Testimony by Ramona Edelin, Ph.D. for the Hearing on the Budget Before the Committee on Education & Committee of the Whole
June 4, 2020
Chairman Mendelson, Chairman Grosso, and Members of the DC Council Committee on Education and Committee of the Whole, thank you for inviting my testimony today at this Joint Budget Oversight Hearing. I am Dr. Ramona Edelin; and for the past 14 years I have served as Executive Director of the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools, the Membership organization founded by Charter School Leaders in 2004 which has been their Collective Voice in matters of public policy, advocacy and strategic communications. As you may know, the Association and FOCUS are in the process of merging to form a powerful new charter school support organization ‒ the DC Charter School Alliance. I will be honored to serve as Senior Advisor to our new Executive Team and Membership.
Today, I would like to call your attention to three Budget considerations:
• The need for significant resources targeted to our students with the greatest needs, including mental health services;
• The expansion of solutions to our long-standing facilities challenges; and
• A city-wide communications outreach to Families to ensure that they enroll their students for school in the fall, including the free job training and career credentials offered by our Adult Charter Schools, so that our students and schools can prepare for a successful school year. Before I do so, however, I would like to commend our Mayor for the unequivocally strong statement she has made in support of education by proposing a 3% increase in the UPSFF and by honoring the multi-year commitment to increase the charter facilities allotment by 2.2% — even in this period of extreme financial exigency. We are proud to live and work in a CityState that prioritizes Health and Education and understands so clearly their relationship to Economic Recovery.
The need for significant resources targeted to our students with the greatest needs, including mental health services:
Councilmembers, TERROR is not too strong a concept to describe what far too many of our students, families and school staffs are and have been experiencing during the second half of this school year. None of us has faced the dread, isolation, sickness unto death, mourning, and episodic panic of a global pandemic before; certainly our children and young adults have not. Some of us older residents have endured the horror of lynching, vigilante violence, and cold- blooded murder at the hands of the police many times and know their centuries-old origins, but this period of unbridled racial hatred with killers pursuing African American men like hunters in the wild is certainly new to us all. Then, at the same time, our students are not permitted the comfort and personal reinforcement of those who are perhaps the most important people in their lives at their age — their friends. Even those who have Internet and smart phones miss their friends; and those who do not are bereft. If, in addition, they are surrounded by trauma, discord, hunger, shelter-insecurity or abuse at home or in their neighborhoods, the mental health implications are incalculable. The students we currently designate as “at risk”, as well as those who would be included if we expanded the definition, those who have special needs, and frankly, ALL of our students need systematic mental health supports at this time. They are terrified! And this condition has a profound impact on learning and well-being that schools will have to address. Our Schools should not have to choose between instruction and mental health supports. The $1.5 million allocated in our Mayor’s Budget, which will supplant not supplement, is not at all sufficient for this huge task.
The expansion of solutions to our long-standing facilities challenges
We appreciate our Mayor’s intention to release Wilkinson for charter school use, and to co- locate a charter school at Spingarn — and consider these intentions in accord with our campaign to End The List of thousands of students on waiting lists for high quality charter school seats while millions of square feet of public school buildings are vacant or drastically underutilized. We hope the Council will support these decisions; but will also work with us to release additional buildings, and to engage in systematic planning for co-location to ensure access and equity, in the most timely yet thoughtful way. We have had many discussions about this.
A city-wide communications outreach to Families to ensure that they enroll their students for school in the fall, including the free job training and career credentials offered by our Adult Charter Schools, so that our students and schools can prepare for a successful school year.
It is said that extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. We believe that declaration to be true about outreach to Families encouraging/urging them to enroll their students after the re-opening of schools in the fall. We would like to see our City — a partnership among the Executive, Legislative, Independent and Civic Sectors — work together to heavily promote enrollment in our public schools. School attendance is mandatory in the District of Columbia! Enroll now, so our students and schools can prepare for a successful school year. Attendance is not mandatory for our early childhood education learning centers, or for our schools serving adults, but they should be included in this campaign. Our Universal Pre-K reputation and reality attest to our commitment to beginning learning as early as possible, to help ensure educational success and close the race and income opportunity and achievement gaps. Central to economic recovery and fiscal soundness is the preparation of our workforce. Our Adult Charter Schools offer free training and credentialing courses that lead to good-paying jobs that our City needs, and to careers that are life-changing for students, their families and communities. Such an outreach campaign would be extraordinary. It is needed at this extraordinary time.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
