front page - search - community

Few attend school board forum
(Published April 19, 2004)

By MARK ROSE
Special to The Common Denominator

A mere smattering of D.C. school activists, parents of public school children and four school board members vented anger April 17 at D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ proposal that would allow him to appoint the next D.C. Public Schools superintendent and confine the school board to being an advisory body to the mayor and city council rather than its current status as an independent body.

A national search is underway to replace former superintendent Paul L. Vance, who resigned in November. Interim arrangements have Assistant Superintendent Robert C. Rice assuming the interim chief’s duties after current Interim Superintendent Elfreda W. Massie leaves April 22.

Before the meeting began, Board of Education President Peggy Cooper Cafritz said that "a few exciting candidates have applied" to be the next superintendent. A decision is expected sometime in June.

If Williams can get seven votes from the city council at its meeting April 20 to back his plan, he is expected to go to Capitol Hill to ask for these changes to the District’s home rule charter.

The current arrangement has four elected board members each representing one district, an elected president, plus four members appointed by the mayor.

The city council has not fully approved yet a proposed seven-member Education Advisory Collaborative that would share oversight of the school superintendent with the Board of Education until Jan. 2, 2007. The school board has approved the collaborative.

In a "town meeting" hearing at Dunbar Senior High billed as a forum for citizens to address problems with student achievement, school building facility conditions and security, and the school system’s chronic underfunding, only 27 people came to speak to only four board members who showed up to say their childrens’ schools need more money, the money those schools are getting is often misused, and that often the schools’ principals are incompetent.

Basically, they all said, the school system is "broken" and the idea of the mayor and council running it will make the situation worse.

Referring to past efforts to have the schools run by the D.C. financial control board, District IV school board member William Lockridge said: "This school system belongs to D.C. and we can’t let others try to take it into their own hands. This mayor will do anything to take over this school system. …We’ve had everything you can think of, but nothing works."

Referring to a trip that school board members made recently to St. Louis, where the school board brought in an outside corporate governance company to advise them how to right their own troubled system, Lockridge, who went on the trip, said that it looked like that endeavor didn’t work as St. Louis school officials had hoped.

"You don’t know the pain the St. Louis system suffered under that turnaround company," he said. A group of St. Louis school officials is making a trip to the District on April 22 to discuss what changes have been made there, he said.

The current school budget, he added, is $760 million. Some high schools under the current budget are losing $20,000 or $30,000 in funding from the figures originally proposed, he added.

Lockridge and Harold Fisher Jr., a past president of the Washington Teachers’ Union and now running his own education advocacy company, both said the D.C. schools are being "duped" into allowing the mayor to gradually change how the schools are run.

"Our school board is now finding it more difficult to do a job that was always difficult to do," Fisher said. He and Lockridge both emphasized that the person who "holds the pursestrings" has to be running the system, too, and that Mayor Williams doesn’t know how to run a school system.

"The system has to have a commitment to public education rather than (be) run by the mayor who controls (its) money to be successful," Fisher reiterated. "Now in the system’s state of chaos and moreso under the mayor’s proposal, the superintendent doesn’t have the administrative tools he needs to be effective."

Emily Washington, a resident of Ward 7 and a member of the Ward 7 Democrats, called the current board arrangement "a hybrid board that is dysfunctional; they don’t have the interests of children at heart, but are (rather) playing games with our children."

Activist Wendy Glenn-Flood, whose son attends Eastern Senior High, said the system put Eastern on the "failing high school" list, which means they may consider closing it. Students there, including her son, are feeling bewildered and lost.

"When you promise kids reform, you get children ‘acting out’; either acting violent or complacent in response to feeling neglected. They don’t know where they fit into the school board’s agenda," she said.

Glenn-Flood remarked that there is no plan at Eastern for vocational training that might benefit students not performing well academically. "These failing students are forgotten about," she said.

Washington noted that two academicians formerly on the board, appointed by the mayor, resigned in protest because they said the mayor wouldn’t listen to them.

Washington also said she wondered why Williams decided to try his oversight plan now after six years as mayor of the District. She added that he has given his administration nine more years, or until 2013, to get all District public school students performing at grade level.

Marvin Tucker, an Anacostia Senior High football coach who has been there 17 years, said that McKinley High, proclaimed the District’s technology magnet school by Williams and slated to receive $100 million to accomplish that goal, never used that money. Tucker asked what happened to funding for other schools that need it.

Instead of money being steered, for example, to needy Ballou Senior High in Southeast, Tucker said, houses costing $300,000 or $400,000 are being built in that poor part of town.

"You can see it -- gentrification is happening," Tucker said. He spoke of "out-of-control" administrators at some schools such as Noyes Elementary, whose chief officer, he said, received an appropriation of $14,000 to be spent on computers for students. Those computers were never bought.

Cafritz told the few audience members left at the end of the two-hour session, on a warm sunny Saturday, that she is strongly opposed to turning school buildings over to the mayor.

"But I’m not opposed to working with developers to rebuild and revitalize existing schools ... We’ve got to get creative," she said.

She said that 140 schools, which is most of the system’s buildings, are not being fully used.