- D.C's Deputy Mayor of Education resigns
- D.C. losing De'Shawn Wright, deputy mayor for education
- District suit alleges woman lived in Md., sent daughter to D.C. school [Booker T. Washington PCS mentioned]
- D.C. considers bill to benefit military children
D.C's Deputy Mayor of Education resigns
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
October 19, 2012
Mayor Gray announced yesterday that De'Shawn Wright, Deputy Mayor of Education, has resigned his post for a job in New York. We now officially have a public school facility mess on our hands.
He couldn't be leaving at a worse time. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson is about to announce the closing of several of her sites. The Illinois Facility Fund Report, which Mr. Wright commissioned, calls for charters to replicate and replace under-enrolled and under-performing traditional schools. This has spurred a D.C. Council driven task force to consider whether charters should be forced to provide a neighborhood admission preference, which would dilute the power of school choice that has been the fountainhead behind their success. The findings have also led to a effort by the Deputy Mayor's Office to work on devising a comprehensive public school building plan encompassing both charters and traditional schools which, based upon a presentation at this week's Public Charter School Board meeting by Marc Bleyer, Capital Program Manager at the Deputy's Mayor's Office, seems about as likely to succeed as it would be for Michelle Rhee to win a Miss Congeniality Award.
Compounding all of this is a $3,000 per child charter school facility allotment that seems certain in coming years to dip below the legal level of $2,800 due to lack of City and Federal funding.
The Washington Post's Emma Brown quotes Mr. Wright as saying “Anyone who thinks I would shy away from tough work is misinformed and doesn’t know my history.” Well that's exactly what he has done. An individual who cares about the nation's capital and its children facing the prospect of a new job would say without hesitation that this is not the time to go. Unless, of course, Mr. Wright knows what many others of us already suspect. There is a train wreck coming that no one has the will to stop.
D.C. losing De'Shawn Wright, deputy mayor for education
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
October 18, 2012
De’Shawn Wright, the D.C. deputy mayor for education, who has played a key role in decision making about the future of the city’s public schools, is leaving his post for a job in New York state, Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) announced Thursday.
Wright will serve as New York’s deputy secretary for education, a top state education post. Wright’s chief of staff, Jennifer Leonard, will begin serving as the interim deputy mayor for education in November.
“De’Shawn is a brilliant educational innovator and a tireless public servant, and our loss is definitely New York’s gain,” Gray said in a statement. “He has done a spectacular job serving the children, families and educators of the District of Columbia, and we will miss his extraordinary gifts sorely.”
The departure comes at a critical moment for education in the District, as officials try to envision and plan for the future of both traditional D.C. public schools and charter schools, systems that operate independently and often compete for city resources.
Wright has been leading that planning effort. In January, his office released a controversial study that recommended opening more high-performing charters and turning around or closing dozens of low-performing traditional public schools.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has said repeatedly that some schools must be closed, and she is expected to announce closures in the coming weeks.
The study, the impending closures and the continued growth of charter schools — which enroll more than 40 percent of the city’s public school students — have sparked a backlash from community activists who say they fear the dismantling of the traditional school system. The resistance is likely to intensify when closures are made public.
“It’s gearing up to be a brutal battle,” said Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, who said he had been looking forward to working with Wright “to allay some of the concerns.”
Wright said his departure has nothing to do with the political situation. “Anyone who thinks I would shy away from tough work is misinformed and doesn’t know my history,” he said.
He said the New York job was just the right opportunity at the right time — a chance “for me to return home to lead education statewide in a place where I started my career.”
Wright was a Teach for America corps member in New York City in the late 1990s. He later worked for the New York City Department of Education and as chief policy adviser to Newark Mayor Cory Booker before joining Gray’s team in 2011.
District suit alleges woman lived in Md., sent daughter to D.C. school [Booker T. Washington PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
October 18, 2012
D.C. officials have filed a civil suit against the mother of a teenager who allegedly lived in Maryland while attending D.C. public schools for free, Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan announced Thursday.
Jacinta L. Mason and her daughter lived in Hyattsville when the teen enrolled in the District’s McKinley Technology High School in 2008, the suit alleges. Mason agreed to pay non-resident tuition, but then failed to keep up with the bills, and by November 2010 owed the city more than $12,000. Another defendant, Darnetta Paige, then falsely claimed that the girl was living with her in the District, authorities allege.
Paige, an employee of the Booker T. Washington Public Charter School for Technical Arts, also falsely claimed that she was the girl’s legal guardian, the suit alleges. The girl was allowed to finish her course work at McKinley and graduated this year, according to Ted Gest, a spokesman for the attorney general.
City officials want to compel Mason to pay $31,294 in unpaid tuition for those four years. They are also seeking to win at least $69,160 in damages and penalties from Paige.
Authorities said this is the first suit alleging falsification of student residency in recent memory.
Nathan said his office is working with D.C. public schools and other education officials to find other students who don’t live in the city and have wrongly attended its schools for free.
D.C. considers bill to benefit military children
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
October 18, 2012
D.C. schools Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley knows the drill: Her husband was a military officer, and so her eldest daughter has attended eight schools.
And in just three months at Leckie Elementary School in Southwest D.C., across the freeway from Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, 50 students transferred out as their parents were relocated to other bases. Others enrolled, as their own active-duty mothers and fathers were sent to the base.
"It's a constant influx of students leaving and a constant influx of students coming in," said Principal Jermall Wright.
The District is considering a bill to join the Military Interstate Children's Compact Commission, currently comprised of 43 states including Maryland and Virginia. It ensures that children of active-duty military officers are accommodated and afforded smooth transitions when they move from state to state and school to school.
For students who transfer in their senior year of high school, that might mean taking a test other than the state's exit exam, and being given flexibility with course requirements so that they could graduate on time. Children in honors or gifted programs, or special education students or English-language learners, would be allowed to continue in those programs, though their new schools could re-evaluate them after they enrolled.
There are 763 students in the District with active-duty military parents, plus about 400 children of National Guard members who could become active. Thousands more children have active-duty parents who work in the District but live in Maryland or Virginia and send their children to school there.
The bill is not exactly controversial: At a D.C. Council hearing on Thursday, Mahaley said DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and Public Charter School Board Executive Director Scott Pearson have pledged their support, while the city can easily cover the $2,000 in annual membership fees to the commission. And no D.C. Council members joined Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who presided over the hearing, on the dais to voice any concerns.
Joining the commission would require some work by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, Mahaley acknowledged. The city would have to identify where military children were enrolled and what specific problems they were encountering, as well as establish a commission and appoint a education liaison to military families.
Thomas Hinton, senior state liaison for the Department of Defense, said he has seen even grizzled veterans choke back sobs because of the challenges their children faced constantly changing schools: transcripts that are never sent or sports and clubs that are limited because a student shows up midyear.
"It is a readiness isue for the Department of Defense. We know if good people are hurting as they sit around the dinner table, they are going to get out of the military in deference to their families," Hinton said.