NEWS
- ‘You’re Not Going to Give Up’ [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, Two Rivers PCS, Washington Yu Ying PCS, Sela PCS, Maya Angelou PCS, St. Coletta Special Education PCS, SEED PCS, Mounment PCS, Roots PCS, Latin American Montessori PCS and KIPP PCS mentioned]
- Senate passes No Child Left Behind rewrite, would shrink federal role
- Consensus building around No Child Left Behind replacement and it’s not good
- Senate tweaks formula for Title 1 funds to educate children from poor families
- Can D.C. afford to build the greenest schools in the world?
- If you want your children to succeed, teach them to share in kindergarten
- Agencies pledge modernization fixes
‘You’re Not Going to Give Up’ [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, Two Rivers PCS, Washington Yu Ying PCS, Sela PCS, Maya Angelou PCS, St. Coletta Special Education PCS, SEED PCS, Mounment PCS, Roots PCS, Latin American Montessori PCS and KIPP PCS mentioned]
Politico Magazine
By Debra Bruno
July 16, 2015
Success, it turns out, is quiet. It’s a sunny and warm spring Thursday at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Anacostia, one of the poorest areas of Washington, D.C. The halls are hushed, and students walk by wearing maroon polo shirts embroidered with the school name. They smile and greet teachers respectfully. There are no jangling PA announcements, no clanging bell to mark the end of class, no metal detectors at the front door.
It’s quiet too inside teacher Joshua Biederman’s AP history class as Jeremiah Garland, a tall junior, wraps up his opening argument in a mock trial of Lt. William Calley, the officer behind the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. In the art room down the hall, it’s downright peaceful as students put finishing touches on their portraits in pastels, while a three-paneled mural honoring the life of the school’s namesake rests against a nearby wall.
But make no mistake: These almost Rockwell-esque scenes represent a genuine revolution, a triumph of a two-decade-long education reform experiment that has turned the nation’s capital into ground zero for an ambitious overhaul of its failing schools. Thurgood Marshall—and dozens of other public charter schools that range across a wide variety of teaching styles and program themes—are the result.
It’s a success that’s seen in student lives: At Thurgood Marshall Academy, 100 percent of the school’s graduates are accepted into college. And two-thirds of those students finish college, a rate that is higher than the national average—and about eight times the rate for D.C. students in general, says principal Alexandra Pardo.
Keep in mind that about a third of TMA’s entering ninth-graders start off at or below a fifth-grade level of proficiency in math and reading, and come from 50 to 60 different middle schools across Washington, Pardo adds.
This, the academy’s leaders explain, is charter schools done right.
The nation’s capital is perhaps an unlikely place for education reform to take such firm hold. Its school system had long been regarded as a failure; for years it served as Exhibit A for congressmen and U.S. Department of Education bureaucrats who pointed to their hometown as the poster child for underperforming schools. D.C. schools graduated just 48.8 percent of its students in 2006; only one in twenty students who started high school earned a college degree. Nearly a third of D.C. residents tested as functionally illiterate. Even as late as 2011, years into a massive reform push, D.C. still boasted the worst graduation rate in the country: 59 percent.
The city’s schools were—and still are—deeply segregated. Many white parents sent children to local elementary schools and then pulled them out for high school, leaving many D.C. high schools overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.
Congress, in instituting the District’s Charter School Reform Act of 1995, sought to remedy some of the deepest problems, but it wasn’t until the election of Mayor Adrian Fenty in 2006 and the appointment of Michelle Rhee to lead the school system that the city really committed to reform. For many of the years in between, charter schools and a few limited-entry magnet schools, were the few shining lights in the city’s education system; the reform efforts since 2006 have in many ways accelerated and compounded that growth and success.
The latest push for education reform has also come—not coincidentally—as the downtown has undergone a dramatic transformation, with an explosion of restaurants and nightlife. New condos and gentrifying neighborhoods have brought tens of thousands of residents back into the city. While the city’s charter schools ran independently of Rhee’s efforts to reform the public school system, the slow improvement in the schools overall paralleled the city’s growth—as the city’s population grew over the last decade, more parents chose to enroll their children in the city’s school system, creating pressure for better schools and more schools.
Nationally, charter schools got started in 1991 as an answer to a failing traditional public school system. Although they are also publicly funded, they generally run independently of the local public school system, giving them autonomy in hiring and firing, more flexibility to make changes and a much greater likelihood of being shut down if students don’t enroll or make significant progress once they’re there. Since the first authorization in 1991, 43 states and D.C. now allow charter schools and 2.3 million children in the U.S. attend charters, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Charter schools have been seen as a way to give parents in low-income areas a choice in schooling much like what more affluent families have always had by moving into a better school district or putting their children in a private school. Instead of attending the school in their district, charter school students might go to school on the other side of the city.
D.C. today stands out because a whopping 44 percent of all its public school students—36,565 young people in 112 schools—are enrolled in charter schools, the highest state percentage in the nation. It’s a number that has grown rapidly, increasing more than ten-fold since the 1998 school year. It’s a figure that also stands out because D.C. charter school students consistently score higher on tests than those at traditional public schools in the capital.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in an October 2014 report monitoring the health of public charter schools in terms of growth, innovation and quality, ranked D.C. number one in the nation. Its top ranking stems from a variety of factors, says president and CEO Nina Rees, including its substantial growth, its broad array of educational options and the higher test scores. According to the Office of State Superintendent of Education, 2014 marked the eighth year in a row that the number of charter school students who are proficient in multiple subjects has increased—and that number continues to exceed the state average.
Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, a membership group for charter school administrators, says, “What’s so powerful to me as an educator of 45 years is that some of these schools are having stunning success with the students that so many are concerned about. Students of color from impoverished backgrounds are doing dramatically better in charter schools in D.C. than they are in the traditional public school system.”
The ecosystem of D.C. charter schools that has evolved over the last two decades represents a cornucopia of creative and nontraditional approaches to education, in addition to fairly traditional college-prep schools.
Two Rivers Public Charter School uses what it calls an “expeditionary learning model,” or hands-on learning. Yu Ying Public Charter School is a Chinese language immersion school, with children alternating between Chinese and English-language days for instruction. Sela Public Charter School is a Hebrew language immersion school, which also divides its instruction into English and Hebrew. The Maya Angelou Public Charter School is specifically designed for students in the juvenile justice and foster care system, with a heavy emphasis on mental health care. The St. Coletta Special Education Public Charter School serves students with intellectual disabilities and autism. The SEED School is a college prep boarding school. Monument Academy, which will open in the fall, is a weekday boarding school, grades 5-12, for children in the foster care system. Roots Public Charter School is an Afro-centric school for children through eighth grade. Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School immerses students in both English and Spanish in a “self-directed learning environment” typical of Montessori schools.
Even among a host of high-performing programs, the KIPP chain of charter schools stands out. The Knowledge Is Power Program runs 162 schools across the country. In D.C., 15 schools—its 16th is set to open this summer—serve students from early childhood through high school. Of the top-ranking charter schools named by the Office of State Superintendent of Education, two are KIPP.
Senate passes No Child Left Behind rewrite, would shrink federal role
The Washington Post
By Lyndsay Layton and Emma Brown
July 17, 2015
The Senate on Thursday passed a bipartisan rewrite of No Child Left Behind, the main federal education law, that would shrink the federal role in the nation’s 100,000 public schools and yield greater power to states to judge student achievement and school performance.
The measure passed 81 to 17, an unusual level of agreement in a hyperpartisan era on Capitol Hill. It was a victory for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who navigated divides within their parties to push the measure to passage, which lawmakers have been unable to do for eight years.
Alexander dryly called it “a remarkable accomplishment for a U.S. Senate filled with 100 experts on education.”
But the bill lacks a key accountability measure important to Democrats and the Obama administration: an amendment that would have defined struggling schools and compelled states to act to improve them.
Democrats said they would work to get that part included during negotiations with the House on a final bill.
Under the Senate bill, states would still be required to test students annually in math and reading from grades three through eight and once in high school. And they still must report those results by categories of race, income, ethnicity, disability and English-language learners.
But in a departure from the current law, it would be up to the states to determine if a school is struggling or failing to educate any particular group of students, and states would decide what action to take.
Democrats and civil rights groups said that would allow states to ignore disadvantaged students — those who are the most difficult or costly to educate.
Leslie Proll, director of the Washington, D.C., office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the bill undermines the intent of the original federal education law from 1965.
“It’s simply unfathomable that 50 years after its passage, Congress would consider gutting its primary purpose: to ensure that those who are serving our children are doing so on an equitable basis,” she said. “Yes, transparency and data are good, but information alone without requiring specific action for addressing disparity does great damage.”
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the bill would give states important flexibility and reduce overtesting, but he agreed with civil rights groups that it lacked adequate protections for disadvantaged students.
“We need to identify which schools work and which ones don’t, so we can guarantee that every child will have the education they need,” Duncan said in a statement. “We cannot tolerate continued indifference to the lowest performing schools, achievement gaps that let some students fall behind, or high schools where huge numbers of students never make it to graduation.”
The Senate bill would significantly reduce the authority of the U.S. Department of Education, prohibiting the secretary from influencing state academic standards and assessments, requiring teacher evaluations or prescribing what states must do to address failing schools.
Conservatives called it a victory for state and local control.
“People closest to the children cherish their children,” Alexander said. “We should not assume just because we fly to Washington once a week, we are so much wiser.”
In an unusual alliance, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, joined with Republicans to push back against the accountability proposal favored by Democrats and civil rights groups. The union’s president, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, called the bill a “giant leap forward for childkind” because it would reduce the role of standardized testing.
The move comes a week after House Republicans pushed through an education bill without a single Democrat voting to support it. The House version earned a veto threat from President Obama because it would change how the federal government distributes funds designed to help educate poor children in a way the White House believes would harm them.
The simultaneous action in both chambers is notable because for eight years, Congress has sputtered to rewrite No Child Left Behind, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2002 and was due for reauthorization in 2007. The law became increasingly unworkable and widely despised by school districts, states and even federal officials.
“It’s certainly not the bill that [President Obama] would write if he were writing it,” Alexander said. “It’s certainly not the bill that Sen. Murray would write if she were writing it, and it certainly would not be the bill I would write if I were writing it. But we have a consensus that we need to come to. And why do you need a consensus? Because that’s how you govern a complex country.”
Consensus building around No Child Left Behind replacement and it’s not good
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
July 17, 2015
Yesterday, according to the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown, the Senate passed by an astonishing 81 to 17 vote a revised version of the No Child Left Behind law. Earlier this month the House approved its own version by a much narrower 218 to 213 margin. Now the bills head to conference committee so that the differences in the legislation can be resolved.
Left intact from the original version of the groundbreaking education policy passed under George W. Bush’s presidency is the requirement that public schools test students in grades three through eight and once in high school. The results of these standardized examinations would be publicly available for all of the subgroups currently being categorized. But in a major departure from the way things have worked in the past it would be left up to the states to classify whether any group of students had fallen behind academically and the specific corrective actions to be taken.
In other words, just like before 2001, the states will be essentially receiving block grants from the federal government in the form of Title 1 funds.
As I wrote in June, when student proficiency levels were established by localities there was a hodgepodge of acceptable ranges. The introduction of the Common Core Standards is a strong attempt to normalize what each student is expected to be able to master by grade level. However, by allowing the states to label schools as doing either a passing or failing job we probably should have avoided the entire fight by also letting each community decide what is to be taught.
The only bright part of this entire legislative process is a provision in the House version to allow money to follow low income children to the public school of their choice. Look for this to be eliminated in committee.
President Bush justified the No Child Left Behind law by stating powerfully that we as a society needed to eliminate the soft bigotry of low expectations. Thanks to the United States Congress it appears they have returned.
Senate tweaks formula for Title 1 funds to educate children from poor families
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
July 16, 2015
The Senate on Thursday voted to change the way millions of federal dollars designed to help educate poor children are divided among the states, a move that would give a boost to some states while reducing payments for others.
The vote, by a 59 to 39 margin, came as an amendment to a larger bill to replace No Child Left Behind, the country’s main K-12 federal education law. It marked the first time in decades that lawmakers have worked to change the formula for what is known as Title 1 funds, the largest single stream of federal dollars for elementary and secondary education.
The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), was changed after behind-the-scenes protests from several Republicans as well as Democratic leaders Sen. Richard Durbin (Ill.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), whose states stood to lose a greater amount under Burr’s initial plan.
Burr rewrote the amendment so that the formula changes would not take effect until Congress funds Title 1 at $17 billion annually. It is unclear when that would happen; the program is currently funded at $14.5 billion, an amount that has been steady since 2012. In addition, the change in formula would affect only dollars spent by Congress in excess of the $17 billion benchmark.
The federal government sends about $14 billion in Title I funds to the nation’s schools, handed out through a complex set of formulas that favors states with large populations and wealthy states that spend a lot on education. Rural states, and states with smaller populations, tend to receive less on a per-pupil basis.
About two-thirds of the nation’s public schools receive Title I dollars, according to the Center for American Progress.
Burr’s amendment would attempt to correct for that bias and would streamline the current set of four Title I formulas into one simpler formula. It essentially would dole out money based on the number of children living in poverty multiplied by the national average of the cost to educate that child.
Some believe the new formula would penalizes states that choose to spend more than the national average on education.
“While this is a huge improvement, it is still something that I think is very problematic, so I will be voting no on this,” Sen. Pat Toomey, (R-Pa.) said Wednesday. “The amendment is mistaken in two respects — it fails to recognize the varying cost of living in varying states and, second, it really penalizes those states that are willing to ask their citizens to invest more in education.”
Many states in the South and West would see an infusion of federal dollars, including Texas, California, Florida and North Carolina, Burr’s home state. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia would gain a greater share of Title I dollars.
But 14 states would see fewer dollars than they would under the current system: Illinois, New York, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio and Nebraska.
The Senate is expected to take a final vote on the bill Thursday afternoon.
Can D.C. afford to build the greenest schools in the world?
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 16, 2015
This year, the architects of the rebuilt Dunbar High School announced that the building was one of the greenest new schools in the world, equipped with a geothermal heating and cooling system aided by wells extending 460 feet below the athletic fields and enough solar panels to power all classroom lights for eight hours on a sunny day.
The D.C. public high school, after a $122 million reconstruction project, was awarded Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) platinum certification, the highest distinction awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council, which reviews building energy efficiency.
As District schools have been modernized, many of them are getting greener. But as the overall cost and fiscal management of the school district’s modernization program has come under scrutiny, so too are its environmental features.
The D.C. auditor this month recommended that the city analyze the costs and benefits associated with its LEED certification. The recommendation came as part of a report that was highly critical of the city’s oversight of the school building program and the growing costs of the program.
A 2010 master facilities plan, designed as a planning document to guide funding decisions for school modernization, sets LEED silver certification as a minimum target for all projects. The auditor’s report found that most of the modernization projects reviewed — including seven out of eight high schools — exceed the silver certification “potentially driving costs beyond projections.”
“While adhering to District standards for environmental quality is commendable, cost-benefit questions arise when projects exceed those standards,” the report said.
During the review for LEED certification, buildings are assigned points according to such things as water efficiency, pollution controls, air quality and energy efficiency. LEED rates buildings from among four levels: certified, silver, gold or platinum.
Kenneth Diggs, a spokesman for the city’s Department of General Services, which oversees the school construction program, said the 2010 Healthy Schools Act set a higher bar for environmentally friendly features by amending the Green Building Act of 2006 “to encourage school construction to achieve LEED gold certification.” By pursuing gold certification, contractors are simply building to code, he said.
The District has been considered a national leader in green construction.
Some other Washington-area school systems have also made LEED certification a priority. Arlington County has renovated three high schools; two have gold certification and one — Wakefield High School — is under review but could be rated platinum, according to John Chadwick, Arlington’s assistant superintendent for facilities and operations. Loudoun County Public Schools, which has been building new schools to keep up with enrollment, does not participate in LEED certification but uses the standards as a reference.
Twelve D.C. public schools have gold certification and two have silver. Fifteen are in the process of being certified, and 44 are not eligible because their renovations did not include the entire building, Diggs said.
Two schools, including Dunbar, achieved the platinum designation. Diggs said the platinum certification did not require extra costs, though he did not have a breakdown of spending associated with the buildings’ energy-efficient features nor an analysis of projected cost savings.
He credited the solar panels at Dunbar for earning the extra points that propelled it into the platinum category. He said Constellation Energy, a Baltimore-based company, paid for the panels in exchange for using some of the power they generate.
McKinley Middle School achieved a platinum rating for its interior renovation in part, Diggs said, because of some incidental features, such as being close to public transportation.
D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), chairman of the education committee, said he supports the goal of energy efficiency, but he’s worried about the potential costs associated with the certification process.
Without close government oversight, contractors running the projects do not have any incentive to think about “the whole city” and cost savings, he said. “They want to get award after award,” he said.
Since 2007, the city has paid two D.C. contractors as part of a partnership to perform the day-to-day management of the school system’s construction projects.
In a letter responding to the auditor’s report, Jonathan Kayne, interim director of the Department of General Services, said that the renovated schools have garnered many awards for design excellence.
If you want your children to succeed, teach them to share in kindergarten
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 16, 2015
Kindergartners who share, cooperate and are helpful are more likely to have a college degree and a job 20 years later than children who lack those social skills, according to a new study.
Kids who get along well with others also are less likely to have substance-abuse problems and run-ins with the law.
The research, which involved tracking nearly 800 students for two decades, suggests that specific social-emotional skills among young children can be powerful predictors for success later in life.
“These are skills that probably portend their ability to do well in school, to pay attention and to navigate their environment,” said Damon E. Jones, a research assistant professor of health and human development at Pennsylvania State University. He was the lead author of the paper, published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.
Jones said the study suggests that early-childhood education programs and schools could identify children with weak social skills early on, when they are still very receptive to learning how to behave differently.
It may be difficult for overburdened schools to find time to focus on children’s social-emotional selves, he said, especially in grades beyond kindergarten. But “there are effective programs that can be delivered efficiently and that can help give a boost to children in these areas,” he said. “We just need to recognize that these may be important skills to incorporate into the curriculum as well.”
The study is based on data collected beginning in 1991 at schools in Nashville, Seattle, rural Pennsylvania and Durham, N.C. Teachers of 753 kindergartners were asked to rate each student’s skill level in eight areas:
- Resolves peer problems on his/her own.
- Is very good at understanding other people’s feelings.
- Shares materials with others.
- Cooperates with peers without prompting.
- Is helpful to others.
- Listens to others’ point of view.
- Can give suggestions and opinions without being bossy
- Acts friendly toward others.
Each teacher was asked to assess how well each statement described the child on a 5-point scale: “Not at all (0),” “A little (1),” “Moderately well (2),” “Well (3)” and “Very well (4).”
Researchers then tracked those students for two decades, using police records, reports from parents and self-reports from the children.
They then used statistical models to filter out the effects of factors such as a child’s socioeconomic status, family characteristics and early academic ability to isolate the impact of early social skills on life outcomes.
Children who scored “well” on social competence were four times as likely to get a college degree by age 25 as those who scored “a little.”
Children who scored higher were also more likely to have a full-time job by the time they were 25. Similarly, children who scored on the lower end of the scale were more likely to have negative interactions with the police and spend time in juvenile detention. They also had a higher chance of being arrested, of recent binge drinking and of being on a waiting list for public housing.
The research does not say that the ability to share causes one’s life to go more smoothly or that refusing to share causes one’s life to be difficult. But coupled with the growing body of research on social-emotional skills, it provides more evidence for what seems like common sense: Children who interact well as kindergartners are more likely to make friends and get positive feedback from teachers and, therefore, are more likely to like school and stay in school.
“It’s easy to see where these are skills that can lead to good outcomes,” Jones said. “We all know that when you start to succeed in relationships or in school, that’s going to influence where you’re headed next.”
The children in the study represented a cross-section of society, with a somewhat higher proportion of at-risk children than the general population, Jones said. Of the sample, about half were white, 46 percent were black and 4 percent were from other ethnic backgrounds. Fifty-eight percent were boys.
Steven Barnett, the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, said the study shows that schools can’t just be concerned with teaching social-emotional skills — that’s too broad a category. The study did not find strong correlations between aggressive behavior, for example, and later life outcomes.
“We’ve got to be very fine-tuned about what exactly it is we need to help kids with,” he said.
Barnett said the study is heartening to those who see high-quality preschool as a powerful way to change the trajectory of children’s lives. “It does offer the promise that if we can help kids get to this place by 5, that it will be sustaining,” he said. “You don’t have to worry that it is going to unravel.”
The study was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Agencies pledge modernization fixes
The Current Newspapers
By Brady Holt
July 15, 2015
Officials responsible for modernizing D.C. Public Schools facilities are pledging to make a series of reforms following a damning audit that found serious mismanagement in many recent school projects.
At a D.C. Council hearing last Wednesday, officials with the Department of General Services and D.C. Public Schools said the city will more carefully review the private firms hired to oversee school projects; develop precise cost estimates earlier in a project’s process; and more clearly define who’s in charge at what stages of a project. Furthermore, they intend to eliminate inefficient accelerated scheduling as well as phased modernizations, which they said often result in last-minute increases to a project’s scope. They also said they will more readily refuse costly community requests, and they will develop and adhere to a formal procedure for selecting which schools are modernized when.
However, officials defended their reliance on “DC PEP,” the partnership of two companies that is tasked with overseeing the city’s school projects. The D.C. auditor’s report — covering the 2010 through 2013 fiscal years, a period with $1.2 billion in school modernization spending — showed that DC PEP was paid $37 million. During those four years, 37 percent of the financial records and 84 percent of total documentation was found to be missing or lacking.
Although officials acknowledged that ballooning costs of many school modernizations could have been reduced, they maintained that many high costs were unavoidable and that early cost estimates were always intended to be mere “placeholders,” as opposed to accurate sums — which “leads to the perception of an increased budget.”
Council members generally expressed support for the planned changes during the six hour hearing, while also questioning whether the agencies are prepared to go far enough. Calling some of the testimony he heard “offensive,” Chairman Phil Mendelson said the General Services Department — which handles the construction of city buildings — was blaming widespread problems on a handful of issues. He said officials didn’t adequately respond to concerns that overbilling was hidden in the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of insufficiently documented payments.
“You pull out all these excuses for cost drivers and you don’t discuss or acknowledge any of the other ones,” Mendelson said. “You’re dodging them.”
At-large Council member David Grosso also blasted the agency for using costly materials like copper without outside input on whether the project needed it, and he criticized the school system for not paying attention to where the money was going. “We need someone to stand up and say, ‘No, actually we don’t need that — that’s more in line with what the Prince of Wales would do,’” said Grosso, chair of the council’s Education Committee.
Jeff Bonvechio, the General Services Department’s new director of capital construction, said officials will work harder to “separate niceties from necessities” — for instance, giving more scrutiny to a parking garage at the much-maligned Duke Ellington School of the Arts project, where costs have increased more than 150 percent.
“I believe the path moving forward would be to say, ‘Your budget is $178 million, so if you want the underground parking, something else has to give — you don’t just go back to the well for additional funding,’” he said.
Officials said it’s especially difficult to turn people down during phased modernizations, when it’s tempting to take care of a school’s many legitimate needs while work is already underway. That’s why the school system now intends to carry out only complete modernizations or smaller projects with limited, strictly defined scopes going forward.
However, even during the full-scale projects, council members noted the series of “change orders” that have come before them in the midst of construction as budgets steadily grew. Even though the council has the authority to vote against these changes, Mendelson said that’s not really practical.
“What are we going to do — not approve the project, say to all the parents of school X that we’re not going to go forward with the project?” asked Mendelson. And thanks to the flurry of change orders, coupled with paperwork deemed so lacking that the city doesn’t know how much some projects ended up costing, “the process is almost rigged against accountability,” he said.
Erin DiPalma, vice president of the parent-teacher organization at Garrison Elementary, said her Shaw school has seen its promised renovations repeatedly delayed, and it would be unfair for that project to face “across-the board cuts to respond to overages in schools that have already been modernized.” Meanwhile, the Lafayette Elementary community in Chevy Chase is already smarting at a last minute 5,000-square-foot cut to their new addition, a change intended to offset $500,000 in cost increases elsewhere in the project.
Nathaniel Beers, the school system’s chief operating officer, said the city needs to — belatedly — begin reining in costs, even at the risk of offending communities around schools that haven’t yet been upgraded.
“There’s going to be some pain in these conversations; there’s going to be people who feel like they were promised things,” said Beers. “We have to be able to stand up and have the spine to say, ‘What it actually costs to do this project is X, and this is the reason we’ve prioritized this project first’ ... and acknowledge that these are what the needs are, and then leave it be.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser also spoke at the hearing, noting that the audit uncovered problems under prior administrations — issues that also predate Beers and Bonvechio — but she said changing the system is a priority.
“What I came to realize is that our government had a model recently about how to get school construction done — and that model is very expensive,” she said. “I will say that a lot of people watched for a long time the model that we had been using. I’m the mayor now, and I get all the benefits that I inherited. I also get the lulus that I inherited. But I need the opportunity to fix them.”
And responding to calls for a clear procedure for prioritizing schools for modernization — as opposed to a previous system that the audit deemed to be driven by politics — Bowser said she needed the council’s cooperation. “I don’t want to be here next year talking about the budget and eight ward council members tell me they are disappointed that certain buildings weren’t included,” she said.
Regarding the DC PEP project management team, Mendelson asked repeatedly whether they should be fired due to the issues the audit uncovered. That question seemed to catch Bonvechio off-guard. “They are providing quality work and the oversight on these projects,” he said.
“How can you say that if they can’t document it?” asked Mendelson, who rejected the suggestion that a well-built school is evidence of a well-managed project. The chairman also responded with derision to Bonvechio’s assertion that projects were completed on budget.
“Is this the moving budget, the budget that starts out at $6 million and then becomes $20 million and then becomes $40 million and then becomes $170 million?” asked Mendelson.
Grosso warned Bonvechio to develop a “Plan B” for project management in case the council refuses to renew DC PEP’s contract this fall.
The audit did not investigate a separate complaint, raised by some council members and witnesses, about the quality of construction in some of the school projects.
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