FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin

February 21, 2006

Superintendent Wants to Lease 250,000 Square Feet Next Fall; Pushes Charter Co-Location

The school system’s proposed FY 2007 budget, presented by Superintendent Clifford Janey to the Board of Education on February 14, calls for consolidating three school programs and leasing at least a quarter of a million square feet of space by the fall of this year. Noting that “perpetual enrollment decline has severely impacted the amount of revenue DCPS receives,” the superintendent’s proposal also calls for reducing the amount of “swing space” the school system keeps for use in its school renovation program and reintegrating special education centers and STAY programs into “home” schools. These changes are projected to favorably affect the system’s budget by nearly $8 million. The superintendent proposes to save another nearly $21 million by increasing current class sizes by one student.

The budget proposal is remarkably candid about how the school system’s practice of clinging to huge amounts of space it no longer needs contributes to its budget woes. The superintendent notes that while DCPS standards require 150 square feet for each elementary student, 170 square feet for each middle school/junior high student, and 200 square feet for each high school student, DCPS controls (and must staff and maintain) 291 square feet for each of its 54,683 resident students. According to the budget presentation, this means that “[e]ven at the highest level of investment of 200 square feet per student, DCPS would need to reduce its inventory by nearly 5,000,000 square feet.”

An analysis done by the Brookings Institution and the 21st Century School Fund last year also estimated DCPS excess space at around five million square feet. The system has lost another 4,000 students since then.

In a dramatic departure from past practice, the superintendent states in the budget presentation that the “guiding factor in the development of the Facilities Master Plan” due to the Council in May of this year will be the recent Board of Education commitment to give up three million square feet of space by July of 2008 (Bulletin, February 2, 2006. See www.focusdc.org). Past facilities master plans have largely ignored excess space and have been based on what proved to be wildly inaccurate enrollment projections. DCPS has lost 30% of its enrollment in the last 10 years but has not given up a single school building.

Finally, according to the budget presentation the superintendent intends to provide incentives to co-locate with charter schools to DCPS schools located in buildings with excess space, another departure from past practice. At the same time, he hopes to reverse the enrollment decline — largely attributable to the success of the charter schools — by designing “an aggressive public campaign to make the public more aware of the quality educational opportunities within DCPS.”

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