- Gray budget proposal calls for D.C. school renovations, more money per student
- Vincent Gray proposes $442 million for school construction
- Two Rivers students' proposal included in Mayor Gray's budget [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
- Charter advocate says more progress needed [FOCUS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
March 28, 2013
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray is proposing to spend $1.7 billion in coming years to renovate and rebuild dozens of schools, continuing a years-long effort to upgrade city education facilities. Among the schools slated for modernization is Spingarn Senior High, one of the 13 schools that Chancellor Kaya Henderson plans to close this spring because of low enrollment. Gray (D) is seeking to spend $26 million to turn Spingarn into a vocational school that would train students in fields related to transportation and health.
The investment is part of what Gray described as a renewed effort to ensure that students who choose not to attend college can graduate from high school with employable skills.
“Spingarn will be a school that will start to bring back, in a real way, career and technical education in our schools,” said Gray, who presented the school spending plan to the D.C. Council on Thursday as part of his citywide fiscal 2014 budget proposal.The mayor’s school-construction plan, which includes $350 million for 2014 alone, drew praise from council members whose constituents have been clamoring for the investment. But Education Committee Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large) questioned whether it’s sensible to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in high schools designed for more students than they now hold.
The new Ballou Senior High, for example, is designed for 1,400 students, but the school enrolls fewer than 800. Catania suggested that shrinking the design would create savings that could be reinvested elsewhere.
Gray said the modernizations will accommodate an expected growth of school-aged children in the coming years and will help traditional high schools compete with charter schools. The operating budgets of both school sectors would increase under the mayor’s proposal, which calls for raising the basic per-student allocation — the main source of dollars for schools — by 2 percent. That translates into a $74 million increase in operating funds for fast-growing charter schools, whose enrollment is forecast to jump 8 percent from this year to next. The traditional school system, which has struggled to maintain enrollment, would have a smaller increase, of about $7 million. Some parents are warning that despite the increase, their schools stand to lose key staff and programs.
The city dedicates about $2 billion of its $10 billion operating budget to public education. The mayor said the District will continue reducing the number of special education students enrolled in private institutions at public expense, a policy that has been controversial among some parents, who say city schools aren’t equipped to educate students with disabilities and special needs. The reduction in private placements will save $30 million next year, the mayor said, funds that will be invested in strengthening public schools’ special education programs. The council will hold several public hearings on the education budget during the next six weeks. The council can make changes to the plan before taking a final vote in late spring.
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
March 28, 2013
D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray on Thursday proposed spending $442 million on school construction in the coming fiscal year, as well as $79 million more on schools' daily operations and $7.4 million for charter school facilities.
Among the construction projects proposed for fiscal 2014 is $85 million toward the construction of a new Ballou Senior High School in Ward 8, whose groundbreaking was Tuesday, $38 million toward a $127 million renovation of Roosevelt High School in Ward 4 and upgrades at 15 elementary schools and six middle schools.The projects are part of $1.8 billion Gray has proposed spending to renovate existing schools and build new ones over the next six years, following $2.5 billion that already has been spent on DC Public Schools' construction plans.
But at-large D.C. Councilman David Catania, chairman of the council's Education Committee, questioned whether all the money being spent on school expansions was being spent wisely. He pointed to Ballou, where roughly half the seats are filled, and Coolidge High School -- slated for renovations in fiscal 2015, 2016 and 2017 -- where 41 percent of the seats are filled. "I'm just asking that there be some smart planning with respect to these expenditures," he said, adding that spending more than is necessary on high schools takes money away from elementary and middle schools.
Gray justified the new Ballou building by pointing to the adults who will take classes there in the evenings. The mayor released his budget proposal on the heels of a report by his office that criticized the District's lack of a citywide plan for school buildings. Charter schools open "haphazardly" across the city, while uneven enrollment growth has caused DCPS to announce the closings of 15 underenrolled schools this year.
That report suggested directing city funds to build new buildings in parts of the city where enrollment is low despite a large population of children. "Rather than focus on a few neighborhoods where enrollment has been historically high, this redistribution of resources ensures that parents and students will have a high quality school facility to choose from in every neighborhood," the report advised.
Catania disagreed. The focus should be on attracting parents by improving school programs, rather than with new buildings, he said.
He criticized the lack of funding in the budget for truancy prevention programs. Gray's budget has $1 million, while Catania said the city should spent $1.5 million on preventing truancy among just ninth-graders.
He also suggested the city spend $30 million on technology in schools, rather than the $9 million Gray allocated. "We're just building buildings with the hope that people will put their children in them," he said. "Bricks and mortar alone do not make a good school. They make for great ribbon cuttings."
Two Rivers students' proposal included in Mayor Gray's budget [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
March 29, 2013
We could look at the Fiscal Year 2014 budget that the Mayor proposed yesterday and be desperately disappointed. After all it does nothing to correct the funding inequity between charters and the traditional school system. The charter facility allotment remains stuck at $3,000 per pupil ($2,800 by law) where it has been now for years. There is also no movement on freeing shuttered DCPS sites so they can be utilized by the alternative educational institutions that now educate 35,000 public school students. At the same time another $1.7 billion is suggested as part of the regular school modernization program, on top of the $1.5 billion that has already been spent. But we will not be focusing on these things today.
The per student funding for educating pupils goes up for both school systems by two percent, the second time in as many years that this is the case. And tucked into the wide-ranging proposals by Mayor Gray is a plan to allocate $50 million on building parks in D.C.'s NoMa neighborhood.
The additional of public recreation space in NoMa was the topic of one of the Two River Public Charter School's students' winter expeditions that I was extremely fortunate to have observed last January. Here's what I wrote at the time about the exciting academic work completed by these scholars: "I started with an eighth grade class that had studied the use of public spaces going back to the time of ancient Athens, who then applied what they had learned to vacant land in the NoMa section of Washington, D.C. When I entered the room students were reading stories from notebooks they had written based upon reading The Odyssey. The kids were positioned at various stations throughout the room. But these were not one or two page works. These young people had created tales that filled the amount of space you would typically find in a chapter of a serious adult book of fiction. They were uniformly poised, confident, articulate, and proud of what they were sharing with the tightly packed crowd of people. One pupil even read the story of another classmate.
Once this portion of the presentation was completed the visitors to the school came together to learn of a student-led proposal for turning a parcel of land into a public park. The team of pupils had carefully considered various uses for the property from adding basketball courts to playground equipment. During the question and answer period one of the participants explained extemporaneously the valuable role parks play in society. Now it was the audience’s chance to return to the stations to see how other teams had tackled the same assignment." I hope that Mayor Gray turns to these kids to design the new spaces. Now that they have received the attention of the city's chief executive I have some other ideas for future expeditions that could greatly assist the local charter school movement. Congratulations to these outstanding students.
Charter advocate says more progress needed [FOCUS mentioned]
The Northwest Current
Current Staff Report
March 27, 2013
Despite the rapid expansion of charter school options and attendance in the District, the founder and outgoing chair of the Friends of Choice in Urban Schools advocacy group says major educational challenges remain. Malcolm Peabody, who founded the organization in 1996, said ongoing problems include unequal funding, a lack of access to former D.C. Public Schools buildings and the threat of reduced autonomy, as well as traditional public schools’ failure to close the income-based achievement gap. Peabody spoke Thursday night at a fundraising dinner for his group, where other speakers called his lobbying the catalyst for the District’s charter school movement.
Peabody said that charter school students have outscored their D.C. Public Schools counterparts in standardized testing. And excluding public schools west of 16th Street — where there are no charters — the difference increases despite a disparity in funding.
The reason for charters’ success, Peabody said, is local autonomy. Charters can control their own budgets, staff and curricula, and can offer incentives to overcome student behavior problems. Peabody also pointed to the Canadian city of Edmonton’s successful experiment giving its principals far more authority over budgets, curricula and staff. He urged Mayor Vincent Gray to form a community commission to study and take lessons from various school systems in Canada, South Korea and Finland, where students from divergent backgrounds have far better reading and math scores than in the District. Peabody, a longtime Georgetown resident, will soon be leaving Friends of Choice in Urban Schools to ramp up an effort pushing for campaign finance reform.
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