Record Funding Boost Likely for Schools

Costly Stadium Plan Provoked Advocates to Fight for Systemwide Renovations

By Lori Montgomery

source: Washington Post

Sunday February 5, 2006

The D.C. Council is expected to approve the biggest school funding increase in city history after months of pressure from more than 1,000 parents, educators and activists galvanized by the decision to pay millions for a new ballpark.

Long rebuffed in their pleas for more money for decrepit public schools, frustrated parents said they were outraged when the mayor and council agreed in 2004 to spend more than $500 million on a baseball stadium, a price tag that since has risen. Over the past year, groups across the city banded together to form a single, powerful lobby focused on forcing city leaders to do for schoolchildren what they agreed to do for Major League Baseball.

The campaign appears to have worked. On Tuesday, the council is expected to give preliminary approval to a bill that would devote an additional $100 million a year -- $1 billion over the next decade -- to school modernization, enough to complete a systemwide overhaul. Although debate continues over how to fund the measure, council Chairman Linda W. Cropp (D) said passage is all but assured, and a spokesman said the mayor intends to sign it.

In addition to a large and disciplined grass-roots movement, a variety of other factors helped propel schools to the top of the council agenda, activists and political analysts said. Polls show that education is by far the most important issue to D.C. voters at a time when seven of the 13 council members are running for reelection or higher office. Three are competing to replace retiring Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), including Cropp and the bill's author, Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4).

The city also has a huge budget surplus and fresh confidence in Clifford B. Janey, the superintendent of the school system, which has had an abysmal record on renovations.

"It was a nice harmonic convergence," said Matt Wuerker, a Woodley Park activist whose son attends Woodrow Wilson Senior High School. "Oddly enough, it was the baseball stadium that gave us a new element of leverage. . . . Baseball, ironically, created the political opening for schools."

The contrast was stark. After years of deferred maintenance, many of the city's 147 schools are in appalling condition. The buildings -- 73 years old, on average -- have leaking roofs, stopped-up bathrooms, ancient lighting and air-handling systems that leave classrooms freezing or stifling.

In 2000, the school board adopted a $3.5 billion plan to renovate every school by 2020. But annual council funding never hit the $300 million goal, and the plan fell apart after several projects came in over budget. By the time baseball came on the scene, the mayor was proposing to drop the school renovation budget to just under $100 million.

At the same time, Williams proposed building a state-of-the-art baseball stadium with luxury skyboxes and views of the Capitol. A new tax on business would be used as collateral for revenue bonds. The deal brought the former Montreal Expos to Washington but quickly became a political lightning rod, viewed by some as potent evidence that city leaders cater to the privileged. The city is working to control costs of the stadium project, now estimated at $667 million.

In September 2004, voters booted three council members who supported the stadium deal. After much public hand-wringing, the council approved it that December, days before the new members took office.

Fenty, planning a run for mayor, voted no. Afterward, stadium opponent Ed Lazere remembers telling him that the deal easily could provoke a backlash.
"I said, 'The progressive response to this ought to be, if you can issue bonds for a baseball stadium, you can issue bonds for schools. So let's do a big bond for schools,' " recalled Lazere, executive director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute.

Others made the same connection. Although school modernization already was the focus of hearings chaired by council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), "the stadium thing, in my mind, really helped propel things," said Marc Borbely, a former Eastern High School teacher and a leader of the schools coalition. "It was something we used to generate outrage."

In April, at the Washington Nationals' home opener, school advocates staged one of their first protests. More than 400 people handed out peanuts to arriving fans under signs reading, "Millions for the stadium, Peanuts for the kids."

Five days later, Fenty announced his schools bill, a $1 billion bond issuance that would have been secured by D.C. Lottery revenue. Cropp sent it to two committees: Patterson's education committee and the finance and revenue panel chaired by Jack Evans (D-Ward 2).

The bill quickly was dismissed as unrealistic. "There's no money available," said Evans, who was considering a mayoral run at the time. Cropp responded with what she called a "fiscally prudent" plan to raise $150 million for schools. Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi said Fenty's bill would generate no more than $400 million while wrecking the city's bond rating.

But in late spring, Fenty, Evans and others started polling. When the results came in, education popped off the page. In Fenty's poll, it exceeded other issues, including crime and affordable housing, as the top concern by more than 40 percentage points.
Ron Lester, who did a poll for then-mayoral contender and current at-large council candidate A. Scott Bolden (D), said even affluent white voters ranked public schools as their top priority, a "sea change" over past surveys.

"People are more stressed financially. With the recent housing boom, they have to pay these high mortgages," Lester said. "Two-income couples each earning $100,000 are stressed because of the private-school bill. They would like to send their kids to public schools, but they really don't trust them. So education becomes a quality-of-life issue."

Activists latched onto the Fenty bill, packing the council chamber for a July public hearing. "People said it was crazy, unworkable," Borbely said, but it was something concrete to fight for. "Without that bill, we would be a bunch of advocates screaming in the wind," he said.

On July 14, the finance committee voted. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) was absent. Patterson voted yes. And, in a bizarre piece of political theater, Evans, mayoral candidate Vincent B. Orange Sr. (D-Ward 5) and Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6) criticized the bill, then declined to vote yea or nay. They registered "present," and the bill survived on a vote of 1 to 0.

In a recent interview, Evans said he couldn't vote for the measure because it "didn't make any sense."

"I tried to explain to everyone why it didn't make any sense, but nobody would listen. So, I just said, 'Okay, we'll just pass the bill,' " Evans said. "Maybe we should have voted it down, but I thought the end result couldn't have been better."

The end result is a measure that has been completely reworked, first by Patterson -- who proposed funding it with new taxes and by delaying a planned cut in income taxes -- and finally by Evans.

The final product guarantees $200 million a year for modernization. About half would come from the existing capital budget, which the mayor would be required to maintain at $100 million. The other half would come from sales tax revenue currently dedicated to other purposes, leaving a hole in the budget that would be filled with future surpluses, if any.

Gandhi must decide this month whether the city will have enough cash to make the bill work for the first five years. If the answer is no, Williams has promised to find new revenue or spending cuts in the budget he is preparing, his spokesman Vince Morris said.

The bill also would address one of the primary concerns about giving school officials significant new funds by creating a nine-member advisory board to oversee spending and raise alarms if the cash is wasted or misspent. It also requires school officials to lay out a strategy for efficiently spending the money by May 1.

Cropp and Patterson said the strategy must demonstrate the will to address the politically sensitive issue of closing underused schools. "We do not need to restore or renovate or modernize empty buildings," Cropp said.

In the end, Cropp said, she, Evans and Patterson did more to advance school modernization than Fenty did. Though the bill bears Fenty's name, he "never worked on it," Cropp said in an interview. "He threw it out there and then went to rallies."

Fenty said he's not looking for credit. "Here's my quote: The bill is consistent with the priorities of the people of the District of Columbia. People find the schools a complete embarrassment," he said.

"When you throw that out there and people have a chance to rally around it, the voice of the public -- which is what we're supposed to pay attention to -- was extremely passionate."