A city investigation spurred by the deaths of four young girls earlier this year found that the D.C. school system can’t account for hundreds of students who were cut from attendance rolls late last year, The Examiner has learned.
E-mails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that 745 children withdrew or were deleted from their schools’ rolls between Nov. 15 and Dec. 15.
Officials weren’t sure what happened to the children, and are scrambling to find them, according to the e-mails and city sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The missing dropouts were discovered by a team of city officials after the four school-age daughters of Banita Jacks were found dead in a Southeast home in January. Those girls had vanished from city schools largely unnoticed by officials. Jacks has been charged with murdering them.
Stung by revelations that D.C. bureaucrats ignored signs that the girls were in danger, Mayor Adrian Fenty orderedall his agencies to review their records to account for children.
District Councilwoman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, said she was disgusted that it took city education officials so long to begin tracking dropouts.
“It’s emblematic of the disarray of our record keeping in those schools,” she said. “It’s beyond shocking.”
State Superintendent Deborah L. Gist’s staff created a database program and discovered the missing dropouts, the e-mails state. The e-mails suggest that it was the first time D.C. recognized how many children were leaving the city’s schools.
John Stokes, spokesman for Gist, said that there may be an innocuous reason behind the large numbers. Many children in big cities often move from school to school, he said.
“It isn’t necessarily sinister,” Stokes said. “Those numbers are not surprising for an urban school district. Baltimore has 30 percent mobility.”
But Stokes acknowledged that the city hasn’t figured out where the 745 children went. The State Superintendent’s Office is now requiring every school in the District to assign “exit codes” to children who leave the rolls so that they can be tracked easily, he said.
Got a tip on D.C. schools, public or private? Call Bill Myers at 202-459-4956 or e-mail [email protected].
