Valerie Jablow DGS testimony on 2-26-2024 on DGS to DC Council
/I am Valerie Jablow, a DC education analyst who discovered via FOIA that neither the CFO nor DGS has records of rent payments for a 5-year period by the Mary McLeod Bethune charter school for the former DCPS school Slowe, which the charter leases from DC.[1]
I received no response from the mayor’s office about this; the charter board apparently believes it has no purview here; and the school did not provide me the missing records.[2]
All of that--as well as DGS responses to council oversight questions--raise a number of serious issues around DC-owned school buildings that I hope you get answers for:
1. IFF Bethune never paid rent for that half decade, what was that money spent on and why wasn’t this flagged at DGS?
2. IFF the city had Bethune’s rent money, where did it go and why do no records exist?
3. Is this lack of accounting happening with other charters renting former DCPS schools still owned by DC, whose payments are supposed to be handled by DGS?
Of the 30 former DCPS schools owned by DC and leased to charters, the majority--19--are being provided by DC to those leaseholders for $0 rent in exchange for credits for renovations.[3]
Slowe is not one of these, so DGS should have fulsome accounting of all rent payments for it—or an explanation for why it doesn’t.[4]
In addition, given that there are only 11 former DCPS schools for which rent payment is supposedly due (and that DGS has no records of payments for one of those for half a decade), I hope you determine whether DGS is collecting rent for ALL of these other schools.[5]
I hope you also ask DGS why there is apparently no accounting of
--money spent by the leasing charters on those facilities toward rent credit;
--what work was done for that credit (and for whom—i.e., the charter leaseholder or an entity subletting the space from the charter leaseholder);
--whether the credits exceed the money spent on renovations; and
--proceeds of sublets by those charter leaseholders that DC is supposed to receive a percentage of.[6]
I also hope you follow up on what appears to be cavalier data on schools from DGS’s responses. For instance, in response to oversight question 54, instead of listing the square footages of buildings DGS lists the square footages of the land the buildings stand on. In addition, Watkins elementary is listed under “recreation,” while some former DCPS schools are not identified as being leased at all (though they are) and Birney is identified as being under DGS control. (Other problems are outlined in my written testimony.[7])
Finally, I must underscore that my testimony here is not about mere recordkeeping, but about securing public assets for the public. Many of those $0 rent former DCPS buildings are being subsidized twice by DC taxpayers: first, in per pupil facilities funds to the charter leaseholders and second, by DC not accounting for millions in renovation credits. As it is, DCPS doesn’t have use of its former buildings—despite a deep need for swing space for renovations, even as those leased buildings contain hundreds of thousands of square feet of unused space.[8]
Put another way, DGS is ensuring that DC is likely getting a negative ROI on its leasing of former DCPS buildings—and that is in the best light, presuming there is no fraud with unaccounted-for rent payments.
Please let all of us know what you will do to hold DGS accountable in its stewardship of DC-owned school buildings. Thank you.
1] While researching square footage occupied by Bethune at Slowe over time, I requested by FOIA from DGS the leases of Slowe. I received three:
—One for the 2007-08 school year (from 9/1/07 to 8/30/08) for 8000 square feet of the Slowe building, leased to Bethune by DCPS (which at that time still occupied the rest of the building);
—One for the 2008-09 school year (from 9/1/08 to 8/30/09) for 16,000 square feet of the Slowe building, leased to Bethune by DC (DCPS had vacated the building by then in the wake of Slowe’s closure as a DCPS school); and
—One from 9/1/14 to the present, for 25 years, for the entirety of Slowe (about 54K square feet), leased to Bethune by DC.
After I inquired about no lease for Slowe for the 5-year period from September 2009 to September 2014, the DGS FOIA officer, Victoria Bartee, wrote to me via email that there is no other lease but noted that the pre-2009 tenant “occupied the property as a holdover tenant, therefore there would be no 2009 – 2014 lease.”
To figure out the space Bethune actually occupied in that period, I then asked via FOIA both DGS and the CFO for all receipts for rent payments during that 2009-2014 period for any and all rented space at Slowe. Neither DGS nor the CFO had any documents that were responsive to that request. FOIA requests to the mayor’s office, DCPS, and DMPED for the same information got the same response: no responsive records.
[2] I emailed both the mayor’s office as well as charter board staff and members several times about the missing rent receipts, with no bounces and no responses. When I emailed staff at the Bethune charter school about this lack of payment records, the school’s executive director, Linda McKay, assured me via email in late January that they have paid rent each year since 2007 and would send me evidence of payment to DC for Slowe for that 5-year period from 9/1/09 through 8/31/14. I never received anything more from the school, which as a private entity is not obliged to send me anything.
After I lodged a community complaint about this with the charter board, the staff member handling those complaints, Theresa Kemp, said to me on 2/23/24 that she spoke with the agency’s general counsel, Sarah Cheatham, who advised her that this situation is “complicated” and that as an agency the charter board has “no purview over” this. I have yet to receive a response from my VM and email to Ms. Cheatham about that.
[3] I was able to determine from DGS’s answer to oversight question 58 and other data sources that 19 former DCPS schools owned by DC and leased to charters are being provided for $0 rent.
The facilities being leased for $0 are the following:
Draper
Mamie D. Lee
Rabaut
Terrell
Keene
Benning
Shadd
Clark
McGogney
Shaed
Hamilton
Webb
Harrison
Gibbs
Cook
Taft
Young
Rudolph
Ferebee-Hope
The rest of former DCPS facilities owned and leased by DC to charters (11) are the following:
Bruce
Evans
Woodson
Brightwood
Harris
Douglass
Montgomery
Slowe
Paul
Weatherless
Wilkinson
(This is not counting St. Coletta’s free rent for its DC-owned land or KIPP DC’s free rent of Bundy Field.)
Using a variety of sources--the latest version (from 2021) of the DME's citywide landscape of closed DCPS facilities (https://dme.dc.gov/node/1558751); the 2019 list of charters in former DCPS spaces from FY18 responses to council (https://educationdc.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/buildings.pdf), and the Q58 chart in the current DGS responses to council oversight: https://lims.dccouncil.gov/Hearings/hearings/255)--I was able to determine all of the above.
Because this data was otherwise not provided in one place, I created the table here, which incorporates all of it:
[4] When the Slowe lease for that period of missing rent payments (9/1/09-8/31/14) was executed in 2008, it explicitly said checks were to be made out to the DC Treasurer and sent to the realty office of DCPS. That DCPS realty office was subsumed in 2010 by OPEFM (the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization). OPEFM itself was subsumed by DGS in 2011. Thus, DGS should have any and all records for lease payments for Slowe from its first leasing to the present.
[5] Again, the only place where all this data exists in one place for public consumption is here:
[6] Right now, there is no accounting for whom renovations at DC-owned former DCPS facilities are done: the charter leaseholder or an entity subletting the space from the charter leaseholder. This means that renovation credits may be given not for ensuring the charter school is in a better space (which would be a public-facing and public-focused use), but for a potentially private use.
This in turn suggests that charter leaseholders may be able to profit from their rent credits and subletting. We know right now, for instance, that Perry Street Prep, which leases the former Taft school, is likely profiting from its extensive subleases and $0 rent at Taft.
Yet we do not know whether this or any leaseholder is giving to DC the proceeds DC is due for those sublets of DC-owned school buildings. Of the few charter leases I have seen for former DCPS facilities, most have a clause that specifies the leaseholder gives to DC a certain percentage of sublet proceeds.
Bottom line: DGS needs to be collecting sublet proceeds and ensuring credits are going toward public uses, while the charter board’s fiscal accounting needs to be explicit and specific about that, rent credits, and what those credits were for.
[7] There are many issues I found just WRT DGS reporting of its school oversight:
A. It is unclear if the chart for 16b is at all aligned with the chart in 16a, which shows income and permitting for DCPS facilities. The loss of income from universities using the Duke Ellington field is curious and notable—and unexplained.
B. In addition to what I noted in my spoken testimony, the chart provided as an attachment to Q54 (DC owned facilities) gives multiple entries for Shaw MS alongside Banneker HS and THREE (different) entries for Jefferson MS. The old Banneker is listed as “Benjamin HS.” There is a Randall school here listed belonging to DCPS—but this appears wrong as it was closed a long time ago and AFAIK is not owned by DC.
Former DCPS schools not identified by their names but by their leaseholders on this chart include Cook, Rudolph, Weatherless, and Taft. The former DCPS Shaed school is not identified as being leased at all—though it is. Ditto for Shadd, which is listed here as belonging to DCPS. Ditto for Wilkinson, which is under long-term lease to DC Prep. Malcolm X ES is listed under DPR control.
This is needlessly inaccurate recordkeeping.
C. The chart in response to Q58 is also somewhat nonsensical. For one, the column “building codes” tells you nothing about what the building is/was—so former DCPS schools are difficult to identify. For another, it is not paired with the $0 rent tab, so figuring out a total list of charters leasing DCPS spaces is essentially impossible.
And that doesn’t get into the contradictions within this chart as well as across charts.
For instance, on the second tab it shows that Bethune paid $390K for some time period (not clear what), but on the first tab it says they have $62K/month in “current” rent for Slowe—which works out to a LOT more in one year than $390K. So which is it?
You would be hard pressed from this Q58 chart to figure out 1. which former DCPS schools are being leased to charters and 2. what each school is paying 3. for how much square footage 4. for what time period.
D. On the file with the questions from the council and the responses, the response to #90 should have something about sewage. It is one thing to have WATER leaking and quite another to have sewage. DGS differentiated between water amounts for emergencies but nothing for sewage.
E. DGS is squirming out of responsibility when they say in response to #117 that they take responsibility except when the other agency “has resources to do it on their own.” And then doesn’t specify what that looks like OR how that is determined. This is a BFD for all DCPS buildings.
F. In answer to #121, DGS says the info around who has access to salesforce is “proprietary”—which is incredible! WHO is the “proprietary” owner if not DC??
G. The answer to #126 is insufficient: more than a dozen years ago staff at Watkins elementary “secured” outside doors that didn’t lock by chaining them shut during aftercare. They were fire doors. There was no way to get the doors repaired, there was no way to lock them, and there was no one to guard them. So staff “secured” them—which for DGS in response to this question is sufficient to have chained fire doors at an occupied school building not warranted as an emergency!
H. The answer for #138 is not illuminating because the answer is not broken out by type of building (i.e. school or rec center). That said, it is obvious that most of the problems occur east of rock creek park. This is a huge red flag for equity.
[8] The utilization of former DCPS schools owned by DC and leased to charters is not being accurately reported, with hundreds of thousands of square feet unused. To examine this, I looked at capacities of four such facilities: Paul, Taft, Slowe, and Rabaut.
I discovered that between just these four former DCPS school buildings occupied by charters, they could hold at least an additional 1500 students—or what would be 5 small elementaries or 3 middle schools.
The fact that there is no clear accounting of the sheer amount of extra space in just these 4 publicly owned facilities means that DC is being cheated of its own real estate assets. How many others there are remains unspoken publicly.
The DME’s boundary tool for this purpose is misleading because it does NOT account for different charter facilities—only for each “campus,” even when the campuses are MILES apart, so while functionally they are in different facilities, the tool doesn’t recognize it. (Bethune is a good example.) And the boundary tool only accounts for the space at each charter facility that the charter itself has designated for its use—which in at least the case of Perry St. Prep and Sojourner Truth is NOT the entirety of the facility they occupy.
Paul: Paul charter school occupies a DC-owned bldg at 5800 8th NW, which when it was closed as a DCPS school comprised about 128K square feet. The DME's boundary tool says that Paul HS is 52% utilized, with a capacity of 800 and an enrollment of 419. This is misleading, as both Paul's MS and HS are in the same bldg and the SY22-23 enrollment audit says that Paul had 705 students, with 419 in the HS and 275 in the MS.
Paul added on to the bldg before 2015, and an article said that the size of the original bldg was 135K square feet and the addition 30K, bringing the total square footage to 165K. Using the conservative metric of 70K square foot space for 500 students (or about 140 square feet per student), the total that could be in Paul now (assuming 165K square feet is accurate) would be close to 1200 students.
So theoretically one could arrive at 52% utilization with a capacity of 1200--but NOT with a capacity of 800, unless the space devoted to the HS is in fact for only 800 (i.e. 419 HS students/800 HS capacity). But that is not accounting for the middle school, of course.
No one is reporting that Paul could hold an additional 500 students—or another entire school.
Taft: The former DCPS school Taft in Brookland has 201,000 square feet. Its charter leaseholder, Perry St. Prep, has sublet a lot of space, including about 21,000-31,000 square feet to LAMB, which has now moved out entirely. There is yet another charter school contained in Taft, Sojourner Truth, which has both a middle and high school.
Per the DME’s boundary tool, here are the numbers for these schools at Taft:
Perry Street Prep elem.: 69% utilized, 650 capacity, 321 enrollment
Perry Street Prep MS: 69% utilized, 650 capacity, 129 enrollment
Sojourner Truth MS: 70% utilized, 300 programmatic capacity, 166 enrolled
Sojourner Truth HS: 70% utilized, 300 programmatic capacity, 44 enrolled
The total programmatic capacity of these two charters (i.e. the space inside Taft that they have assigned to themselves—NOT the total unused) is much less than what Taft could hold (300 + 650, or 950 students reported capacity versus about 1500 estimated total capacity, using the 70K square feet/500 students rule of thumb). The enrollment of these two charters is 660 (321 + 129 + 166 + 44), which gets to the utilization rates on the boundary tool. A small portion of Taft is also leased to a private school that has less than 100 students.
No one is reporting that Taft is actually 50% empty and could hold another 600-700 students, amounting to 1-2 schools.
Slowe: This is a former DCPS school in Brookland leased to the Mary McLeod Bethune charter school. The most recent fiscal audit for Bethune shows the square footage of both its facilities: 56,028 square feet for Slowe and 7,819 for its (private) facility in Ward 4 on 16th St. The January 29, 2024 charter board staff report (for Bethune’s impending move of its Ward 4 facility) says that Bethune’s SY23-24 enrollment is 361, with 93 students at 16th street.
That means there are about 268 students at Slowe this year. Using the 70K square feet/500 students metric, Slowe could hold at least 400 students—more than the entire LEA has enrolled in the last 7 school years at both facilities combined.
No one is reporting that Slowe has been half full for years running and could hold 150-200 more students.
Rabaut: This holds the entirety of the Capital City charter school at 100 Peabody NW. At its closure as a DCPS school, Rabaut had about 176K square feet. Capital City has its entire operation from elementary through HS in it. Audited enrollment for SY22-23 shows the following for Cap City: 342 HS; 332 MS; 380 elementary, for a total of about 1054 students. As noted above, using a metric of 70K square feet for 500 students, about 1300 students could fit into Capital City’s facility (using the size at its DCPS closure).
No one is reporting that Rabaut could hold at least 300 more students than are currently there—or what amounts to another entire school.
While researching square footage occupied by Bethune at Slowe over time, I requested by FOIA from DGS the leases of Slowe. I received three:
—One for the 2007-08 school year (from 9/1/07 to 8/30/08) for 8000 square feet of the Slowe building, leased to Bethune by DCPS (which at that time still occupied the rest of the building);
—One for the 2008-09 school year (from 9/1/08 to 8/30/09) for 16,000 square feet of the Slowe building, leased to Bethune by DC (DCPS had vacated the building by then in the wake of Slowe’s closure as a DCPS school); and
—One from 9/1/14 to the present, for 25 years, for the entirety of Slowe (about 54K square feet), leased to Bethune by DC.
After I inquired about no lease for Slowe for the 5-year period from September 2009 to September 2014, the DGS FOIA officer, Victoria Bartee, wrote to me via email that there is no other lease but noted that the pre-2009 tenant “occupied the property as a holdover tenant, therefore there would be no 2009 – 2014 lease.”
To figure out the space Bethune actually occupied in that period, I then asked via FOIA both DGS and the CFO for all receipts for rent payments during that 2009-2014 period for any and all rented space at Slowe. Neither DGS nor the CFO had any documents that were responsive to that request. FOIA requests to the mayor’s office, DCPS, and DMPED for the same information got the same response: no responsive records.
[1] I emailed both the mayor’s office as well as charter board staff and members several times about the missing rent receipts, with no bounces and no responses. When I emailed staff at the Bethune charter school about this lack of payment records, the school’s executive director, Linda McKay, assured me via email in late January that they have paid rent each year since 2007 and would send me evidence of payment to DC for Slowe for that 5-year period from 9/1/09 through 8/31/14. I never received anything more from the school, which as a private entity is not obliged to send me anything.
After I lodged a community complaint about this with the charter board, the staff member handling those complaints, Theresa Kemp, said to me on 2/23/24 that she spoke with the agency’s general counsel, Sarah Cheatham, who advised her that this situation is “complicated” and that as an agency the charter board has “no purview over” this. I have yet to receive a response from my VM and email to Ms. Cheatham about that.