D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty on Wednesday sought to lower expectations that all summer public school repairs would be finished in time for the return of students next week, arguing people would rather see work in progress than no work at all.
Every D.C. public school will open on time Monday even as renovations continue, Fenty said during a news conference outside Cardozo High School.
What most upsets people, he said, is “when nothing happens, when you walk into the school and it looks exactly as it did … from when you left in the spring.”
“When you come in and see work’s being done, and work in progress, I think that people have faith that people care, that change is coming,” the mayor said.
Allen Lew, executive director of the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization, is overseeing the effort to upgrade dozens of facilities prior to the first day of school, at a cost of more than $160 million.
The most ambitious work is going into 28 so-called “receiving schools,” which must be reconfigured to accept the students of two dozen schools that were closed in June. The projects were to be complete by Aug. 15. But the sheer magnitude of work and an extremely tight timeline, compounded by an ongoing mayor-D.C. Council feud over money, has slowed progress.
“The resources and the willpower are there,” said Ward 5 D.C. Councilman Harry Thomas Jr. “Whether or not time is on their side is another issue.”
Visits to 15 schools over the last two weeks have confirmed “major improvements” in some locations, as well as evidence that work isn’t being done at others, Council Chairman Vincent Gray wrote in a letter to Fenty dated Wednesday.
There is a new roof over Ballou High School, Gray wrote, while a “very poor roof” over the gym at MacFarland Middle School was simply patched, “raising questions of durability of the investment.”
Gray also said there were several unnecessary repairs, which he blamed on the “extreme rush to accomplish this work with little planning and, apparently, inadequate oversight of contractors.” That would include, he said, the razing of a health suite at one school “because a memorandum preventing the demolition never got to the job site.”
“Under current circumstances,” Gray wrote, “it appears that the District government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars without the necessary information and framework to make successful and lasting investments.”
Aides to Lew say that any work not completed by Monday will be continued after hours during the school year.
