FOCUS DC News Wire 10/3/13

 

 

A bill that aims to end the “social promotion” of students in the District’s public schools passed a D.C. Council committee Wednesday.

 

The council’s education panel approved the Focused Student Achievement Act on a 3-to-1 vote. It also unanimously passed a bill that would clarify the duties of the public schools’ ombudsman.

 

The legislation was developed by David A. Catania (I-At Large), the committee's chairman, who has introduced a package of seven bills intended to reshape the city’s school reform efforts.

 

Some of Catania’s initiatives have been criticized by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, but council members generally praised Catania’s efforts Wednesday.

 

“The end result is one we can all work with, and that is one that will lead us to a better school system,” said David Grosso (I-At Large).

 

Under current regulations, students may be held back due to poor performance only after the third, fifth or eighth grades, meaning that students who have not shown academic proficiency are routinely promoted.

 

For third-graders during the 2011-2012 academic year, 96.8 percent were promoted even though only 39.3 percent showed proficient test scores.

 

“That’s ridiculous,” Catania said Wednesday. “I’ve yet to hear anyone defend it.”

 

Catania’s bill would allow a student to be held back by a school principal at any point, but only after the student is identified as at risk for retention by a teacher and given opportunities to catch up. For those students, summer school would be required for the first time.

 

“We don’t want children to pass just because,” said Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 7), speaking of the promotions bill. “Overall, this is great.”

 

Committee member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) opposed the bill, citing “grave concerns” about the council assuming a too-active role in classroom matters.

 

“We have stepped directly into the shoes of the D.C. school board that I helped and you helped to eliminate,” Wells told Catania, referring to the Board of Education disbanded by the council in 2007. “It’s not just a slippery slope, it’s a very large door we have opened.”

 

Catania said he chose to establish the promotion guidelines in regulations rather than by statute, meaning they could be more easily tweaked by the school system if necessary. “It leaves it for them, on their own, to make changes going forward,” Catania said.

 

A fifth committee member, Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), was absent Wednesday.

 

The second bill, the Parent and Student Empowerment Amendment Act, passed 4 to 0. It clarifies the role of the city’s schools ombudsman as a neutral resource for students and parents in both traditional public schools and charter schools who are seeking to resolve complaints. The bill also establishes a “student advocate” to “serve as a voice for the needs of public school students and their parents,” according to the panel’s report.

 

 

D.C. school officials have agreed to settle one of two civil rights complaints charging that traditional public high school sports programs systematically discriminate against girls, in violation of the federal Title IX law.

 

Girls will now be given the same opportunity to play sports as boys, according to a settlement agreement that Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson signed with the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights.

 

And if the D.C. schools don’t, or fail to keep to a series of tight deadlines set out, the agreement warns that the Office of Civil Rights may refer the school system to the Justice Department for legal action to more formally hold officials’ feet to the fire.

 

“This is a signpost to the future,” said Herb Dempsey, a retired educator and activist in Washington state who filed the complaint in May 2012. “Ultimately, I’m hoping that a girl born in Washington, D.C., will no longer have to pay a price for being treated like a second-class citizen.”

 

Melissa Salmanowitz, a schools spokeswoman, said the settlement “does not constitute a finding of fault on the part of DCPS but does define a framework which will work to benefit both our male and female student athletes.”

 

Dempsey, who began his Title IX fights when his now-grown daughters were in school and had a dearth of opportunities for sports, is head of a loose coalition of retired men that calls itself “Old Guys for Title IX.” The group has filed thousands of complaints on behalf of female student athletes against school districts across the country — most recently in Colonial Beach, Va. — because, he said, the boys’ baseball fields have bright lights and the girls’ softball fields go dark at dusk.

 

“When it comes to Title IX, schools in D.C.,” he said, “are about as bad as I’d ever care to see.”

 

A second Title IX complaint, filed in the summer by the National Women’s Law Center, is under investigation. That complaint found that the gap between the percentage of girls enrolled in high school and the percentage playing sports is as high as 18 in some schools, higher than in many other districts with active Title IX investigations.

 

“This is a good first step, but D.C. has a long way to go to make sure it’s giving girls a fair shot at playing sports,” said Neena Chaudhry, legal counsel for the law center. “Our complaint also found inequities in coaching and facilities that this settlement didn’t address.”

 

According to the settlement, dated Sept. 27, D.C.’s traditional public high schools will now be held to tight deadlines to begin collecting better information about girls’ participation in sports and reporting it to the Office of Civil Rights by July 1 every year that the settlement is monitored.

 

“Nobody was keeping records,” Dempsey said. “And what you don’t count, you can’t change.”

 

The settlement also requires the schools to, among other things, survey eighth-grade and high school-age girls about what sports they may be interested in playing, to compile all requests for girls’ teams made to school officials in recent years, and to canvass surrounding areas about their sports offerings for girls.

 

School officials have also agreed to expand team rosters if girls’ interest is high in sports now offered — creating junior varsity teams, for example. The agreement also requires D.C. high schools to “take ongoing steps to develop students’ interest and ability,” by creating sports clubs or allowing female student athletes to compete for other schools.

 

D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) recently introduced Title IX legislation — co-signed by every council member — requiring that all public and charter schools in the District, at every level, ensure equal opportunity for girls to play sports. He plans to continue to push the bill, staff members said Tuesday, because the settlement will not be binding in perpetuity.

 

The expansions are not to come at the expense of other existing teams, the settlement states. The federal monitoring will stop once the percentage of girls and boys enrolled in schools is proportionate to the percentage of girls and boys participating in sports, or school officials can prove they’re making a good faith effort to make it so.

 

 

D.C. PUBLIC charter school officials say that, as soon as they learned about alleged fiscal irregularities at the city’s oldest charter school, they took swift action. That’s true. But two issues remain: why the alleged abuses were not discovered sooner, and whether sufficient protections are in place to ensure that public funds are spent in the best interest of students.

 

Suspicions by the D.C. Public Charter School Board about improper contracts at the Options Public Charter School resulted in a lawsuit by D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan , seeking a receiver for the Northeast school. The civil lawsuit, filed Tuesday in D.C. Superior Court, alleges that leaders of Options enriched themselves with at least $3 million in taxpayer funds intended to serve students. According to the suit, the school’s leaders created for-profit companies that entered into contracts with the school to deliver services at high prices.

 

Charter school officials launched an investigation on Aug. 19, bringing in an outside accountant to do a forensic audit, notifying the attorney general and now, six weeks later, seeking to revoke Options’ charter. Officials insisted that their actions were unrelated to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by The Post’s Emma Brown. But the fact that she was seeking information about Options and the for-profit companies in requests dated July 10 and Aug. 8 raises the obvious question of whether there were earlier warning signs that school board officials should have spotted.

 

The allegation that Jeremy L. Williams, former chief financial officer for the public charter school board who once served as interim executive director, assisted in the scheme is particularly troubling, since he was the official in charge of fiscal oversight. Mr. Williams’s attorney, Troy Poole, said he had no comment.

 

Public charter schools, which currently enroll 43 percent of public school students, play a vital role in the District. They provide important educational choices for parents and, while education quality varies, charter school students perform above the D.C. average. So it’s important that officials ensure that the public monies going to charter schools are well spent. It’s particularly galling that Options, a school that is supposed to serve troubled and at-risk teenagers, may have misused its funding.

 

The board, which by law reviews but does not approve contracts, has already moved to tighten its internal controls and toughen its conflict-of-interest policy. It’s encouraging that it has retained the outside accounting firm that audited Options to undertake a rigorous review of financial operations to determine if further changes are in order.

 

 

Educational services for at-risk students at Options Public Charter School suffered as the District school’s leaders allegedly diverted millions of taxpayer dollars to for-profit companies they ran, according to current and former teachers and a lawyer for the school.

 

Basic classroom supplies were sometimes scarce and the required special education services for students — most of whom have disabilities — were sometimes lacking, according to the teachers. Teachers learned in the spring that they would get a raise of 2 percent, instead of their expected 3 percent, and they said school leaders told them that it was because the school’s budget was tight.

 

Three former managers of Options are accused of taking exorbitant bonuses and diverting more than $3 million from the school via an elaborate contracting scheme, according to a civil complaint that city officials filed Tuesday. The money was meant to serve 400 of the most troubled students in the District, but the complaint alleges that the money was used instead to “benefit and enrich former executives of the school.” The teachers told The Washington Post that the school’s operations appeared underfunded during the time of the alleged misuse of public money.

 

At a hearing scheduled for Thursday, city officials are expected to ask a judge to halt payments from Options to the group’s two for-profit companies — Exceptional Education Management Corp. (EEMC) and Exceptional Education Services (EES) — and to appoint a receiver to temporarily oversee the school.

 

Although it is unclear how much, if any, money the managers personally received — or whether others implicated in the alleged scheme profited from it — D.C. officials have asked a judge to freeze the assets of the former managers.

 

Donna D. Montgomery, who was the chief executive of Options until she left in July, purchased $1.96 million in real estate in Maryland, Virginia and Florida from April 2006 to April 2013, according to public real estate records. Records in Louisa County, Va., and Hillsborough County, Fla., indicate that Montgomery and a woman with the same name as a former top official at Options had bought two houses together since 2007 — one near Virginia’s Lake Anna and the other outside Tampa — at a total cost of nearly $1.1 million.

 

Montgomery did not respond to an e-mail inquiry or a message left at EEMC’s Washington office. Her attorney, reached Wednesday night, declined to comment. Montgomery has denied that any of the money was misused.

 

Anthony Herman, a lawyer who represents Options, called the allegations “very troubling.”

 

“I have no doubt that the alleged conduct of EEMC has detracted from the quality of the services provided, because if the allegations are true, then they’re more interested in lining their own pockets than they are in educating children,” he said.

 

Herman said it is also troubling that the D.C. Public Charter School Board wants to initiate a process aimed at closing the school, a move it is expected to take up at a meeting scheduled for Oct. 16. Charter board officials have said Options will remain open at least through the end of the year.

 

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Yesterday was a terrible day for D.C.'s charter school movement on many levels. Of course, the news that there appears to be strong evidence that senior executives and the board chair of Options Public Charter School diverted millions of dollars in public money provided for the education of severely at-risk and disabled children to companies they control is enough to make anyone ill. The story, of course, has the public wondering whether financial irregularities such as this could be going on at other charters. And now the questions are coming, as the editors of the Washington Post ask this morning, why the problems were not found earlier. It will take many difficult days to alleviate these concerns. Most unfortunate is that the trouble at Options distracts attention from the tremendous work completed under extremely difficult circumstances by the thousands of people dedicated to improving public education in the nation's capital.

 

The most severe shock felt up and down the spines of local charter leaders is the implication of Jeremy Williams in this plot. As the Post editors comment:

 

"The allegation that Jeremy L. Williams, former chief financial officer for the public charter school board who once served as interim executive director, assisted in the scheme is particularly troubling, since he was the official in charge of fiscal oversight."

 

Mr. Williams, up until yesterday, was one of the most respected and well-liked members of the tight knit charter school community. I met him almost a decade ago as board chair of the William E. Doar, Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts. Our school had accomplished something to this day which is extremely rare; we secured a permanent facility in our first year of operation. However, this created something of an anomaly for these new alternative schools. Doar had millions of dollars of debt on its balance sheet. It was Mr. Williams who guided our financial reporting and explained our unique income statements to doubters at the Public Charter School Board.

 

He played a larger role when I moved on to Washington Latin. Money was extremely tight as it often is for charters in their early years. During that period it was also not unusual for the city to be late or inaccurate with its quarterly payments. I remember like it was yesterday once such stretch of time in which our funding did not come in as expected, and head of school Martha Cutts and I were petrified that we wouldn't meet our payroll. It was Mr. Williams who was able to break through the bureaucracy to get us the money we were owed. There were many other instances of him proving aid and advice.

 

I know that he played a special role in the history of D.C.'s charters in creating, along with past Chairman Tom Nida, the original systems for assessing the fiscal health of schools. He did his work, not as some regulator threatening harsh punishment if his demands were not met, but with genuine kindness and sincere compassion, and the constant reassurance that everything was going to be O.K. His smile was enough to keep you coming back to the office day after day.

 

I know I speak for many others when I say that I hope all of these allegations are not true. And we thank Mr. Williams for all of his loyal assistance over so many years.