- How Often Do D.C. Students Hear Gunshots? A Lot. [Booker T. Washington PCS, E.L. Haynes PCS, and Meridian PCS mentioned]
- City Officials Tackle Absenteeism, Truancy
- Five lessons one woman's story teaches us about poverty and education in DC
How Often Do D.C. Students Hear Gunshots? A Lot. [Booker T. Washington PCS, E.L. Haynes PCS, and Meridian PCS mentioned]
Washington City Paper
By Perry Stein
September 3, 2014
D.C. had 336 incidents of gunfire during school days over the 2011-2012 school year, with more than half of those incidents occurring within 1,000 feet of a public school, a new report from the Urban Institute found.
The study, released today, looked at data collected from Shotspotter, a gunfire-detection system covering about a third of D.C. In the 2011-2012 school year, D.C. had 175 traditional public and public charter schools, and 116 of them were in Shotspotter's range. One thousand feet, the study says, is close enough for the gunshots to be heard from inside.
Nine percent of the 116 schools experienced 48 percent of the gunfire incidents. Four schools, according to the study, were each within 500 feet of nine to 11 incidents of gunfire. These four schools are Booker T. Washington Public Charter School at 14th Street and Florida Avenue NW; E.L. Haynes PCS on Georgia Avenue NW; E.L. Haynes PCS on Kansas Avenue NW; and Meridian PCS near the U Street Metro station.
The study considered the school day anytime between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Twenty-five schools were within 1,000 feet of gunfire from 8 to 9 a.m.—when children typically go to school—and from 3 to 4 p.m.—when children typically leave to go home. The study did not include gunfire that occurred during schools hours on weekend, holidays, half-days, or other times schools were closed.
“Gunfire is incredibly loud,” Sam Bieler, one of the study's co-authors, wrote. “I know there are some concerns that a single gunshot may sound like a firecracker or a backfiring car, but when you’re talking about multiple-round incidents—5, 10, 15, 20 rounds—that’s unmistakable…that sounds like gunfire.”
Bieler and Nancy La Vigne, the study's other author, said the data does not mean these schools are dangerous.
“It’s very easy with that simple narrative to lay the problems at the feet of those communities, which is completely and utterly unfair,” Bieler said. “Crime and gun violence exist within a huge network of economic and social pressures. We’d have to study the whole picture before responsibly saying what the causes are and how we can more effectively remedy these harms.”
Next, Bieler and La Vigne hope to explore how students perceive gunfire and if their data can be used to more effectively deploy school resources and direct law enforcement.
Look at the Urban Institute's interactive map to see where these gunfire incidents occurred.
City Officials Tackle Absenteeism, Truancy
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
September 3, 2014
More than a year after a meeting at Anne Beers Elementary School in Southeast where city leaders, parents and community activists struggled to come to terms with the schools’ burgeoning student absenteeism and truancy rates, little progress has been made lowering the numbers.
In effect, the problem has escalated, with more elementary-age students having racked up excessive numbers of unexcused days from school, according to a report released earlier this year by the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) system.
In 2013 for instance, 269 pre-kindergarten students had more than 20 days of unexcused absences. During the same academic term, of the 3,408 pre-kindergarten students enrolled at District public schools, 1,518 racked up 1 to 5 days of unexcused absences.
“But you have to be careful with the numbers, because they’re not always what they seem,” said Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund in Northwest. “There are a lot of low-income households, especially in wards 5, 7 and 8, where conditions like asthma and a host of other childhood illnesses come into play,” she said.
“Four-year-olds might wake up not feeling well, so the parent is not going to send them to school. Same thing for a three-year-old who’s not feeling that good,” said Filardo, 60, who added that while many elementary school-age absences center on illnesses, housing issues often dictate school attendance as well.
“There are a lot of underprivileged families in the school system who have been evicted and, as a result are homeless,” said Filardo. “So they end up living from house-to-house with relatives or in long- term stays at homeless shelters.”
Vicky Wright Smith, whose daughter attends McKinley Technology Education Campus in Northeast, said she’d always been under the impression that the majority of middle and high school students play hooky from school.
“I wasn’t aware that so many young children are missing school. It’s unbelievable to hear of children at that level intentionally skipping school,” Wright-Smith said. “But if they are absent to that extent, it’s a parental issue going on.”
She added her concern that the new school boundaries that go into effective with the 2015-16 term, could further exacerbate chronic absenteeism and truancy.
“Generally, children have access to schools in their boundaries,” Wright-Smith said. “But because they have to attend schools out of their neighborhoods, which in many cases is a result of mandated school closings in their communities, children end up attending schools they don’t like – and that could be a real problem as it relates to absenteeism and truancy.”
Filardo agreed, noting how school boundaries can also negatively impact travel time to school.
“There are students who are traveling well over a half mile to school, with the average distance of travel in wards 7 and 8 being a mile-and-a-half,” said Filardo. “They’ve got to figure out their bus routes on routes that were not designed for getting children to school, and because of this, there’s been some really difficult travel situations in wards 5, 7 and 8, where so many of the neighborhood schools have been closed,” Filardo said. “So the children are kind of going all over the place just to get to school, which, of course, results in absences and truancies on all grade levels.”
Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism which leads to truancy, also results in poor classroom performance, low graduation rates – and in many instances, opens the pipeline to prison.
Last school year, 32 percent of DCPS students missed 10 or more days, and 19 percent missed 20 or more days.
Overall, absenteeism with or without parental consent, reportedly led to 40 percent of students having missed at least 18 days in 2012-13, compared to 20 percent who missed 35 days during the same term.
Although the school system is required to report any student who’s missed 10 days without an excuse, that was done last year only in 40 percent of the cases.
Chancellor Kaya Henderson has been hard-pressed to get the numbers down, even if it’s been a few notches at a time.
“Last year [2011-12] our truancy rate was 26 percent and we were shooting this year [2013-14] to reduce it to 22 percent,” said Henderson. “However, we actually got it down to 18 percent, which was a huge win for us,” she said, crediting the Ninth Grade Academy program that launched in 2013.
“The Ninth Grade Academy [which helps first-year 9th- grade students successfully transition to and succeed in high school] has been a tremendous contributor, and we’ve got a number of [initiatives] at the elementary level to deal with truancy and to make our schools more engaging and places where kids want to come,” Henderson, 44, said.“It’s not necessarily how many times you refer kids to the Children and Family Services Agency, it’s making school a place that kids don’t want to miss, so attendance has been a huge focus for us.”
In the meantime, David Catania (I-At Large), chair of the D.C. Council’s Committee on Education
who’s also a candidate in the November mayoral election, has been going toe-to-toe with Democratic opponent, Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), over who would be the best to get priorities in order for the school system.
Both candidates are seeking the mayor’s post at a time when the chancellor’s been under mounting pressure to develop initiatives to deter absenteeism and truancy.
Catania, 46, introduced legislation in 2013 to combat truancy that would have ordered the prosecution of parents of chronically truant children. However, he stripped the measure after considering it might be the wrong approach.
Catania, who believes that parents are key to improving absenteeism and truancy, has also indicated that as parents are being made aware of their obligation for getting their children to school, his staff has begun to see improvement – particularly at the elementary-grade levels.
“Mr. Catania believes strongly that the more class time a student misses the greater the chance that they fall behind,” said Catania’s spokesman, Brendan Kief-Williams. “The councilman has put more money into schools to support more attendance counselors and behavioral health professionals, and continues to be a strident supporter of programs that connect families with teachers and administrators in a positive and supportive manner.”
Five lessons one woman's story teaches us about poverty and education in DC
Greater Greater Washington
Natalie Wexler
September 3, 2014
Over two decades ago, Tenille Warren was a student at a high-poverty junior high school in Southeast DC. Last week, at the age of 37, she started college. What happened in between holds lessons for anyone trying to improve educational outcomes for low-income students.
ccording to a story in Sunday's New York Times, when Warren was a student at Kramer Junior High—now Kramer Middle School—a local philanthropist "adopted" her and many of her classmates through the I Have a Dream Foundation. At the time, Kramer was DC's second-lowest-performing junior high.
At the beginning of 7th grade, half of Warren's class was randomly selected to participate in the I Have a Dream program. These "Dreamers" got a heavy dose of extra support through high school, including tutoring, summer school, and help with basic necessities like food. They also got a promise of free college tuition if they graduated.
Warren, one of those selected, seemed to be on track. After Kramer, she got into the selective Duke Ellington School of the Arts and graduated on time. She dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. But instead of taking up the offer of free college tuition, she took a job at Safeway, cleaning bathrooms and stocking shelves.
Eventually, Warren worked her way up to a better job. But she never entirely forgot her dream. 6 years ago, she returned to it in earnest, eventually moving to New York for an unpaid internship in the fashion industry and taking night school classes in the basics of fashion design.
This fall, 14 years after the offer of free tuition expired, Warren enrolled as a full-time student at the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in Manhattan. While she's gotten some scholarship money, she's also taken out $57,000 in student loans.
While Warren's story is in many ways an inspirational tale with an apparently happy ending, it also points up the difficulty of engineering a successful trajectory for students living in multi-generational poverty.
Free college tuition isn't enough, and extra help in school may not be enough either.
Despite the tutoring and mentoring, many of the students in the I Have a Dream program were far from prepared to do college-level work after graduation.
"We realized pretty quickly that we were never going to be able to catch our kids up academically," the Kramer Dream Class co-director and mentor, Steve Bumbaugh, told the Times. "This was triage. We were trying to keep these kids alive. We were trying to keep them in school."
And even Warren, who did well at Ellington, found the prospect of college daunting. She had grown up with a single mother who had trouble holding on to a job, and at one point they were evicted. She told the Times she couldn't imagine leaving DC for college because she was worried about what might happen to her mom, and about her own basic survival.
Aiming high might not always be the best advice.
Bumbaugh said he now regrets urging Warren to head to Parsons School of Design or Pratt Institute, both top fashion design schools in New York, when she was in high school. Perhaps, he says, if he had suggested small steps instead, she would have her BFA by now.
Grit actually is important.
For a while, it was fashionable to talk about the importance of grit, meaning qualities like perseverance and resilience. Now it's fashionable to dismiss grit as overrated. But Warren's story is a testament to the power of grit.
Her efforts to get herself on track for a career in fashion have been heroic. Setting her sights on a job with the clothing company founded by the rapper Jay Z, she did everything but stand on her head to get his attention. After FIT rejected her for the second time, she called the admissions office to ask, "What exactly do I need to do to make no a yes?" When she finally got in, she was living in a homeless shelter while working multiple jobs and taking sewing classes.
It's clear that Warren has grit, but what's less clear is how she got it and how to instill it in others. It's possible that the years of mentoring and support she got in her teens helped develop her remarkable resilience. But then again, that didn't necessarily happen for the other Dreamers in her cohort.
Don't judge the success or failure of a program too soon, or by only one measure.
By the standards of the I Have a Dream program, Warren would probably be considered a failure, since she didn't graduate from college within the time allotted by the program. But that would be a vast oversimplification.
The story is also complicated, to some extent, for her Dreamer cohort as a whole: Only 6 of the 67 students in the group earned a bachelor's degree on time. Even now, only 9 have their degrees. But 4 students from her class are now in college. And 72% graduated from high school or earned a GED, compared to only 27% of the non-Dreamers in their class at Kramer.
The program also may be having positive effects on the next generation. Currently, 18 children of the Dreamers are in college, 3 hold bachelor's degrees, and two are in graduate school.
Try not to leave a whole school behind.
While Warren's fortunes have risen recently, the same is not true for Kramer. It's still one of the lowest-performing middle schools in DC, with proficiency rates of 24% for math and 22% for reading.
To the extent that the I Have a Dream program was able to help Warren and some of her fellow Dreamers, that's terrific. But if we're going to change outcomes for students like them on a broader scale, we need a strategy that transforms entire schools—and, as much as possible, their surrounding communities—rather than the lives of a few members of a subgroup.
The story of Kramer's Dreamers may hold more lessons for those interested in poverty and education: the author of the Times article, Diana Kapp, is working on a book that will trace the lives of several students from the group. I, for one, am eager to read it.