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The Washington Times
Charters reflect founders’ ideas
By Deborah Simmons
Friday, January 29, 2010

It's hard to imagine what level of education schooled the prodigious group of men who collectively became known as America's Founding Fathers. Picture Benjamin Franklin, a school dropout at age 10, becoming a voracious reader; he did. Or another Massachusetts native, Horace Mann, the "founding father of common schools," riding around his home state on horseback advocating school reform; he did.

There were no magnet and charter schools then, and no one railing against vouchers, either. Indeed, there was no public education system to speak of. Public schooling, though, was no mere afterthought.

There were, thank heaven, provocateurs like Thomas Jefferson, who said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Where do expectations stand today?

There's a line in the "civilized vs. uncivilized" film "The Book of Eli" that stands as one answer. Amid the destruction of the world that was, the gangster who holds sway over a spiritually starved town asks one of his henchmen to check behind the TV for Eli's book, the Bible. The puzzled henchman asks, "What's a TV?"

In this 21st-century age, teachers surely are challenged when prolific texting, e-mailing and cellular-phone calling are the common communication threads that bind civilization. It's hard to imagine what goes on inside today's public schoolhouses if you aren't obligated to step inside.

Gone are the days when the Romance languages were commonplace in grammar schools. Heck, even the term "grammar school" has been banished. These days, public schooling isn't so much about teaching and learning as it is testing, filing paperwork and imitating George Wallace with rules that block the schoolhouse doors for the very children who are most in need of "common schooling."

Yet one of the most successful modern means for common schooling is charter schools. Interestingly, states around the country are scrambling to either create or expand their charter portfolios - though their motive isn't altruistic.

States have been in a take-the-money-and-run mode because of the Obama administration's $4.35 billion program to pay states that ease restrictions on charter schools and adopt some charterlike standards for other public schools, including linking teacher pay to student achievement. (Can't you hear the teachers unions moaning?)

Charter schools are hugely popular in the nation's capital, where Congress had to practically force them down the city's liberal throat, and their academic and graduation-rate successes are well-documented.

One of the most successful D.C. clusters is Friendship Public Charter Schools, whose Chamberlain Middle School campus recently celebrated the fact that one of its own, Stephanie Day, was named D.C. Teacher of the Year. She is just the third charter school teacher to be so honored.

Ms. Day has established a high teaching-and-learning standard, and she holds herself and her students accountable.

"Ms. Day won because she believes in her students and knows that they can achieve immeasurable goals when held to the highest standards," said Barnaby Towns, director of communications of the advocacy group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. "We are delighted that this honor is going to one of the many outstanding educators who teach the 38 percent of D.C. children in public charter schools."

Educating the public is necessary for a civilized republic.

The Founders got it right: A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

The Washington Post
Former D.C. Catholic schools seeking identity as charter schools
By Michael Birnbaum
Thursday, January 28, 2010

St. Gabriel's Catholic Church in the District's Petworth neighborhood and the Center City Public Charter School next door share a parking lot and the shade of some trees. Until a year-and-a-half ago, they also shared a faith.

But in 2008, the Archdiocese of Washington gave up control of seven of its financially struggling inner-city schools, stripping down crucifixes and turning the facilities into secular charter schools in three months. Dozens of teachers and hundreds of students departed; 1,000 new students signed up.

The reincarnated schools walked a fine line between staying secular and capitalizing on Catholic schools' reputation for quality inner-city education. The schools made clear that God wasn't part of the picture but focused their curricula on character values and "moral virtue." And many parents flocked to the schools because they believed their children would receive a free parochial education.

"I kind of wish they did keep the prayer in the school," said Catina Butts, a parent at Center City's Trinidad campus, the former Holy Name School. "But they kept the structure, they keep the kids disciplined. They knew my son's weakest points, and they helped bring him up."

Students talk about respect, perseverance and integrity -- a focus that Center City educators say was part of the Catholic curriculum but also fit the charter school model. Every month, the schools pick a value and spend the month working on it, making students write essays and discuss how they live it.

A morning meeting has replaced morning prayer; students chant a code of respect. Girls wear the same plaid jumpers they did as Catholic students, and boys wear pressed shirts and slacks. Some say the dress code is enforced more strictly than it was in the Catholic days. Students unfailingly stand when visitors enter the room in a show of old-fashioned politeness.

"We have the same uniforms," said eighth-grader Amber Sneed, who started at St. Gabriel's School when she was 4 and stayed on to go to Center City. "We have the same discussions."

But the school also made moves typical for charter schools: lengthening the school day, focusing on student performance data and hosting workshops to improve teachers' craft.

At the time the conversion was proposed, it drew fire from all sides. Some critics thought the Catholic Church was forsaking inner-city youth. Others worried that religion would remain in classrooms and that the public money going to the church in the form of rent -- $2.3 million this school year, much of which has been used to bolster the remaining D.C. Catholic schools -- was an unacceptable mixture of church and state.

Clearing the Bibles out of the library brought challenges that neither critics nor advocates expected.

"The response [to the conversion] was unbelievable," with new families streaming in to register their children, many of whom were coming from poorly performing public schools, said Maureen Holla, president of Center City, which has been running the organization since the spring after the conversion.

Holla, who has worked with charter schools and inner-city education for more than a decade but doesn't have connections to Catholic education, said the rapid changes had clearly been tough for the schools. "There are tremors that come from turning a place upside down in four weeks," she said.

Six of the seven campuses that converted remain, each with one class per grade, pre-kindergarten through eighth. The seventh school, the former St. Francis de Sales in Brentwood, closed after a year, the victim of continued low enrollment.

Initial test scores at the schools were unimpressive, something school leaders acknowledge. They blame the results on the turmoil of the conversion. Across the seven campuses that were open the first year, 38 percent of students scored proficient or above in reading on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests, compared with 48.4 percent of students in traditional public schools. In math, 24.6 percent of Center City students scored proficient or above -- "abysmal," in Holla's words -- compared with 45.6 percent of D.C. public school students.

Holla noted that other promising schools have struggled with disappointing test scores in their early years. Initial internal tests this school year, especially in earlier grades, are more encouraging, she said. Students will have a second crack at the DC-CAS this spring.

In a classroom at the Petworth campus next door to St. Gabriel's one recent morning, eighth-grade teacher Niya White led her class -- two-thirds of whom have arrived since the conversion -- in a discussion about courage, one of the values the schools have focused on. Most of the talk centered on whether students had the guts to 'fess up to parents about typical 14-year-old foibles such as staying out too late and not doing homework.

Although the charter schools are a lean financial operation, they are on much better footing than they were as Catholic schools. White says she no longer has to think twice about ordering a new set of novels for her English class. Principals elsewhere express relief that they're able to hire people to help students who need special education.

At the Trinidad campus, Principal Monica Evans said she had about $2,500 per student to spend each year when she ran a Catholic school. As a charter, the school receives $8,800 to $11,400 per student from the city.

"For someone like me, who's been so used to operating on nothing," she said, "we've been able to do some incredible things with the resources." That includes hiring teacher trainers, expanding an arts program and purchasing classroom supplies.

She also said the charter has become more of a neighborhood school, drawing local students who had been intrigued when it was called Holy Name but were unable to afford the $4,500 tuition.

Though conversations about the futures of seven other D.C. Catholic schools took place this fall, a spokesman for the archdiocese said there were no plans to apply for any conversions this year.

For at least one Center City teacher, Catholicism is a guide even when it's not part of the classroom. Sister Patricia Ralph spent 14 years at Holy Name, five as principal. She stayed on at Center City. Her impeccable handwriting covers the chalkboards of her fifth-grade classroom. A small crucifix dangles around her neck.

"The conversion was hard in the beginning, but children are children, and I made sure that I was focused on that," she said. "It's been a challenge."

One solace: When the school pulled off a blackboard panel to install an electronic whiteboard as part of the conversion, Ralph saw that a cross was drawn directly onto the cement wall. The whiteboard went right over it.

"Y'all thought you took Jesus out of here, but in my heart I know it's there," she said.

The Georgetown Voice
The Marshall Plan: a charter across the Anacostia
By Will Sommer
Thursday, January 28, 2010

Although some successful businesses have recently opened on the street, space on Anacostia’s Martin Luther King Avenue SE doesn’t exude status like a K or M Street address does. It’s in Ward 8, the city’s poorest ward. With 43 homicides in 2009, it is also the city’s most violent. A half-collapsed building rots on the street, which local residents claim has been untouched since a 1968 riot. Elsewhere, the street is spotted with the canker sores of poverty, derelict buildings and check cashing storefronts.

Yet the avenue is home to D.C.’s most successful open-enrollment high school, Thurgood Marshall Academy. This unlikely success story began in a similarly unlikely way: with ten students and a class project at the Georgetown Law Center.

The charter school’s interior reveals its Georgetown roots. A Georgetown pennant hangs next to a classroom entrance, signifying the teacher’s alma mater.

“It makes college more real,” Joshua Kern (LAW ’01), the school’s executive director, said. Kern and nine other law students, along with professors from the Georgetown Law Center, founded Thurgood Marshall in 2000.

College is real for Thurgood Marshall’s students—last year’s seniors were all accepted to college, and 90 percent attended. Ten years since its founding, Thurgood Marshall is one of D.C.’s highest performing public schools, outperforming Anacostia’s two other high schools in reading and math scores by nearly three-to-one.

Kern, in a suit with no tie, looks more Boston Legal than Boston Public. He seems to derive physical pleasure from getting things done. On the phone with a friend, Kern reacts to good news by pounding his fist on a desk and exclaiming, “Yeah, I love progress!”

It was at Ballou, another Anacostia high school, where the idea for Thurgood Marshall was born. Kern was placed there in 1999 to teach law to high school students as part of Street Law, a Law Center program that teaches legal concepts to D.C. public school students. What they saw at Ballou convinced Kern that public education in Anacostia was fundamentally flawed.

“Until you see what’s happening, what’s not happening, you really just don’t understand how bad [inner-city schooling] really is,” Kern said.

Metal detectors and incessant PA announcements beat down Ballou students’ enthusiasm for learning. Just as damaging was the way teachers and administrators treated the students.

“There wasn’t really the expectation that the kids were going to learn,” he said.

Disheartened by what he experienced at Ballou, Kern, along with Lee McGoldrick (LAW ’99), an adjunct professor at the Law Center, approached then-Law Center Dean Judith Areen at the end of the semester. They wanted to create a student-initiated seminar, a rare type of Law Center class, on public education. Areen was skeptical and told them she would only approve the class if they could prepare a syllabus by the beginning of the next semester.

”I think she felt like it was the beginning of break and these kids aren’t going to do it,” Kern said.

To Areen’s surprise, McGoldrick and Kern did prepare a syllabus, and soon began picking the law students who would join them.  Street Law professor Richard Roe and McGoldrick became the class’s advisors.

The students spent the next semester figuring out how they could improve public education in D.C. After considering starting an afterschool program within the D.C. Public School system, Kern and his classmates decided to create a charter school in Anacostia.

“We wanted a truly college preparatory school in an area of the city that didn’t have one,” Kern said. “Why should kids who want that have to go all the way across the city?”

When deciding what to name the school, almost all of the students in the Law Center class chose to name it after Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice and a lawyer in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

Like Dean Areen, D.C.’s Public Charter School Board took a chance on the law students, approving Thurgood Marshall’s charter in August of 2000. That left Kern and his classmates only one year to find a building and students for their new school, all while working on their law degrees.

“Law school became my second priority,” Kern said.

Thomas Hutton (LAW ‘00), a member of the law Center class who had already graduated by the time Thurgood Marshall received a charter, scoured the area for a location for the school.

“Where are we going to house this thing?” Hutton recalled wondering. “I can remember driving around Ward 8, block by block.”

Eventually the school found room in a church’s annex building.

In order to get students for their charter, however, the law students had to grapple with a more difficult problem than limited real estate: winning the trust of a neighborhood that had been burned by outsiders before.

More than the Anacostia River separates Ward 8 from the rest of Washington. Decades of neglect by the District government have left Anacostia impoverished, with a 28 percent unemployment rate in 2009, according to the Washington Post.

Ward 8’s disdain for outsiders is best personified by its councilman, former mayor Marion Barry (D). Barry is perhaps best known for saying “bitch set me up” on a surveillance tape, right after being arrested for smoking crack cocaine during an FBI sting operation.

Despite earning a misdemeanor drug conviction in the ensuing trial, he returned from jail for another term as mayor. In 2008, he won the ward’s Democratic primary with 77.5 percent of the votes cast. The ward’s willingness to elect a recovering drug addict who continues to be linked to patronage scandals can seem incomprehensible to outsiders, including other Washingtonians. But many in Anacostia value Barry’s ability to stand up for the marginalized ward in local government.

“There was a lot of distrust when we opened this school,” Kern said. “It was from decades of false promises.”

As a primarily white group, the law students were out of place in Anacostia, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. But Thurgood Marshall’s founders discovered that a legacy of distrust was a bigger obstacle than racial differences.

In one awkward attempt to win neighborhood support and gain students for Thurgood Marshall, Hutton crashed a meeting of a Ward 8 activist groups.

“Walking down there in my little suit and saying ‘Hey, we’re interested in starting a charter school here and we want to talk about it,’” he said. “It was sort of a clumsy attempt to reach out to a whole bunch of people at once.”

Thurgood Marshall’s founders also had trouble convincing parents and students to take a chance on a smaller school that didn’t offer the benefits of much larger neighborhood schools, Anacostia High School and Ballou.

“You’re never going to have a football team, you’re never going to have a band,” Joe Feldman, the school’s first principal, said.

The law students managed to convince parents to trust them with their children through leaflets, community meetings, and introductions at Metro stations. By the start of the school’s first class in the fall of 2001, Thurgood Marshall had 80 students.

Kern attributes the school’s initial enrollment not to the school’s reputation, but to the failure of other Anacostia high schools.

“There was a level of dissatisfaction that existed with the current options,” Kern said.

By the end of its first year, though, the school was still not rooted in the community its founders wanted to serve. The church’s leaders refused to renew the school’s lease or give it more room to expand, and the space they did have flooded.

“Every time it rained, I would have to mop up the basement,” Feldman said. “I was the highest-paid janitor you’ve ever seen.”

School space across the Anacostia River in Ward 6 beckoned. Since leaving Anacostia would mean no longer being a college preparatory school for the neighborhood, Kern turned to D.C. Council Chair Vincent Gray (D), then the director of a charity for homeless teenagers based in Ward 8, for advice.

“So many organizations come into Ward 8 promising to do great things,” Kern said Gray told him. “Ward 8 is like a city unto itself. Things get hard, and they leave.”

Gray told him to try to stay in the community, even if problems finding space meant closing Thurgood Marshall. Eventually, the church leadership allowed the school to renew its lease.

Gray did not respond to a request for comment.

After spending $12 million on rehabilitating a disused elementary school, Thurgood Marshall moved into its new  building on Martin Luther King  in October 2005, leaving space issues behind The new building allowed the school to expand to its current enrollment of 391 students.

The school’s origins as a Law Center class are visible in its curriculum, which frequently incorporates the law in courses.  Thurgood Marshall employs a retired lawyer who works with teachers to weave legal concepts into their classes.

“We want to give them some basic legal concepts and the skills that lawyers traditionally have,” Kern said. According to Kern, the school was founded to prepare students both for college and for participation in American democracy.

This focus on the law is on display in the school’s mentoring program. One Saturday a month, students meet with mentors from the D.C. area, many of whom are lawyers.

School meetings on Saturday are just one aspect of Thurgood Marshall’s academic rigor. Even more significant is the school’s refusal to advance a student to the next grade if the school doesn’t think they’re ready.

“We have kids who were straight-A students in junior high school, at a DCPS junior high school, who come here and get an F,” Kern said. “It’s hard for kids to understand why they got an F.”

Kern thinks that by the end of ninth grade students understand that they need to work hard at school.

This rigor is reflected in the school’s test scores. In 2009, 72 percent of Thurgood Marshall’s students scored proficient or higher on the math portion of the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, the test used to evaluate Washington students. This score, along with a 67 percent proficient rating on the test’s reading portion, makes Thurgood Marshall not just the best scoring open-enrollment high school in Anacostia, but one of the best public schools in the city.

The school’s success is even more impressive considering Anacostia’s high rate of adult illiteracy, according to Barnaby Towns, the Director of Communications at FOCUS DC, an organization that promotes charter schools in the District. Towns credits Thurgood Marshall with innovative use of tracking that catches students who are falling behind.

“They’ve been among the pioneers,” Towns said.

While Hutton is impressed with the progress made at Thurgood Marshall, he hopes the school will create change throughout the DC public school system. Still, he understands the concerns from charter school opponents about law students with little teaching experience operating schools.

“That’s one of the things that people will debate,” Hutton said. “Do you want to turn over the education of children to dilettantes who don’t have the track record?”

Opponents criticize charter schools for lacking the oversight of traditional public schools, attributing comparatively higher test scores to the idea that only the most motivated students would attend a charter school.

The school’s community problems in Anacostia have eased considerably since its founding. Nothing symbolizes Thurgood Marshall’s acceptance in Ward 8 like the support it now receives from Barry, its iconic councilman.  Barry attended the openings of the new school building and the dedication of a new gym in 2009, and Kern takes a break from work to eat lunch with him.

Although most of Thurgood Marshall’s founders no longer work there, McGoldrick, the professor who advised the class, said she’s proud of the work she and her law students did.

“What I saw was the uniquely right group of people and the uniquely right moment in time,” McGoldrick said.

The Current
D.C. celebrates standouts in the city’s classrooms
By Jessica Gould
Wednesday, January 27, 2010

It was 2005 when Stephanie Day first set her sights on being D.C. Teacher of the Year.

At the time, the Oregon native was a brand-new Teach for America recruit, bracing for her first year in the classroom.

Figuring it would be a while before she found her footing, she gave herself until she was 30 to win.

As it turns out, she’s four years ahead of schedule.

Last week, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education presented Day with the 2010 Teacher of the Year award. She’s 26.

“To be Teacher of the Year means to be surrounded by great mentors and fantastic teachers and colleagues,” she said.

Day teaches pre-kindergarten through second grade at Friendship Public Charter School’s Chamberlain Elementary campus in Southeast, where she’s known for her outside-the-box lesson plans.

When she teaches probability, for example, she sings a math song to the tune of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.”

“It’s a common joke among my friends that I can take a popular song and find my own twist to make it nerdy,” she said.

When she reads books, she and her students dress like the characters.

And when she lectures about snow, she pours cereal and cotton balls on the floor so students can feel the difference between crunchy flakes and soft ones.  “I want them to feel crunchy.”

Day, who is a special education teacher, favors experiential learning.   She said her philosophy is to use students’ strengths to teach to their weaknesses.  Her motivation is simple: her kids.

“My students deserve so much, so much more than they’ve been given,” she said.  “I want my students to have the best possible education.”

It’s a sentiment she shares with her fellow D.C. Teacher of the Year finalists – Aris Pangilinan from H.D. Woodson High School, Christopher Bergfalk from John Eaton Elementary School, and Brigham Kiplinger and Nate Franz from E.L. Haynes Public Charter School.

“There’s a great sense of urgency,” said Kiplinger, a fifth-grade literacy teacher who’s known to his students as Mr. Kip.  “We want to get them ready for college and beyond. But often they’re coming to us from behind grade level.”

Kiplinger and Franz share adjacent classrooms, a sweeping view of the city, and two classes of fifth-grad students.  They both live in Petworth, and they both began teaching at Haynes in 2007.

They said they immediately recognized the similarities between their teaching styles.

“We use something called the responsive teaching model, meting kids where they’re at, and taking them places they didn’t think they could go,” Franz said.

“No excuses, for ourselves or for the kids,” Kiplinger added.

Haynes; principal for fourth through seventh grades, Eric Westendorf, said the two teacher complement each other so well, he couldn’t help but nominate both.

“They’re both relentless,” he said.  “When students see an adult who not only believes in their potential for greatness, but also works to hard on their behalf, it’s hard for them not to believe in themselves.”

The Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU 88.5 (NPR)
The business of charter schools
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

*While discussing the topic of facilities funding during the last half hour of the broadcast, Kojo presented the following comment by FOCUS:

“A point on charter facilities funding in the District:

In the last D.C. budget, D.C. public charter schools received less than half the public facilities funding that city-run schools receive on a per-student basis.”

To listen to the clip, please click the following link: http://thekojonnamdishow.org/audio-player?nid=16136

Program description: Lofty educational goals and innovative ideas help to get most charter schools off the ground. But behind the scenes of the charter system is a maze of complex business transactions -- like financing, compliance regulations and property deals. We explore the business behind charter education and the labyrinth of issues involved.

Guests:

Emily Lawson
Founder and CEO of DC Prep charter school

Kathleen deLaski
Senior Program Officer for Education, The Walton Family Foundation

Nelson Smith
President of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

WTOP.com (WTOP 103.5 FM site)
D.C. charter schools get police
By The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 5, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) - Washington is stationing police officers at more than two dozen city charter schools.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced the police postings Monday. The department recently began stationing officers at charter schools in an attempt to address violence that has dogged some of them this fall.

The plan spreads school resource officers among both charter and traditional public schools.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Monday that she believed the new approach would work. But the police union expressed concerns saying that spreading the same number of officers among more schools would mean an overall decreased police presence in schools.

WAMU 88.5 (NPR)
Police at D.C. schools to serve twice as many schools
By Kavitha Cardoza
Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Click here to listen to the clip: http://wamu.org/audio/nw/10/01/n3100105-31322.asx

Metropolitan police officers will now serve as School Resource Officers in public charter as well as traditional public schools. Chief Cathy Lanier says the approximately 100 officers will continue to work as School Resource Officers. But they'll now work with more than twice as many schools, from 39 last year to 88 schools this year.

Lanier says schools close to each other will share SROs and some schools will have "roving" SROs who will visit at least once a day. Lanier was asked whether having almost the same number of officers serving so many more schools would weaken security at traditional public schools. She says no.

"It's really important that officers are not seen as a fixed post inside the school, that's never been their job. They've always been responsible for home visits and going inside and outside the schools," says Lanier. "So I don't think anyone is losing anything here. I think this is just more of a team approach here, we're just bringing in the charter schools."

Part of an SRO's job will include mediating conflicts, and visiting chronic truants at home.

NBC Washington
Leaders promise more protection for D.C.’s charter schools
Monday, January 4, 2010

Click here to view clip: http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local-beat/Leaders_in_DC_Promise_More_Police_Protection_for_the_City_s_Growing_List_of_Charter_Schools__Washington_DC.html

The Washington Examiner
Newsmakers: Stephanie Day, D.C. Teacher of the Year
Friday, January 22, 2010

Day, a special education teacher at Southeast D.C.’s Friendship Public Charter School, was named the city’s 2010 Teacher of the Year.  Day will receive a $3,000 check and will represent the District in the National Teacher of the Year competition.  The application process included essays, an interview and a classroom observation.  Day was selected by a panel of D.C. education leaders from charter and traditional public schools.

WAMU 88.5 (NPR)
Special education teacher named D.C. Teacher of the Year
By Kavitha Cardoza
Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Click the following link to listen to this clip: http://wamu.org/audio/nw/10/01/n12100120-31699.asx

Stephanie Day has been named the "D.C. Teacher of the Year." She uses innovative methods to motivate her special education students.

At Friendship Chamberlain Elementary Public Charter School, Day's 7-year-old students all have different reasons for why their teacher deserves the award.

"My teacher's so special because she's nice and she gives us treats. She lets us play with her toys. She loves all the students," says one student.

What they might not realize is how much time Day puts into her non-traditional lesson plans. She takes the lyrics to Beyonce's 'All The Single Ladies' and rewrites them to help children learn about math concepts. And she uses basketball scores to help children learn all about probability theory.

And before the big standardized tests, Day dresses up as a superhero. "I was D.C. CAS girl, which is the big test in D.C., the cape and everything, flying around the school," she says. "Everything I try to turn into games and fun because I know that when kids are having a good time, that's when they're going to be learning the best."

Day says she sees herself as the gatekeeper.

"So despite the backgrounds my kids [are] from, or the disabilities they're faced with, we see it as an opportunity to change their life."

There are more than 5,000 teachers in the district and two dozen were nominated for this award.