Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs
April 19, 2024
Council of the District of Columbia
Committee on Facilities and Family Services
1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20004
Re: Committee on Facilities and Family Services: DGS Budget Hearing – School Facilities
Dear Chairwoman Lewis-George:
As the Council reviews and decides on the FY 2025 budget, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs urges the Council to prioritize investing in DC’s young people. Although there have been many improvements to DC public school buildings over the years, the inequities in physical school conditions experienced by students of color and lower-income students have persisted. These poor school conditions disproportionately affect students of color and students living in poverty. Students in Wards 4, 5, 7, and 8 are more likely to experience crumbling school infrastructure and lengthy delays in any repairs. As schools are experiencing challenges with re-engaging students in school since the pandemic, and the community is experiencing an uptick in crime, the District must prioritize investment in students’ education and send a message to young people in DC that they are valued and worthy of our investment. The Council must commit to guaranteeing all DC students can attend school buildings throughout the city that are physically safe and welcoming environments for all students, school staff and the school communities that use these buildings.
The safety of DCPS school buildings depends on the Department of General Services’ (DGS) ability to make timely and effective repairs and ensure school buildings at least meet a minimum health and safety standard. The Office of the DC Auditor’s 2022 report revealed several systemic problems with DGS’s system, including a lack of a quality control system, incomplete documentation of work order costs, inconsistent photo documentation of supposed completed repairs, lack of a preventative maintenance system, and failure to complete work orders within the mandatory timeframe.[1] In January 2024, the DC State Board of Education (SBOE) released a report to assess the current school facility quality, efficiency, and equity across DC’s public schools.[2] The report emphasizes that “[t]here are no location, condition, design, utilization, operational or maintenance standards for public education buildings and grounds that apply to all the District of Columbia’s nearly 250 publicly-funded schools and 70 LEAs serving pre-k through adult education.”[3] This report identifies several systemic problems with DC’s current school facility landscape: 1) inconsistencies in facility information, 2) inequities in design, condition, utilization, and maintenance, and 3) limited district-wide standards.[4] The recently published 2023 Master Facilities Plan highlights several recommendations for improving the quality of school buildings like continuing to invest in modernizations, preventative maintenance, investing in capital funds for security systems, reducing work orders, evaluating and establishing performance criteria for contractors, and expanding facility condition assessments for public charter schools.[5] We refer you to our testimony at the Department of General Services Performance Oversight Hearing on February 26, 2024, for our full comments.
We urge the Council to take immediate steps to ensure the safety of our school buildings and allocate funds to implement the recommendations from the DC Auditor’s report, the SBOE report, and the 2023 Master Facilities Plan. DGS must work in partnership with DCPS and the other education agencies to create healthy and safe environments for students and staff.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
Sincerely,
Marja K. Plater
Senior Counsel
John E. Nolan Youth Justice Counsel
[1] D.C. Auditor’s Report, “Multiple Failures in DGS Management of Work Orders,” (November 28, 2022) available at https://dcauditor.org/report/dgs-management-work-orders/.
[2] DC State Board of Education, DC Healthy Schools Facilities Recommendations: Survey of Policies, Regulations and Standards, Related to School Facilities, (January 2024) available at https://sboe.dc.gov/publication/dc-healthy-school-facilities-recommendations.
[3] Id. at 4.
[4] Id. at 12-15.
[5] Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education, DC Public Education Master Facilities Plan 2023 (2023) at 6, available at https://dme.dc.gov/mfp2023.
UPDATED TESTIMONY - 2/28/24 - 11:31AM Elizabeth Corinth - DC LSAT COLLLECTIVE C4DC Member
DC Council Education Oversight Hearing 2-28-2024
Hello, my name is Elizabeth Corinth. Thank you for the chance to testify. I am a Ward 6 resident, the parent of three DCPS students, an LSAT member, and a co-facilitator of the DC LSAT Collective. I have also served as a substitute teacher at several DCPS and public charter schools.
First I’d like to speak to the importance of Local School Advisory Teams, and the need to do more to ensure that every school has an active LSAT with productive connections to their school community and their principal. Currently this is not the case at every school, despite it being a requirement of the WTU's collective bargaining agreement. In conversations with LSAT members from all 8 wards, a few key barriers to this goal have become apparent:
(1) Need for more direct principal training to foster buy-in and build skills for positive LSAT engagement, in addition to more opportunities for and responsiveness to LSAT feedback on principal engagement
(2) Need for LSAT access to communication tools including dedicated email and virtual meeting accounts
(3) Need for LSAT access to key data and tools relevant to their mandate to help develop, monitor, and refine their Comprehensive School Plan
(4) Need for additional resources to support schools where a functioning LSAT has not been established
(5) The tight and unpredictable timeframe of budget allocation release and submission deadlines
Second, I’d like to speak on the recently released school budget allocations. I want to highlight the fact that DCPS has declined to comply with the Schools First in Budgeting Act’s requirement to, after adjusting for any enrollment changes, ensure that all school budgets increase by at least the 12.4% that the UPSFF went up by this year. Approximately half of all schools seem to have missed this minimum. Even for those schools whose allocations met or exceeded this minimum, most are still experiencing decreases in buying power as a result of the 22% increase in the cost of a teacher from last year to this (in addition to percentage increases in other position costs ranging from 6% to 25%). It is unclear why the cost of a teacher has gone up significantly more than the negotiated salary increase -- perhaps DCPS can shed light on the driving factors here -- but this circumstance has left many schools in the agonizing position of needing to cut a number of staff members for the coming school year.
The DC LSAT Collective has begun to compile a list of the positions that schools have been forced to cut. Among the 10 schools we’ve heard from so far, whose collective enrollment increased by 3%, 57.5 positions have been cut, including 21 teachers, 12 coaches, and 8 climate and culture specialists. At my own school, we navigated the impossible decision by identifying pairs of positions to combine into one
-- effectively telling teachers, "Yes, you've received your negotiated pay increase, but now some of you will be cut, and others will need to do twice the work.” At our school, these cuts hit in the areas of specials classes, academic coaches and interventionists, special education, and early elementary aides. The failure to fund schools in a manner commensurate with the collective bargaining agreements' increased salaries constitutes a bad-faith circumvention of those agreements. It is essentially a declaration that, while we have promised our educators this level of compensation, we are unwilling to fund that compensation, forcing schools to cut back on staff and pile more work onto those who remain. Amidst an educator shortage, this will only result in further burnout and departure from the workforce. Most importantly, it is not the way to adequately support and educate our students. Furthermore, I am very concerned by the rhetoric of "rightsizing" that the Mayor and Chancellor have been using to discuss the cuts that schools have been forced to make as a result of DCPS' failure to follow the Schools First in Budgeting Act (much less to ensure that school budgets keep up with this year's drastic rises in costs). The Mayor's UPSFF press release noted that over the past five years, the number of full-time employees has grown by 18% compared to a 2% increase in enrollment.
The implication is that these added positions have been excessive and need to be reeled in. My personal experience and what I am hearing from other schools indicates otherwise. Our principal has said that the current school year has felt like the first year when he is able to truly meet the needs of all of our students with the staff in the building. This is as a result of the addition, in recent years, of positions such as a behavior tech, academic coaches and interventionists, and instructional aides. As a teacher, I can affirm that these types of academic and behavioral support positions are critical to ensure that high-need and struggling students are able to thrive, which in turn improves the educational climate for all students. I haven't done the analysis across all other DCPS schools, but I hear anecdotally and suspect more generally that these are the same types of positions that other schools have taken the opportunity to add with any expansion in buying power they have seen in recent years. And while these are indeed the types of positions best equipped to help address Covid-related learning loss, an issue which has of course *not* yet been fully addressed, they are also positions that most schools were already in sore need of before Covid even hit. And I'll note that our school has a relatively low-need population and highly-resourced parent body. So I’m sure there are many schools across the city who, even after recent staffing expansions, still need more resources in order to feel that they are doing their students justice.
Thus, the loss of these positions in the coming school year is not "right-sizing," but rather a return to a system that was already failing many of our students, and will continue to do so. What we have right now is an opportunity to test out the effectiveness of the staffing decisions that our school principals have made to better support the students at their individual schools. Rather than clawing back the much-needed and targeted expansion, if we can maintain it for a couple of years, and analyze the student outcome data we will collect, we can assess which of these decisions were most effective, learn valuable lessons, and then incorporate those lessons into our school budgeting and staffing moving forward.
If the Mayor and Chancellor don’t believe that maintaining the positions schools have added is the best way to serve our students, then they need to present an alternative plan that works within the budget model they have developed, because simply saying we can’t afford to effectively educate our students isn’t acceptable. I appreciate that these budgets have been developed under a challenging fiscal reality for the District as a whole. I know that finding ways to more adequately fund our schools will not be a trivial task, that it will necessitate hard decisions, and that we likely will not be able to reach the ideal level of funding that our schools truly need to do their work effectively. Nevertheless, I come to you to insist that we must do better than the budgets that are currently on the table. The consequences of these funding decisions will ripple through the affected students' entire lifetimes.
With hope that the Council will find some ways to rectify this dire situation, I also must note that this pattern of DCPS underfunding schools and forcing the Council to subsequently swoop in and improve the outcome is not a sustainable one. The several-month gap between required budget submissions based on the lower allocations and any subsequent budget increases means that valuable educators who hold the critical institutional knowledge and experience that makes them the best fit for a cut-andthen- regained position will often be forced to find a placement elsewhere to ensure their own job security -- a shuffling that hurts our schools and students unnecessarily. We need to do our budgets right the first time around.
Thank you for your time, your attention, and anything you can do to ensure that our schools receive the funding they need to in turn ensure that students are succeeding academically, connected to school, and prepared for what's next.
Resources:
Budget, Enrollment, Cost, and Staffing Analysis Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/
1OqExSSKJ8Z4VimzF1eTldJIPEW82-GNz7oaG8Ejg8i8