–In March, parents of students with disabilities filed a lawsuit against DC for transportation problems around buses that DC’s office of the state superintendent of education (OSSE) runs for disabled students. The buses have been legendarily bad. This month, a judge ruled that OSSE has to cough up a transportation plan for disabled students for the upcoming school year.

Now, OSSE has come out with a plan—albeit one that will take until April 2025 to be fully realized. The court will issue another determination after the first week of the SY24-25 school year.

–Following up on the May 13 roundtable on a host of truancy bills, the DC council held a June 26 hearing on the four bills:

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

The weekly charter board newsletter from July 10 has a helpful write-up of the hearing, noting witness support for services, not punishment. (Materials for the hearing are here.) Indeed, a lawyer in the DC attorney general’s office gave compelling testimony at the June 26 hearing about why support, not punishment, is the way to go. (The DC attorney general’s office issued its most recent truancy report on July 12.)

On July 23, a temporary law around truancy went into effect, through October 21. Weeks earlier, the DC council had passed it to provide some measure of social services in SY24-25 for truant teens at five high schools with truancy rates greater than 50%.

In a similar vein, a DC charter school is paying a few of its families $2400 in the upcoming school year, in hopes of reducing truancy and providing supports in the face of poverty.

–On July 12, C4DC wrote a letter to Chancellor Ferebee and deputy mayor for education (DME) Paul Kihn demanding changes in the way that the city engages families and schools around swing spaces. The letter came in the wake of Nalle’s field being summarily taken from the school for swing space as families protested the lack of engagement and the loss of the school’s space for years.

C4DC also sent along a detailed list of planned swing spaces, as outlined in the most recent PACE Act supplement. (See here for a great explication of both and here for a visualization of how terrible the swing space crunch is right now, especially in wards 5, 7, and 8.)

Yet instead of deploying resources to outline extra space in the 31 DC-owned former DCPS schools leased to charters, or ensuring that there is a fulsome accounting of all former DCPS buildings (including ones sold to charters that are currently not fully utilized—hey there, Friendship!), the DCPS chancellor sent a letter in response to C4DC outlining how he is not changing, well, much of anything.

The chancellor’s letter also states that “DCPS’s goal is to never leave swing sites unoccupied for more than 6 months to a year.”

Now, this statement is curious on several levels—not least of which is that there are very few empty DCPS buildings left that can be used for swing space, which has contributed to the current space crunch.

The chancellor’s statement thus suggests that once the (relatively few) remaining DCPS renovations are done, the buildings currently serving as swing spaces (Meyer, Emery, Sharpe, Davis, Kenilworth) will be quickly discarded. And that’s not even saying anything about the currently empty DCPS buildings whose near future use is still TBD, including Spingarn, Winston, and K.C. Lewis.

Indeed, all of this is likely what the chancellor discussed a few weeks back when he met with a (disgraced) former DME and a former mayor, who happens to head that wealthy and powerful lover of all things private Federal City Council. Per Chancellor Ferebee, they discussed “uniting DC’s public & private sectors.” As both this former DME (Niles) and mayor (Williams) worked together on the cross sector task force to figure out ways they could speed DCPS buildings to charters, this recent meeting suggests a resurrection of bankrupt ideas that should have been long ago consigned to the dustbin of anti-democratic (and anti-public school) authoritarianism.

As it is, the current DME has not made information about these empty buildings easy! While the DME’s website has multiple iterations of supplements to the master facilities plan (MFP), these buildings are not mentioned in the 2023 MFP nor is there any one place where I have found all of them mentioned.

Now, that’s not bad record keeping—it’s just because someone somewhere has their eye on these buildings, and you can bet that someone isn’t We The People. To be sure, offloading a long-closed school building is a lot easier than closing a current one—for one, a closed school has no parents to scream about it and for another, the offloading can be accompanied by press releases touting the glorious end of DCPS renovations (well, until the first schools to be renovated need work—but who’s thinking beyond 2030 anyway?).

–In a letter dated June 5, the mayor simultaneously accepted the work of the boundaries committee and rejected the committee’s recommendation to end the 2014 phase-in policies. As a result, the Ward 4 education alliance sent a letter to the mayor, asking her to re-consider, given that there is no earthly need for the phase-ins anymore.

Several weeks later, the DME responded in an undated missive that essentially says “thank you, but we will not do anything until after the 2024 boundary recommendations are in place, thus grandfathering the 2014 phase-in policies more or less indefinitely.”

(That sound you hear is the weeping of Julius Hobson’s ghost.)

–On July 10, the DC council held a hearing on two school health bills:

The CPR Amendment Act would require schools to have a plan for personnel responding to cardiac and other health emergencies. The Seizure-Safe Schools act would require schools to develop individualized plans to respond to students with seizure disorders.

All of this makes sense—except we have no word whether school nurses will ever be in every publicly funded school, as DC law demands and could help with such things.

–It’s a DC summer with heat and humidity, which means DCPS has been messing with DCPS teachers—in this case, apparently excessing teachers outside their contract.

–In a survey about schools enrolling a hypothetical older, immigrant student, many public schools did not do very well—including several in DC.

Incredibly, a DC council member *excused* some of the DC schools, noting that they do not have the “flexibility” to admit such students at all times. One of those schools was Basis, which has made an art form of student attrition and limited access to ensure a student body best suited to its objectives. Next month, the charter board will vote on allowing Basis to expand its (limited) view of student achievement to the youngest students in our schools.

–A judge ruled this month that Jackson-Reed high school has to allow a student group that declares homosexuality as immoral. Recall that a few months back, in May, another Jackson-Reed student group that sued over disparate treatment was given leave to screen 3 films about . . . Palestinians.

*As the inestimable P. Barry would have it.