Examiner February 22, 2007

HEADLINE: DC Crumbling city schools no match for winter cold

Crumbling city schools no match for winter cold
WASHINGTON - When Sade Benjamin, a 16-year-old sophomore, showed up for school earlier this month, she discovered the building was closed because it lacked heat.

Below-freezing temperatures had caused the pipes to burst at H.D. Woodson Senior High School. Three other aging public schools had similar problems, forcing all four schools to shut down completely for several days. About 30 other schools closed classrooms because broken boilers and burst pipes rendered them too cold to use.

About 1,800 students had to be relocated to other facilities - their normal classes often in disarray until the District of Columbia made repairs.

The disruption was the latest embarrassment for the city's school system, often ranked among the worst in the country. As new Mayor Adrian M. Fenty addresses long-term education problems in his plan to gain control over the school system, some say he must also deliver on promises to modernize schools that are literally falling apart - with complaints of leaking classrooms, deteriorating athletic facilities and missing doors on restroom stalls.

"The buildings are old, and when the buildings are old you need more money in your maintenance budget, not less," said Erika Landberg, interim executive director of D.C. VOICE, an independent nonprofit group that works on teaching and learning conditions.

The week of Feb. 5, when temperatures dipped to 10 degrees, the schools' aging boilers and pipes buckled under the pressure. In response, officials had students sent by bus to other schools where they either received no lessons or had setbacks to their academic progress.

Benjamin said she and her classmates were put in classrooms with teachers who weren't their regular instructors. "They were going over stuff we already learned," she said, adding that the students were sometimes taught the wrong subjects.

On her way into class this week, Benjamin said the heat was working, but that now the dilapidated classrooms were too hot. She and a friend walked into the building past a wall with the school's name, incomprehensible because so many letters are missing.

Benjamin said she heard stories of other displaced students sitting in a school gymnasium, talking on cell phones all day.

"To me it sounds like there was not much education going on, that it was just a holding area," said Karen Jackson, whose daughter is a 10th grader at Woodson.

To reopen the schools, the city was forced to spend at least $900,000 on the repairs.

Audrey Williams, a spokeswoman for the public schools, said the emergency repairs were in addition to $2.3 billion approved by the D.C. Council to modernize schools over 10 years. About $75 million will be available beginning this month for urgent fixes to broken restrooms, water fountains, lighting and security doors, she said.

The 10-year plan involves a combination of repairs, modernization and building new schools. Most of the schools are more than 65 years old - and their maintenance has been deferred for so long that the city is playing catch up.

"This is not something that happened this year or last year; this is years of underfunding maintenance of district schools," Williams said.

But D.C. Council member Jim Graham called the school system's process of requesting maintenance or repairs an "impenetrable bureaucracy."

"I've been in office for nine years and every time I have to approach the bureaucracy I do so with dread," Graham said. "On occasion you do get a response but more often you don't. It's part of the frustration I feel as a very active official that my constituents are in these school buildings exposed to all these various problems, but it's been next to impossible to represent them effectively."

Washington native Yolanda Thomas, who once attended D.C. public schools, said her four children - ages 7, 8, 10 and 11 - attend Ludlow-Taylor Elementary School in Northeast Washington. Although she says she wasn't upset that her children were moved to other facilities as an alternative to staying in a building with no heat, she did lament the state of the city's schools.

"They're building a ballpark but they can't put money into the schools," said Thomas, referring to the city's plan to spend more than $600 million on a new stadium for the Washington Nationals. "That's so backwards."