- D.C. to give charter schools hand with facility costs
- Mayor Gray replaces lost three sector funds for charters
- Enrollment is Up for DC Public Schools, but Is That the Whole Story? [FOCUS mentioned]
- D.C. charters enroll 43 percent of all public school students
- D.C. officials expect enrollment numbers to hold up well under audit
- D.C. Public School Enrollment Increases, With Charters Leading the Way
- Arts panel backs plans for Washington Latin [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
D.C. to give charter schools hand with facility costs
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
October 25, 2012
The District has agreed to pay for charter-school facilities costs that are currently paid for with federal funds, Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced Thursday.
The $7 million move will free up those federal dollars, essentially turning them over to the charter sector to use for other needs.
“Ensuring that all D.C. public school students have access to a high-quality education has been a top priority of my administration,” Gray (D) said in a statement. “Part of this commitment is ensuring that the learning environment for our students is stimulating and conducive to academic achievement.”
The $7 million comes from capital dollars left unspent at the end of the 2012 fiscal year, which ended in September.
Charter schools are publicly funded but independently operated. They enroll an increasing proportion of the city’s students — about 43 percent, according to the most recent projections — but are not included in the city’s capital budget and must find and secure their own real estate.
They receive $3,000 per student to help pay for leases and mortgages on school buildings. Most of that facilities allowance has come from city tax dollars in recent years, but some of it — $200 per child — has been paid with federal funds.
There was some uncertainty about whether the U.S. Department of Education would allow the city to continue using those funds, meant to improve school quality, for facilities. Gray’s announcement ensures that the full amount of the facilities allowance will be funded with city dollars, not just this year but also into the future.
“It’s great news for charter school quality,” said Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. “A lot of schools have bond obligations and debt obligations, so knowing that these funds are going to be there, year in and year out, is very important to their creditworthiness.”
Ultimately, the District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education and the U.S. Department of Education will work with charter leaders to determine how the $7 million will be spent. Pearson said it could go to charter schools in the form of grants for specific efforts to boost quality, such as improving instruction or special-education services.
Gray’s announcement does not change the fact that charters receive less public funding for buildings than schools in the traditional public school system, something that has long drawn complaints from charter leaders.
The District this year is spending nearly $6,000 per student for construction and renovation of D.C. Public Schools buildings.
Mayor Gray replaces lost three sector funds for charters
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
October 26, 2012
D.C. Mayor Gray announced yesterday that he has found money out of a $140 million budget surplus to make up the U.S. Department of Education funding that in the past has brought the charter school facility allotment from the legal level of $2,800 a child to the $3,000 that these schools have received the last several years. The Mayor asserted that going forward the total facility allotment will come from city revenue.
The Department of Education had already announced that the charter school portion of three sector funds could no longer be used to help pay for facilities. The three sector funds are the Federal dollars that Joseph Robert, Jr. had Congress allocate to both charters and the traditional schools so that he could convince them to finance the Opportunity Scholarship private school voucher program.
Charter leaders have asserted for quite some time that the facility allotment should come entirely from local revenue. FOCUS has championed this idea. Without this money the facility allotment would have dipped below the $3,000 level. The charter portion of the three sector funds will still go to this school system for other yet-to-be determined uses. So we have one tiny victory in a public school educational landscape heavily tilted to support the traditional schools.
The Washington Post's Emma Brown points out today that DCPS has allocated about $6,000 per pupil to build and renovate their properties. Mr. Gray's announcement decreases by $7 million the $72 million to $127 million a year in additional revenue that the regular schools receive compared to charters.
Enrollment is Up for DC Public Schools, but Is That the Whole Story? [FOCUS mentioned]
The Washingtonian
By Harry Jaffe
October 25, 2012
More families are trusting their children to DC public schools, according to numbers released today, but a deeper look shows promising trends, raises questions about the future of public schooling, and points out troubling numbers for the traditional public schools.
The base numbers would warrant happy days for public school officials: For the first time in more than a decade, the number of students enrolled in public schools topped 80,000, according to preliminary figures provided by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
In 2002 that number was 76,427, representing a trend of families fleeing the deteriorating public schools. Now the renovation of many decrepit school buildings and the drive to reform is drawing students back to public schools. The latest head count is 80,854.
New population figures show that younger people are moving into the city. Many are staying to start families, and they are sending their offspring to public schools.
Most of the increase went to public charter schools, from preschool to high school. The charters, funded with public dollars but operated independently of DCPS, gained 11 percent compared with the last school year. Traditional public schools gained 1 percent, a number that might drop to 0 when auditors review the preliminary figures.
“The trend of the past 16 years is continuing apace, at rates none of us could have anticipated” says Robert Cane, executive director of FOCUS, a charter school advocacy group.
If the trend continues, the city can anticipate the day when more than half of its students attend charter schools. Last year, 41 percent of DC students attended charters; the new figures put that number at 43 percent. With that rate of growth, charters will surpass public schools in three years.
The numbers show that school choice is working well in the nation’s capital. Charter schools are setting up shop in the city’s poorest wards and showing success measured against public schools, and families are responding. According to the charter schools, charter high school graduation rates are 80 percent, compared with 61 percent for traditional high schools. Across grades, charter students score higher than counterparts in DCPS.
The Public Charter School Board says enrollment in charter high schools has increased a whopping 19 percent. That rise is due in part to the success of current charter high schools and the fact that the board approved four new schools this year. The 18 existing charter high schools increased their capacity, and some middle schools expanded into high schools.
How are the city government and DCPS reacting?
The city is still failing to give charters access to public space, according to advocates.
“The Gray administration has been very poor in making school buildings available to us,” says Cane. “Our growth in numbers is in spite of that. Our numbers might be even larger if we had the space.”
It’s possible that DCPS wants to fill that space with its own charter schools. The Board of Education, disbanded five years ago under former mayor Adrian Fenty, had the power to authorize independent schools. Since then the chartering authority has been in the hands of the Public Charter School Board. DCPS chancellor Kaya Henderson has shown interest in getting back the authority from charter schools.
DCPS didn’t respond to questions. Cane met with Henderson last month.
“They are interested in it,” he says, “but they didn’t appear to have concrete plans to move ahead.”
Those plans would require the city council to pass a law giving the chancellor authority to create charters. Either way, the charters are bound to gain ground.
D.C. charters enroll 43 percent of all public school students
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
October 25, 2012
Word comes today from the Washington Post's Emma Brown that charter schools in the nation's capital now enroll 43 percent of all public school students, up from 41 percent last year.
Over 35,000 students now attend a charter school. DCPS demonstrated a one percent increase over last year, but Ms. Brown indicates that once this figure is audited it is typical to find that the number drops. Therefore, enrollment in the traditional school system may be the same as last year.
The jump in charter school students is thought to be attributable both to an overall increase in the number of public school students which now stands at 85,000, five percent more than last year, and transfers of pupils away from private schools. It is also a testament to the strong popularity of these innovative educational institutions.
In the not too distant future charters are certain to teach the majority of kids in this city. Just imagine what that will do to the debate over who should control school buildings.
Not to be caught off guard it would be best to figure out now where charter school students will be housed. It would also be smart for the Public Charter School Board to work with schools to develop a strategic plan for replication of Tier 1 facilities.
The growth of charters, together with a reinvigorated voucher program, means the future of public school education in Washington, D.C. looks exceedingly bright.
D.C. officials expect enrollment numbers to hold up well under audit
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
October 25, 2012
Charter school enrollment in the District continues to grow quickly while DCPS enrollment appears to be either holding steady or headed for a slight drop, according to raw data released today by the Office for the State Superintendent of Education.
My full story on the numbers — which show that this fall’s charter enrollment has ticked up to 43 percent of the city’s total student population — is here.
The numbers are self-reported by schools Oct. 5 and will be audited by an independent accounting firm. While the raw figures are a good indication of trends, the numbers themselves always change — and sometimes significantly — during that verification process.
Last year, for example, the audit shaved more than a thousand students off DCPS’s enrollment and shrunk the charter sector’s figure by more than 400.
But OSSE officials say they expect this year’s raw numbers to be more accurate than in years past, the result of more training for school leaders, stronger database tools, and a revamped counting process meant to catch and correct discrepancies early on.
Last year, for example, there were more than 3,000 students who were claimed by more than one school on Oct. 5. This year, that number has shrunk to about 500.
“The issues are flagged earlier in the process and resolved before the actual audit takes place, so we don’t have this 3,000 kid number and we’re not sure what happened,” said Marc Caposino, an OSSE spokesman.
Also new this year is a more intensive effort to verify that students actually live in the city. Auditors are examining all students’ residency forms, instead of just a sampling.
The fall enrollment numbers are critical — they determine how much money each school gets. But they’re only a snapshot. They don’t answer important questions about what happens after October 5: Which schools are good at retaining students throughout the year? Which schools are not? How many students leave charter schools mid-year for DCPS and vice versa?
OSSE’s data guru, Jeff Noel, says the agency is getting closer to developing the technological wherewithal it needs to able to answer some of those questions. But he wouldn’t venture a guess as to when hard data would be available.
Meantime, full school-by-school fall enrollment data won’t be available until the audited numbers are published sometime early next year. But the Office for the State Superintendent of Education did release some information today that breaks down enrollment into charter vs. DCPS schools and by grade level.
D.C. Public School Enrollment Increases, With Charters Leading the Way
DCIst
By Martin Austermuhle
October 25, 2012
Enrollment at D.C. public schools has grown again, according to unaudited figures published by the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education today. The numbers show that overall enrollment in public schools rose from 76,782 last year to 80,823 this year, a five percent jump that caps off three steady years of enrollment increases.
But much like in years past, the jumps in enrollment have largely been led by the city's public charter schools. This year, according to OSSE, enrollment in public charter schools increased by 11 percent, from 31,562 to 35,019. Enrollment in D.C. public schools, by contrast, only jumped by a single percentage point, from 45,191 to 45,835.
That the numbers are unaudited provides one caveat, though—once F.S. Taylor & Associates checks over the numbers and releases the audited final tally next year, enrollment in D.C. public schools may remain flat or even go down slightly. Looking at last year's unaudited and audited reports, for example, D.C. reported 78,200 students in October 2011 and an auditing firm concluded that there were actually 76,517 students in public and public charter schools.
Regardless, city officials said the numbers were a good sign for D.C. “One of the strongest indicators that our school system is improving is a steady increase in enrollment numbers-an increase I’m proud to see we have once again achieved This marks the largest enrollment increase in the District’s public schools in 45 years," said Mayor Vince Gray in a press release.
Arts panel backs plans for Washington Latin [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Northwest Current
By Elizabeth Wiener
October 24, 2012
Washington Latin Public Charter School’s permanent home will have a big new gym, library/media space, separate entrances for the upper and middle school, and a tree-lined outdoor “forum” where students will gather, under plans presented to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts last week.
The commission, which reviews designs for D.C. schools and other municipal and federal buildings, unanimously endorsed Latin’s plan for “adaptive reuse” of the now-closed Rudolph Elementary School at 5210 2nd St. NW. “We like the concept,” said chair Earl “Rusty” Powell.
But the project must proceed on a very fast track. The high-performing charter school is now spread among three separate sites along 16th Street, and the facilities lack a gym, large meeting room and outdoor space. Leaders want to have Rudolph, which has been vacant for several years, ready to welcome the entire middle and upper school by next August.
Thus the transformation of the old elementary school into a middle and high school will proceed in phases. The first phase will include renovation of the 1939 redbrick school building, demolition of what architect Sean O’Donnell called an “ill-conceived 1968 addition,” and construction of the basic box of a modern gym. The second phase — “predicated on funding,” O’Donnell said — will include building the library and media center, and completion of the gym with locker space and other facilities on the north side of the block-long site.
Latin currently occupies “a diffuse campus, deficient in outdoor space, housed up and down 16th Street,” O’Donnell told the commission. Current space on the scattered sites totals about 31,000 square feet, while the transformed Rudolph will offer 75,000 square feet on five acres, including two large playing fields.
Although the school will more than double its square footage, the current enrollment of 598 will expand only to a maximum of 650, said head of school Martha Cutts. “We’re not planning a big increase,” she said in an interview, adding that the school wants to offer better facilities — indoors and out — for its students.
The current front steps of Rudolph on 2nd Street are not accessible to the disabled. So O’Donnell also wants to add a gentle entrance ramp that would create a small amphitheater” of seats in its curve. He also noted that the school, near the eastern edge of Ward 4, is a short walk from the Fort Totten Metro station and well-located for students from across the city.
Latin prides itself on offering students from all eight wards of the city a “rigorous classical education,” with all students taking Latin and French or Mandarin, as well as a full college prep curriculum. It opened in a church on Massachusetts Avenue in 2006, with 179 students in grades five through seven, and added a grade a year as it spread out — adding makeshift space — along upper 16th Street. All 42 students in the first graduating class last June were accepted to colleges.
Amid the ongoing competition for space among charter schools — and especially for space in the city’s many “surplused” public schools — Latin in July won the right to a 25-year lease for Rudolph, with an option to renew. The city provides charter schools $3,000 per pupil per year to pay for facilities, but Cutts said the school also expects to take out loans and seek donations to pay for the ambitious renovation and expansion project.
The fine arts panel seemed inclined to help the school meet its hurry-up timetable. “I’m thinking we could let the architects finish it up,