FOCUS DC News Wire 12/4/13

 

 

The D.C. Council gave its tentative but unanimous approval Tuesday to a bill that would funnel extra dollars to public schools serving low-income students and others at risk of academic failure.

 

It’s not yet clear how much additional money the city’s traditional and charter schools would receive — that’s up to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) to decide when budget season arrives next year. But there are signs that the investment, meant to help close persistent achievement gaps between poor and affluent children, could be large.

 

More than 40 percent of the city’s students fit the measure’s definition of “at risk,” and adequately supporting them could cost as much as $120 million a year, according to a study commissioned by Gray’s administration.

 

D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), who introduced a version of the bill in June, said teachers and principals throughout the city have told him that they could do more for struggling students if they had more resources.

 

“They see firsthand what common sense tells us: Certain students require additional resources to support their education because of poverty and other barriers,” Catania said.

 

The council passed the bill without debate on first reading Tuesday and appears all but certain to give final approval next month. The measure has drawn broad support from parents, school leaders and education advocates, as well as from Gray, who called it a “good interim step forward” in a letter Tuesday to Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D).

 

Gray and Catania are political rivals who have sparred over school policies since Catania took the helm of the council’s education committee in January. But the two said their staff members worked together to revise this bill, and Gray said the current version dovetails with his administration’s efforts to improve school funding.

 

Consultants working for Gray’s education deputy, Abigail Smith, have been studying the issue for a year and are expected to release final recommendations for changes this month.

 

The study’s draft recommendations, released in October, suggest that the city should invest an additional $88 million in helping at-risk students. But “at risk” was defined relatively narrowly and included fewer than 18,000 students, according to Catania.

 

His bill broadens the definition to capture more than 34,000 students. They include children who are homeless or in foster care or who qualify for food stamps or the welfare program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The category also includes high school students who are a year or more older than they should be for their grade level.

 

Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) said Tuesday that he’d like to see an even broader definition. “If a person is left out that ought to be in, that means they don’t get the support,” Barry said.

 

If the bill becomes law, traditional and charter schools will receive additional funds based on the number of at-risk students they enroll.

 

The District has among the highest per-pupil spending rates in the country. Traditional and charter schools receive $9,306 for every student they enroll, plus extra money for students with disabilities and those learning English as a second language.

 

But activists have long argued that schools need additional dollars to address the needs of the city’s many poor children, who tend to lag behind their more affluent peers and often face profound challenges.

 

Other jurisdictions, including suburbs such as Fairfax County and cities such as Boston, Baltimore and New York, already provide extra resources for low-income students.

 

The bill requires the city’s traditional school system to send 90 percent of the additional at-risk funds to schools. Principals, in cooperation with parents, teachers and other community members, would then create a public document detailing how they plan to use the money.

 

Charter school leaders would have the latitude to use the extra funds however they want.

 

The bill also creates a grant program to spur stronger vocational education across the city, and it limits the amount of money that the central office can take from a school in any year to 5 percent of that school’s total budget.

 

More than two dozen parents and community activists signed a letter praising Catania and Smith for their work on the bill, which has changed significantly since it was introduced.

 

More funding for at-risk students “can prove to be an important step in strengthening educational opportunities for all of the children in our city, particularly those with the greatest need,” they wrote.

 

The council also gave its final approval Tuesday to two other education bills, one to end social promotion and the other to establish a new student advocate to help families navigate the city’s traditional and charter schools.

 

Both were among seven measures Catania introduced in June in what he described as an effort to accelerate school improvement.

 

 

D.C. Council Member Muriel Bowser introduced a resolution Tuesday calling on the city to improve its struggling traditional middle schools, which have long driven families into charter schools, private schools and the suburbs.

 

Bowser’s non-binding “sense of the council” resolution says that all middle-school students across the city should have access to the kinds of opportunities — including arts, world languages and challenging academics — currently available at Alice Deal Middle School in Northwest.

 

The scramble for a good middle schools has left Deal overcrowded and strained, said Bowser, (D-Ward 4), who is running for mayor.

 

“This council and this government should commit to providing and replicating Alice Deal across the District of Columbia so that more families have access to this high quality education,” she said.

 

The resolution, which calls the dearth of excellent D.C. middle schools “unsustainable and unjust,” has four co-introducers: Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), Anita Bonds (D-At Large), David Grosso (I-At Large) and Kenyan McDuffie (D-Ward 5). Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) signed on as co-sponsors.

 

The resolution comes just weeks after Chancellor Kaya Henderson publicly recognized that the city’s traditional middle and K-8 schools have largely failed to attract families.

 

Speaking at a council hearing on school boundaries, Henderson said that the city should perhaps consider funneling middle-grade students into more-successful charter schools. The suggestion that drew immediate criticism from council members and parents.

 

Henderson has since announced that improving middle schools is one of her three budget priorities for next year.

 

 

The District’s high school football championship — Washington’s equivalent to a state title game — was Clark Ray’s first key task two years ago. D.C.’s top high school athletic official will watch like a proud father as H.D. Woodson and Friendship Collegiate play Friday night . But he’ll leave the stadium firm in his hopes that the game never looks quite like this again.

 

Over the past two decades, Washington’s high school football fields have slowly turned into an open marketplace, with schools and coaches competing to attract the best talent, and Friday’s game will be a showcase of what Ray considers to be an alarming trend.

 

H.D. Woodson is just a season removed from losing its longstanding coach after an investigation revealed it used an ineligible player from Maryland. The school is just a few months removed from a residency investigation of its best player, who transferred schools twice in six months.

 

On the other sideline, Friendship Collegiate has been investigated at least four times in the past year in relation to transfers and currently has four players under review for possible residency infractions and a staff member on probation for recruiting.

 

“Academics are a right, but athletics . . . they’re a privilege. So you can’t just change schools to participate in athletics,” Ray said of a trend that has come to define high school football in the area. Ray, the D.C. State Athletic Association athletic director, put into effect new regulations to curb the practice this year.

 

Transferring schools has long been a centerpiece of the District’s football culture. For as long as there have been trophies to be won, players have wanted to suit up for the schools that win them. The allure of college scholarships has only accelerated the trend.

 

Interviews with more than two dozen area coaches, players and administrators, in addition to a review of hundreds of documents and e-mails obtained from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education through the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that shifting allegiances and suspected recruiting have transformed the makeup of not just team rosters but the entire landscape of football in the region. It has created a competitive imbalance in which some teams routinely assemble high-powered rosters that dominate their opponents.

 

Washington’s complicated education system and unique geography, sandwiched between two states and more than a half-dozen independent school districts, lends itself to an especially high mobility rate. A study from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education earlier this year found the District’s public schools have a particularly fluid population, with more than 15,000 students leaving the D.C. school system and more than 17,000 entering it over a recent 12-month period. The study did not break down the movement by grade or cause, such as athletic or academic considerations, but D.C.’s transfer rate is, for example, about 50 percent higher than nearby Fairfax County.

 

As a result, every team in the area is affected by players hopping from school to school and team to team.

 

 

 

D.C. Council member David A. Catania is planning to file papers Wednesday to create an exploratory committee for a mayoral run.

 

His intentions were confirmed by former council member Sharon Ambrose, who said she will lead the committee. Catania (I-At Large) declined to comment Tuesday night.

 

“I think that there are very few council members . . . who work as smart and as hard as David has,” said Ambrose, a Democrat who represented Ward 6 from 1997 to 2007.

 

The move adds a new dimension to the city’s already crowded mayoral race, raising the possibility that the contest could remain competitive well past the April 1 primary.

 

Catania is perhaps the council’s fiercest critic of Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), who announced Monday his intention to seek reelection.

 

As an independent, Catania would run on the November ­general-election ballot against the primary winners. He would not have to make a final decision about whether to run until June, when nominating petitions become available — allowing him to see first who emerges from the Democratic primary.

 

No non-Democrat has been elected mayor since Congress granted the District home rule in 1973. The closest any has come was in 1994, when Republican Carol Schwartz lost to scandal-scarred Marion Barry, 56 percent to 42 percent.

 

Ambrose said Catania can overcome the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate. “I really think that the District of Columbia is entering into a new kind of political paradigm,” she said. “I think that we are really a ­post-partisan city.”

 

Catania, 45, was first elected to the council in a 1997 special election, becoming its first openly gay member. Initially elected as a Republican, he became an independent in 2004, breaking with the GOP over President George W. Bush’s support for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

 

A lawyer, Catania is known for a prosecutorial bent and having the council’s sharpest tongue, sparring with colleagues on the dais and using oversight hearings to hold executive-branch officials to account — and in some cases, his critics say, to micromanage and browbeat them.

 

As chairman of the council’s Health Committee from 2005 through 2012, Catania promoted the expansion of basic health-care services and insurance coverage, and he crusaded to maintain the only city hospital east of the Anacostia River, now known as United Medical Center.

 

A $79 million city bailout orchestrated in 2008 with then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty stabilized the long-troubled hospital but backfired when the hospital’s new private owner defaulted on its financial obligations. The hospital now is in the city’s hands and is in the midst of a new turnaround effort. Meanwhile, the District, in part because of Catania’s efforts to expand the city’s public ­health-insurance programs, now enjoys one of the highest rates of insurance coverage in the country.

 

In January, Catania took the helm of the council’s Education Committee, and he has pursued issues including test security, social promotion and school funding. In June, he introduced seven wide-ranging bills that he said would accelerate the city’s closely watched school improvement efforts and lift student achievement.

 

The council gave final approval to two of those bills Tuesday and gave tentative but unanimous approval to a third measure that would send more money to schools to help at-risk students.

 

Catania, almost halfway to making good on his promise to visit the city’s more than 200 traditional and charter schools, has accused Gray of sluggish and uninspired leadership of the city’s public schools. Gray has countered that the schools are on the right course, steadily improving and attracting more families every year.

 

District political observers have long considered Catania a potential mayoral candidate. He has declined to confirm his interest in the job in recent months even as he has traveled the city, talking several nights a week with likely voters in school PTAs and civic associations.

 

In those public appearances, Catania focuses on his priorities for public education, including his recent proposal to establish a new financial-aid program that would give high school graduates up to $20,000 a year for college.

 

“The more he’s gotten into the whole education picture, the more he’s become convinced education is the key,” Ambrose said. “I could not agree with him more.”