- D.C. board moves to revoke charter for Potomac Prep [Potomac Prep PCS and Options PCS mentioned]
- Educators, parents sound off about D.C. truancy laws
- The common school lottery website is better than ever, but you may not want to rush to use it [Ideal Academy PCS, Roots PCS, Tree of Life PCS, LAMB PCS, and Washington Yu Ying PCS mentioned]
D.C. board moves to revoke charter for Potomac Prep [Potomac Prep PCS and Options PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
November 19, 2014
The D.C. Public Charter school board voted Monday night to begin the process to revoke the charter for Potomac Prep in Northeast Washington.
Darren Woodruff, vice chairman of the board, said the decision was based on a "a decade- long pattern of declining academic performance and challenges with management.”
According to a staff report, the school is not meeting 17 of its 20 goals and academic expectations. The staff also reported high turnover among school leaders, basic compliance issues, weak fiscal management and an “often chaotic environment at the school.”
Last June, the school terminated its agreement with Lighthouse Academies, a Massachusetts-based management company, and put a new leadership team in place.
School leaders are now asking the board to extend the charter and give them time to make improvements.
“The last 10 years have been trying to say the least ... but the new administration is committed to guiding Potomac Prep in a new direction,” said Nicholette Smith-Bligen, chairman of the school’s board.
“We don’t want our story to be that we made mistakes, but when we finally made a change for the better, we were not given the opportunity,” she said.
The school can request a public hearing before a final decision is made about its charter.
The charter board also voted Monday to give conditional approval to a charter application by Kingsman Academy, which is seeking to take over Options Public Charter School, a school for at-risk students that is under court receivership.
The application was submitted by members of the interim school leadership team.
Woodruff said that he was impressed in a recent visit by how engaged students were in the classrooms.
“It’s been a pretty incredible turnaround already,” he said. “I am optimistic for what potentially could come if they are given the opportunity to continue.”
The board also approved an amendment to a charter that was granted last spring for Children’s Guild, a Maryland nonprofit with experience in educating children with disabilities. The original charter included plans for a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school. The amendment would let it expand to high school grades, giving it a chance to compete for the Options takeover, although the board stipulated that the school would have to expand into high school one grade at a time.
The board voted against an application from Phillips Programs for Children and Families, an organization that operates special education and nontraditional schools in Maryland and Virginia. The board cited concerns with curriculum, disciplinary policy and academic goals.
Options has been in turmoil since last year, when the city sued the charter school and its former leaders, alleging that they diverted more than $3 million from the school through contracts to companies they founded.
More recently, the school came under scrutiny again when a substitute teacher was charged with having sex with a student in a classroom.
A final decision about which applicant will take over the school is expected next month.
Educators, parents sound off about D.C. truancy laws
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
November 18, 2014
More than a year after the D.C. State Board of Education approved stricter attendance regulations aimed at getting more students into classroom seats, principal Stephen Jackson said monitoring truancy has become an all-consuming task at Dunbar High School.
“I would like for you to come visit and see the enormous amount of work being done,” he said, citing regular meetings with parents, home visits and court referrals. “But when they changed the rules, it became overwhelming.”
Jackson shared his experiences with board members at a roundtable discussion Monday night to see how the new anti-truancy policies are playing out.
New regulations were approved in response to a law the D.C. Council passed in July 2013, which aimed to combat pervasive absenteeism in city schools. The push reflects growing national attention to the issue, which experts link closely to academic performance.
Early data show the new D.C. law is having an impact. The portion of D.C. public school students ages 5 through 17 who had 10 or more unexcused absences dropped from 27 percent in 2012-2013 to 18 percent during the most recent school year. The D.C. Public Charter School Board reported a drop from 19 percent in 2012-2013 to 15 percent last school year.
“It’s sending a message that it’s important to get to school to learn,” said Tim Harwood, a data and policy specialist with the charter board, who attended the meeting.
But during the past year, state board members said they have heard from schools that are struggling to implement the new rules and from parents who are frustrated by seemingly incessant robo-calls.
In one highly publicized case, a globe-trotting piano prodigy at Deal Middle transferred after her family received repeated notices of disciplinary action for absences they believed were excused.
According to D.C. law, if a child has reached five unexcused absences, a school support team, including administrators, teachers and social workers, meets to develop a plan with the family to improve attendance.
At 10 unexcused absences, the family must be referred to the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency. At 15 unexcused absences, students aged 14 to 17 can be referred to court.
At the roundtable, youth advocates, attorneys, charter and traditional school leaders, and parents said the new regulations are flooding schools with paperwork and pushing tardy students into the criminal justice system.
Complaints in family court related to persons in need of supervision, which includes truancy cases, increased 92 percent between 2012 and 2013, to a total of 427 cases, according to an analysis by D.C. Lawyers for Youth. The number is expected to increase again in 2014 because the law will have been in effect all year.
Particularly challenging for some schools is a new regulation approved by the state board that says if a student misses 20 percent — rather than 40 percent — of the school day, he or she is counted as absent.
At high schools that have block schedules and longer class periods, that could mean missing one class. “So if a student misses one period a day, they’re truant,” Jackson said. “That’s insane to me.”
Jackson said free train passes might speed some students’ commute and help them get to school on time. The city provides free bus passes, but some teens have long rides to school. But what he would really like to see is a change to the law.
Board member Mary Lord (At Large) said she would like to work with the Office of the State Superintendent for Education to rewrite the “80-20” regulation.
“It’s the usual law of unintended consequence,” she said. “It sounds good in theory . . . [but] the solution seems to be increasing the problem.”
The common school lottery website is better than ever, but you may not want to rush to use it [Ideal Academy PCS, Roots PCS, Tree of Life PCS, LAMB PCS, and Washington Yu Ying PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
November 18, 2014
This year the common school lottery, My School DC, will provide families with a centralized waiting list and an interactive map to help them locate schools. The lottery opens December 15th, but families new to the school system may want to hold off entering it until the future of the new boundary plan is settled.
DC launched the common lottery last year. Families only need to enter the lottery if they want to attend a DC Public School they're not zoned for, a selective DCPS school, a DCPS preschool program, or a participating charter school. They submit an application ranking up to 12 choices, and an algorithm matches them with one of their choices, waitlisting them at any school they ranked higher.
After surveying and speaking with parents across the District this summer, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education decided to incorporate several new features into this year's lottery.
One of those is a tool that helps families find schools that meet their needs. A user can enter her address and see a map of schools that can be filtered by distance, grade level, or type of program. If, for example, you want a dual-language school for a 6th-grader within a mile of your home, you can search for that.
Once you have a list of schools that meet your criteria, you can follow links to find more information, including open house dates, school profiles, and school equity reports
Right now, you can search for your zoned neighborhood schools. But the map will show results based on the new school boundaries adopted by Mayor Vincent Gray in August, and Mayor-elect Muriel Bowser has said she will not adopt that plan in its entirety. That could affect who enters the lottery, because some families may decide they're not happy with their new zoned school and enter the lottery as a result.
Bowser's plans aren't clear
It's not clear how extensive Bowser's changes to the school zoning plan will be. Before the election earlier this month, she called for restarting the entire boundary overhaul process, which went on for many months. More recently she said she only plans some tweaks, but didn't provide details.
As Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith pointed out in a recent interview, the boundary changes won't affect the majority of DCPS students anytime soon. Most changes will arrive in phases, and in the 2015-16 school year the new boundaries will affect only those students who are new to the system.
But if Bowser changes the boundaries after the lottery starts, those people will have submitted applications on the basis of information that is no longer valid. To ensure the lottery assigns people where they really want to go, most likely Bowser will need to restart it—which could require everyone who has already entered it to resubmit an application.
Smith said she hasn't spoken with Bowser about her intentions. She added that, based on last year's data, "by the time the new administration comes in, we expect that several thousand students will have applied." But she acknowledged that figure could be lower this year because of uncertainty about the future of the boundary plan.
Still, if Bowser plans to change the boundaries, the only way to avoid restarting the lottery would be for her or another DC councilmember to introduce emergency legislation before the lottery opens on December 15, since there's no longer enough time to enact legislation in the usual way. And there is only one opportunity left to do that: at the DC Council's legislative meeting on December 2.
If that happens, and if the emergency legislation gets the nine votes it needs to pass, the lottery would presumably go forward using the old boundaries.
Families trying to choose among the many school options available in DC may want to attend a District-wide school fair called Edfest, to be held at the DC Armory this Saturday from 11 am to 3 pm. More than 180 DCPS and charter schools will be there, and activities will include health screenings, a story time for kids, and an introduction to the My School DC school finder tool.
A central waiting list and more charter participation
Another new feature of the lottery this year will be a centralized waiting list. Rather than having to call individual schools repeatedly to find out where they stand, parents will simply be able to log into the My School DC website or call the lottery hotline at 202-888-6336.
The lottery will also include more charter schools this year. Last year, a dozen or so charters opted to continue to accept applications and run a lottery as individual schools rather than participate in the common lottery.
This year, Smith said, the only charters that have chosen not to participate in the common lottery are those that serve adults; two residential programs; and Ideal Academy, Roots, Tree of Life, and Latin-American Montessori Bilingual (LAMB). Washington Yu Ying, a highly sought-after Mandarin-immersion school, sat out the common lottery last year but has decided to participate this year.
No reason to enter lottery early
There is no advantage to entering the lottery early, according to Sujata Bhat, executive director of My School DC. And once a family applies, they can make changes and resubmit the application anytime before the deadline without any penalty.
The deadline for the high school application lottery, which includes applications to selective DCPS high schools, is February 2. For preschool through 8th grade, the deadline is March 2.
"We do tell people they should probably avoid applying on day one, because the site tends to be slow," Smith said. "After that it's really up to families to decide when they want to apply. They can start the process, then come back and finish it."
And given the uncertainty about DCPS boundaries and whether a new lottery will be necessary, families might want to wait and see exactly what Mayor-elect Bowser has in mind before entering the lottery at all.