- D.C. Board of Education names ombudsman as liaison between families, schools [Excel PCS mentioned]
- District details options for school boundaries
- Revising D.C.’s boundary revision process
D.C. Board of Education names ombudsman as liaison between families, schools [Excel PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 10, 2014
D.C. parents have a new place to take their questions and complaints about city education: Joyanna Smith, the independent ombudsman charged with helping families navigate the District’s traditional and charter schools.
Smith is a lawyer and former charter school official who will serve as a clearinghouse for parents’ concerns and as a mediator to help resolve problems. She is only the second person to fill the position, which was created by the same law that established mayoral control of the schools but has been left vacant and unfunded since fiscal 2010.
“We’re excited. We think it’s going to empower the parents and the community to have an independent voice for problem-solving,” said Mark Jones, president of the D.C. State Board of Education, which appointed Smith with the input of community members who interviewed finalists for the position.
Parents can call the ombudsman for help with any issue related to schools. Smith — whose appointment is expected to be publicly announced Friday but who began the job about six weeks ago — said she has already fielded calls from parents concerned about bullying and frustrated with special-education services.
“We don’t have power to compel the school to do anything, but we don’t need that power,” said Smith, who said schools have been receptive to working with her to resolve families’ issues. “Really, it’s supposed to be a collaborative experience between the students and parents and schools.”
Besides resolving individual complaints, Smith also is tasked with compiling data to identify recurring issues and problems that need deeper examination.
Smith said she saw the ombudsman’s position as a “unique opportunity to combine the various work experiences that I’ve had in the past.”
She worked for the District government for about three years as a labor relations adviser at the Department of Public Works and as a policy analyst at the Department on Disability Services. In 2009, Smith joined the staff of Excel Academy Public Charter School, an all-girls school in Southeast Washington. She rose to director of finance and operations, a position in which she said she often fielded parents’ complaints and questions. Smith left Excel in 2011 and has been working as a consultant and grant writer for clients that include charter schools.
Smith, who lives in Ward 8, is a graduate of Brown University and the law school at George Washington University.
“This represents a welcome return for a parental advocate within the school systems,” said D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), a mayoral candidate. As chairman of the council’s Education Committee, Catania pushed last year to fund the position.
“It’s long overdue,” he said.
In 2007, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) appointed the District’s first ombudsman, Tonya Vidal Kinlow, calling her “the city’s face of customer service for education.” But Kinlow resigned in 2008, and the ombudsman’s office closed the following year.
Since then, parents and activists have consistently called for a new ombudsman, but Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) declined to fund the position, saying that there were more important spending priorities for education.
In 2012, council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) successfully pushed a measure that moved the ombudsman job, which had been housed within the office of the deputy mayor of education, to the Board of Education. In 2013, the council’s Education Committee added funds to the board’s budget that allowed for the hiring of an ombudsman and an assistant. Smith said she hopes to hire that assistant within the next several weeks.
Parents seeking help can call Smith directly at 202-741-0886 or contact her via e-mail at ombudsman@dc.gov or online at sboe.dc.gov.
District details options for school boundaries
The Northwest Current
By Graham Vyse
April 9, 2014
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith unveiled initial proposals over the weekend to redraw D.C. school boundaries and reform the way District students are assigned to public schools.
Developed by an advisory committee that Smith chairs, the proposals include three policy scenarios. Each aims to address issues such as overcrowding and underutilization of school facilities, which have cropped up across the District since boundaries and assignment policies were last overhauled in 1968.
At the first public meeting on these ideas — held Saturday at Dunbar High School — the deputy mayor stressed that the scenarios were meant primarily to begin community conversations and would almost certainly be revised. She explained that the final reform plan, which Mayor Vincent Gray is scheduled to announce in September, would be shaped by feedback from D.C. residents over the coming months.
“We are about halfway through this process,” Smith told a crowd of more than 100 at the start of her presentation. “Know that you are coming in at a great point if you are new to this.”
The deputy mayor provided an overview of the initial ideas, starting with those for pre-kindergarten. She said D.C. could opt to continue its current system of lottery-based access to early learning programs, designed to prevent overcrowded classrooms. Alternatively, the city could guarantee access to programs in neighborhood schools. Another idea is to tweak the lottery system to prioritize low-income students.
At the elementary school level, ideas include the creation of “choice sets,” which would guarantee families access to one of several nearby schools, but not to one in particular. That would mean more in-boundary choices for families, but also less certainty about where students would land. This option could be modified to allow charter schools to participate in the choice sets. Another elementary-level idea is a citywide lottery system with no guaranteed access to a neighborhood school.
Smith explained that choice sets are also under consideration for the middle school level, along with the idea of granting each family the right to one middle school and one high school based on their address. The notion of a citywide lottery for high schools, with or without proximity preference, is another possibility.
The deputy mayor’s office has posted all of the proposed reforms online at dme.dc.gov. They include redrawn boundaries for the following elementary schools in The Current’s coverage area: Barnard, Brightwood, Garrison, H.D. Cooke, Hearst, Hyde-Addison, Janney, Key, Marie Reed, Murch, Oyster-Adams, Powell, Stoddert and West. For example, Murch’s boundary is reduced to the south, with the goal of relieving overcrowding. Hearst’s boundary is expanded to the north to achieve the opposite effect. In the case of Hyde-Addison, Stoddert and Key, the Hyde-Addison boundary would shift north and west to Whitehaven Parkway and its extension, encompassing the Burleith and Foxhall neighborhoods.
During a question-and-answer period at Saturday’s event, several residents expressed concerns about the reform process.
“My main concern is the diversity issue,” said one woman. She suggested that a focus on neighborhood schools would effectively segregate the education system, clustering students of the same race together. “To have a productive future, we want all our kids to be able to get along with people of other races,” she said.
The deputy mayor also acknowledged this risk during her remarks. “Strong neighborhood schools and access close to home may not be the same thing as providing access to quality for everybody,” she said.
Meanwhile, at least one D.C. Council member believes ensuring access to neighborhood schools is vital. In a statement, Ward 3’s Mary Cheh said, “I want to make clear that I will vigorously oppose any plan that does not maintain the right of families to send their children to their neighborhood public schools.”
Cheh said many families have purchased homes in certain parts of the District specifically to guarantee their access to a school nearby.
In an interview late yesterday, Ward 4 D.C. Council member and Democratic mayoral nominee Muriel Bowser said she believes there must be “predictable, by-right options at every stage,” meaning pre-kindergarten through high school. She said she was pleased that the proposals acknowledged the need for four new middle schools, but she said she was concerned by the notion of a citywide lottery for high schools. As the proposals are refined, Bowser will take a wait-and-see approach.
“It’s good to consider the options,” she said.
Revising D.C.’s boundary revision process
The Northwest Current
By Stephanie Maltz and Chris Sondreal
April 9, 2014
Forget about last week’s mayoral primary and school lottery results. The biggest day on the calendar for D.C. education watchers was last Saturday.
April 5 was B-day — Boundary Day — the moment when Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith and her team revealed their long-awaited scenarios to revise the city’s boundary, feeder and student assignment policies. The deputy mayor hosted two separate community meetings that day, with a third meeting held Tuesday. What are we in store for? Two of the scenarios laid out offer “choice sets.” What are those? If you look at education reform discussions on the national level, you’ll see that “choice sets” are another expression of what education think tankers are calling “controlled choice.”
We think the label is murky and misleading since you are only guaranteed a narrow list of schools from which to choose, and then you need to win a lottery for admission to your top choice. “Choice sets” effectively turn elementary and/or middle school assignments into the same enrollment lotteries we’ve seen citywide, but based on neighborhood proximity. High school assignments citywide are similarly thrown upon this altar of school chance.
In our opinion the two choice-set scenarios (options A and C) do little to solve the school system’s primary problem: a scarcity of quality. These scenarios fail to alleviate the concerns of families who have expressed a desire for predictability in the face of the various enrollment lottery schemes. Options A and C are confusing, and they risk undermining D.C. Public Schools by perpetuating unpredictable education trajectories rather than providing clarity.
Another scenario may have more promise.
Option B focuses on clear, by-right pathways from kindergarten through 12th grade in every neighborhood, but we do feel that it makes unrealistic assumptions about the school system’s ability to implement and support school turnarounds. Nonetheless, Option B harbors some interesting ideas. For instance, we are happy to see ongoing demographic changes in Ward 2 recognized by this scenario’s call for a new standalone Center City Middle School, possibly in the empty Shaw Junior High building. It similarly acknowledges that a new high school in Ward 2 or Ward 3 could be a viable way to ease overcrowding at Wilson High.
Yet despite a few promising ideas, no scenario constitutes a plan that will lead, a priori, to better educational outcomes for more students.
The deputy mayor and her advisers have strayed. We ask them to return to the four goals with which they began the student assignment and school boundaries review process:
- to clarify access rights;
- to update feeder relationships;
- to ensure boundaries align to capacity and projected
- population;
- and to explore opportunities to bridge assignment
- policies across D.C. Public Schools and charter schools.
We ask parents and community members who are concerned about the state of education in D.C. to reject proposals that do not directly address school quality and that are not backed by data. As currently conceived, we feel this process is on a trajectory to succeed at nothing more than pitting parent against parent.
We propose communities push for a fourth scenario: Refrain from overhauling D.C.’s education map and making vague promises of programming improvement until families have better schools from which to pick. Tweak and repair the boundary map where it has fallen apart over the decades, but improve school quality and invest in facilities first, before pulling the rug out from under neighborhood public schools such as Garrison, School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens, Powell and Bancroft.
These are among the schools experiencing the city’s recent baby boom — and perhaps, more relevantly, its baby retention rate. Middle-class families are increasingly attending these schools alongside their traditional majorities of low-income students. These school communities — along with others on Capitol Hill — are at a fragile turning point. If allowed to continue to grow, they will soon serve as models for the inclusive turnaround. If damaged by adoption of these scenarios, they may be set back years.
Stephanie Maltz is a member of the Dupont Circle advisory neighborhood commission and its designee to the Ward 2 Education Network, and Chris Sondreal is a School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens parent and the Foggy Bottom/West End advisory neighborhood commission’s designee to the Ward 2 Education Network.