- Phill Mendelson shuffles leaders, makeup of D.C. Council committees
- D.C. schools lose millions on meal programs
- City Council: DCPS food contract is an 'abomination'
- Parents Lobby for Ward 2 schools
Phil Mendelson shuffles leaders, makeup of D.C. Council committees
The Washington Post
By Mike DeBonis
12/20/2012
Chairman Phil Mendelson took the first steps toward putting his personal stamp on the D.C. Council he has served on for 14 years Thursday, handing his colleagues their committee assignments for the new term.
For the first time since 2006, the council will have a stand-alone education committee. It will be chaired by David A. Catania (I-At Large), the council’s second-longest-serving member.
“This will be very good in intensifying our work on public education,” Mendelson (D) said after announcing the assignments.
For the past six years, education matters were handled by the Committee of the Whole, on which every council member serves. In 2006, the incoming chairman at the time, Vincent C. Gray (D), argued that the structure allowed all members to participate in education debates, but it also gave the chairman great sway over a front-burner political issue.
Catania said he has started preparing for his new assignment, assembling binders with budget, student performance, demographic and personnel information on every public school in the city, both in the D.C. Public Schools and charters.
“It’s going to be a heavy focus on evidence and data and accountability,” said Catania, who is leaving his post atop the council’s health panel. “I’m so excited, I can’t stand it. It is the last and greatest hurdle this city faces.”
Catania had lobbied hard for the education appointment. Mendelson acknowledged some labor leaders had “misgivings” about giving the assignment to Catania, who has often been at odds with public employee unions. But Catania said he met recently with Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders to establish a working relationship.
Mendelson handed the reins of the economic development committee to Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), favoring the potential mayoral candidate over colleagues who also sought the powerful post.
Bowser said she planned to use her clout to focus on affordable housing and creating “responsible neighborhood development” across the city. The post gives her an especially influential role in directing development on the former Walter Reed hospital campus in her ward.
In other moves, Mendelson handed the judiciary and public safety committee to Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6). Also a potential mayoral challenger, Wells has previously focused mainly on transportation and planning issues.Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) will helm the council’s health committee, while Vincent B. Orange (D-At Large) takes over a portfolio that includes business-oriented and regulatory agencies. The panel led by Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) will have oversight of employment and community affairs agencies. Other members generally kept their previous assignments.
D.C. schools lose millions on meal programs
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
12/20/2012
Taxpayers in the District have subsidized a public schools meals program that lost more than $10 million a year since it was outsourced to save money in 2008, according to an independent audit commissioned by the school system.
Meanwhile, many other local school systems break even or even profit from their food service programs. Montgomery County, which operates its meals program in-house instead of contracting out, ended the 2011-12 school year with a $2 million surplus.
School leaders in the District must improve their management and monitoring of the food service program, said D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, speaking at an oversight hearing Thursday.
Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) spoke more forcefully, calling the audit’s findings “impressively despicable” and the outsourcing of school meals “a failed experiment.” Serving healthful food to children should be central to the school system’s mission and run by school officials, not by a for-profit company, she said.
“I think what we’ve done over the past several years is really an abomination,” said Cheh.
Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has previously been reluctant to resume operations of the food service program, saying that the school system is staffed by experts in teaching and learning, not in managing a food service operation.
The city’s largest school meals vendor is Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality, which serves meals in more than 500 school systems across the country. The company released a statement Thursday saying the audit — which analyzed a period from 2008 to 2012 — is riddled with errors and was conducted by a firm with no experience in the food service industry, Washington-based Federal Management Systems.
The District’s school system is now losing less on its food program each year than it was before Chartwells took over in 2008, according to company officials.
“Over the past four years, Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality has helped DCPS implement a school foods program with the highest food quality and nutrition standards in the city’s history,” the company said in a statement. “We are deeply disappointed by the recent public release of a highly-flawed audit of DCPS food service vendors.”
The D.C. schools program has won widespread recognition in recent years for overhauling its offerings, serving more fresh fruits and vegetables and getting rid of flavored milk and other sugary, processed foods.
The meals program has also expanded, serving more breakfasts and introducing supper in a city where many poor children get their most nutritious meals at school.
But costs have been an ongoing concern.
Chartwells won a contract in 2008 to serve 50 million meals to D.C. students at a cost of $42 million. In fact, the food services company charged the city more money — $49 million — and served only 35 million meals, the audit said.
Over the four years of the contract, Chartwells’s meals program lost more than twice as much as the company originally anticipated, according to the audit.
Company officials said the rising cost was partly because of their efforts to comply with Cheh’s Healthy Schools Act of 2010, which gave the District some of the most stringent nutrition requirements in the nation.
School system officials, concerned about those losses, did not renew the Chartwells contract for the current school year. Instead, they issued a new request for bids.
Chartwells responded and succeeded in winning a $29 million contract to serve 107 schools.
Anthony DeGuzman, the school system’s chief operating officer, suggested that the District’s costs are not comparable to other school systems’ costs, in part because of the city’s stringent nutrition requirements.
He said he’s optimistic that the new contract with Chartwells will result in savings.
The school system used to reimburse the company for all its costs and now pays a fixed price for each meal regardless of the company’s expenses.
But DeGuzman still anticipates millions of dollars in losses: Because of the contract’s price structure, the school system loses money on every meal it serves.
The more meals it serves, the more losses it incurs.
Mendelson said the school system needs to be more aggressive in contract negotiations to get a better deal for D.C. taxpayers.
“There’s a significant management problem,” Mendelson said. “We can manage ourselves to substantially less cost while maintaining quality and nutrition.”
Ivy Ken was among several parents who testified Thursday, arguing that for-profit companies are ill-suited to run school meals programs because of their mission to make money. This fall, Ken pointed out, New York reached an $18 million settlement with Chartwells’s parent company for overcharging dozens of schools for meals.
“Anyone who wants to continue the District’s relationship with this company, or any other large for-profit company, must be able to make an extra-persuasive case,” she said.
City Council: DCPS food contract is an 'abomination'
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
12/20/2012
DC Public Schools' primary school food provider charged the system $7 million more than agreed upon to serve students 15 million fewer meals over five years, according to an audit of the contract and testimony of local lawmakers.
Anthony DeGuzman, chief operating officer of the school system, said Thursday he is investigating whether Chartwells-Thompson owes the schools money. The D.C. Council slammed DCPS for renewing the Chartwells contract, which has operated at a loss of more than $10 million annually and which has upset parents, who say Chartwells is serving their children unhealthy food such as Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.
"Have you ever heard of anything as bad as this?" Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh asked a panel of witnesses at a Thursday hearing, to silence. "No ... I think what we've done over the last few years is really an abomination."
From 2008 to 2012, Chartwells was contracted to serve 50 million meals at a cost of $42 million. Instead, the company ended up serving only 35 million meals but charged the schools $49 million.
DeGuzman said Chartwells may have ended up serving children different food than the original contract stipulated. He also pointed to new features like salad bars, which cost more to fill and staff.
The public school system's food contract was privatized under former Mayor Adrian Fenty, who believed contracting with Chartwells would cut costs and provide better food for children, freeing former Chancellor Michelle Rhee to focus on the schools' academic priorities.
But the contract has never allowed the schools to break even or run a profit like neighboring Montgomery County Public Schools, which generated $2 million from its in-house food service program last year. Cheh and Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry said they believe DCPS should run its own food service, an option DeGuzman said he was "not closed to."
Steven Jumper, a spokesman for Chartwells, deferred comment on the budget gap to DCPS but issued a statement calling the city's audit "highly flawed."
"The audit report reached conclusions that cannot be reconciled with [our] contemporaneous documentation," Jumper said in an email.
DeGuzman said he is "digging into" the gap and is monitoring the first fiscal quarter. While DCPS' food service ran at a $12 million loss last year, DeGuzman said, a new contract they negotiated will save the city 8 percent of the roughly $37 million cost. That means the D.C. Council is likely to be on the hook for another $9 million subsidy.
"I'm not sure your procurement process was aggressive enough in securing the right price," said Council Chairman Phil Mendelson.
Several parents advocated for DCPS to run its own food service, questioning whether a for-profit company could truly have their children's best interests at heart. Jody Tick said she was concerned when her child's all-natural yogurt was switched out for Yoplait Trix yogurt.
"What's so confounding about this food situation is it doesn't have to be this way," Tick said.
Parents Lobby for Ward 2 schools
The Current Newspapers
By Deirdre Bannon
11/19/2012
As D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson prepares to make final calls on her proposed school consolidation plan, several communities continue to make the case for their campuses to remain open.
Among those are the Francis-Stevens Education Campus, a prekindergarten to eighth-grade school in the West End, and Garrison Elementary School in Logan Circle. Under Henderson’s proposal, students at the under-enrolled schools would be sent to other campuses; her decision on these and 18 other proposed closings is due in mid-January.
Francis-Stevens stakeholders met last week with Henderson to try to
convince her to keep the doors open at the neighborhood’s only elementary and middle school campus, and they’re feeling optimistic about their chances.
“We feel we presented more of a strategy and a growth plan that reflects the strengths and unique opportunities at Francis-Stevens, rather than a counter-proposal,” Tim Ryan, vice president of the school’s PTA, said in an interview. “We looked at the priorities of the chancellor’s plan — improving academic outcomes while taking into account her concerns about cost and efficiency — and tried to come up with ideas that could help her meet her objectives.”
Henderson felt that meeting was productive and insightful, and that Francis-Stevens offered a robust proposal, D.C. Public Schools spokesperson Melissa Salmanowitz wrote in an email to The Current.
While the PTA is reluctant to reveal all the specifics of its plan, members say they came up with a growth strategy that matches Henderson’s goals for the citywide school system over the next five years. The chancellor aims to increase math and reading proficiency rates, graduation rates and enrollment, while also addressing the stated purpose for the consolidations — to decrease the costs of maintaining under enrolled schools.
Henderson has increased the focus on Francis-Stevens’ pre-kindergarten program, which has met its enrollment goals, Ryan said. That attention, he said, has helped create a vibrant and active parent community, and stakeholders want to see these younger students advance from elementary to middle school.
But under the proposal she announced in November, Henderson recommended shutting down Francis-Stevens, at 2425 N St., and using its campus to expand Schools Without Walls, a magnet high school in Foggy Bottom. In this scenario, Francis-Stevens’ current 230 students would be sent to Marie Reed Elementary and Hardy Middle, both more than a mile away with a likely two-bus-transfer commute.
A better option, the Francis-Stevens PTA says, would be to keep the existing education campus intact while also allowing Walls students to use the school building, which has a capacity for 400 students. With three floors and a number of stairwells, Ryan said, the older and younger students could easily be separated.
Full article can be found at the link above.