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Leaving Children Behind:
The Underfunding of D.C. Public Schools Building Repair and Capital Budget Needs

A Parents United for the D.C. Public Schools
Civic Leader Advisory Committee Report
July 2003

PREFACE

The following report was prepared for Parents United for the D.C. Public Schools and a special Advisory Committee of Civic Leaders by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and volunteers at the firm of Sidley, Austin, Brown and Wood LLP. 

Parents United is a citywide parent organization established in 1980 to support quality public education in the District of Columbia.  Over the years it has issued a series of reports on a range of school finance and school reform issues.  Its most recent report, D.C. Public School Funding: Myth v. Reality, was released in February 2003.  The Washington Lawyers’ Committee serves as counsel to Parents United.  Ronald Flagg, Patrick Linehan, and Rebecca Riley, of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP, are the primary authors of this report.  Rod Boggs of the Washington Lawyers Committee and Iris Toyer of Parents United took the photographs contained in the report. 

Parents United would like to express its deep appreciation to following individuals who served as members of its Civic Leader Advisory Committee: 

Maudine R. Cooper---President of the Greater Washington Urban League.  Ms. Cooper has served in this position since 1990. Previously she served in a number of senior positions in the D.C. Government, including a term as Director of the D.C. Office of Human Rights and the Office of Minority Business Opportunities.  She has also served on numerous governmental commissions and task forces. 

Ronald S. Flagg---Mr. Flagg is a partner in the law firm of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP. He is a longtime District resident and a leader in community service.  Between 1991 and 1994 he served as Executive Director of the Mayor’s Management Advisory Committee.  He is the parent of three children attending the D.C. public schools.

James O. Gibson---Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy.  Mr. Gibson has a long history of involvement in issues of urban policy, civil rights and community development.  He previously served as: a founding Director and President of the D.C. Agenda, Director of the Equal Opportunity Program at the Rockefeller Foundation and President of the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation. 

James W. Jones---A Director of the Hildebrandt International, a management consulting firm serving the legal industry.  Prior to joining Hildebrandt, Mr. Jones was managing partner at the law firm of Arnold & Porter. He currently serves as chair of the Pro Bono Institute and Chair of the Board of the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation.  Richard W. Snowdon, III---Partner in the law firm of Trainum, Snowdon & Deane.  Over the past twenty years, Mr. Snowdon has served in a series of position focusing on key policy issues in the District of Columbia. These have included membership on:  the Committee on Strategies to Reduce Chronic Poverty; the D.C. Advisory, Local Initiative Support Committee [LISC]; the Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Promotion of Arts and Economic Development; and Board of Directors of For Love of Children [FLOC].


INTRODUCTION AND EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This Report analyzes the current status of the District’s efforts to modernize its crumbling school buildings.  Five years ago, following an assessment of each of the District’s school facilities, it was widely recognized that the physical condition of the District’s schools was disastrous.  After decades of failing either to build new schools or even to make the minimal repairs necessary to maintain the existing buildings, students in our Nation’s Capital attended public schools which impaired their education and, at times, threatened their health and safety.  To its credit, the D.C. Public School System (“DCPS”) faced up to these longstanding problems in a reasonable and rational way – in consultation with experts and community members, it developed a Facility Master Plan to modernize our schools over a 10-15 year period.  Consistent with the Master Plan, DCPS has completed modernization of four schools and is nearing completion of the modernization of six more schools.

Now, however, just two years into implementation of the Master Plan, funding cuts threaten to halt this modernization plan.  The FY 2004 Budget and Financial Plan sent by the Mayor and Council to Congress provides far less funding than is needed to maintain, much less modernize, our city’s schools.  Most ominously, the Proposed Budget for FY 2007 proposes a paltry $21 million in capital funds for DCPS and calls for no capital funding whatsoever for FY 2008 and 2009.  The Proposed Budget also calls for a reduction in DCPS’s maintenance budget for FY 2004 from $44 million to $17 million.

The dire need to fix the District’s school facilities remains.  We do not need a blue ribbon panel or a legislative study to address this critical problem.  We already have a carefully constructed Master Plan to modernize our schools over the next 10-15 years, and a maintenance budget request from DCPS for FY 2004 that would maintain them in a minimally sufficient way in the meantime.  It is now simply a matter for our lawmakers to fund these plans.


HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: YEARS OF NEGLECT

The physical deterioration of DC’s public schools is by no means a new issue.  The average DC public school building is now over 65 years old.  In 1989, Parents United undertook a comprehensive investigation and analysis of information about the physical state of the D.C. public schools.  Finding severe deterioration and disrepair in the school buildings, it waged a multifaceted campaign that resulted in a one-time contribution of $12 million in funding from Congress to repair D.C.’s deteriorating public schools.  An average of $18 million was spent annually on school facilities between 1990 and 1996.  This represented less than $300 per student, and was one of the lowest rates of any school district in the country.  Most of these funds were being used for emergency repairs due to aging infrastructure.  “There was not enough money spent to stem the tide of continued deterioration, let alone address the decay that had already occurred.” [1]   Moreover, during this period there was no strategic plan to end the downward slide in District school facilities; the District had last adopted a master plan for school facilities in 1967.

In March 1992, Parents United instituted a lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court [2] alleging that the District was in repeated violation of the D.C. Fire Code. [3]    After a bench trial, the Court’s June 10, 1994 Order found thousands of life-threatening violations including: defective fire doors, exposed wiring, breached ceilings, defective alarm systems, and serious electrical problems.  In total, the court found 5,695 fire code violations throughout the District’s public schools, the vast majority of which the Court deemed life-threatening.  The Court ordered the D.C. Government to fix these violations and ordered the D.C. Fire Department to inspect all DCPS schools periodically and to file reports detailing its findings.  The result was temporary and sporadic fixes, individual schools and sometimes the entire system shut down, but ultimately an out of court settlement that promised DCPS a consistent share of the city’s capital funding. 

In 1998, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducted an assessment of each of the District’s operating public school facilities.  At that point, there had been no significant capital improvements since 1980 and no new school had been built during that period.  In 1998, there were more than 20,000 open work orders, and seventy-percent of the schools were deemed in poor physical condition, meaning that most systems and components had exceeded their useful life expectancy and the building needed to be modernized or replaced.  In the DCPS’s own words, the state of the public school facilities “had reached an all-time low:” [4]

Roofs were leaking, windows needed to be replaced, boilers were failing, plumbing, wiring and heating systems were old and unreliable.  Many of the floors, walls, and ceilings were in poor condition, and people often avoided the use of the bathrooms altogether.  There were very few schools in the District of Columbia with working science laboratories. [5]