FOCUS DC News Wire 9/16/13

 

 

D.C. police this year have quietly adjusted the way they patrol the District’s traditional public and charter schools, moving away from assigning dedicated officers to most public high schools and instead clustering groups of schools with shared officers.

 

Some worry that the shift, which was not publicized before the school year, takes officers away from permanent posts at some of the District’s most troubled high schools to rotate them among campuses.

 

Under the new system, traditional public and charter schools — from elementary through senior high — are grouped into geographic “clusters” based on population, neighborhood crime statistics and truancy rates. Police say the strategy is needed in part because of the District’s changing educational landscape, in which charter schools have been growing quickly and now enroll more than 40 percent of students.

 

The deployment change comes as school systems across the country debate school safety — and whether schools need armed guards — after last year's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

 

“I must say in a time when security is [of] the utmost importance, all schools should have a dedicated [officer] and in some cases more than one,” said Aona Jefferson, president of the council of school officers, a union that represents principals. “I’m concerned about the response time when there’s an emergency in a school.”

 

D.C. police note that each public school also has permanent, private security guards, some as many as 11, who provide day-to-day protection and monitor access to buildings. Those 253 unarmed guards are hired by D.C. police under a $15 million contract but unlike police are not deployed to charters, which have to hire their own private security.

 

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said the primary role of the 102 armed school resource officers — about 60 on days, 23 on nights and the rest supervisors — is to mediate disputes before they escalate and deal with truancy. “It’s really to have them be a resource to students, to try to keep them in school,” she said. “The number of crimes reported in schools is very low.”

 

According to the D.C. police School Safety and Security report, school police officers in 2011 made nearly 500 arrests and mediated more than 2,300 disputes. Lanier described this year’s changes as evolutionary, and she said that some clusters have more officers than schools and that there is flexibility to move officers based on need.

 

D.C. charters are taxpayer-funded institutions that operate as independent school districts. They receive the same per-student tax funding, but they do not get some of the government resources — such as legal services — that benefit traditional schools. Many charters do not follow traditional grade divisions, nor do they have standard hours.

 

Charter schools lacked regular police presence until fall 2009, when a spate of violence near Northeast Washington’s Friendship Collegiate Academy spurred city leaders to begin providing charters with protection.

 

Since then, police presence at charter schools has increased, said Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Public Chartered Schools, a key force in pushing for the change.

 

“I don’t know that school leaders feel as if they have an [officer] at hand whenever they need one, but there is a hotline and there is a roving presence,” she said.

 

Edelin said she is cautiously optimistic about the new deployment strategy, though there are still many questions, including whether roving officers will build relationships with students.

 

“It certainly signals that there’s an awareness that charter schools are public schools that deserve the same taxpayer-provided services,” she said. “How it’s implemented and whether students feel safer in schools remains to be seen.”

 

In most cases, eight to 10 officers are responsible for between nine and 16 schools, most of them elementary and middle schools that do not require constant attention. The exception is in the 2nd Police District, which has six officers assigned to five schools.

 

Lanier said high schools are continuing to get the bulk of attention, but she emphasized that it was a misconception that many high schools previously had a full-time officer. She said the “dedicated” officers — a term used by police — had always been expected to keep tabs on nearby elementary and middle schools in addition to visiting the homes of suspected truants. Even under the old system, officers would not be exclusively at one school.

 

The chief said that she does not need more school resource officers. Recent consolidations and closures have left the city with fewer schools. Last year, police covered 47 charters and 41 public schools; this year, it’s 45 charters and 34 traditional schools.

 

D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D Ward-6), chairman of the public safety committee, said he wants to review crime statistics to ensure that officers are properly distributed among campuses. A report by police detailing the new plan does not include information on crime in or around schools.

 

“I want to know what is the typical infraction that the police currently respond to,” said Wells, who is running for mayor, “and to what degree having a policeman in a school is a preventative measure versus a law enforcement measure.”

 

A spokeswoman for the D.C. school system said in a statement: “We are fully confident in [the police department’s] commitment to our shared priority of keeping all our students safe.”

 

Word of the change emerged during staff meetings before the start of the school year, such as one at the newly renovated Cardozo Education Campus, a sixth-through-12th-grade school in Northwest Washington. Some teachers expressed concerns, not only over safety but also about whether officers responsible for more schools will have time to interact and connect with students.

 

“This goes against Chief Lanier’s whole concept of community policing,” a teacher at Cardozo said after learning of the plan. The teacher spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships with colleagues. “The police should be at the school developing positive relationships with the staff and students. Instead, they are just going to be responding to problems.”

 

Cardozo was, until this year, a high school with two dedicated officers. This year, eight to 10 officers are responsible for Cardozo — with about 700 students — as well as four other high schools and five elementary and middle schools. The high schools include Benjamin Banneker, one of the District’s highest achieving, with about 420 students, and three charter schools with grades up to 12th. Two of those charter high schools, Booker T. Washington and Cesar Chavez, each had a dedicated officer last year.

 

The District’s largest public high school, Wilson Senior High, with about 1,800 students, is in the smallest grouping, sharing six officers with two other high schools, an elementary and a middle school.

 

Coolidge High School in Northwest — where last year one student shot another outside as classes were being dismissed — is in one of the biggest groups, sharing 10 to 12 officers among 15 schools, including another public senior high school and four charters with grades up to 12th. Ballou High, where last year four students were hospitalized when someone used pepper spray on a crowd during a fight, now shares police with nine other schools, including three high school charters.

 

The District has the largest contingent of school police in the area. Most suburban police agencies use the cluster format as well, and typically only for high schools.

 

 

The Public Charter School Board is reviewing the eligibility of four Friendship Collegiate football players after the District of Columbia State Athletic Association raised concerns over the school’s residency documentation and requested an investigation late last month.

 

DCSAA Executive Director Clark Ray notified Friendship Collegiate Athletic Director Michael Hunter on Aug. 30 about the inadequate documentation of the four players, three of whom submitted “insufficient sworn statements by other primary caregivers,” according to a document obtained by The Post.

 

All four players named in the document played at schools outside the District in 2012, including two who played at Maryland public schools last fall. Friendship determined the four players were eligible earlier this summer.

 

The investigation will be conducted by the Public Charter School Board. Ray also requested that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education look into the situation. A charter board spokesperson offered no timetable as to how long an investigation could take.

 

The implications of an investigation could be far-reaching for the 10th-ranked Knights, who have started the season 2-0 and played in Florida on Friday night against Manatee. The Knights would have to vacate any wins this season should any player be found ineligible after-the-fact, Ray said.

 

“Some of the [documentation] looked a little bit suspicious to us . . . and when I say suspicious I mean there were some forms that weren’t filled out correctly maybe,” Ray said in a telephone interview. “[Friendship] is its own [local education agency], they’ve made an eligibility determination. So those students therefore can play . . . but if they’re deemed to be found non-residents, then they are in violation of Chapter 27 and they’ll have to forfeit any game in which they’ve [won].”

 

On Thursday, Public Charter School Board spokeswoman Theola Labbé-DeBose confirmed that the office had received the request and is currently reviewing the matter. Hunter, who traveled with the Knights football team to Florida, also confirmed earlier this week that he had received the notification and that the school had responded by sending more verification paperwork to the DCSAA office.

 

“[The DCSAA] was basically requesting more information, and our school provided more information, and it’s been cleared up,” Hunter said. “I mean, I don’t know about an investigation. I don’t know if that’s what they’re calling it, [an] investigation. But it required us to send more paperwork for four kids because I believe the Office of the Superintendent didn’t have the paperwork in hand.”

 

Hunter declined further comment Thursday, and wouldn’t elaborate if the four players would continue to suit up with the investigation underway. An e-mail requesting comment from the Friendship Chief of Staff Kimberly Campbell was not immediately returned. Ray said he received additional documents from Hunter after notifying him of the potential problems, but the request for an investigation was still pursued.

 

Although the DCSAA does not have the authority to overturn or deny a local education agency’s residency determination, the office requested a closer review of Friendship’s roster in late August. That request stemmed from aninvestigation earlier this year, when the DCSAA found that Knights assistant coach Khenny Wonson influenced a student to transfer to the school for athletic purposes. Wonson was placed on one-year probation for the violation.

 

A month later, Ballou Coach Jason Lane was hit with the same punishment after the DCSAA found he allowed a Friendship Collegiate student to participate in spring football practices at the public school in Southeast. The DCSAA reviewed Ballou’s eligibility documentation last month as well, Ray said, and no potential infractions were found.

 

The Public Charter School Board began investigating residency fraud cases for charter schools last fall, the result of the D.C. Council passing the District of Columbia Public Schools and Public Charter School Residency Fraud Prevention Amendment Act of 2012. This marks the first time in its two-year history that the DCSAA has requested an investigation by the PCSB.

 

“This is the first time we’ve done it, so I don’t know what an investigation entails,” Ray said. “It’s all new to us.”

 

 

At tonight's monthly meeting of the D.C. Public Charter School Board members will vote to approve its Performance Management Framework Guidelines and Technical Guide which will for the first time provide a structured process for revocation of Tier 3 schools.

 

Here's some background. The D.C. School Reform Act of 1995 allows the PCSB to revoke the charter of any school that "has failed to meet the goals and student academic achievement expectations set forth in the charter." Traditionally, the Board has shuttered charters for failing to meet academic goals at its five, ten, and fifteen year "High Stakes Reviews." The PCSB has closed many charters between these periods for poor financial performance.

 

Beginning with the PMF Guidelines in 2011, the first year in which the tier system was implemented, criteria was established for utilizing the tool to identify charters for possible closure. "Schools scoring below 20 percentage points in the most recent year, showing greater than or equal to five percentage point decease within Tier III from one year to the next, or performing in Tier III for three consecutive years will become candidates for revocation."

 

The following year the guidelines for taking actions against Tier 3 schools was modified slightly to say that a school could face revocation if it is found to be in this category for three of the last five consecutive years instead of just three consecutive years. This was done to allow the board to include under consideration academically low performing charters that move between Tiers 3 and 2 "within a three-year consecutive period."

 

In 2013, the PCSB has built upon this language to say that any charter that is categorized as a Tier 3 school under the above criteria will be "immediately subject to a High Stakes Review as a 'Candidate for Charter Revocation' to determine whether their charter should be revoked pursuant to the SRA." The contention by the regulatory body is that schools that frequently score in the lowest PMF category are often failing to meet the academic goals spelled out in their charters.

 

A staff member of the Board pointed out that they were reluctant in the past to begin revocation procedures against Tier 3 schools based upon PMF results because of limited experience with the measure. Now it appears that the organization is heeding calls to close consistently poorly academically performing charter schools at a much faster rate.

 

 

A new charter school for adults will open this week offering technology-driven education to adults who have faced chronic under-education and unemployment in Washington, D.C.

 

The Community College Preparatory Academy (CCPA), located in a site previously used for a public charter school, plans to serve 150 students in its first year and up to 350 by the third year. An initial charter application submitted in February 2012 said the school would expect to enroll 1,225 students at full capacity in multiple sites.

 

CCPA has contracted with Pearson Education to deliver much of the instruction. Those instructional services will include mentoring, on-demand online tutoring, and access to three types of Pearson online courses:

 

MyFoundationsLab, a program that includes assessments, personalized learning plans, and interactive learning activities for developing core skills in reading, math, and writing; Pearson Workforce Education, to provide work-related training in multiple areas, including health careers, manufacturing, IT, and business-related jobs; and Propero, self-paced college credit-granting courses in science and math, social and behavioral sciences, and other subjects.

 

Students will also gain technical literacy during the first semester they attend the academy. The first two weeks of instruction will focus on computer basics and online search techniques, taught in a hybrid format, originating with in-person and then switching to computer-based lessons. They'll also be required to take several Pearson Workforce Education courses: computer concepts, workforce readiness, interpersonal communication skills, effective business writing skills, Internet search, and job search.

 

"We chose Pearson because they have a proven track record of quickly and efficiently creating learning programs that meet the needs of students and have the technology to make it a seamless process," said Executive Director Connie Spinner. "In the District of Columbia, we are experiencing exponential growth in the number of infrastructure engineering-related projects that will be underway for the next 30 years. It is our goal to help prepare these adult learners for the jobs that will be available in the near future."

 

The Academy will run a staffed computer lab from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. According to the school, those who perform well in that first semester will be able to participate in a laptop loan program.

 

The school will be funded by local public dollars just like any other public charter school in the district. Washington, D.C.'s charter school legislation is unique in that it encompasses not only pre-K-12 but also adult education.