Public School Patrons Mobilize Against “Meddling Mary”
By Taaq Kirksey
WI Contributing Writer
Thursday, April 6, 2006

Waving signs that read “DC is not your plantation,” a group of protestors from the Save Our Schools Coalition took to the walkways outside of Senator Mary Landrieu’s East Capitol Street home recently over her endorsement of charter schools. The assembly took the Louisiana Democrat and Mayor Anthony Williams to task for what they saw as a collaboration that undermined the District’s public school system.

“It’s an affront to home rule,” said Ward 7 resident Emily Washington, a veteran educator in the District of Columbia Public School System. Washington was referring to the 2004 congressional legislation that Landrieu, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, helped to pass in which charter schools would have the first right of refusal for unused school property. The charter schools would also pay 25 percent less than their competitors.

Cardozo Senior High School teacher Kerry Sylvia attacked the lack of public oversight of charter schools, which – while receiving public funding – are able to operate outside of the requirements applied to the traditional system. “They don’t have to follow the same rules … it’s a double standard,” said Sylvia. Washington took the grievance a step further. “They literally pull people in off the streets to teach,” she said.

According to the Coalition, charter schools often attract a school district’s brightest or most amiable students, leaving public schools to deal with troubled kids and less money. “They cannibalize the public schools,” said labor organizer and guest speaker Roger Newell. “You deny [public schools] the funding to have anything and then you create a funding stream for [charter schools] to get whatever they want.”

According to Lee Glazer, chairman of the Coalition, the SEED Public Charter School is currently negotiating the opening of a residential campus in Kingman Park, not far from an already under-funded Eastern High School. SEED and other charter boarding schools cast a disturbing shadow for Sylvia. “There’s a lot of racist undertones in all these boarding schools … for all these poor Black children.”

The concerns of the Coalition have been aggravated with the recent announcement of some 30 public schools being closed by the District School Board over the next two years for budgetary reasons. For Washington, such developments fit into the larger economic tension among residents, the wealthier – and more pro-charter – among them being oblivious to the plight of the poor. “Not all public traditional schools are dysfunctional … the city is so polarized based on class.”