As the DC council prepares to take its first votes on the budget, let’s plunge into some recent developments around our schools:

–For much-needed swing space, DCPS is leasing the (presumably soon-to-be vacated) Anacostia Elementary building owned by DC Prep at 1409 V Street SE.

The fiscal grotesquery could not be greater:

Recall that DC Prep was recently awarded the former DCPS building Wilkinson (naturally, outside of the legal process for doing so). That >130,000 square foot building (still owned by DC) could house several schools at once—but is reserved now for the <700 students at DC Prep’s Anacostia middle and elementary schools.

So it is that DC leaders are forcing DCPS to pay a private entity for its private facility, while that same private entity is leasing a publicly owned facility that once was DCPS’s. Adding insult to fiscal injury, DC Prep is leasing Wilkinson for $0 rent for in exchange for rent credits, which we know DGS is not tracking.

–Near the end of the April 11 budget oversight hearing for government witnesses for DCPS and the office of the state superintendent of education (OSSE) (specifically, at the 6 hour, 31 minute mark in the video), at large council member Christina Henderson asked the OSSE director about the “transition year period” for special education (SPED) and noted that DCPS’s model demands kids go back to their neighborhood schools at those transition years if they are SPED students—even if they get a lottery slot at another school for the next school year.

Henderson then noted that this appeared to be re-segregating schools, using as an example Deal MS, where White SPED students were able to move on to Jackson-Reed HS (presumably because they live in bounds to it), while Black students (presumably not living in bounds for Jackson-Reed) were forced to go to their neighborhood high schools.

Interestingly, the law governing provision of education to all students with disabilities (IDEA) gives schools leeway to do just this. The law also does not give students the right to challenge where services to fulfill individualized education plans (IEPs) are located.

Several years ago, DCPS outlined its intentions with implementing this policy, ostensibly as part of an effort to keep students as close to their homes as possible. (Here is a more recent outline.) In DC, such re-location of students appears to be mainly confined to students with IEPs in DCPS’s self-contained SPED classrooms, as few DC charters have such classrooms. As it is, this policy affects mainly students with the most hours in those self-contained programs—a small number of students, admittedly, but perhaps the most vulnerable of all in DC. (According to Maria Blauer at Advocates for Justice and Education, about 13% of kids in DC’s schools have IEPs—and of them, about 10% are in self-contained classrooms.)

While DCPS itself has about 300 of these self-contained classrooms, no one in the public knows how many are in DC charters because literally no one in DC leadership cares to report or demand the data. Blauer noted to me that charter students with IEPs often go to nonpublic placements because most charters have no capacity to handle them.

Via email, Henderson noted to me that DCPS’s policy represents a violation of school choice for SPED students. Perhaps naturally for someone well-supported by ed reform interests, Henderson did not mention that school choice itself is doing quite well in segregating students–nor that losing a lottery slot may be the least of these students’ concerns.

–Speaking of violations: There are now publicly available letters of resolution by DCPS’s Comprehensive Alternative Resolution and Equity (CARE) team to grievances filed by students and others, courtesy of Advocates for Justice and Education suing for access to these public records.  

Here is a blog post about the latest developments as well as information that families may find helpful.

And here is one website, and here is another, with links to the previously undisclosed CARE decisions, which are (perhaps unshockingly) not clearly otherwise available on the DCPS website.

–Charter teacher pay scales by steps and grades were supposed to be submitted to OSSE by May 1, per DC code. As nothing turned up for me when I searched for this recently, it sounds like a FOIA request is in the offing.

–Eagle Academy’s outpost in Nevada is facing fiscal scrutiny from officials there around $800K in public funds. In Nevada, it seems, they actually audit their own schools when stuff goes sideways like this—while here in DC we still have no word from any DC official about reimbursing taxpayers the $2M embezzled from KIPP DC.

–The audited enrollment for DC’s publicly funded schools came out a few weeks ago, the latest release date in a decade. I found just this press release about it—in contrast to the huzzah around unaudited reports in fall 2023. It is unclear whether that recent (relative) silence is due to news outlets cutting local reporting; the fact that the unaudited enrollment numbers closely track with the audited ones; or the fact that enrollment has not grown as robustly as it did immediately after the pandemic.

–The mayor’s press statement about the audited enrollment was released during Teacher Appreciation Week, which was also when DCPS filed a complaint against its own teachers, who still are working without a contract.

–The Post just published results of a poll of parents of school-age children in the DMV that showed . . . something. The part of the poll about school concerns included a total of 294 people, 95 of whom are sending their kids to DC schools (these folks presumably also live in DC—though that is unclear).

Anyhoo, assuming that each of those 95 parents represents a unique school-age child AND that they are sending said unique children to DC’s publicly funded schools (both unclear), that means the sentiments expressed in this part of the poll at best represent not quite 0.1% of all kids in DC’s publicly funded schools. (Or, in other words, the only proof this part of the poll provides of anything is that the Post decided to not let it die in darkness for 3 years.)

–On May 13, the DC council held a roundtable on student absenteeism and discipline, with invited witnesses. In the mix are four separate bills purporting to address the growing crisis of DC students missing school:

B25-0740: Truancy Reduction for Student Success Act of 2024

B25-0754: Chronic Absenteeism and Truancy Reduction Amendment Act of 2024

B25-0758: The Showing Up for Students Amendment Act of 2024

B25-0791: Utilizing Partnerships and Local Interventions for Truancy and Safety (UPLIFT) Amendment Act of 2024

Expect a future hearing on at least a few of the bills.

–Starting in January, DCPS changed food vendors at some of its schools. Without outlining exactly which schools are getting what vendors (see here for more information), DCPS is seeking out feedback via this form. (In the fall, DCPS also implemented a new system that purports to eliminate onerous transaction fees charged for each meal.)

Fascinatingly, DC council chairman Phil Mendelson huffily convened two hearings in 2023 (see here) about DCPS’s failure to bring its food contracts before the council–only to quietly approve in December the latest contract with Aramark “by virtue of the Council having taken no action to disapprove it.”

–Speaking of the council chair getting huffy with DCPS:

In the wake of the Schools First legislation, which requires schools to get at least its prior year’s money if no enrollment loss, DCPS has steadfastly ignored the law. This has led to repeated confrontations by Chair Mendelson with the DCPS chancellor on cutting funding for DCPS’s central office to cover losses at individual schools.

Never mind that some central office programs are actually needed at individual schools. Here is what Mendelson proposed weeks ago in the form of cuts to DCPS’s central office.

Here is what DCPS said on this subject.

And here (and here in shorter form) is what Mendelson is currently proposing.

Despite plenty of initial testimony and analysis around proposed school budgets (see here)–and even public protest about its cuts to community schools (see here)–it is as yet unclear how much will (finally) be cut from DCPS schools and/or DCPS central office.

Yet beyond this year’s school budget issues, there are clear reasons why DCPS schools face shortfalls every year. As parent and education analyst Betsy Wolf has identified, part of the problem is that Schools First is “legislation of political expediency: appeal to everyone with the promise of stability and no more staffing cuts, but not consider the adequacy or equity of existing school budgets.”

But underpinning that are deep structural problems around DC’s school budgets that rarely, if ever, are mentioned:

1. No one at the council dares go against the chair. This leads inevitably to a council of 1 where school oversight is concerned—a disconcertingly small number of eyes and insight for an annual expenditure of $2 billion for DC’s publicly funded schools.

2. No one at the council understands the fundamental need for DCPS (and specifically, the need for DCPS schools of right) aside from simply taking in children that charters don’t want. This policy tilt toward privatizing interests in DC education exists in part because . . .

3. Like some of his colleagues in the Wilson Building, the council chair has disproportionately benefitted from charter lobbying and donations. Most immediately, this means that charters will likely get an annual 3% raise in per pupil facilities funds reinstated, which Mendelson has championed—despite the tight budget and the fact that charters receive $20 million more annually from DC than they need for facilities (per the most recent adequacy study).

More importantly, Mendelson’s ties to charter interests mean that he has no reason to stop tearing down DCPS and the chancellor at every hearing—which he does on the regular.

While one can argue that DCPS does well enough on its own to look bad (and therefore deserves opprobrium), Mendelson’s simple political math to cast DCPS as the ever-bad actor does nothing to improve the system overall, while bolstering his own power as well as that of charter interests.

4. No one in the Wilson Building understands (nor, apparently, wants to understand) budget sustainability around our schools except as it pertains to DCPS.

Betsy Wolf gets to this bait and switch by noting that “the Council of DC has propped up Schools First as a way to guard against staffing cuts due to declining enrollments in underserved schools . . . yet [it] doesn’t fully protect schools from declining enrollments” all the while the council “has been unwilling to address the root causes for declining enrollments in underserved schools: misuses of “at-risk” funds since their inception . . . no controls or restrictions for new schools opening in underserved communities, no funding to account for midyear mobility, and so on.”

Sadly, Wolf’s “and so on” amounts to untold tens of millions wasted every year on, well, you name it, including seat and school proliferation without commensurate growth of DC’s student population; wasteful use of former DCPS spaces; and no oversight of facilities money to charters.

Rather than beating up the DCPS chancellor, for instance, Mendelson could look at the millions wasted not accounting for charter rents and credits and use that money to ensure that every school has a nurse, as legislation that he helped pass demands.

Instead, for Mendelson and others in the Wilson Building school budget sustainability means, among other things,

–cutting DCPS’s central office instead of asking why we pay $20 million more per year than charters need for facilities and instead of giving charters $17 million more for facilities in this budget; and

–giving charters money that DCPS teachers fought for and won themselves instead of asking why the private entities running those schools have refused to do that by themselves; and

–closing or co-opting for charters DCPS schools with low enrollments instead of addressing the root causes of those low enrollments. 

Because our leaders in DC have clearly embraced a budgetary playing field tilted to the private interests behind ed reform and our charters, it remains to be seen if they will ever recognize the need for DCPS outside of that. Best not to hold your breath.