FOCUS
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DC PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL
N.E.W.S.L.E.T.T.E.R

VOLUME 5, NUMBER 1 - WINTER 2000

• DCPS Attacks Charter Schools

• 1999 Annual Report

• Donors

• Join the Movement

DCPS Attacks Charter Schools
Funding Delays Affect Students

Stung by the popularity and attendant rapid growth of the District's public charter schools, DCPS is threatening the movement's progress by blocking the conversion of Paul Junior High School into a public charter school and preventing other charter schools' access to abandoned DCPS buildings. Meanwhile, confusion at the Control Board and in the Chief Financial Officer's office have led to serious budget problems that affect many public charter schools.

Last spring Paul Junior High School — a Ward 4 DCPS school — met the rigorous requirements of the charter school law and gained approval to convert into a public charter school. One of the most powerful mechanisms for the improvement of individual schools and, ultimately, of DCPS as a whole, conversion requires the two-thirds approval of both the school's faculty and the parents of children attending the school. Having gotten well over 70% of the needed signatures and the blessing of the DC Public Charter School Board, which approved its charter, Paul applied to DCPS to lease its school building. Although it is clear from the language and legislative history of the School Reform Act that a conversion school is to stay in its building and continue to serve as the neighborhood school, DCPS first informed Paul that it would be evicted from the building. Under pressure from FOCUS and others, DCPS relented; instead, it now insists, Paul must share its building with a newly-announced DCPS program that is a carbon copy of Paul's arts and technology focus. The law grants DCPS no right to share the building, which is already fully occupied by Paul Junior High. This has not deterred DCPS from pressing its demand to share the building. FOCUS and the DC Public Charter School Coalition are working hard to help the Paul parents and teachers maintain their legal hold on the building and open their school as scheduled.

Meanwhile, DCPS is working hard to stop some charter schools from opening and others from expanding by denying access to excess DCPS facilities. As regular readers of this newsletter know, DCPS has long made it very difficult for the public charter schools to exercise the preference to lease or buy abandoned DCPS school buildings granted to them by the School Reform Act. In recent months, however, DCPS has upped the ante, illegally pulling from the market a number of buildings — some empty for as long as 20 years — that various public charter schools had sought to acquire. Other buildings are listed as “in negotiations” with non-public charter school buyers, even though offers on these buildings have been rejected by DCPS. So bad has the situation become that members of Congress with oversight over the District are threatening a formal investigation into this shutting down of the facilities disposition process.

FOCUS and the Coalition have also been grappling with painful delays in charter school funding. Under the School Reform Act, charter schools were to receive 75% of their annual funding as soon as the District budget was signed by the President on November 29. But weeks went by with no funding, while many of the schools grew increasingly more desperate. Under constant prodding from FOCUS, the Control Board finally released an emergency payment just before Christmas to those charter schools that were going to miss payroll. More funds were released during the first three weeks of January, but as this newsletter went to press at the end of January more than half of the public charter schools had not received a significant percent of the funding to which they are entitled under law. These funding delays have been a major distraction to school leaders and have in many cases forced them to put off making necessary purchases and hiring teachers and other personnel, often to the detriment of their academic programs.

Why the delays? First, in developing the FY 2000 budget the District ignored the estimates provided by FOCUS and the two chartering boards showing that there would be approximately 3500 new charter school students this year. Instead, only 300 were budgeted for. Second, after the District budget reached Congress $30,000,000 of DCPS's budget was set aside to cover anticipated charter school enrollment growth. When charter school and DCPS enrollments were tallied in the fall, however, it turned out that while the charter schools gained 3,200 students, DCPS had lost only 1200 students. DCPS immediately began demanding a share of the $30,000,000 that had been set aside for the charter schools. The Control Board, faced with competing demands for the same funds, made no decision until the bank accounts of many of the charter schools approached zero.

As we go to press, the Control Board has given to DCPS over $10,000,000 of the funds set aside for the public charter schools. This means that approximately 8% of our students are unfunded – a result that, in addition to being illegal, represents a great burden to the fledgling charter schools and their students. FOCUS and the Coalition are continuing the fight to gain full funding. We'll keep you posted.

1999 Annual Report

“When the first two public charter schools opened during the 1996 school year, few would have imagined the startling expansion in the number of charter schools in two years. Today — with one charter school for every five traditional public schools and one charter student for every ten or eleven students in the D.C. Public School system (DCPS) — D.C. is arguably the single most `charter-ized' jurisdiction in the entire country.”

— George Washington's Center for Washington Area Studies November, 1999

1999 was a year of extraordinary growth for D.C. public charter schools. Fifteen schools survived a challenging first year and nine new ones opened in the fall, bringing the total number of charter school campuses in the city to 31. FOCUS grew along with the movement, expanding our staff and services. More important than mere growth, however, was leadership. The emergence of so many schools at once required the city to adapt quickly to a new and unfamiliar form of public education. The schools themselves needed not just individual help but help to act collectively, to pool their resources and make their needs known to those in power. FOCUS in 1999 lived up to our acronym, focusing the attention of the public on the charter school movement, focusing the movement on sustaining itself for the years to come.

Leading the D.C. Charter School Coalition

The D.C. Public Charter School Coalition, which FOCUS staffs and organizes, this year increased its effectiveness dramatically. At weekly meetings and through regular e-mails, FOCUS kept the Coalition informed about issues affecting the movement and sought consensus on how to respond. A special advocacy committee, made up of charter school leaders willing to devote time to the movement as a whole, developed an agenda for improving the city's charter law and met throughout the year with District Council members and members of Congress. As a result, the 1999 D.C. Appropriations Act included four pro-charter amendments, including a requirement that the District improve its policy on disposing of abandoned school buildings, which the charter schools badly need. The Advocacy Committee also responded to crises throughout the year, most notably the Council's and Mayor's initial failure to appropriate funds for charter school enrollment growth. FOCUS also organized Coalition witness panels to testify at all relevant public hearings. FOCUS chairman Malcolm Peabody and executive director Robert Cane themselves represented the Coalition at no less than nine hearings before the D.C. Board of Education, the District Council, and the D.C. House Appropriations Committee.

The Coalition also launched a number of groundbreaking collaborative projects. A Student Support Committee was formed to enable multi-school grant applications. On its second application the Committee found success, winning a $9 million, three year grant to improve student health and safety — by far the largest federal grant ever awarded to a consortium of charter schools. To administer the grant, the Student Support Committee transformed itself into a non-profit organization, the D.C. Public Charter School Student Support Center. The Center maintains close ties to the Coalition and will seek out new opportunities for creative cooperation among the schools. Two other Coalition-supported collaborations are worthy of note: a targeted public relations campaign over the summer that resulted in a number of favorable articles about the public charter schools, and a sports league that just began its inaugural basketball season and intends to incorporate in 2000. FOCUS is also helping to bring charter school teachers together through a new Coalition teacher's forum.

Participation in the Coalition broadened over the course of the year. Despite their extreme work loads, representatives from more than half of the twenty seven schools now attend every meeting and every school attended at least some of the meetings. One-hundred and ninety people now receive Coalition e-mails and faxes, up from 80 at the end of 1998 — a rate of growth that outpaced the Nasdaq!

Reaching Out to Policy Makers and the Press

Our work for the Coalition blends with our general work in support of the movement. A priority this year was to cultivate stronger relationships with those in power, especially in local government. To that end, FOCUS met with the Mayor and members of the District Council and Control Board. FOCUS also kept in frequent contact with senior aides to these officials, as well as with key staff at the Office of Budget and Planning, the DCPS Realty Office, the Board of Education, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, and Congress. In addition, FOCUS developed relationships with reporters at the Post, the Times, and various community newspapers, and appeared on local tv and radio public affairs programs. Decision makers now call FOCUS when they need information about charter schools — and expect a call from us when charter school interests are at stake.

Although much more needs to be done, our work in 1999 paid dividends. The funding process for charter schools is still dysfunctional, but FOCUS convinced the Council and Control Board to raise the charter school appropriation and the charter school facilities allowance to levels required by law. And support for charter schools on the District Council is growing to the extent that we are hopeful that future improvements to the charter school law can be initiated at the local level rather than in Congress.

Reaching Out to Parents and the Public

As in 1998, FOCUS undertook two major student recruitment initiatives: a Charter School Fair in the spring and a Metrobus ad campaign in the summer. At this year's Fair, co-sponsored by D.C. Parents for School Choice, hundreds of families came together with representatives of all the charter schools. The bus ads generated upwards of a thousand calls from parents over the summer. In addition to providing comprehensive information to these parents, FOCUS counseled them about which schools best fit the needs of their children.

Our efforts to reach parents and the public with the good news about public charter schools was greatly aided in 1999 by a new emphasis on information technology. In May, we launched an extensive website that includes descriptions of each school, the full text of the charter law and funding act, the FOCUS newsletter, the text of FOCUS testimony at public hearings, and much more. The home page has attracted over 1400 visitors. FOCUS also helped to construct another major web site for parents, DCSchoolsearch.com, which provides extremely detailed, searchable profiles of every public and public charter school in the city.

Helping Schools Survive and Flourish

FOCUS helps individual charter schools in a number of important ways. For example, FOCUS intervenes on behalf of any charter school that finds itself in conflict with an official entity, especially if the dispute is causing a crisis or violates the letter or spirit of the District's charter school law. For example, FOCUS defeated a DCPS plan to place a program for expelled students in part of a building leased by the Hyde Leadership PCS, which had been assured that it could expand into the space in question. FOCUS also convinced the Office of Budget and Planning to release emergency funds to schools that were especially hard hit by delays in funding (see article, page 1). Outside the political arena, FOCUS responded to many large and small requests from charter leaders — finding a good corporate lawyer, getting information on how to identify limited English-proficient students, or publicizing an open house. In 1999 FOCUS also increasingly began to provide help to approved charter schools in the difficult period before start-up.

FOCUS's role is not to tell charter leaders how to run their schools. We do, however, meet the expressed needs of the public charter schools by sponsoring occasional programs that take advantage of our board members' expertise in such important areas as facilities acquisition and financial management. In 1999, FOCUS expanded its efforts to help the schools manage themselves better by linking up with the National Executive Service Corps to launch a new program that will put experts in management, marketing, and financial management directly into individual schools for up to 50 hours of consultation. FOCUS is picking up half of the modest fees involved.

Looking Towards the Future

The D.C. public charter school movement in 1999 caught everyone's attention — those who are desperate for change, those who are threatened by it, and the many who still are on the fence. The challenge in 2000 is to turn momentum into stability, which again will require leadership: leadership to keep the movement strong and unified in the face of increasingly aggressive attacks by those who see the public charter schools as a threat to their prerogatives.

Like many of the new charter schools, FOCUS is just beginning to hit its stride. In preparation for what we expect to be a watershed year for the public charter school movement, in December we renovated and expanded our offices, upgraded our computer and telephone systems, and added another professional staffer and an office manager. In 2000, we hope to find the resources to enable us to add a full-time parent outreach coordinator and to expand our efforts to promote the public charter schools in every ward of the District. We look forward to being able to report to you 12 months from now that 2000 was another year of impressive growth for the charter school movement, the DC Public Charter School Coalition, and FOCUS.

Donors
Below are listed the many people and organizations who donated to FOCUS in 1999. We are deeply indebted to these supporters, whose confidence in us makes possible our continuing service to the burgeoning public charter school movement.

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