FOCUS DC News Wire 12/3/13

 

 

The D.C. Council is scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to allow the Lab School of Washington, a private school for students with disabilities, to extend its lease on an old public school building in Northwest Washington.

 

The proposal would allow Lab to lease the old Hardy School off Foxhall Road — not to be confused with the still-operating Hardy Middle School in Burleith — for 25 years, with an option for an additional 25 years. It has drawn broad support and passed out of the council’s Committee on Economic Development on a unanimous vote.

 

But parents at nearby Key Elementary are asking the council to delay a decision until the city finalizes new school boundaries in September. The boundary overhaul is meant in part to address severe overcrowding at Key Elementary and other Northwest schools, they argue. What if it turns out that the city could use an extra building in that part of the city?

 

“The old Hardy school should be factored into the boundary review process currently underway,” said Key parent Bill Slover, adding that it’s premature to execute a long-term lease on that building until the city can “provide a clear road map that will solve the existing overcrowding, not to mention future issues.”

 

Two dozen of Key’s former PTA officials and other parent leaders echoed that argument in a letter to Gray administration officials and council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), who has pressed to resolve school overcrowding in the neighborhoods she represents.

 

Cheh said school system officials have assured her that they don’t want or need the old Hardy School. School system officials declined to comment.

 

Lab is well-known for serving children with disabilities and currently enrolls nearly 360 students, including about 70 whose tuition is paid by D.C. taxpayers because their needs cannot be met in the city’s public schools.

 

The Hardy building serves as Lab’s elementary-school annex, home to about 80 students in grades one through four. Lab’s current lease would allow it to continue using the school for another decade, until 2023. But Lab officials say they need a longer lease to make needed renovations and secure the future of their school.

 

“The Old Hardy Building has become a major asset to our program,” Head of School Katherine Schantz wrote in testimony to the council. “Losing this building would place our school in a precarious situation.”

 

The Hardy School has not been used as a public school since the mid-1990s. In 1998, the city leased it to Rock Creek International, a private school that declared bankruptcy in 2006. The Lab School acquired Rock Creek’s lease and has used the building for about the last five years.

 

Lab currently pays $80,000 per year for the property, which includes a land area of 50,000 square feet and a building of more than 17,000 square feet. The proposed lease would charge $16.50 per rentable square foot, but the city would discount up to $10 per square foot to help offset the school’s operating costs.

 

After 25 years, the base charge would be reset according to fair market value.

 

Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith said the Gray administration is “comfortable moving forward with the lease.”

 

“The Lab School serves an important role as part of the continuum of services available to students in the District, and we believe there are a number of viable options to address the over-enrollment issues at nearby schools,” Smith wrote in an e-mail.

 

 

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Faced with mounting evidence that get-tough policies in schools are leading to arrest records, low academic achievement and high dropout rates that especially affect minority students, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.

 

Perhaps nowhere has the shift been more pronounced than in Broward County’s public schools. Two years ago, the school district achieved an ignominious Florida record: More students were arrested on school campuses here than in any other state district, the vast majority for misdemeanors like possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti.

 

The Florida district, the sixth largest in the nation, was far from an outlier. In the past two decades, schools around the country have seen suspensions, expulsions and arrests for minor nonviolent offenses climb together with the number of police officers stationed at schools. The policy, called zero tolerance, first grew out of the war on drugs in the 1990s and became more aggressive in the wake of school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado.

 

But in November, Broward veered in a different direction, joining other large school districts, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver, in backing away from the get-tough approach.

 

Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.

 

These alternative efforts are increasingly supported, sometimes even led, by state juvenile justice directors, judges and police officers.

 

In Broward, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, the school district entered into a wide-ranging agreement last month with local law enforcement, the juvenile justice department and civil rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P. to overhaul its disciplinary policies and de-emphasize punishment.

 

Some states, prodded by parents and student groups, are similarly moving to change the laws; in 2009, Florida amended its laws to allow school administrators greater discretion in disciplining students.

 

“A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

 

Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.

 

“What you see is the beginning of a national trend here,” said Michael Thompson, the director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center. “Everybody recognizes right now that if we want to really find ways to close the achievement gap, we are really going to need to look at the huge number of kids being removed from school campuses who are not receiving any classroom time.”

 

Pressure to change has come from the Obama administration, too. Beginning in 2009, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education aggressively began to encourage schools to think twice before arresting and pushing children out of school. In some cases, as in Meridian, Miss., the federal government has sued to force change in schools.

 

Some view the shift as politically driven and worry that the pendulum may swing too far in the other direction. Ken Trump, a school security consultant, said that while existing policies are at times misused by school staffs and officers, the policies mostly work well, offering schools the right amount of discretion.

 

“It’s a political movement by civil rights organizations that have targeted school police,” Mr. Trump said. “If you politicize this on either side, it’s not going to help on the front lines.”

 

Supporters, though, emphasize the flexibility in these new policies and stress that they do not apply to students who commit felonies or pose a danger.

 

 

 

Scores in math, reading and science posted by 15-year-olds in the United States were flat while their counterparts elsewhere — particularly in Shanghai, Singapore and other Asian provinces or countries — soared ahead, according to results of a well-regarded international exam released Tuesday.

 

While U.S. teenagers scored slightly above average in reading, their scores were average in science and below average in math, compared to 64 other countries and economies that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which was administered last fall. That pattern has not changed much since PISA was first administered in 2000.

 

“Our scores are stagnant. We’re not seeing any improvement for our 15-year-olds,” said Jack Buckley, commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. “But our ranking is flipping because a lot of these other countries are improving.”

 

The test scores offer fresh evidence for those who argue that the United States is losing ground to competitors in the global market and others who say a decade’s worth of school reform has done little to improve educational outcomes.

 

“While the intentions may have been good, a decade of top-down, test-based schooling created by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top — focused on hyper-testing students, sanctioning teachers and closing schools — has failed to improve the quality of American public education,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. The AFT released a video on Monday in which it implored the public not to blame teachers, the unions, parents or students for poor PISA results.

 

Shanghai dominated the exam, occupying the top slot in all three subjects. The Chinese province has catapulted to the top in PISA over the past decade after focusing on teacher preparation and investing in its most challenging classrooms, among other things.

 

Germany, Poland and Vietnam were among several countries that made significant improvements in their test scores while Finland, which had been a top-scorer in the past several exams, dropped from its elite perch.

 

“Finland is still a strong performing educational system that’s seen a drop,” Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said during a briefing with reporters Monday. “I’m not yet able to explain it.”

 

The test, administered every three years by the OECD, measures performance on math, reading and science. PISA is designed to test whether students can apply what they’ve learned in school to real-life problems. Approximately 510,000 15-year-olds in public and private schools took the paper-and-pencil exam in 2012.

 

On the math portion, 28 countries tested better than the United States. Aside from the Asia powerhouses of Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Korea, Japan, the United States was outscored by a string of European countries including Latvia, the United Kingdom, Poland, France, Germany and Slovenia.