Friday marked the final day for Local School Advisory Teams (LSATs) and school principals to build upon the fiscal year 2025 budget proposal that D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) central office recently released.
This year, LSATs only had 10 days to deliberate on which staff positions to cut out of their budgets, a situation that, for some leaders, brings to mind concerns that parents, teachers, and community members brought up in years past about the tight deadlines imposed upon them.
For LSAT leaders like Aliscia Gerken, such complaints ring true during a budget season where depleted federal COVID relief, teacher salary increases, and inflation threaten the viability of academic and intervention programming for D.C.’s public school students with the greatest need.
Gerken, LSAT chair at Key Elementary School in Northwest, is the mother of a second grader who receives speech therapy, occupational therapy, and behavioral services within and outside the general education setting.
She told The Informer that she and her LSAT colleagues haven’t met the submission deadline due to ongoing discussions about what she called difficult budget decisions guaranteed to negatively affect the entire school community. Part of that process, she said, involves engaging Key Elementary School Principal Dr. David Landeryou and conveying the budget to community stakeholders.
For Gerken, retaining positions, especially those pertaining to special education (SPED), intervention, and resource connection, ensures that the needs of students, parents and teachers are met in a balanced manner. She told The Informer that, without the appropriate staff members, the remaining teachers and staff members would be obligated to perform beyond their capacity.
“Educators spend time giving all they can,” Gerken told The Informer.
“They’re overworked, trying to use their skills and expertise ten-fold in various capacities,” she continued. “The dynamics and logistics of budget season are taking the joy out [of their profession] as teachers are met with the additional strain of retention within their current role and school community. How do the people at central office not understand that?”
Concerns Persist about Public School Enrollment
Most District public schools saw their allocation increase in the FY 2025 budget.
For instance, MacArthur High School, DCPS’ newest high school based in Northwest, experienced a 76.73% increase in its allocation, according to a data sheet compiled by the LSAT Collective. Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Northwest, Payne Elementary School in Southeast, and Eliot-Hine Middle School in Northeast will see an increase of 35.58%, 26.66%, and 25.76% respectively.
Meanwhile, nearly a dozen schools saw a decrease in their allocations. Kelly Miller Middle School in Northeast experienced the greatest decrease at 4.66%. Kramer Middle School in Southeast and Ron Brown College Preparatory High School in Northeast experienced a similar decrease at 4.5% and 4.18% respectively.
Anacostia New Tech High School in Southeast, along with Truesdell Elementary, Janney Elementary, Hearst Elementary and Lafayette Elementary School, all in Northwest, experienced a budgetary decrease of between 2 and 3%.
John Hayden Johnson Middle School in Southeast, LaSalle-Backus Elementary School in Northeast, and Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest saw a decrease of less than 2%.
The current budget dilemma caught the attention of a group of Anacostia High School alumni coalescing around a movement to boost enrollment at the Southeast-based high school.
A report released by the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education last year showed Anacostia’s utilization rate at 50%.
Paul Spires, a 2008 Anacostia alumnus, said a budget decrease impedes efforts to attract young people, especially if teachers are losing their jobs.
“If we are successful in raising the enrollment, but students get to schools with no teachers, then we will have a big problem,” Spires said.
Spires, a Northeast resident who was recently installed as Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6A community outreach chair, told The Informer that misconceptions about violence take away from positive narratives that he often shares about his alma mater.
Spires credited Keith Killgo, his former teacher and founding member of the Blackbyrds, with helping him take his musical aspirations to new heights. As Anacostia and the surrounding community experience upgrades, said that students could continue to have similar stories with DCPS’ support.
“This is a new school,” Spires told The Informer. “The school could collaborate with the community. The roads are changing, the names of the streets are changing. We have a business improvement district. It’s becoming a tourist attraction.”
Questions About Extracurriculars and Vocational Training
Every budget season, after DCPS releases its budget, LSATs engage the broader school community about their priorities. The LSATs then confer with their school’s principal, who then submits the finalized budget.
Depending on the school, there’s a question of whether the principal considers the LSAT’s viewpoint, or whether an LSAT, or even a parent-teacher association for that matter, has been formulated.
DCPS central office designates principals, librarians, English-language learner teachers, and self-contained classroom teachers as Level 1 positions. This means that funding can only be used for those positions.
For Level 2 positions, including social workers, psychologists, custodians, special education aides, and Pre-kindergarten teachers and aides, principals must successfully petition their superintendents before reallocating that funding elsewhere.
While principals have full flexibility to allocate dollars for Level 3 positions, which include classroom and subject teachers and academic and behavioral support positions, they must do so within the bounds of what teacher contracts dictate for class sizes, required breaks, and planning hours.
As such, principals can’t make flexible hiring and programming decisions without meeting the aforementioned requirements. As one LSAT member explained to The Informer, discussions at LSAT meetings often center on how to maintain a teacher workforce that meets requirements for class size and planning periods, all while ensuring that students are supervised and educated during teachers’ planning periods.
At the middle and high school levels, principals tasked with cutting costs might tinker with Level 3 positions to ensure that there are teachers covering core classes and physical education. This puts arts, music and other specialized subjects at risk of getting cut.
At Anacostia High School, the LSAT collaborated with the interim principal, Kenneth Walker, to prevent substantial cuts to the teacher workforce.
In the end, the finalized budget sent back to DCPS central office shows the loss of one classroom teacher, a social worker and a slew of front-facing office positions. LSAT co-chair Ronald Edmonds said the outcome aligns with the LSAT’s longtime endeavor to prevent cuts that undermine students’ academic experience.
However, Edmonds, a 1988 Anacostia alumnus in his 12th year as a teacher at the school, lamented how budget constraints prevent Anacostia from expanding its band program and other music and arts programs. He said the school band, which only consists of a drum line, doesn’t suffice in attracting students from Sousa Middle School and other schools in Anacostia’s feeder pattern.
Edmonds went on to espouse the need for vocational programs that supplement the University of the District of Columbia Community-to-Career Partnership, through which Anacostia students can earn a professional certification or up to 60 college credits while in pursuit of their high school diploma.
Such offerings, he said, reflect the needs of the student population and better enable Anacostia to raise its enrollment.
“We have cried so much about what our students, our community, our population is crying for. Unfortunately, DCPS central office hasn’t agreed with the staff and community,” Edmonds told The Informer.
“We do understand the need for liberal education but there’s a need for students who don’t mind being a barber, doing hair and nails, or landscaping. With the budget, there’s no room for that. We’re restrained from bringing in different things.”
Community Members Demand Budget Transparency
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) is expected to release her FY 2025 budget proposal on March 20. Last weekend, she conducted the first of four budget engagement forums at Deanwood Community Center in Northeast.
Other forums scheduled throughout the week are taking place at Brookland Middle School, at District senior centers, and online.
The D.C. Council also finds itself in the throes of budget season work. On Friday, March 1, Deputy Mayor for Education (DME) Paul Kihn, DCPS Chancellor Dr. Lewis D. Ferebee, and State Superintendent Dr. Christina Grant will testify before the council’s Committee of the Whole.
That hearing comes amid tension between some council members and DME and DME/DCPS about the latter’s refusal to follow the Schools First in Budgeting Amendment Act.
That law mandates each District public school to receive no less than what DCPS allocated to them during the previous budget cycle. It also requires DCPS to meet a budget submission deadline of no later than 42 days before the mayor’s submission of the District’s budget and financial plan to the council.
This year, community members saw the budget allocation for each school on Feb. 13, instead of Feb. 7 as mandated by the legislation.
In years past, Ferebee and Kihn said they prioritized stability over equity, noting that dollars get wasted when budgets aren’t adjusted for declining enrollment. However, some people, like Ward 6 parent Elizabeth Corinth, said that enrollment is one piece of the puzzle.
Corinth, co-facilitator of the DC LSAT Collective and an LSAT member at School-Within-School @ Goding in Northeast, told The Informer that DCPS complicates community-level budget deliberations by not fully explaining why some schools receive cuts. She hinted at a number of factors, beyond enrollment projections, that are unknown to community members.
Earlier in February, Corinth wrote a letter to all members of the D.C. Council asking them to boost funding to mitigate the inflation and increase in teacher-staff salaries that’s decreasing every school’s purchasing power. Even with a 3.43% increase in funds, students at School-Within-School @ Goding stand to lose a bevy of positions, Corinth said.
Those positions include one special education teacher, half of the instructional coaches and academic interventionists, one kindergarten aide, and one first grade aide. In the process of dropping a general education teacher, they also combined a special education and general education class.
While Corinth remains hopeful that the D.C. Council will restore or increase public school funding in the finalized FY 2025 budget, she expressed her concern that by the time schools receive those extra funds, principals had already cut positions.
She said this happened at School-Within-School @ Goding last year.
“The people who we wanted to keep had to find other jobs,” Corinth told The Informer.
“We found them again in some cases, but not in other cases. There’s a loss there with that gap of several months, she continued.
“You lose the person who already knows and has a relationship with the students. Also, you have people who are told that their job is the least valuable. That’s just a concern with the council swooping in later. There’s damage that’s done there.”
