We could look at the Fiscal Year 2014 budget that the Mayor proposed yesterday and be desperately disappointed. After all it does nothing to correct the funding inequity between charters and the traditional school system. The charter facility allotment remains stuck at $3,000 per pupil ($2,800 by law) where it has been now for years. There is also no movement on freeing shuttered DCPS sites so they can be utilized by the alternative educational institutions that now educate 35,000 public school students. At the same time another $1.7 billion is suggested as part of the regular school modernization program, on top of the $1.5 billion that has already been spent. But we will not be focusing on these things today.
The per student funding for educating pupils goes up for both school systems by two percent, the second time in as many years that this is the case. And tucked into the wide-ranging proposals by Mayor Gray is a plan to allocate $50 million on building parks in D.C.'s NoMa neighborhood.
The additional of public recreation space in NoMa was the topic of one of the Two River Public Charter School's students' winter expeditions that I was extremely fortunate to have observed last January. Here's what I wrote at the time about the exciting academic work completed by these scholars:
"I started with an eighth grade class that had studied the use of public spaces going back to the time of ancient Athens, who then applied what they had learned to vacant land in the NoMa section of Washington, D.C. When I entered the room students were reading stories from notebooks they had written based upon reading The Odyssey. The kids were positioned at various stations throughout the room. But these were not one or two page works. These young people had created tales that filled the amount of space you would typically find in a chapter of a serious adult book of fiction. They were uniformly poised, confident, articulate, and proud of what they were sharing with the tightly packed crowd of people. One pupil even read the story of another classmate.
Once this portion of the presentation was completed the visitors to the school came together to learn of a student-led proposal for turning a parcel of land into a public park. The team of pupils had carefully considered various uses for the property from adding basketball courts to playground equipment. During the question and answer period one of the participants explained extemporaneously the valuable role parks play in society. Now it was the audience’s chance to return to the stations to see how other teams had tackled the same assignment."
I hope that Mayor Gray turns to these kids to design the new spaces. Now that they have received the attention of the city's chief executive I have some other ideas for future expeditions that could greatly assist the local charter school movement. Congratulations to these outstanding students.
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