Who is Tom Nida?

Complicated answer: Chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which will govern 58 public schools and a third of D.C. students come fall.

Questions about who’s going to run D.C.’s public schools consume us these days. Should the school board keep running the system? Should Mayor Adrian Fenty take a turn at making public education work for our children?

In this very public debate, we have largely overlooked the governance of the city’s burgeoning charter schools.

This week, the State Education Office issued its latest audit of the city’s school population. The charter schools’ enrollment rose 13 percent last year. Nearly 20,000 of the city’s students attend charter schools. Meanwhile, D.C.’s regular public schools lost nearly 5 percent of their students, according to the audit.

This news is a huge endorsement of the charter schools, which are financed by tax dollars but are not under the control of the central school bureaucracy. They are essentially independent schools run by public funds. So who’s watching the money and the quality of education provided by these schools?

Which brings us back to Thomas A. Nida, chairman of that board. Former Mayor Anthony Williams appointed him to the charter board in 2003. He became chair in 2005. Williams reappointed him to another four-year term in August, so Nida will be running things until 2010.

Who is this guy?

He was born 58 years ago in Alexandria, but his parents raised him in D.C. He graduated from Ann Beers Elementary, Kramer Junior High and Anacostia High, class of 1966.

“I’m the third generation of my family to graduate from D.C. public schools,” he tells me from his downtown office. Both parents graduated from Eastern High. His own children went to public schools in Virginia, but he now has a home in D.C.

Nida has no expertise or training as an educator. He got into charter schools by financing them “in the frontier days,” joining the board of the Arts and Technology Charter School, then the charter board.

His charter board is lean and cheap. It has a staff of 13 and a budget of $975,000. The difference between his board and the regular school board is that charter schools essentially run themselves, from hiring teachers to buying toilet paper.

Tom Nida and the Public Charter School Board are about to come under much more public scrutiny. In the fall, they take control of 18 charter schools now run by the D.C. school board, plus three new ones they have chartered, added to the 37 they now have. Nida and his group are favorites of Fenty and his education reformers.

What will change, especially after Capitol Hill activists protested they were not allowed to participate in last week’s board meeting?

Says D.C. Council Member Tommy Wells: “They’re not open enough.”

Says Nida: “We recognize the broader audience requires broader responsibility.”

He promises “open sessions at every meeting.”

And a much more public Tom Nida.

Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at hjaffe@washingtonian.com.