FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin



December 1, 2005

--DCPS Highlights Enrollment Declines, Empty Seats
--Orange Schedules Hearing on Surplus Schools, Exempts Pet Project
--Board of Ed Votes to Resume Chartering After Year Layoff
--DC Public Charter School Board Toughens Charter Application Process
--Charter Neighbors Challenge “Matter of Right” Zoning in Residential Neighborhoods
--School Board Member Attacks Superintendent’s Planning Process, Claims East of River Schools Being “Privatized”

DCPS Highlights Enrollment Declines, Empty Seats

DCPS has published a series of fact sheets highlighting its ten-year history of enrollment declines and the consequent under-use of many of its school buildings. In so doing, DCPS appears to be trying to prepare the public for the possibility of program consolidations and school closings.

The fact sheets were distributed at a series of community meetings being held by DCPS to take public comment on issues to be dealt with by the superintendent’s “master education plan,” scheduled to be published in late January. One of the sections of the plan will deal with school buildings.

In the fact sheets DCPS admits to having in excess of 21,000 empty seats in its 150+ school buildings and predicts that its enrollment will continue to decline: “For every 100 students who started 1st grade in DCPS in 1999, only 58 are still enrolled as 7th graders in 2005. At this rate, only 38 of the original 1st graders will graduate in 2010.” According to DCPS’s figures the largest enrollment losses occur in grades six and seven, but all grades but ninth have experienced enrollment declines.

Orange Schedules Hearing on Surplus Schools, Exempts Pet Project

Under heavy pressure from the Williams administration, Council Member Vincent Orange has scheduled a hearing December 19 in front of his Government Operations Committee to determine whether the mayor can sell or lease four surplus school buildings to the charter schools. A fifth building on the mayor’s charter school list will not be discussed at the hearing, as it is the subject of separate legislation sponsored by Council Member Orange.

Under legislation passed long before the charter school law, before the mayor can dispose of District property, including schools, he must receive Council permission. The Council has a two-stage permission process. The first stage is a hearing before the Government Operations Committee to determine whether the property is still required for a “public purpose.” If a public purpose is found, the mayor may not sell or lease the property. If no public purpose is found, the Economic Development Committee (Sharon Ambrose, chair) then decides in a separate hearing whether to approve the disposition of the property to the buyer/lessee proposed by the mayor.

With the passage of the School Reform Act in 1996 this procedure became both nonsensical and illegal as applied to surplus school buildings. It is nonsensical because charter schools, as public schools, clearly should be considered a public purpose (but have never been defined as such); it is illegal because under the School Reform Act the mayor is required to offer surplus schools first to charter schools without regard to the Council’s views on the matter. Nevertheless, the procedure is being followed with the surplus buildings currently under consideration for disposition to the charter schools.

As regular readers of the Bulletin are well aware, more than half of the the District’s 52 charter schools lack permanent homes, and many of these operate in ongoing crisis mode with respect to facilities. Under pressure from FOCUS and others the mayor promised in August of 2004 to make five buildings available for lease or purchase by the charter schools: the former Bruce, Crummell, Keene, Langston/Slater, and Old Congress Heights schools. All but Crummell are the subject of the hearing on the 19th; a separate hearing will have to be held on Orange’s bill to turn Crummell into a “Fundamentals of Reading and Mathematics Pilot Program” for three- and four-year olds, presumably run by DCPS.

Board of Ed Votes to Resume Chartering After Year Layoff

In a split vote, the Board of Education decided recently to resume chartering schools after a one-year moratorium. Three board members voted against the resumption, evidently because they felt that the Board had not dealt with the uncertainties about the Board’s role as chartering authority that had led to the imposition of the moratorium.

The Board, which in the early years of the charter school movement approved a large number of schools (many of which later were closed down), had chartered few schools in the years running up to the moratorium. The Board did not accept applications for the 2001-2002 school year, and in the next four years opened only nine schools. By comparison, the D.C. Public Charter School Board chartered 19 schools during those years.

Although the Board lifted the moratorium (preliminary applications are due on March 3, 2006), it is far from clear how interested the members are in actually chartering schools. In the past, various members of the Board have expressed the belief that the Board should charter only schools that fill a need “not being met by the school system,” such as special education. The Board is understandably loath to charter schools that will compete with its regular education programs, which annually lose significant numbers of students to the charter schools.

DC Public Charter School Board Toughens Charter Application Process

The DCPCSB has decided to streamline its charter school application process by eliminating second-stage review of promising applications. The change is likely to reduce the number of new charter schools approved annually, perhaps significantly.

Under the current two-stage application scheme, after review by a panel of experts an application to start a charter school can be approved, denied, conditionally approved, or granted “first-stage clearance.” The Board’s action eliminates this last category, which was designed for promising applications that required major revisions. Unlike schools given conditional approval — a near-guarantee of final approval — until recently those granted first-stage clearance often were denied following second-stage review of their revised applications. During the last two application cycles, however, all eight first-stage clearance schools participating in the FOCUS charter school startup program received conditional approval of their second-stage applications. All are now open and operating or are expected to open next fall.

According to a Board press release, “one of the main reasons for eliminating the second stage was the increasing number of quality applications received in recent years” and the consequent increase in the number of schools approved by the Board. According to Board chair Tom Nida, quoted in the release, the increased competition for enrollment resulting from the larger number of startup schools figured heavily in the decision: “We’re at an historic point. We’ve honed the process. We must now ensure that new schools are not only high quality, but are also competitive in an environment with so many public school options.”

The new rules will apply to groups applying next April to open charter schools in the Fall of 2007. Eighteen potential 2007 applicant groups are enrolled in the FOCUS School Design Workshop Program that concludes this weekend. Between five and nine of the most promising of these groups will receive intensive help on their applications from FOCUS over the next four months.

Charter Neighbors Challenge “Matter of Right” Zoning in Residential Neighborhoods

A Ward 6 ANC commissioner has asked the new director of zoning, Bill Crews, to rule that the AppleTree Early Learning PCS may not locate as a “matter of right” in a property it has purchased on 12th Street N.E. in a neighborhood zoned residential. In an email response to the commissioner on October 20th, Crews wrote that he shared the commissioner’s concern about matter-of-right siting in residential neighborhoods and indicated that he had “placed a hold on approval of any Certificates of Occupancy for charter schools in residential zones” until he had been able to fully consider the matter.

FOCUS is not aware of this issue having been dealt with before by District zoning authorities. Other than those locating in former DCPS buildings, few charters have ended up in residential neighborhoods. In addition, there is evidence that zoning officials prior to Crews have assumed that charters would be subject to the same matter-of-right siting that applies to DCPS schools. The relevant zoning regulations, however, were written decades before the first charter school opened, and hence leave room for challenges of the sort being faced by AppleTree.

As fully public schools, D.C.'s charter schools should be able to locate by right in all neighborhoods, just as DCPS schools can do. If it were held that charters were not entitled to matter of right location in residential neighborhoods they would be subject to the same kinds of attacks that private schools commonly experience from neighbors, possibly even when they take over abandoned DCPS buildings in residential areas. Given the severe shortage of available buildings in which charters can locate, an unfavorable decision on this question, if not reversed on appeal, could be a severe blow to D.C.’s public charter school movement.

FOCUS is closely monitoring the situation and will keep you informed.

School Board Member Attacks Superintendent’s Planning Process, Claims East of River Schools Being “Privatized”

Ward 7/8 School Board member William Lockridge has allied himself with the small but vociferous anti-charter school group Save Our Schools and is organizing Ward 7 and 8 residents to oppose “privatization” of the school system “in the form of charters and vouchers,” which he says “has created separate and unequal school systems” in the District.

In a memorandum to the community sent over his signature this fall (on Board of Education stationery), Lockridge claims that the Ward 7/8 community has been left out of the superintendent’s master education planning process. To rectify this perceived slight, Lockridge says, District IV Save our Schools has been formed to “demand culturally appropriate primary and secondary public schools” for east of the river. Although pledging cooperation with those developing the master education plan, Lockridge states that the new organization “will not rubber stamp a hidden Plan that may have already been masterminded by those seeking to take-over so-called “low-performing schools.””

This is not the first time that Mr. Lockridge has organized the community to oppose the policies of the board on which he sits. Last spring at a series of community meetings called by DCPS he argued vehemently against the school board policy permitting sharing of underutilized DCPS school space by charter schools. His opposition resulted in fewer buildings being made available for shared use by charter schools and the rejection of charter school offers on some of the space that was made available.

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