Courtney Mabeus, The Examiner
2007-08-14 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

Two months after taking on day-to-day leadership of the troubled D.C. Public Schools, Chancellor Michelle Rhee counts among her early successes laying the foundation for greater communication with parents and educators.

Rhee has crisscrossed the District with a series of town hall and “living room” chats that have largely impressed participants. In doing so, education officials and parents have said Rhee has given a face to the otherwise faceless bureaucracy.

“First of all, we have to acknowledge [that] what we are getting from her is something that we haven’t been getting from the administration, which is face-to-face contact,” said Zein El-Amine, a member of Save Our Schools, an organization that opposed Mayor Adrian Fenty’s takeover.

“I can’t say [there’s] transparency yet, but we are getting face-to-face interaction with her,” said El-Amine, who said he is cautiously optimistic about Rhee’s success.

But while Rhee may have succeeded in charming some naysayers early on, local education officials and experts say the honeymoon among Rhee, parents and educators could soon end.

Rhee has been forced to delay massive overhauls in teacher benchmarks and in how the city recruits and retains its educators because of immediate needs for opening day Aug. 27, she has said. How she handles those actions will be more telling, some people said.

“We will not evaluate her until after school opens,” said Washington Teacher’s Union Vice President Nathan Saunders. “The proof has got to be in the pudding. That is the first reflection of progress.”

Saunders, whose union represents more than 4,000 teachers, said he has been satisfied with Rhee’s comments that new teachers will be paid on time and that supplies promised under their contracts will be delivered in a more timely manner.

But Saunders said it will take until some time during the next school year before it will be possible to judge Rhee.

Still, some dissent already appears to be growing.

El-Amine said he is growing tired of what he called a public “sensationalizing” of problems discovered within the schools by Fenty and Rhee.

El-Amine called it a “farce” that they waited until August to visit a warehouse where Rhee said she discovered thousands of textbooks after having already warned that thousands of children could start school without them.

“It’s kind of a set up to catalogue the miseries of the school, which happens with every administration,” El-Amine said.

cmabeus@dcexaminer.com