FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin



November 7, 2005

--Charter School Enrollment Up By 15%; Nearly One in Four Now In Charters
--DCPS Local School Enrollment Drops Under 57,000, Led by Jr. High, Elementary School Declines
--Still No Action From Vincent Orange on Surplus School Buildings

Charter School Enrollment Up By 15%; Nearly One in Four Now In Charters

Unaudited enrollment in the District’s charter schools rose to 17,819, 15% higher than last year’s total. There are now 52 charter schools on 64 campuses. Combined, the charter schools enroll 24% of all public school students in D.C.

The first two D.C. charter schools opened in the fall of 1996 with a combined total of 300 students; two additional small schools opened in the fall of 1997. In the fall of 1998, charter school enrollment jumped to 3,594 with the opening of 16 new schools. The next year enrollment nearly doubled, and the fall of 2000 saw another increase of nearly 40%. Since 2001, enrollment increases have moderated to an average of around 13% per year.

About 40% of this year’s more than 2,000 additional charter school students are enrolled in schools that opened their doors for the first time this fall. Because of difficulty finding suitably-sized facilities, several of the new schools enrolled significantly fewer students than they had planned for. But grade additions in existing schools and the opening of several expansion campuses kept enrollment growth strong.

DCPS Local School Enrollment Drops Under 57,000, Led By Jr. High, Elementary School Declines

The District’s public school system experienced another sharp drop in enrollment, losing more than 4% of its students between last school year and this. Enrollment in the elementary schools, which house more than half of all DCPS students, dropped nearly 7%, while the nine junior high schools were down nearly 11%. The 11 middle schools experienced a decline of just under 4%, while high school enrollment increased by 5%.

DCPS also enrolls more than 2,500 “tuition grant” students — special education students it places outside the District in public or private schools. The number of these students declined by around 5% this year.

The continued decline in DCPS enrollment has significant implications for the ongoing effort to get the Board of Education to permit the public charter schools to use school building space on an equitable basis with DCPS schools. When the charter schools started up in 1996, DCPS’s own studies showed that it occupied around three million square feet of school space it did not need to house its already shrunken enrollment. Since then DCPS has lost approximately a quarter of its student body, and a 2005 study by the Brookings Institution and the 21st Century School Fund — done before the release of this year’s enrollment figures — put the excess space figure at around five million square feet.

Sadly, some of this excess space is in newly built school buildings like Barnard Elementary and Patterson Elementary. These buildings, opened in the last two years, are badly underutilized. Constructed at great expense for 520 students, Barnard ($337/sq. ft.) enrolls just 350 and Patterson ($392/sq. ft.), also built for 520, just 361. This overbuilding has resulted from wildly inaccurate projections of DCPS and charter school enrollment in DCPS’s year 2000 Long Range Facilities Master Plan and subsequent revisions.

DCPS has not closed any school buildings since before the first charter schools opened nor permitted the charter schools to use excess school space except on a limited, emergency basis. Most of the charters, therefore, have been forced into the commercial real estate market, where they frequently pay large rents for less than adequate space.

The school system plans to revise the Long Range Facilities Master Plan in the spring of 2006 and is under pressure from the Council and the administration to right-size its inventory of school buildings.

Still No Action From Vincent Orange on Surplus School Buildings

Council member Vincent Orange, chair of the Operations Committee of the Council, continues to block charter school access to five surplus school buildings the mayor has designated for charter school use. Orange cancelled a hearing early last month on resolutions to make the buildings available and has not set a new date. Committee staff say that Orange, who is running for mayor, has been too busy with other matters.

The Council member’s failure to move the buildings through the Council approval process follows many months of delay by the Williams administration in getting the proposed resolutions on the buildings to the Council. The mayor promised the buildings to the charter schools at a press conference on August 18, 2004, but did nothing to move the process forward until late in the year. A dispute between the administration and the Council over the form of the resolutions stalled the process for another several months.

Meanwhile, two members of the Council, Marion Barry and Orange himself, have introduced bills that would designate two of the five buildings for non-charter purposes; another member reportedly has a non-charter purpose in mind for an additional building and developers have expressed strong interest in a fourth.

Since taking control of 38 surplus school buildings in March of 2000, the administration has made only four available to the charter schools, which have a legal preference to acquire them. During this same period the administration, over strenuous charter school objections, has turned back five of the surplus buildings to DCPS, contributing to its excess space problem, and has sold or leased several others to commercial developers and other non-school entities.

Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
1530 16th Street, NW #104
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 387-0405 phone
(202) 667-3798 fax
www.focusdc.org