It’s understandable that some DC residents might feel as if they’ve been cast in a remake of Groundhog Day. In that 1993 film, Bill Murray’s character keeps waking up to the same day, replete with the same remarks and the same behavior by the same people. In the District, the issue of how public schools — traditional and charters — have been using taxpayers’ money and have unlawfully spent at-risk funding allocated to improve education outcomes for the city’s most vulnerable students has been replayed for years — without much change in either the script or the school ratings.
“Every year the council Education Committee reports in its budget notes that the school system has disregarded the law,” Mary Levy, one of the city’s foremost local public education finance experts, told me during a recent interview. “[School officials] have even admitted what they’ve been doing in sworn testimony.”
Levy has studied the city’s handling of at-risk funding since the DC Council’s 2014 passage of the Fair Student Funding and School Based Budgeting Amendment Act, which was signed by then-Mayor Vincent C. Gray. Currently, Gray serves as the Ward 7 council representative. Chairman Phil Mendelson still leads the legislature.
At-risk funds were intended to supplement the basic school budget to help those students who may be homeless or in foster care, who receive welfare or food stamp assistance, or who may be one or more years older than grade level. These funds now amount to about $106 million annually, resulting in about $2,400 for each student. However, instead of using those funds to supplement the standard school budget, the DC Public Schools (DCPS) system and some charters have been misspending the at-risk money to supplant basic costs.
For example, DC Auditor Kathy Patterson has found that many schools have used at-risk money to pay for art teachers, physical education teachers, language instructors and even counselors. Those are all positions that are part of the comprehensive staffing model (CSM) and therefore should be paid for through each school’s basic budget.
Patterson told the council earlier this year that 42 out of 64 stand-alone traditional elementary schools “with an average at-risk enrollment of 56 percent were required to use at-risk funds to meet the CSM; 22 other schools with an average at-risk enrollment of 42 percent were fully funded or over-funded for the same requirements.”
That looks and sounds like budget inequity to me.
Reports on at-risk spending during the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years, provided to me by DCPS spokesperson Shayne Wells, confirm the concern raised by Patterson and Levy. In school year 2016-17, for example, Aiton Elementary spent $132,179 of its at-risk funds for an assistant principal; Amidon-Bowen Elementary spent $6,000 for field trips and another $100,000 for “contractual partnerships.” That same year Anacostia High School spent $562,830 on “High School Investment.”
In 2017-18, Benjamin Banneker Academic High School spent $110,365 for “athletics and activities coordinators.” Brookland Middle School used $195,370 for “Middle Grades Teacher Investment.”
Wells told me in an email that “teacher investment” refers to areas that are deemed district priorities. For example, “‘high school investment teacher’ could represent investments that were made to offer additional Advanced Placement courses and elective courses.”
That information was part of a report sent to the council in October, Wells said. Interestingly, when I asked for the narrative or descriptive explanation for the spreadsheet, Wells indicated none accompanied the report.
Why would the council accept a bunch of random numbers as a report on how taxpayers’ money is being spent?
“The decisions to use at-risk funds to pay for basic staff positions do not seem to be made at the school level but instead by DCPS in its funding allocations to schools,” Ed Lazere, executive director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, noted in budget testimony earlier this year. “In the allocations for FY 2019, only $30 million of the $50 million in at-risk funds could be identified. It is likely that much of the roughly 40 percent of at-risk funds that could not be identified in the individual school budgets are paying for core staff.”
The problem is well-known. The solution, however, has seemed elusive — or it could just be that elected officials and government education leaders are unprepared to do their jobs by either following the law or holding violators accountable.
Instead, they have been content with ad nauseum gabfests, accented by hand-wringing and pronouncements of varying degrees of frustration, incompetence or impotence. Earlier this year, the Committee on Education and the Committee of the Whole held a public roundtable on the issue. Next week, they are scheduled to hold yet another public hearing on two legislative proposals: the School Based Budgeting and Transparency Act and the At-Risk School Funding Transparency Amendment Act. Both echo the Fair Student Funding Act — the existing law.
The school-based bill was introduced by at-large Council member David Grosso, chair of the Education Committee, and co-introduced by his 12 colleagues. Among other things, the bill as written would require DCPS to submit a budget based on costs for each school and projected enrollment, with a separate line item for at-risk funding at each facility. It also would require narrative descriptions of programs and services financed with at-risk money, along with a breakout of central-office expenses listing specific categories and associated student grade levels.
That all sounds good. But shouldn’t all of that already be featured in the standard budget submission? If DCPS hasn’t detailed how it’s spending money by school and categories, what in the world has it been providing to the council? The more important question is, Why haven’t council members demanded a true, accurate and detailed budget, exercising the power of the purse when they have not received it?
The At-Risk School Funding Act leaves me pondering similar questions about budget submissions and the rigor — or absence thereof — in the oversight of public education. Introduced by Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen and five other legislators, the proposal would require school-by-school financial details with a separate line item for at-risk funding, and narrative descriptions of programs and services financed with at-risk money. The law would also mandate an annual report; if charters fail to file in a timely manner, they could lose funding the following year. Perhaps the most salient feature is that the bill would shift control for spending decisions on those special appropriations back to the principals and established advisory teams at local schools.
Some people, like Lazere, think the at-risk bill could make a difference. “Allen’s bill is more detailed, and breaks out [data] in a way that makes it harder to hide the supplantation,” he told me. Lazere added that it would also shine a light on the issue, providing more clarity and perhaps embarrassing those who aren’t adhering to the law.
“There’s no magic solution, no guarantee of an overnight fix,” added Lazere. He said his organization has pledged over the next year to continually remind policymakers that “it’s not appropriate year after year to agree on the rules but not be following them.”
Levy is less sanguine about the two legislative proposals. She said she is “very disappointed” by how the administration and elected officials have dealt with the issue. “It’s been all this spin, half-truths and denials.” She said if DCPS is short of funds, as some have claimed, it can “take care of the problem without cheating at-risk students. They can take money out of central offices; not all local school money is allocated through the CSM.”
However, as DC Auditor Patterson said in an interview with me, “It’s not just misapplication of at-risk funding, but also the comprehensive staffing model that the school system is not following.” She noted that there are “4,000 classroom teachers with a total of 8,000 staff at DCPS. The question is, Do you need more non-teachers than teachers?”
And, do we need new legislation to address the issue of stealing money from at-risk students? Absolutely not.
Consider that the 2014 Fair Student Funding Act, the existing law, requires school officials to delineate all funds budgeted to each school. It requires a narrative description of each program and a list of any funding associated with at-risk students. It also limits DCPS to using 5 percent of its budget for central office expenditures.
“The real downside of the misspending is that we don’t know what works and what doesn’t work,” Patterson told me. “We tried a longer school year and decided that wasn’t working. Other than that, we can’t say what is our strategy for dealing with at-risk students.”
The 2014 law makes clear, however, that the DCPS chancellor “shall make publicly available a written plan” that will explain with “particularity how the use of funds will improve student achievement before the use of any such funds.”
Five years after passage of that Fair Student Funding Act — and after the expenditure of more than $6 billion in taxpayers’ funds over that period — everyone is living the Groundhog Day experience. If elected officials and education leaders refuse to do anything different to change outcomes other than pass more legislation to mask their failure to enforce the law, then residents, parents and advocates should act — including possibly filing a lawsuit against the DC government — to ensure a decent and prosperous future for DC children.
jonetta rose barras is an author, a freelance journalist and the host of The Barras Report television show. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.
Mary Levy has dedicated her career in assisting lawmakers in areas of improvement with Charter and DCPS. Who’s listening? At risk funds for high salaried positions is outrageous. And what about the DCPS and Charter schools mandating that health/vaccinations forms MUST be required before allowing a child to attend school? If the DCPS and Charter schools can’t do this, they should absolutely team up with DCHeath and get this done. DCHealth should be much more active with this critical public health need.