Bad news for DC Public Schools: Mary Levy is back. The perennial watchdog of school funding has been quiet, but her investigations of spending within the city’s public school system are once again about to shed a harsh light. “I don’t think anyone controls that budget,” Levy says. “The school system just spends money.”
Money — as in the $25 million DCPS will tell the city council it must have during a hearing scheduled for Tuesday morning. The schools say they need the money in supplemental funding to finish out the school year.
Two questions for the city council, handling the matter as a committee of the whole, since it has no education committee:
» Should the public schools have to live within their means, as other agencies must? City bean counters tell me privately the answer is yes.
» If the council agrees to fork over $25 million to the public schools, must it also allocate more funds to charter schools, in equal per pupil funding, as mandated by law?
Levy might be the only person on the face of the Earth with the interest, time and ability to make sense of the school budget. She has been trying to get a fix on how the District spends money on education since 1989. For two decades she worked under the auspices of the Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights. In that time she created the per-pupil funding formula upon which the system bases its budget. She lost the lawyer’s gig in 2009 and has been consulting on public schools since. Vince Gray hired her to help the council make sense of the school budget back when he was council chairman.
Now the charter schools have asked Levy to compare public funding to the semi-independent charter schools to money that goes to DCPS. Under the congressional act that created the charters in 1996 and the council’s own law, funding levels are supposed to be equal. Levy has concluded in a detailed report that they are not, by about $100 million a year in favor of the public schools.
The money matters will be in dispute before the council Tuesday when it considers the D.C. public school system’s $25 million ask. Half of that is for increased costs of food; an estimated $3.4 million is to pay noninstuctional staff that was supposed to have been fired (really!); and nearly $3 million is for merit pay.
“The charters have to bear the same costs,” Levy tells me. “Why don’t they get the increase, too?”
Robert Cane, executive director of FOCUS, which advocates for charters, says they are weighing whether to file suit for equal funding. Levy asks more fundamental questions.
“The school system keeps getting more funding, but the money isn’t getting to the classroom,” she says. “The system receives more money, but the individual schools have less than before. How is it possible they get these increases, yet they are still screwing the local schools?”
Good questions for the council.
“You would think the council would apply more oversight,” she says, “be more resistant.”
Yes, you would.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
