jonetta rose barras: School boundaries are more than just geographic lines

Oct 30, 2023

DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson may have been right to persuade his colleagues to use the 2023 Budget Support Act to mandate a DC Public Schools (DCPS) boundary study — but not so much on his narrow perspective on its scope. The resulting document and recommendations must be delivered this year.

“We need to address school boundaries. Some jurisdictions do it on a regular basis,” he told me during a telephone interview last week. A predictable schedule is a way to make the process less “traumatic” than it’s been in the past, he suggested.

DCPS operates chiefly through a system of neighborhood schools, most with specific geographic boundaries. Associated with those designations are “feeder patterns,” pathways that help direct the flow of students as they progress from elementary to middle school and then on to high school. By law, students have a right to attend any K-12 school within their boundary and feeder pathway. District charter schools are exempted from that law, however.

The DCPS boundary process was supposed to ensure adequate, predictable enrollment at each facility and yield an equitable public education system. It hasn’t, however.

Some schools are overcrowded; others are underpopulated, explained Mendelson, citing as an example Plummer Elementary in Ward 7. He said it has a “catchment of 1,300 but only has an enrollment of 300. Do we keep the boundaries?”

“Arguably the worst boundary in the city is Jackson-Reed High School,” formerly known as Wilson, continued Mendelson, who as chair of the Council’s Committee of the Whole has oversight of public education, including DCPS and charters. As one of nine neighborhood high schools, Jackson-Reed’s current boundaries — which are set to change this fall with the creation of a high school on MacArthur Boulevard — encompass all of Ward 3 but zigzag into three other wards.

Interestingly, neither Plummer nor Jackson-Reed is specifically identified in the School Attendance Zone Boundaries Amendment Act of 2022, which actually requires not just the forthcoming study but also an update every 10 years. The one this year is supposed to result in clear assignment to DCPS by-right schools and feeder pathways; adequate capacity in these DCPS schools; and equitable access to high-quality public schools.

Further, it is expected to establish boundaries for the new Foxhall elementary school in Ward 3 and a Euclid Street middle school in Ward 1, the latter of which may serve as a replacement for the shuttered Shaw Middle School; identify by-right schools for prekindergarten (PK3 and PK4); and assure equity and diversity in DCPS institutions.

Asserting via email to me a belief “that all DC students deserve a wonderful education in a great school, surrounded by loving, supportive educators,“ DC Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn called the study a “critical priority” for his office.

He said that as part of an “initial community engagement,” he and his team have reached out to “residents, families, and stakeholders on the upcoming process and to share our vision and priorities for ensuring a robust, comprehensive, and transparent process.” He claimed his office has held “26 meetings and events.”

A spokesperson later provided a list that wasn’t as diverse as Kihn initially suggested. The persons with whom the DME met seemed to be the usual suspects with an overabundance of organizations and individuals connected to charter schools, although charters do not have by-right neighborhood institutions. The spokesperson declined to tell me how much the office expects to pay an outside consultant to do the work. “The budget will be shared publicly after [the contract] is awarded,” he said.

Whose money is it, anyway?

Even if you’re a District resident who doesn’t have any children or relatives in a DCPS institution, you deserve to be informed. After all, in fiscal year 2022, DC taxpayers forked over $2.8 billion for public education; that was 26.5% of the city’s general fund expenditures, according to the Office of the Chief Financial Officer.

It’s unbelievable that amount is being spent on a system branded by indisputable funding inequities, with the hardest impact felt in schools east of the Anacostia River; poor teacher retention; and measurable citywide inconsistencies in the caliber and variety of academic programs.

It would be wonderful if the boundary study and this year’s council-mandated comprehensive master facilities plan could effectively address and eliminate those decades-old issues. Don’t count on that.

The last study — conducted between 2013 and 2014 during Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration by then-Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith — came close.

Then politics stepped in. Muriel Bowser, at the time a DC Council member and the Democratic nominee for mayor, rejected most of that hard work done by Smith and a citywide advisory group. When she took office, Bowser imposed some changes, in response to concerns by her Ward 4 base, which ultimately exacerbated school boundary problems.

She also caused some issues for other wards. Eboni-Rose Thompson, who participated in that 2014 study and is now president of the DC State Board of Education, remembers that Bowser changed the feeder pattern for Eastern High School. Students enrolled in Kelly Miller Middle School who were supposed to go to H.D. Woodson were given the option of attending Eastern.

“Now Woodson had half of a feeder pattern,” Thompson, who represents Ward 7 on the board, told me during an extensive interview last week. That decreased the potential population for Woodson and resulted in a loss of funds, since school budgets are partially based on how many students are enrolled.

The botched implementation of the previous boundary study is making DC Auditor Kathy Patterson less than sanguine about this latest effort. She described it as the proverbial cart before the horse.

“I think prior to a study we need to ask the question ‘Do we [really] want a system of high-performing neighborhood schools?’” said Patterson, who came to public service as Ward 3’s DC Council member in the 1990s as a parent advocate. “Is the city prepared to make sure that every single school is as good as our best school?”

From her vantage — and mine, by the way — the answer appears to be no.

Patterson said education policy seems to be going in the opposite direction. DC officials “place our highest value on parental choice.”

She offered that her children went to neighborhood schools; she became friends with some of her fellow parents, and to this day they are still friends.

There are socioeconomic benefits as well. Consider the fact that so many young couples who are anticipating having children purchase homes near schools they consider high-quality. They often help raise the tax base in those communities while attracting retail and other commercial businesses.

There are 116 DCPS facilities; 98 of those are considered by-right and 18 are citywide. According to “The Role of School Boundaries in the District of Columbia,” a recent analysis conducted by the DC Policy Center, 72% of students use the common lottery each year to secure a seat in a charter school or a DCPS institution outside of their community; only 28% of students attend their by-right school.

The “Jackson-Reed boundary participation rate is three times greater than the city average,” Chelsea Coffin and Julie Rubin wrote in their DC Policy Center report. The rates of neighborhood enrollment at Anacostia, Dunbar, Ballou and Woodson high schools are all below 20%.

That data caused the report’s authors to conclude that in “contiguous areas of the city where boundary participation is low, changing the geographic delineation of a boundary will not have a large effect on enrollment at by-right schools.”

However, Ward 3 Council member Matt Frumin argued that just because few people are actually attending neighborhood facilities, “it doesn’t mean we should forsake those schools.”

“We know from talking to people that there is a hunger to have great schools in every neighborhood,” added Frumin, who has been active for more than a decade in a variety of education issues, including the 2014 boundary study. He was elected last year to the council.

“People in my community are very concerned about school quality,” said Thompson, who led the Ward 7 Education Council before being elected to the State Board of Education. “My people are going to want to show up and want better for their kids.”

And people know what they want from their schools.

“Shopping for Public Schools in DC” — a 2018 survey commissioned by Patterson’s office — reported that, among the 600 parent/guardian respondents, the quality of educators and evidence of an academically challenging curriculum were the most important factors in selecting where they wanted their child to attend. They also said the physical condition of the building and the safety of the surrounding neighborhood are important considerations.

Those factors alone underscore the need for the boundary study to go beyond the process of gerrymandering geographic lines. It needs to incorporate a more comprehensive education strategy that could excite parents to support and embrace their neighborhood schools. Oddly, when I raised the issue of academic programming with Mendelson, he seemed to dismiss it.

“I see programming as separate from that,” he told me. “[It] might be that programming is a way to implement the boundary study.”

What?! Sometimes Mendelson is all trees and no forest.

Unfortunately, the state of the public education in DC makes clear he isn’t the only elected official suffering from that ailment.

So we continue to operate a school system that consists primarily of neighborhood schools with established boundaries. Yet many of the students in those institutions are enrolled on an out-of-boundary basis. Obviously there is no appetite for addressing the consequences of that contradiction.

The antidote: more consistent and robust citizen involvement, especially in this latest boundary study.

jonetta rose barras is an author and freelance journalist, covering national and local issues including politics, childhood trauma, public education, economic development and urban public policies. She can be reached at [email protected].