If Adrian Fenty rolls to an easy victory for a second mayoral term, he will have his No. 1 school system reformer to thank.
That would not be Michelle Rhee.
No disrespect meant to Fenty’s public schools chancellor. She has taken on the monumental crusade of dismantling and rebuilding the academic side, from classrooms to administration. Her successes will come at the cost of bruising some voters and Fenty supporters. Fenty was brave to take on the schools, and Rhee will succeed, but the political upside is paltry in the short term.
The school reformer who will pay off well next election is Allen Lew, executive director of public education facilities modernization. Follow Fenty around town and you often find him at a new playground or school building. He will cut a ribbon or shove a spade in the ground on the average of once a week.
Says Lew: “We are cranking things out.” Lew and his small squad of executives will have done the design work, hired the contractors and made sure the job was done to perfection — then the mayor gets to take credit, as it should be. Take the new playground at the J.O. Wilson Elementary School. Wilson is in a tough part of town, not far from Trinidad and the notorious crack markets on Orleans Place. Before Lew scheduled construction, he met with the Wilson community.
“Often the community has good ideas about what it wants to do,” Lew tells me. “The results have been pretty good. It would compare well with anything around the country.”
Wilson neighbors got together with nonprofits and design firms. They presented Lew’s team with sketches and charrettes. Lew took many of the community’s cues, and the result is as much a theme park as a playground. “The community starts out with some distrust of working with the D.C. government,” Lew says, “but we have proven to be really good partners.”
Lew has proven his mettle to builders and designers across the country who once shunned D.C. contracts. “We are raising the bar, demanding a standard of excellence, and people see it.”
By the end of the year, Lew’s staff expects it will have spent $1 billion in school and playground construction. In addition to the new and renovated school buildings, kids can play on a new baseball diamond in Chevy Chase, a football field at Benning Terrace, new turf on high school athletic fields across the city; Lew has plans to renovate 10 more school playgrounds around town.
The payoff to Washingtonians is simple: Rather than hanging on corners and getting into trouble, kids have places to play and compete.
The payoff to Lew, who has already managed construction of the city’s convention center and Nationals Park, is strangers coming up to him in the frozen food section of the supermarket and saying: “Thanks. You are doing great stuff for the children.”
They don’t vote, but they count.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
