Mayor Adrian Fenty flatly dismissed giving the D.C. Council a vote on every planned closure of a D.C. Public School as proposed by a pair of council members this week.
“The job of the legislature is to make sure that the executive makes the schools excellent,” Fenty said in an interview with The Examiner. “So, I think everyone agrees on that. They have to oversee, make sure we’re doing our job. We actually have to do the work.”
Fenty won unprecedented control of the schools early in his administration with the council’s approval, and most major education-related decisions now rest in the executive. But the council has grown increasingly frustrated with the mayor’s decision-making style, which often leaves the legislature out until the last moment.
The issue re-emerged in late November, when Fenty and DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced 23 schools would be shuttered in 2008 due to declining enrollment. The council learned of the plan the night before it was announced.
“We look impotent and uninformed and out of the loop,” Council Chairman Vincent Gray said during a recent oversight hearing.
He added: “We were partners in the beginning of this. … There’s no way we shouldn’t be involved.”
Councilmen Marion Barry and Harry Thomas pitched a bill Tuesday mandating that all school closures go through the council for approval. Thomas said he “signed up to be an equal partner” in the school reform effort.
Fenty was asked whether it’s a proposal he could support.
“No,” he said flatly.
The mayor told a lunchtime crowd in Georgetown on Wednesday that he expects the same council members who backed his school takeover will “resist these efforts” and reject the Barry-Thomas legislation.”Nothing would ever get done,” if a 13-member body had to deliberate every school decision, he said while a guest at Nathans’ Q&A Cafe with Carol Joynt.
“It’s a management decision,” he said of school closures, “rather than a legislative, budget or oversight decision.”
When you push a reform agenda, Fenty said, it’s “safe to expect there is going to be push back.”
