CM Grosso hosts Ward 3 town hall Tuesday on DC schools

by Ruth Wattenberg
Ward 3 member, DC State Board of Education

On Tuesday, June 30th, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Tenley-Friendship Library, DC Council Education Committee Chair David Grosso is holding a town hall meeting on DC public education. I hope you will join me and discuss the state of public education in DC and Ward 3.

Two topics that Council member Grosso has focused on at previous meetings are the schedule and budget for modernizing DC schools and the recent evaluation of DC public education commissioned by the DC auditor.

The evaluation of our schools, prepared by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science, reviews the quality of DC public education and the state of education governance in the city since the city adopted mayoral control in 2007. Here’s a copy of the NRC report (for those who don’t want to read it all – it’s long! – I recommend the summary) and the Washington Post article about it. It raises a lot of issues that effect all the city’s schools.

School modernization is governed by the Capital Improvement Plan. Here is an article from Greater Greater Washington on modernization issues and here is a copy of the new tool that Grosso has proposed to use for deciding the order in which schools will get modernized. In addition, the June 24th Northwest Current has an article about cost overruns ($100 million) associated with modernizing the Ellington School of the Arts.

This is a great opportunity for Ward 3 residents and parents to raise their educational concerns on these two issues and others. Many of you have raised with me issues around overcrowding, narrowing of the curriculum towards tested subjects, and budget predictability for our schools, among others. All of these and more would be appropriate topics.

I hope to see you there!

Ruth Wattenberg is Ward 3’s elected representative on the DC State Board of education. Visit her website, Ruth4Schools.com.