FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin

February 28, 2006

--DCPS “Master Education Plan” Released; Responding to Charter Competition Is System’s Number One Challenge
--School System to Revise Co-Location Policy
--Patterson Presses For Equitable Medicaid Funding for Charter Schools
--FOCUS Argues for Shift of Federal Funds Function from DCPS to SEO

DCPS “Master Education Plan” Released; Responding to Charter Competition Is System’s Number One Challenge. Better Use of School Space, Pressure on Small Schools Also Features of Plan

Superintendent Clifford Janey released his much anticipated “Master Education Plan” last night to a large audience gathered in the auditorium of the renovated Bell-Lincoln Multicultural High School on 16th Street N.W. Designed to provide a blueprint for creating “a world-class public school system in a world-class city,” the Plan faces squarely the need to improve DCPS in order to compete with charter schools. In fact, making DCPS “the school system of choice” for D.C. parents tops the list of 12 “challenges and opportunities” facing the school system.

To meet this challenge, the Plan’s authors write, “we have to demonstrate that we can compete successfully with all the other available choices — not only in the quality of our academics but also in the condition of our facilities and many other factors, such as safety, convenience and parent involvement.”

Among the responses to competition envisioned by the Plan is to create a variety of specialty high schools, including hospitality and tourism; international studies and world languages; construction and design; business, commerce, finance and entrepreneurship; education; health and medical sciences; and a school patterned on the Boston Latin School. Another response to competition is a proposal to better manage the DCPS out-of-boundary program, which thousands of D.C. families take advantage of. “[T]here is sufficient evidence to confirm that whatever choices families make, they are happier for having had the opportunity to make them....With the expansion of the number of public schools among which parents may choose to send their children, the way DCPS manages its policy on school choice within DCPS will be critical to retaining and attracting students.”

Reducing the amount of school space for which DCPS is responsible and making more effective use of the space it continues to maintain are key elements of the Plan. According to the Plan’s authors, DCPS’s average enrollment is 459 students per school, very low by national standards. Enrollment has declined at 123 of the District’s 147 school buildings (containing 167 schools and learning centers) over the last ten years, and “[m]any...have relatively few students.” According to the Plan, there are 600 underutilized elementary school classrooms and 250 underutilized classrooms at the middle/junior high school level. In all, the system is burdened with 21,114 unfilled seats.

The Plan envisions gradually filling some of these seats by increasing the number of preschool and pre-kindergarten students by 400 per year. But the Plan also calls for reducing DCPS space utilization by 500,000 square feet in fiscal year 2007 (enough for several thousand students) and leasing half of that space to generate revenue. The Board of Education has promised to reduce DCPS space by a total of three million square feet by July of 2008 (See 2/2/06 Bulletin at www.focusdc.org).

It appears from the Plan that much of the space to be eliminated will be found in stand-alone special education schools, which will be closed as their students are returned to neighborhood schools, and from small schools, especially at the elementary level. A school that is too small to be viable — 318 students for elementary schools, 360 for middle schools, and 600-700 for high schools — will be required to choose from among four options: pairing with another school to share administrative or teaching staff; sharing space with a compatible agency or organization (including a charter school); reassigning students to other neighborhood schools and closing; or relocating within another DCPS school building.

Small elementary schools are especially at risk from the Plan. These schools currently receive a substantial subsidy from the District, which under the “Weighted Student Formula” funds its other schools based strictly on enrollment. According to information contained in the Plan, small elementary schools (under 300 students) get an average of more than $1200 per student more than larger elementary schools. Under the Plan, however, the subsidy will be reduced in FY 2007 and eliminated in FY 2008.

FOCUS has learned that the superintendent already has asked principals of at least some small schools to begin thinking about these alternatives. However, reorganizations based on these “voluntary” proposals will not take effect until the 2007-2008 school year.

Other changes outlined in the Plan also will affect space utilization and could lead to the emptying out of more school buildings. For example, junior high schools will be phased out completely by the 2008-2009 school year. In some cases, their buildings will be used to house new K-8 schools “to obtain the benefits of a larger school size with shared administration, staff and student supports....” The specifics of this and the other facilities changes will be spelled out in the Facilities Master Plan, scheduled to be released in May.

School System to Revise Co-Location Policy

As part of an effort to “build strong partnerships with local and national businesses and organizations,” the Master Education Plan calls for revision of the DCPS co-location policy that was developed in 2004-2005 in response to FOCUS-advocated changes in the charter school law that made it more difficult for DCPS to avoid sharing space with charter schools. According to the Plan, under the revised policy DCPS will give priority “to uses that support the mission of schools, including after-school programs, libraries, charter schools and recreation programs”; to uses that serve students, families, and the neighborhood in which the school sits; and to uses that do not endanger the safety of students and staff.

Although DCPS evidently intends to consider leasing space in its underutilized school buildings to a wide variety of community organizations, the Plan, in a highly unusual nod to DCPS legal obligations, notes that “by law, DCPS is required to give priority to public charter schools in the allocation of school space. This mandate will be more fully addressed in the forthcoming Facilities Master Plan (FMP).”

The School Reform Act, D.C.’s charter school law, requires that DCPS give charters a “right of first offer” on all excess space it intends to offer for lease or use. DCPS ignored the first offer requirement last year, when it made available space in a few underutilized school buildings; as a consequence, charters lost out to D.C. government agencies that had bid on two of the most desirable buildings. DCPS. personnel with whom FOCUS has spoken continue to insist that the right of first offer does not apply to co-locations, a stance completely without legal justification according to lawyers with whom FOCUS has consulted.

FOCUS will report further on this issue when the Facilities Master Plan is released in May.

Patterson Presses For Equitable Medicaid Funding for Charter Schools

Education Committee Chair Kathy Patterson, supported by David Catania, chair of the Council’s Committee on Health, has joined the public charter schools in demanding that the District’s Medicaid office end its long practice of reimbursing DCPS schools at a higher rate than charters for the same services and otherwise discriminating against charter schools that provide reimbursable medical services to their students.

As public schools, the District’s charters are required to provide to their students medically necessary services mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. The cost of these services is eligible for reimbursement with Medicaid dollars. But charter schools, some of which have been providing these services for eight years, have found it difficult to surmount the barriers placed in their way by the District’s Medical Assistance Administration (MAA), which administers the Medicaid reimbursement program.

In a hearing last Friday before Patterson’s Committee, Julie Camerata, Executive Director of the D.C. Charter School Cooperative, testified that a three-year, MAA-approved effort to create a centralized, non-profit Medicaid billing entity for the charter schools was rendered meaningless when MAA changed its policy and demanded that each of the 50+ charter schools individually apply for Medicaid provider status and individually bill MAA for reimbursement.

Since that decision a number of the District’s charters have contracted with for-profit companies to help them apply for Medicaid provider status and manage the arcane reimbursement process. Others do the best they can on their own, and still others provide the services without seeking reimbursement.

But for those charters that obtained provider status the battle had just begun. For some services, they discovered, charters were reimbursed at a significantly lower rate than DCPS schools, and some of the services they provided were not eligible for reimbursement at all, even though identical services provided by DCPS were reimbursed. Retroactive billing for services provided in the two-year period prior to obtaining provider status, authorized by the Medicaid law, also was denied to them.

Yesterday, at a forum sponsored by the Cooperative and the D.C. Public Charter School Association, staff representing Ms. Patterson, the mayor, the chief financial officer, and MAA discussed these inequities and responded to questions posed by a large gathering of charter school leaders and their advocates. Holding forth at the beginning of the meeting, the mayor’s representative expressed satisfaction that all the parties were in the same room talking together, which would help to eliminate the “mixed messages” the charter schools had been getting from MAA. Education Chair Patterson’s staffer was more direct: “public charter schools are public schools and should be treated the same” as DCPS schools by MAA. Ms. Patterson, she went on, was “very disappointed” to find out at Friday’s hearing that the equity issue, which she had been led to believe had been solved, remained in fact very much unsolved. According to her aide, the Education Committee Chair expects a satisfactory resolution to this issue by March 28, the date of the charter school budget hearing.

FOCUS Argues for Shift of Federal Funds Function from DCPS to SEO

FOCUS has urged Education Committee Chair Kathy Patterson to support the charter schools’ so-far futile effort to get the District to shift the management of federal funds acquisition and disbursement from the DCPS State Education Agency (SEA) to the mayor’s State Education Office (SEO). FOCUS Executive Director Robert Cane’s testimony on this issue is attached.

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