NEWS
- D.C. Council Objects to School Renovation Costs—Again
- Police officers allegedly enrolled their children in city schools illegally
- A charter-city deal that doesn't really help kids: New York should look to Denver and Washington for truly productive collaboration
D.C. Council Objects to School Renovation Costs—Again
The CityPaper
By Will Sommer
June 10, 2015
Councilmembers ate bacon at their monthly breakfast last week, but the real meat on the menu was beef. Beef, that is, with the Department of General Services over the continuing costs of school modernization.
LL forgives you for checking the date. The Council has been cranky about school costs since at least the Adrian Fenty era, when the hard-charging mayor with the throbbing vein in his head told renovations boss Allen Lew to hurry up and fix the schools.
“Fenty said to him, ‘Build them and build them fast, I don’t care what it costs,’” Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh says.
Now, the Council’s discontent has landed with Mayor Muriel Bowser and rising school costs under her administration. Consider the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where a $139 million remodel now needs an additional $39 million. Or Roosevelt High School, the site of a $15 million remodel that has exploded to more than $125 million. On July 8, Cheh and At-Large Councilmember David Grosso will hold a joint committee hearing on school construction costs.
“Twenty-four schools have gotten nothing,” D.C. Council chairman Phil Mendelson said. “It’s not like we haven’t spent a couple of billion dollars.”
At breakfast, councilmembers bemoaned the long-standing practice of retroactive change orders, in which the Council is asked to approve outlays for money that has effectively already been spent.
“We pass all this stuff today and they get away with it,” said Ward 2's Jack Evans.
Unlike other Council-mayor showdowns of late, though, Bowser actually agrees with her former colleagues, saying she’s also “concerned” about school modernization costs at DGS. LL will see if there’s reason for concern later this month, when the D.C. Auditor is expected to release a report on how school modernization money has been spent.
Police officers allegedly enrolled their children in city schools illegally
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
June 11, 2015
The District is suing two D.C. police officers for more than $224,000 in back tuition and penalties for allegedly enrolling their three children in D.C. public schools while they lived outside the District.
The lawsuit alleges that Lt. Alan Hill and Sgt. Candace Hill used a false address in Northeast D.C. to enroll their children in public schools near the Second District police station in Cleveland Park where they worked, a scheme that allegedly lasted as long as 10 years.
Non-residents can attend public schools in the District, but they must pay annual tuition. The complaint seeks recovery for unpaid tuition, plus penalties that could total more than three times the amount they owed, under the terms of the D.C. False Claims Act.
“You shouldn’t take advantage of the taxpayers of the District of Columbia and expect to get away with it, and suits like these are one of the tools we use to safeguard public integrity,” Attorney General Karl A. Racine said in a statement.
The couple has three children, now teenagers, who attended D.C. public schools starting in 2003, according to the complaint. They attended John Eaton Elementary and Alice Deal Middle, both schools that often have long wait lists. The oldest was enrolled in Woodrow Wilson High School for a short time.
To enroll their children, the couple used the address of an apartment in Northeast that Alan Hill purchased in 1996 and rented to other people, according to the complaint. The family instead resided in Mitchellville, Md.; Alexandria, and Accokeek, Md., during that time.
Alan Hill, reached by phone Thursday, declined to comment about the case. “We are in the middle of this process and still trying to understand it,” he said.
The issue of nonresidents enrolling in D.C. public schools is often heated, particularly as students compete for a limited number of seats in highly sought-after schools. Parents often talk of sitting on wait lists for schools while they see drivers with license plates from neighboring states lining up to drop off their children.
D.C. Public Schools investigators look into tips of residency fraud. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education is charged with investigating allegations of residency fraud in public charter schools. Cases are often hard to prove in a city with high student mobility.
The OSSE submitted a report to the D.C. Council this week showing that it has investigated 70 tips for the 2014-2015 school year. Just two of the 38 cases that have been closed were determined to be residency fraud.
In addition, the annual enrollment audit of students turned up 111 whose residency status could not be verified. Subsequently, 65 students submitted documentation that proved residency, 31 students withdrew, and seven students were determined to be non-residents.
In September 2013, after a Metropolitan Police Department investigation of the Hills’ residency status, D.C. Public Schools informed the couple that they would have to withdraw their children unless they paid back tuition.
The Hills pulled their children out of D.C. schools but appealed the school system’s decision to remove them. At the time, the police department also referred the matter to the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue, which declined to conduct a criminal investigation.
At a hearing this January, the couple withdrew their appeal.
The Office of the Attorney General has recovered nearly $800,000 in public school tuition since 2012 through 13 monetary judgments and five out-of-court settlements.
The office settled one case for $26,700 in August 2014 against a former D.C. schools principal and her adult daughter and adult granddaughter. The lawsuit alleged that, while principal of Langdon Education Campus, Barbara Campbell drove her great-grandson who lived with her in Maryland to school with her to attend pre-kindergarten for two years.
A charter-city deal that doesn't really help kids: New York should look to Denver and Washington for truly productive collaboration
New York Daily News
By Richard Whitmire
June 11, 2015
Any day now, we can expect news out of Albany that will sound like an ideal compromise for New York City schools. Sadly, it won’t be.
Lawmakers will extend mayoral control of schools in New York City, probably for less time than Mayor de Blasio wants. Also, the cap on charter schools will get a lift, probably less than what charter advocates want.
But this is not a plan that will improve schools. What New York City badly needs instead is a Denver-style compact between charters and traditional schools, a collaboration that exposes thousands more students to high-performing schools and the lessons they have learned about how to drive achievement higher.
This deal will not make that happen. Not even close. All it will do, instead, is cement the already-terrible relationship between charters and the traditional public schools overseen by de Blasio and his chancellor, Carmen Fariña.
How bad is the relationship? Farina has yet to even visit a Success Academy charter school, part of the highest performing charter network in the city, possibly in the country.
What could Fariña learn from a charter group that is taking in thousands of low-income minority children and turning them into academic stars? Plenty, but so bitter is the political climate, she won’t even peek.
Meantime, Eva Moskowitz, the head of that charter network, regularly lobs angry attacks at the city’s Department of Education.
The fact that these two sectors are barely on speaking terms borders on the bizarre, and kids are getting hurt in the process. To understand the degree of hurt, New Yorkers need to shed a bit of their parochialism and look beyond their borders.
In Denver, for example, the district makes charter schools a core part of its strategy, inviting successful charters to either take over struggling schools or share space with traditional schools. Not only do Denver students get access to high performing charter groups such as DSST (Denver School of Science and Technology), but promising school leaders for Denver traditional schools get training in top charters. All kids benefit, regardless of the schools they choose to attend.
An even better example of a productive compact between charters and traditional schools is found in Houston’s Spring Branch Schools, where KIPP and YES Prep charter schools got folded into two middle schools, not like hostile New York co-locations; more like partners. Again, all students benefit.
In Spring Branch all it took was a single curious superintendent who decided to investigate high performing charters and then concluded that he wanted a dose of that kind of schooling in his own district. It was pretty much that simple.
In New Orleans, schools chief Patrick Dobard, who oversees the Recovery School District, acts more like a CEO than a turf-conscious schools chancellor. He sets common rules — all schools accept a fair share of special education students, mid-year transfers and youth out of incarceration — and then grants autonomy in all things academic.
In New Orleans, decisions about who gets to launch a new school and who gets to use which school building are decided on one criterion: Who’s doing the best for kids.
That kind of simple logic explains the remarkable renaissance in the city’s schools, which only a few years ago made anyone’s worst-in-the-nation schools list.
For years, the schools in Washington D.C. ranked at the bottom with New Orleans, were examples of school systems that made New York look good by comparison. Now, a charter school sector that is fast improving and a schools chancellor, Kaya Henderson, who’s willing to work alongside charters she knows are great, are working to the benefit of all students.
Suddenly, D.C. is an example New Yorkers need to imitate. That has to be embarrassing to New Yorkers.
Everyone knows the source of the problem in New York. An aggressive push by former Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chief Joel Klein to bring in top charters, while closing low-performing traditional schools, led to a lot of great schools getting created, but also to education balkanization. Belated attempts to build collaborations went nowhere, thanks in part to union resistance.
Then arrived a progressive mayor who believed all schools should be operated Post Office-style, with government officials fully in charge. De Blasio found a chancellor who agreed. Had Gov. Cuomo not stepped in, de Blasio today would probably be ejecting charters from their shared spaces in school buildings.
Thus arrives the likely deal from Albany, a compromise that would do nothing to close an already unhealthy divide between charters and traditional schools. Lawmakers whose hearts are with students, rather than grown-ups employed by the system, should look to Denver and Washington and see this as beginning, not an end.
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