By this time of year in D.C. we would have heard reports from across the school system about broken pipes and busted furnaces and kids wearing jackets to school just to keep warm.
This year — silence.
And parents across town, from the Chase Chase to Deanwood, would be shopping for toilet paper and supplies to bring to school for the bathrooms that were either undersupplied or out of order.
This year — silence.
April would bring showers that would run into the schools through leaky roofs.
This year — all’s dry in the classrooms.
The reason for the silence is that Allen Lew and his team at the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization have fixed the furnaces and the plumbing and the bathrooms. And the roofs.
As Lew reported to the council last month, his “heating and boiler blitz” had the heaters working in all the schools. They also renovated athletic fields at 10 high schools and fixed up more playgrounds. They painted more than 100 schools and spent $600 million last fiscal year to clear out 25,000 work orders, some of which had been pending for more than a decade.
In short, Allen Lew gets stuff done.
This fact was evident in a report by the Public School Modernization Advisory Committee sent last month to Council Chairman Vince Gray. The panel was created by the first school-modernization law in 2006. The committee members, all volunteers, said they visited schools and talked to Lew.
“During our relationship with OPEFM we could not help but notice that Allen Lew has assembled a hardworking, talented staff comprising individuals with a wide range of talents who have provided the city the quality of workmanship and leadership it deserves,” the committee wrote.
But implicit in the essentially glowing report are questions that could bring grief to Lew and his grand plans to fix school buildings across town. Having finished the basic work of making bathrooms and furnaces and air conditioning units work, Lew and his crew are embarking on the more ambitious plans to renovate entire school buildings. They already have fixed five; 12 are in the planning stages.
The money is there. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi told the council in February that $1.7 billion is available for Lew and his team.
What’s missing, according to the advisory committee, is adequate planning among the executive branch’s planning and development arms, School Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Lew. How would Lew’s new buildings better fit into neighborhoods? Which ones need bigger gyms, better health clinics, modernized performance spaces?
It’s as if Lew, the builder, has been told to build and rebuild schools without much direction from Mayor Adrian Fenty or Rhee.
The missing person appears to be Victor Reinoso, whose job as deputy mayor of education would appear to be organizing the executive branch around the schools.
Where’s Victor?
