NOTE: This article was updated at 11:50 a.m. on Nov. 1, 2024 to correctly reflect State Board Representative Ben Williams’ designation as the first District public school employee to sit on the board.
Six years later, Ward 4 State Board Representative Frazier O’Leary is still advocating for teacher mentorship programs in District schools.
In the midst of his reelection bid, O’Leary has been preparing for a D.C. Council hearing about teacher retention while laying the foundation for a process that he said will result in a state board resolution about teacher retention and mentorship.
Such a resolution, he said, stands to benefit Ward 4 community members, and the District at large.
“The attrition rate isn’t as high in Ward 4, but it’s over 20%,” said O’Leary, a former Cardozo High School teacher who retired in 2017. “A lot of teachers leave because they are young and they find something else to do. They are not taught how to be a teacher.”
O’Leary said he had support in the beginning of his teaching career, recalling his on-the-ground experiences.
“I was lucky as a brand-new teacher in 1971 to have vets help me through the first couple of years,” he told The Informer.
In 2018, Frazier bested Rhonda Henderson, Ryan Tauriainen, and Elani Lawrence in a special election to serve out the rest of then-Ward 4 State Board Representative Lannette Woodruff’s term. Two years later, in 2020, he ran again for a full term, but without opposition.
This go-round, O’Leary has endorsements from D.C. Councilmembers Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) and Robert White (D-At large). He also has a challenger in Dr. T. Michelle Colson, a Ward 4 native and D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) alumna and administrator.
If reelected, O’Leary pledges to leverage relationships to move the needle on teacher mentorship, truancy, cellphone use, school safety, and career and technical education. He pointed out that, as a onetime state board vice president, he has engaged city officials on a monthly basis about Ward 4-specific issues.
“I was able to be in the room with the chancellor, deputy mayor, superintendent and council chair,” O’Leary said. “I had my voice heard to convince them that parents, teachers and people working in school buildings are the most important thing in this city. I’m excited about trying to keep my voice in the conversation to hold the mayor and her appointees accountable.”
He recounted making similar strides when it came to the District’s school rating system and the development of social studies standards.
“When we started having a better relationship with the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE),… we were working on the report card and getting rid of the stars,” O’Leary said in reference to the rating system that, at one point, graded school performance nearly exclusively on standardized testing data.
“We have so much promise in having a school system that could be a model,” he told The Informer. “The social studies standards are forward looking, the type that several states wouldn’t have because it mentions equity and the real reasons why this country is the way it is now.”
Introducing Dr. T. Michelle Colson
If elected, Colson would be the second DCPS employee, after Ward 1 SBOE Representative Ben Williams, to sit on the state board since the D.C. Council’s passage of emergency legislation in 2022 allowing public school personnel to run for that office.
Colson, an education professional of more than 20 years and advisory neighborhood commissioner, received her doctorate in education leadership and policy studies from Howard University in May, two months before declaring her candidacy.
She told The Informer she has current and firsthand knowledge that’s essential in identifying and addressing Ward 4 students and parents’ needs.
“I’m still in the school system,” Colson, a dean at a D.C. public school and Leaders of Color program alumna, told The Informer. “I work daily with policies that come down from OSSE and the central office. I also see the daily realities of life in public schools”
Colson cited experiences analyzing student data with colleagues and learning about the severity of housing insecurity among District students. With memories of finding a gun on school grounds fresh in her mind, Colson also expressed concerns about what she called school safety issues that often go unrecognized.
“We need a larger conversation about how school safety, postsecondary outcomes, absenteeism, and homelessness affect the city,” Colson said, alluding to the shooting death of a safe passage worker near Coolidge High School last year.
“We must be proactive in leveraging relationships with the greater community to deal with changes that are affected by social media and other forces beyond school walls.”
Colson identified the creation of a strategic plan as one of her goals as Ward 4 state board representative. She said that the Ward 4 Education Alliance, Ward 4-based parent-teacher organizations and community members would take part in that process to address teacher retention, social education, out-of-school time programming, and what she understood to be the absence of scholarship resources for students who want to attend colleges and universities outside of the District.
“I want to be more intentional about finding out what Ward 4 needs beyond policy, to see how data can be applied and make a plan for the next four years that carries all of us into a better future,” Colson said, expressing a desire to anchor her plan in the launch of a Ward 4-based Saturday school.
“Students can make friends from different schools while we learn how each school teaches,” Colson said. “Ward 4 is [also] blessed with a wealth of knowledgeable and experienced elders who can speak to students and contribute solutions based on their understanding of our history.”
Community Members Weigh In
Compared to the Ward 7 state board race, there hasn’t been much dialogue about the contest between O’Leary and Colson in Ward 4. Regardless, there continues to be some contention among education experts about the constituents’ glaring lack of knowledge about SBOE’s presence and scope of powers.
Despite O’Leary and Colson’s assertion that they’ve canvassed neighborhoods and spoke to residents, some parents, like one who spoke to The Informer, said they haven’t heard from either.
This mother, a District native who’s been living in Ward 4 for nearly a decade, told The Informer that she had no interest in engaging in the political process when it comes to her young ones.
“I don’t want to hear from any state board candidates,” said the mother, who requested anonymity. “I’m not giving that my energy. I help children [who are] in dire situations when they are being left home alone.”
During the pandemic, this mother homeschooled her children. Upon the District public school system’s return to in-person learning, she enrolled them in public school at their request, despite not wanting to do so initially.
That journey, she said, has been cumbersome and at times dangerous for the sisters.
Since re-entering the school system, they have changed schools at least once due to what the Ward 4 mother called lack of accountability for students who attack their peers.
By the 2021-2022 school year, her daughters settled on Coolidge High School, but not before, as the mother recounted, administrators denied her older daughter’s homeschool transcripts.
Amid concerns about her older daughter’s issues with a teacher, the Ward 4 mother unsuccessfully attempted to speak with the principal at Coolidge. She said that continues to be the case to this day, even with some prodding from Lewis George’s office.
The Ward 4 mother told The Informer that the tension has increased since May, when she signed a re-enrollment form under duress after administrators denied one of her daughters a slot on a field trip.
The mother went on to say that administrators coerced her to sign the form again at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year when they misrepresented the previous document as expired.
Months later, her older daughter is navigating the college application process without assistance from her counselor, the mother said. For her, such a dilemma highlights the prevalence of the school-to-prison pipeline.
“I don’t want to switch them out of school, but the education is horrible,” the mother told The Informer. “My younger daughter feels that her teacher [that she had a problem with] has no control over the class. There are a lot of distractions. They’re supposed to be preparing my daughters for college, but I don’t know if the school’s just passing them along.”
While Jon Rhodes, a Petworth resident and father of three Ward 4 students, expressed his concerns about adequate teacher pay, he also identified safe passage as an issue of significance for his children who travel a total of 12 blocks home from school every evening.
That’s why Rhodes said he wanted to see an expansion of safe passage programs and school-based public safety resources.
“Maybe we need …more armed guards around the perimeter of the school more so than on the inside,” Rhodes told The Informer. “Some children, like mine, travel multiple blocks so maybe we should have a wider perimeter.”
However, Rhodes admitted that he wasn’t sure how to affect change through the state board. “I would probably need to do a little bit of research before I vote,” Rhodes said. “If I had to go outside of the school to solve a situation, I would go to my council member. The mayor is pretty busy, so I might need to write 100 letters.”
As the Ward 4 state board race rages on, albeit quietly, the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) continues to celebrate the ratification of a contract that its collective bargaining team hashed out with DCPS. Throughout the monthslong process, teachers often sported their red shirts and took to the streets in demand of a timely contract.
Sometimes, they exercised their First Amendment rights with O’Leary in their midst.
Days prior to the WTU’s endorsement of O’Leary, union members listened to him and Colson make their case during a special meeting. As WTU President Jacqueline Pogue Lyons recounted, members and leaders touted, among other things, O’Leary’s consistent presence when WTU advocated for a less punitive teacher evaluation system.
Pogue Lyons told The Informer that she and her colleagues are looking to O’Leary as an ally in the fight against that evaluation system, known as IMPACT.
“SBOE Representative O’Leary…would literally call me, if not weekly, then biweekly to get an update, particularly if he’s going to have a meeting with a council member, the chancellor or anything he felt would directly affect teachers,” Pogue Lyons said. “He’s always available and reaching out to us.”
The Candidates Speak on Mayoral Control and Postsecondary Opportunities
This week, on Oct. 28, early voting started in the District. Whoever wins the election on Nov. 5 will have on their plate a bevy of issues, including a mental health services gap, Whittier Elementary’s school modernization, truancy and chronic absenteeism, and public safety.
They will also more than likely be embroiled in what’s becoming a perennial debate about mayoral control of schools.
Last year, the state board released its education governance report, which recommended, among other things, the creation of a citywide board that oversees DCPS operations and facilities, authorizing SBOE to approve school openings, closings and locations, and SBOE’s receipt of notifications from education agencies about policy changes and explanations about its adherence to or deviation from state board requests.
O’Leary, who served as a teacher when Michelle Rhee served as DCPS’ first chancellor under mayoral control of schools, said that the concentration of power in the executive exacerbated the exodus of veteran teachers and decimated mayoral and DCPS central office accountability for facilities management.
“Roosevelt High School was shut down literally before school opened because of air conditioning,” O’Leary said. “Whittier, the school that’s in the worst shape in Ward 4, has constant problems with plumbing, HVAC, and roof leaks. They have a great staff and won medals for education, but it’s still being neglected. That shouldn’t happen in any school.”
Colson, however, leaned on her experience as a DCPS student to express her support for mayoral control.
“I can remember when schools opened in such disrepair, they weren’t prepared to teach. I remember being in classrooms where trash cans served as buckets to collect water from a leaky roof,” said Colson, an alumna of Coolidge High School who also attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
Though she acknowledged the need for improvements under mayoral control, Colson touted it as ideal for the modern-day school system.
“Some of my peers who’ve been here or new to the city have had some issues with change. It has caused them to not accept where we are now,” Colson said. “When our students need something different, we need to find something different.”
The two candidates also weighed in on District students’ access to postsecondary opportunities.
During the pandemic, the D.C. Policy Center identified college access and completion as a weak spot, with fewer than 20% of District high school graduates completing college within six years of starting their undergraduate studies.
While Colson emphasized the need to develop a strategy that better prepares young people for college, she pointed out that there are other factors to consider.
“Being able to navigate the city and do things as an adult starts with education,” Colson said. “Reviving family, adult and vocational education programs would level the playing field so students would be able to go to school wherever they want and have the [educational] background to secure a family sustaining career to stay in D.C. if they desire,” Colson said.
“I want them to move through the world believing in their intelligence, especially students of color and my girls.”
O’Leary said that students’ intelligence shows up in various ways that the school system doesn’t allow them to fully express.
As he awaits an opportunity to testify on At large Councilmember White’s vocational education legislation, O’Leary laments not seeing students often encouraged, and even celebrated, for picking up a trade after high school graduation.
Those hard skills, he said, are needed now more than ever, especially as career and technical education programs are increasingly becoming computer based. “A lot of people don’t do those things,” O’Leary said. “They fix your car and fix your roof. That’s just as important, especially with the different populations in our schools.”
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