At the time the D.C. Council is weighing Mayor Adrian Fenty’s bid to take over the public school system, nearly half of the students who attend those schools live in two wards considered the District’s most disadvantaged and disenfranchised.

According to data provided by the 21st Century School Fund, a nonprofit organization that strives for improvement of urban public schools, about 26,000 students, or 44 percent of the District’s 59,000 public school pupils, lived east of the Anacostia River in Wards 7 and 8 in 2006. The data is based on student addresses.

The data might not come as a surprise to many District residents. Officials have long pointed to the two wards geographically east of the river as emblematic of the social and economic divide between the District’s richest and poorest residents. District Council Chairman Vincent Gray, a Ward 7 resident, campaigned on a platform of uniting the eastern and western wards to become “one city.”

That’s an idea that Board of Education President Robert Bobb, who recently proposed his own legislation to counter Fenty’s, said he supports.

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“We have to address the issues of poverty and employment and housing,” Bobb said. “And those are outside the school. Those are at the government level. You have to show parents that you’re making progress in their community. A parent will do whatever it takes to protect their child and to give their children the best opportunity to be educated.”

As the school data shows, the metaphor of the Anacostia as a dividing line might be the reality around the District’s 142 public schools.

“In a sense, there are two different school systems, [some] highly performing and then there’s the vast majority,” Councilman Phil Mendelson, D-At large, an opponent of Fenty’s takeover plan, said last week.

To be certain, there are well-performing schools in the District, but the majority of those tend to exist in wards where parents can afford greater involvement. In other schools, outside social services, sometimes called “wraparound” services, are vital.

“Wraparound services are critical,” Bobb said. “I would say on a scale of one to 10, they’re a 10.”

When District leaders discuss what needs to be done to improve the schools, oftentimes raising parental involvement sits near the top of the list. The problem is that many parents in Wards 7 and 8, which are more working-class, can’t afford to spare the time.

“I think DCPS has to accept some responsibility,” Councilman Kwame Brown, D-at large, said. “It’s not just the parents that are bad. ... It’s a two-way street here when we look at the school system.”

Brown lives in Ward 7 but sends his children to school in Ward 5 because his children made friends in community-sponsored “cooperative play” group as preschoolers, and he didn’t want to separate them.

“There are no cooperative plays east of the river,” Brown said.

Brown apparently is not alone in sending his children to another ward for school.

A comparison of student address data to school enrollment data per ward revealed that as many as 9,400 students may leave their homes for school in another ward each day. More than 6,800 — about 73 percent — of those students live east of the Anacostia.

The reasons for sending a child to school in another ward can vary. In many cases, the child lives just blocks from their feeder school but has to cross ward lines to attend there. District parents have the right to school choice under federal No Child Left Behind laws if their neighborhood school fails to meet Adequate Yearly Progress for two consecutive years. DCPS also allows parents to make out-of-boundary requests to send their child outside their neighborhood school district.

Last year, 83 of the District’s 142 public schools failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress.

Bobb, who opposes Fenty’s takeover plan, said he recently heard a story about a child living east of the river who travels each day to attend Oyster Elementary School in Ward 3.

“I think we have to do everything we can to bring our city together as one city,” Bobb said. “I definitely agree with that as a goal. But if I’m in Anacostia and the school is not meeting my child’s needs, I would definitely work with the school system and try to understand how to get my child into a school that’s going to meet his or her academic needs.

“What it says [is] that this is a larger community issue. It’s not just a school issue because there may be other things going on in that school.”

By the numbers

No. of students residing in each District Ward

» Ward 1: 5,879 — 10%

» Ward 2: 2,276 — 4%

» Ward 3: 2,668 — 4%

» Ward 4: 7,916 — 13%

» Ward 5: 8,213 — 14%

» Ward 6: 6,531 — 11%

» Ward 7: 11,743 — 20%

» Ward 8: 14,484 — 24%

» Total: 59,897

No. of District students per ward attending public charter schools

» Ward 1: 1,691 — 10%

» Ward 2: 296 — 2%

» Ward 3: 41 — 0%

» Ward 4: 2,435 — 15%

» Ward 5: 2,808 — 17%

» Ward 6: 1,327 — 8%

» Ward 7: 3,585 — 22%

» Ward 8: 4,006 — 24%

» Total: 16,530

cmabeus@dcexaminer.com