As life-threatening due process violations continue (abetted by a feckless high court), and DC is left to stew budget-less in the ugly place Congress has forced on us (which the mayor reportedly is going to address), Congress went on vacation. (Naturally.)

So let us look to other local (and education-related!) events that may on some level reflect actual democracy:

–The DC council is holding a hearing on April 23 (or April 24, depending where you check) on a host of public safety legislation, including the safe passage training act, which would provide standardized training for safe passage workers around schools.

The DC council is also ideating renaming the new Ward 3 high school after Georgetown University’s long-time basketball coach.

Also on the council’s hearing list is a bit of property once part of the old Malcolm X elementary. The building itself was redeveloped into Bard HS, but on April 30 the council will hold a hearing on extending the time frame for development of a part of what had been DCPS property.

The October 2022 hearing for the original legislation to give away that parcel to developers had a public record featuring (by my count) 57 IDENTICAL letters of support for its development, signed by at least that many different people whose identity and residence were never noted. All this happened while the kids who lived near the old Malcolm X school had seats of right at a school more difficult for them to get to, Malcolm X at Green. At the March 28, 2022 DCPS budget hearing, for instance, that school’s principal testified (video here, starting at the 10 hour, 27 minute mark) that her school building was only ever intended as temporary swing space and does not have good transit options (unlike the parcel of land at 1351 Alabama Ave SE–naturally).

Not unrelated: the council is holding a hearing on April 22 to continue to not follow the Open Meetings Act for, uh, eternity.

[Confidential to DC council chair Phil Mendelson: Flying low in the face of authoritarian bullies; ensuring you can meet in secret; and moving forward legislation that checks right-wing boxes isn’t the democratic flex you think it is.]

–In the absence of any real DC budget, EmpowerEd (along with other DC-based education groups) is holding a community-based education budget forum on April 24. See here for more information and to sign up.

In the meantime, if you have not already, consider joining Defend DC Public Education, which aims to resist federal anti-democratic atrocities in DC (not to mention self-inflicted ones, like DCPS ending green cards for teachers or reducing the number of school-based personnel while increasing the number of non-school-based personnel).

Related: On April 22, starting at 8 am at the Supreme Court, there will be a rally for inclusive public education, highlighting ongoing threats to public education, including book bans, curriculum erasure, and civil liberties threats against students and teachers. See here for more information.

—Last week’s Wednesday Bulletin (4/9/25) from the charter board (see here) contained two interesting items around transparency. One (on p. 1) is a training for school staff on making public information public on school websites. The training (held by charter board staff) will take place on April 28.

The other interesting item (on p. 5) was an Open Meetings Act training for charter school boards, held by the Office of Open Government. That agency held a similar training last month for LSATs at DCPS schools, which like charter school boards are supposed to meet publicly.

–In the meantime, the charter board met twice in February 2025 and once in March 2025 to secretly deliberate about charter reviews–which is probably why a little charter board missive about I Dream relinquishing its charter was deposited in the materials for the April 7, 2025 charter board meeting mere hours before the charter board met, as it was one of the schools up for review in 2025.

PDF data show that the charter board’s memo about I Dream was created on the morning of April 7. The memo references a letter from I Dream about its charter relinquishment, which the board materials refer to as “attachment A” and provide a link for—well, except that the link didn’t work until after the 4/7/25 board meeting. (Really: here is the previously posted link to the I Dream letter: https://dcpcsb.egnyte.com/loginDomain.do?redirectUrl=%2Fdl%2FAxkYi4qGZb#username and here is the current (working) link: https://dcpcsb.egnyte.com/dl/hy93QEe3pH)

Now, it’s anyone’s guess why that charter board memo was posted relatively late or why the originally posted link to I Dream’s letter didn’t work. A good reason for both could be that the I Dream letter is a doozy, taking issue with how the charter board evaluates charters and its scoring metrics.

But even this isn’t what it seems.

For instance, the letter from I Dream is dated March 26. When I Dream’s charter relinquishment was brought up about 7 minutes before the end of the 4/7/25 charter board meeting (see the video here), charter board staffer Melodi Sampson reiterated what the board memo said, which was that the board of I Dream voted on March 21 to rescind its charter.

Now, if you look at the various board websites of I Dream, you can see a number of dates—but none of them is March 21. (See here: https://www.idreampcs.org/uploads/1/1/0/7/110797701/board_meeting_calendar_sy24-25.pdf and here: https://www.idreampcs.org/board.html–alternatively, you can see these here and here.) One of those websites says the I Dream board meets on Wednesdays; March 21 was a Friday.

Then there is the little mystery of when I Dream was removed from the My School DC Lottery page. The charter board memo says charter board staff met with I Dream on March 17 to talk about its charter review. But the end of the lottery was on March 3, and the charter school did not relinquish its charter until March 21. (Here is what the My School DC pages for I Dream look like as of this blog post: https://www.myschooldc.org/schools/profile/438 and https://qa.myschooldc.org/schools/profile/438)

Perhaps uncoincidentally, after being approved for another 5 years at the March 17, 2025 charter board meeting, Cedar Tree applied to expand its grade levels, which would cover the grades I Dream has. Cedar Tree is less than 2 miles from I Dream. The Cedar Tree application to expand its grades was submitted March 27—the day after I Dream notified the charter board it had relinquished its charter.

[Confidential to DC taxpayers: If all this feels like you are being left out of the convo, don’t think you aren’t.]

–Also at the April 7 charter board meeting, Capital Village passed its charter review–despite being on the charter board’s financial monitoring list and being reviewed by OSSE (the office of the state superintendent of education) for academic performance issues. (See the school’s review here.)

Like I Dream, Capital Village has struggled with enrollment loss and ensuing fiscal issues, which is not exactly surprising as both schools started in SY20-21 (not a great time for pretty much anything except a single microorganism named covid). In the latest audited enrollment, I Dream had 99 students and Capital Village had 93. Both enrollments are well below targets: I Dream’s charter agreement showed a ceiling of 240 by now, while Capital Village’s charter agreement showed a ceiling of 180 by now.

About 5 minutes into hour 2 of the 4/7/25 charter board meeting, board chair Shantelle Wright noted the charter board’s approval of Capital Village’s continuance was not an endorsement—which she followed about 15 minutes later by reiterating a (new) demand that Capital Village and schools recently continued with conditions (Hope and IDEA—see the March 2025 transcript here) inform their families about those conditions, by way of “clear, direct notice” using a charter board-provided template.

In the case of Capital Village, that notice is due by May 5. Sounds good–but without a clear process to determine whether those families actually receive any information, it remains to be seen what this condition actually means.

–Earlier this month, I discovered a gap in the publishing of the quarterly report from the charter board’s finance committee, which contains a list of schools under financial monitoring.

I stumbled down this thorny path by looking at charter board materials from February 2022 on for anything mentioning I Dream. Recall that until this year, the quarterly reports of the charter board’s finance committee were simply read into the record of charter board meetings, and one could find schools on the financial monitoring list only by searching through materials for every board meeting.

From what I could see of board materials from February 2022 on, it seemed like finance committee reports were regularly published through the charter board meeting on December 19, 2022. That said, the next finance committee report, reported for the March 20, 2023 meeting, had a broken link so you could not access it: https://dcpcsb.egnyte.com/loginDomain.do?redirectUrl=%2Fdl%2F70zsdZAqF7%2F2023-03-20_RR_FY23_Q2_Finance_Committee_Memo_Revised_BBF.pdf_#username

That link has now been corrected (see here) in the wake of me informing the charter board. But the reality (as of this blog post, anyway) remains that the next report of the charter board finance committee was published almost a year later, as part of the February 26, 2024 board meeting.

This means that the charter board skipped publishing the quarterly finance committee report (at least publicly) between March 2023 and February 2024.

The timing here is significant, since it parallels Eagle Academy’s worsening fiscal situation–which leaves uncomfortable possibilities, including the charter board’s finance committee not meeting at all or its reports being suppressed (or both). A FOIA request will (hopefully) answer some of that.

In the meantime, the quarterly finance committee report from the January 27, 2025 charter board meeting still isn’t publicly accessible, either; recall that the charter board swapped it out for one with the same date that dropped Rocketship.

The charter board knows about all of this—but as with so much else in DC, it remains to be seen what will happen now. Stay tuned–and hang on.