DC students.

The most glaring example is that there has been no factoring of charter school issues in any MFP discussions. Even in boundary discussions, any discussion of facilities is all DCPS all the time, even when a host of former DCPS schools still owned by DC are being used by charters and were built as neighborhood schools. Perhaps predictably, the September boundary town halls featured enrollment issues in DCPS immediately and inextricably connected to facilities, while discussions about programming had no sector-specificity.

To be sure, there doesn’t appear to be any recent, publicly available information about charter utilization rates. In fact, one of the DME presenters said at the October 24 boundary advisory committee meeting (at minute 16) that charter capacity is self-reported. It also has not been publicly released as far as I know, highlighting the weirdness in the DME’s insistence that the boundary process—which statutorily has nothing to do with charters—take into account charter schools, which the MFP process all but ignores.

Then there are the odd ways in which facts are presented by the DME.

For instance, the DME’s presentations at all public meetings thus far for both the MFP and boundary work have represented underutilized DCPS facilities as something teetering between a drain on finances and a golden opportunity.

But if any of that is the case, the DME cannot honestly also pretend that an underutilized charter facility is simply unconnected to any of it.

That is because all DC charters schools are mainly, if not exclusively, being funded by DC taxpayer money. More importantly for this work, unlike all DCPS schools of right, DC charter schools have no obligation to the public to take in all students at all times.

So it is that the most basic functionality to the public of charter schools is always less than that of DCPS schools of right.

Indeed, the only obligation DC charter schools have is fiscal, to their (private) boards that head their (private) nonprofits. Educating DC students is not their prime directive—it is simply part of their business model, which for some charters also includes the roles of subletting landlord and/or property owner.

So it is that the DME has apparently concluded that if a DC charter school’s business model says the facility they use as a school need not be filled to capacity or have classrooms with windows or have a science lab or library or gym or music room or even door locks, that is the way it is, world without end, amen. Thus, there’s no way to get in on underutilized charters because they are always perfectly used according to some (publicly unseen and unknown) analysis that the DME has seemingly accepted as Truth.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the MFP town halls in October presented scenarios for how to use extra space in DCPS with nary a peep about extra space in charters—even in buildings owned by DC, which presumably are known to DC planners. And all the goals and challenges articulated by the DME were about utilization in DCPS, even as lack of swing space remains an abiding (and unaddressed) challenge.

That a study about DC school facilities is exclusively focused on schools that only half our students attend while a boundary study (remember: in a process statutorily ONLY about DCPS) focuses on all publicly funded schools underscores the depth of public deception here.

So as DME presenters have maintained that DC’s school landscape is all one “ecosystem,” they have simultaneously been silent on related and relevant issues, like using charters for swing space; using charters for overflow issues; partnership opportunities for DCPS in DC-owned charter buildings; and protecting students in poorly modernized (or frankly untouched or otherwise ungainly) charter facilities. And even as DME personnel insist on including charters in the boundary process, they have been silent about established feeders in the charter sector, like the five charter middle schools that a search of waitlist data shows send hundreds of students every year to DCI’s high school.

Instead, DME programming for meetings about the MFP is nearly all about DCPS, including class size standards and capital spending and prioritizing. (For a good example of this, check out the “next steps” slide at the end of the October 4 town hall, shown at the 1 hour, 30 minute mark of the video. It’s all about uniting work on the MFP and boundary process—but only for DCPS.)

Ironically, all of this contradicts MFP goals, one of which is to ensure every student is in a modern state of the art facility. Why ignore the buildings where nearly 50% of DC students learn? Ditto for the MFP goal of well-maintained facilities for all students. How are you to ensure this for the schools that nearly 50% of DC kids attend when no one knows what the choices those schools are making regarding maintenance?

The DME is ostensibly in charge of all our publicly funded schools—but has no way and no apparent desire to understand what a charter school’s facility represents in terms of spending. There is also no way to tie it to any facilities money that DC taxpayers grant charters because those schools have no obligation to tell anyone what they do with the more than $100 million they are granted by DC for this purpose every year.

Now this accounting could be done, of course—but that requires political will to act on behalf of all students.

(Tell me again: who is the beneficiary of charter lobbying?)

Because there’s no accounting of DC charter facility expenditures, no one in DC can know whether what was spent was a good investment overall. Think about a charter that gets a renovation—then closes or is sold. That’s money that taxpayers are not realizing—and a school facility going to waste. How much or how often, however, are completely unexamined.

And in this vacuum of information, the DME blithely forges ahead.

Excluding the public while pretending to include the public

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the boundary and MFP processes thus far has been how public interest is sidestepped consistently by the DME.

Consider that at the September 14 boundary advisory committee meeting, member Marla Dean asked if anyone took into account the effects of the last boundary changes on existing schools. Dean was told no and the group moved on.

But that doesn’t mean there were no effects—or that those effects have gone away or do not matter. Some students, for instance, have horrible commutes as a result of decisions made during that boundary process, including closures. That is relevant for the work now.

But not to the DME.

In a similar manner, there were these slides from the October boundary advisory committee meeting presentation:

–Slide 8 showed who attended the September boundary town halls, with the wards with the most children (7 & 8) having a very small fraction of all attendees.

–Slide 10 (presented at minute 13 of the meeting video) showed “key updates” from the MFP, ironically underscoring the sheer lack of information shared, whether meetings with specific school communities on the MFP and boundary processes (and what those communities want) and what coordination with the office of planning will look like, given that that agency was wildly inaccurate about population predictions.

–The last slide (appendix) showing the “housing pipeline” actively obscures the realities of housing in DC, as development alone tells you nothing about WHO is living where. Worse, without affordability controls, families who are not rich will not be locating in these newly developed places, so the population of children attending public schools in those areas will necessarily be reduced because wealthier families opt in larger percentages for private schools.

It’s not like the public doesn’t see through this.

At the 35-minute mark of the September 26 boundary town hall, for instance, a member of the public talked about school choice as an agent of socioeconomic segregation; the problems of not ensuring excellent schools everywhere (electrocution hazards, no potable water—yes, really); and the fact that no parent ever said or thought that charters starting in 5th grade was a good idea. A few minutes later, at minute 44, another member of the public noted that there literally has been years of talking about schools in wards 7 and 8—but nothing has changed.

Indeed, at the October 24 boundary advisory committee meeting, member Marla Dean at minute 53 pointed out that “any policy decision that sends kids out of east of the river . . . is a policy decision we can’t support through boundaries or programs. . . And any programmatic offering west of the river must have a programmatic offering east of the river.” Dean then went on to outline what her group discussed: specifics on ensuring better feeders and programming support for DCPS schools east of the river.

Let us hope someone hears that and acts on it before the final boundary town hall is slated for the week of December 11.