Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee revised their list of D.C. public schools that will close by the end of this year last Friday. Six of the 23 schools originally slated for closure were removed from the list, and four new ones were added. Rhee revised the list after numerous protests and boycotts from activists, parents and students.
“[The administration] did concede and take off some schools from the closure list, but they in turn added four more,” Crystal Sylvia, a social worker at Park View Elementary School, said. “For the schools that got taken off the list, it’s great for them. But as a whole, the system is going to suffer as a result.”
Others took a more cynical view, claiming that certain schools were taken off the list to help the administration gain support from council members who had previously opposed the school closings.
According to activist Marc Borbley, four council members supported the closings prior to the revision, and Councilmembers Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) and Vincent Gray (D-Council Chair) had each spoken up very publicly for an individual school.
“At least for those two schools, it was very important that they come off the list so that the administration could claim it had six supporting council members instead of four,” Borbley said.
The administration cited $23.7 million in savings as the primary reason for the closings, money that could be used to improve the rest of the District’s schools.
According to an e-mail that Rebecca Katz, Policy Analyst for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education, sent to Borbely, Fenty and Rhee’s estimate of $23.7 million is inaccurate, because it is based on the amount that would have been saved when the administration planned to close 30 schools in October 2007.
Mary Levy, the Director of the Public Education Reform Project for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, estimated that the savings will only amount to $15 million.
“This is not enough to significantly improve the state of the remaining schools,” Levy said.
Since Rhee’s revisions, activists have been working with Council member Harry Thomas on new legislation to alleviate concerns that the administration would privatize and capitalize on the to-be-closed school buildings.
According to Thomas, the new legislation will ensure a proposed a public hearing process held before there is any disposition of the school buildings.
According to Rhee’s spokesperson Mafara Hobson, Rhee considered public input from community meetings and hearings throughout January and the Save Our Schools Coalition’s march last week in revising the original list.
“The original proposal was never a set plan,” Hobson said. “It was announced … as a way of letting everyone know that we have under-enrolled schools and we need to close them. The final list is basically just a fine-tuning of the list we submitted in November.”
