EDUCATION
D.C. spending plan cuts programs and staff at dozens of schools
When D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced in January that she wanted to close 15 city schools, she said the downsizing would help create a stronger school system with rich academic offerings that could compete with the city's fast-growing charter schools.
But Henderson's proposed 2014 budget has raised concerns about her ability to fulfill that promise. The $818 million spending plan, an increase of less than 1 percent over this year's budget, calls for some new investments but requires cuts to staff and programs at dozens of schools, including some where enrollment is rising or holding steady.
Parents and politicians say the reductions threaten families' faith in the school system, particularly in nonselective high schools and middle schools, many of which are facing deep cuts. At Stuart-Hobson Middle School on Capitol Hill, where enrollment is projected to rise but the budget is slated to be sliced by 12 percent, students will be able to take a foreign language only if parents raise enough money to hire an after-school Spanish teacher.
"The message that DCPS sends to families looking for anything other than the bare minimum is, 'Go to charters,' " said Laura Marks, a PTA member at Watkins Elementary, which feeds into Stuart-Hobson. "It's like DCPS has given up the game at middle school. They're just walking away from it."
Henderson is likely to face that skepticism Thursday morning, when she is scheduled to testify before the City Council's new education committee, which is bringing fresh scrutiny to the school system's spending decisions.
Henderson and Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) have said that school-level cuts are necessary because of the system's failure to meet enrollment projections. The system received per-pupil funding this year for a projected enrollment of about 47,000 students, but only 45,500 showed up for class.
Gray said he was obligated to project a more realistic number for next year: 46,060. But parents say individual schools' enrollment estimates seem arbitrary and unfairly low, and that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Low projections lead to program cuts, which drive families away.
"Not investing in neighborhood schools where enrollment is low is a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Logan Circle resident Jim Sullivan, one of dozens of parents and activists who aired their concerns about the school budget during a five-hour council hearing last month.
Council members have appeared sympathetic to that argument and have signalled an interest in restoring some of the cuts, although it's unclear where they would get the money to do so.
David Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the education committee, has said he is interested in identifying unnecessary spending that can be redirected into a fund that would be used to stabilize budgets at schools with falling enrollment.
Absent such a fund, Catania says, families can't trust that schools will offer the same programs from one year to the next, and schools can't serve the students left behind.
Ballou Senior High School in Southeast, for example, is slated to lose more than 10 percent of its budget next year. But more than 700 students at the school will continue to face profound struggles: Truancy is rampant, 99 percent of students are poor, more than a third have disabilities and fewer than a quarter are proficient in reading and math.
"We do want money to some extent to follow the children," Catania said in a hearing last month. "But we also need stable schools, and the two are not mutually exclusive."
Henderson has argued, in a recent Washington Post op-ed and in budget documents released this week, that the school system is investing in little-seen but important improvements, such as improving literacy instruction, training staff and ensuring equitable access to arts, music, foreign language and physical education.
The system is hiring more than 200 teachers to eliminate mixed-grade classes and is investing $12 million in efforts to boost literacy. The money will be used to bolster curriculum and assessments citywide, extend the school day at nine low-performing schools and hire reading specialists and literacy-focused assistant principals at 11 schools.
For the first time, all elementary schools will be required to offer 45 minutes a week of art, music, physical education and world language, an approach that aims to ensure equitable opportunities for students across the city.
But it also means schools have much less power to tailor spending for their community's particular needs, a change that has been unpopular with some principals and parents.
"My kids don't need to learn French. They need to learn to read and write on grade level in English," said the principal of a school with a high proportion of struggling students, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Some council members have expressed concern about curtailing principals' flexibility. Schools spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said that D.C. principals still have great latitude to choose their staff, but the new scheduling requirements were necessary "to ensure some consistency across the district."
The requirement to offer all four special subjects comes with a catch: Dozens of schools won't receive extra resources to meet the mandate. Some schools that currently have a full-time art teacher, for example, will have to downgrade that position to a part-time role to be able to hire a foreign-language teacher.
Overall spending on art and music is falling from $20 million to $18.3 million, according to budget documents. Meanwhile, the school system is more than doubling its investment in foreign language, from $5.4 million this year to $11.4 million next year.
The school system also plans to spend more on librarians, addressing long-standing complaints about the more than 50 schools that have no librarian.
Nearly every school will have at least part-time librarian coverage next year. But to help pay for that increase, more than two dozen schools that currently have a full-time librarian will see that position reduced to half-time.
Activist Peter MacPherson, who is among the most vocal critics of school policies under Gray and Henderson, has called on the mayor to dip into the $1.6 billion in combined surplus funding to make sure that every school has a full-time librarian and books on the shelves.
"For those of us who have been advocating on this issue for more than year, what the chancellor has put forward thus on this issue is nothing but an affront," MacPherson wrote in an e-mail to Gray. "I'm telling you that a wide swath of the school stakeholder community is deeply unhappy."
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