By Liane Scott, on November 28th, 2012 
The following is the latest television news coverage from the District’s local networks regarding the Bennett Vaughn vs Union Station Redevelopment Corporation lawsuit.
One of the District’s poorest neighborhoods is fighting City Hall’s proposal to the ground around historic Crummell School into a tour bus parking lot.
Judge Judith Macaluso came to see Ivy City with her own eyes. It’s one of the District’s poorest neighborhoods fighting City Hall’s turning the ground around historic Crummell School into a tour bus parking lot.
“They always did what they wanted to do to Ivy City and I hope they put a stop to it,” says Brenda Ingram-Best. The city already parks hundreds of school buses here, plus other city vehicles. Residents complain they’ll now have fumes from tour buses. “I have siblings who have respiratory problems,” says Stephen Scarborough. “I’m totally against the idea.” “My daughter is asthmatic. Literally yesterday she had dark circles under her eyes,” says Peta Gay Lewis.
Judge Macaluso would not answer questions. “It’s not a press conference,” she says. “This is just a viewing so I can understand the content in the courtroom.”
Activists have taken up the cause. “They went ahead and started construction,” says Parisa Norouzi. What if the city loses in court? “Let’s see what happens,” says Mayor Gray. “It’s pending at this stage. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to comment on it until this has been settled.”
Judge Macaluso will hear the case again in her courtroom Thursday.
A DC Superior Court judge left the bench to take a tour of Ivy City as residents near the historic Crummell School are fighting the bus depot lot being built.
A D.C. Superior Court judge visited the northeast D.C. neighborhood where residents are fighting the building of a bus depot near the an historic school.
The Alexander Crummell School near Okie and Kendall streets, built in 1911 and abandoned in 1980, is on the register of historic places, but its expansive yard off New York Avenue is being paved over for the District to use as a tour bus parking lot beginning in March.
Neighbors — some who went to the school — want a job center and community place for the mostly poor and struggling Ivy City neighborhood. They’ve gone to court to block the parking project.
“We were to get the building ready for the neighborhood,” said 82-year-old Remetter Freeman, who graduated from the school in 1941 and helped get it on the historic register. “We wanted to put in job training, lots of things. For the kids, a library.”
“There’s a lot of people around here that are sick and have respiratory problems,” former student Jeannette Carter said. “Then there’re the little kids. They don’t have nowhere to play but in the street. And when I was going to school, we used to have fun right there in the evenings and stuff, all kinds of programs and things we had to do.”
D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith Macaluso took a walking tour of the area to see what neighbors are complaining about. The suit in part alleges the city failed to follow city laws and the heavy bus exhaust is unsafe.
“The city government hasn’t done anything by way of surveys, assessing the problem in the community,” lawyer Johnny Barnes said. “People have lived here forever, and they’ve just been dumping on them because they’re low income and they haven’t voted in the past.”
Neighbors and activists say there’s already too much industrial use in a neighborhood where about 1,200 people struggle to live every day.
DC Judge Oversees Temporary Bus Depot Lawsuit Visits Ivy City
WASHINGTON -A D.C. Superior Court judge left her courtroom on Monday to get a good look at an issue that has many D.C. residents upset.
Judge Judith Macaluso toured the Ivy City section of Northeast D.C. It involves a case concerning a temporary bus depot that is being built in Ivy City. Members of the community have filed a lawsuit asking Judge Macaluso put a stop to it.
Residents believe the pollution created by the buses parked in the bus lot will cause health problems for those living nearby.
The temporary lot will store as many as 65 buses, which are typically used to travel the New York-D.C. route. The lot will be used until bus storage is created once Union Station undergoes a multi-billion dollar renovation.
When the temporary lot is . . . → Read More: Local TV Coverage of the Ivy City Bus Depot Lawsuit
By Guest Contributor, on November 27th, 2012 Cross-posted from The Washington Post
By RootDC Staff
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson stepped into her first major controversy when she announced last week that she wanted to close 20 public schools. Immediately, hundreds of parents and activists lined up to oppose her. One of the organizations that has worked long and hard to stop previous school closings is Empower DC. In an interview with The RootDC, Daniel del Pielago, an organizer for the group’s education campaign, argues that the closures will have a negative impact on thousands of school children largely because 40 percent of the students threatened with displacement this time were also affected by the 2008 school closings.
“Our school communities need stability, not repeated upheaval,” Vanessa Bertelli, chair of the Garrison Improvement Project Committee, with Milo Negri, 4, (in dark yellow), Leo Sank, 3, and Richard Sowell, 3, try to stay entertained at the Wilson Building as D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson talks during a review of school closures in Washington. Negri and Sank attend Garrison Elementary and Sowell attends Francis-Stevens Elementary. (Katherine Frey – THE WASHINGTON POST) he said in the interview. Calling the schools marked for closing “dead schools walking,” he said Henderson’s plan will have a detrimental impact on teacher and student morale.
Pielago said that the group has called for an immediate “moratorium on all school closures until a community driven process is put in place to make these tough decisions and a true study on the impact school closures have had on our city’s students and communities.” He added: “We are concerned that thousands of students left DCPS after the last round of school closures, the biggest dip in enrollment in recent history. This coupled with the uncontrolled growth of charter schools does not give us any confidence that more closures are necessary.”
A second round of public hearings is scheduled to be held Monday evening. Here are some further excerpts of his interview:
Why you are opposed to the school closings laid out by Chancellor Henderson?
This continuous cycle of school closures and attrition will lead to the loss of neighborhood public schools of right. Additionally. school closures have disproportionately affected communities of color. Of the 6,300 students affected by school closures in 2008, only 15 were white, while 99 percent were African American or Hispanic. This year, [based on a study done by local data analyst Mary Levy], out of the 3,800 students who will be displaced, only 36 are white students. Once again, the higher concentration of school closures are in Wards 5, 7 and 8. We feel this is unjust and actually leads to the destabilization of communities.
Some have argued that it’s ineffective to keep schools open that are (a) underperforming and (b) below capacity. In your view. what should be done with these schools, given the attendance/performance erosion cited in some schools?
Firstly, I think the communities who will be directly affected by these threats need to lead the conversations on solutions and not just be nominally included once decisions are made. For example, a school like Garrison Elementary, where parents are fighting and being active to improve programming so it can in turn raise enrollment, is not being given the time nor resources to make this happen.
A recent D.C. auditor report shows how the last round of closures actually cost our city more than originally estimated. The public has also not seen even a basic accounting on how much was saved from the last round and how it was used. I think we need to look at cutting down the inflated DCPS central office before we start to close the institutions our students and communities depend on.
I also think the mayor and City Council need to have a comprehensive plan for public education. This should include any DCPS school closings as well as recommendations for school boundary and feeder pattern changes. Charter school openings and closings should also be considered.
In an op-ed that appeared in The RootDC on Monday, Kevin Chavous, a former D.C. councilman and a senior adviser to the American Federation for Children, writes the following: “If school closures simply mean overcrowding already overburdened schools with more children and fewer resources to go around, we’re doing no better than when those underperforming schools were around in the first place. We must provide families with a legitimately better-quality option in lieu of where they were, and it’s also not fair to overburden teachers and students at . . . → Read More: D.C. school closures: An activist’s view
By Guest Contributor, on November 14th, 2012 As wave of projects begin to sprout, so do disputes
Cross-posted from the Washington Post Written by Jonathan O’Connell
New apartments and shops are spreading into neighborhoods across the Washington region, with developers looking to capitalize on a better-than-average economy and a massive influx of young adults.
Apartment hunters have wider options, more residents have grocery stores in their neighborhoods and, with dozens of new restaurants and bars, Washington has begun to change its reputation as a gray-suit government town.
Many residents are celebrating the changes. But others aren’t.
And as this new wave of development rises, a chasm between its champions and its skeptics is beginning to show.
In Northeast D.C., Ivy City residents have sued to try to prevent Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) from relocating a bus depot for dozens of private buses into their neighborhood to make way for upgrades at Union Station.
In Washington Highlands, one of the poorest parts of the District, public housing residents sued the D.C. Housing Authority out of concern that they would be permanently displaced from their homes when their units at Highland Dwellings were refurbished.
It isn’t just the low income or disenfranchised who are fighting back. In Wheaton, residents turned away a mixed-use proposal pushed by Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D). Residents in Reston have formed an advocacy group, Rescue Reston, and say they have gathered 650 signatures opposing the possible redevelopment of Reston National Golf Course.
There have always been battles between residents and the developers, planners and city officials proposing alterations to neighborhoods. But with the economy gaining steam and apartment construction booming, disputes that faded during the recession are beginning to boil again.
“I think in many ways it’s the same, but now we have many more examples of how these communities are getting screwed over,” said Parisa Norouzi, director of the community organizing group Empower D.C.
‘No trust’
Empower D.C. battled former mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s attempts to close excess schools and lease the buildings to developers, projects that Norouzi said were driven by “gentrification or private profit.” She says those battles have better prepared residents and organizers for disputes such as the bus relocation, which Empower D.C. and residents are fighting in D.C. Superior Court. “At this point, there is really no trust in the process,” she said.
A hearing on the case is expected Tuesday. A Gray spokesman declined to comment.
In other instances, the opponents to zoning changes or development are the well-heeled. Neighborhoods in wealthier parts of Northwest D.C. are raising concerns about parking shortages under proposed changes to the District’s zoning code, while in Reston the concern is a lack of green space should the golf course’s owner try to build a project to capitalize on the construction of two Silver Line Metro stations nearby.
Some Wheaton residents rejected plans to create a mixed-use downtown project because it might resemble the redevelopment of Silver Spring — a success to some but not others. “We know how many small businesses struggled and went out of business in Silver Spring,” Bob Schilke, owner of the Little Bitts Shop of cake supplies, told the Montgomery County Council in February.
Sometimes even the terms used to describe development have have taken on widely different meanings. The D.C. Housing Authority became the envy of other cities in winning seven grants under the federal HOPE VI program, which enabled the District to overhaul blighted public housing projects into mixed-income neighborhoods.
The agency’s renovation of Highland Dwellings, east of Bolling Air Force Base, isn’t a HOPE VI program and no market rate units are even being built. But spokeswoman Dena Michaelson said the agency could have done a better job making that clear to avoid the lawsuit it faced (and since settled).
By Liane Scott, on November 13th, 2012 
DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson is announcing the list of schools on the chopping block today. This despite the growing demand for a moratorium on school closings which haven’t resulted in any improvement in test scores or student achievement. In acknowledgment of today’s announcement, I’d like to remind Chancellor Henderson, the entire administration of Mayor Vincent Gray and public school stakeholders across the city of just a few reasons why this is such a contentious issue.
The epidemic of school closings is not limited to the District of Columbia. Education Week has published an article on school closings as a national issue. Part of that article is reproduced below.
School Shutdowns Trigger Growing Backlash In five cities, groups wage war on school shutdowns Crossposted from Education Week Written By Jaclyn Zubrzycki
As school closures are increasingly used as a remedy to budget woes and a solution to failing schools in many cities, debates are intensifying about their effect on student performance and well-being, on district finances, and on communities and the processes districts use to choose which schools will be shuttered.
Student and parent groups in Chicago, the District of Columbia, New York, Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia gathered in Washington late last month to call for a moratorium on school closings and filed separate complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights. In those complaints, the groups allege that in previous rounds of school closings, their districts have not been transparent and have been influenced by outside interests, such as charter school operators. They also argue that the closings have had a harmful and disparate impact on minority students and communities. Each of the districts has predicted new closures for the coming school year.
“This has become the strategy of first instance, not of last resort,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has affiliates in the cities…
The rest of this article can be found at the EdWeek.org.
The backlash described in the Education Week article made its way to Washington, DC and took the form of a march called the Journey for Educational Justice, which Grassroots Media Project Producers Ben King and Stephan Scarborough report on below. This is a longer version of a video that we posted on the blog a couple of weeks ago.
Finally, from the DC-based education blog Truth From the Trenches I’m cross-posting this article which I think is particularly relevant to today’s announcement. It should be noted that the creators of Truth From the Trenches are two DCPS teachers who go by pen names so as to avoid retribution for reporting their observations and opinions about DC Public School “reform.” What does that tell us?!
On the Chopping Block
Crossposted from Truth From the Trenches Written by Florence
While everyone is anticipating the proposed DCPS closure list set to be announced tomorrow, those of us who are working at schools that are at risk for closure have endured months of anxiety and turmoil. When a school is on the short list of closures, the academic year begins not with excitement but steeped in a cloud uncertainty that pervades every aspect of the learning environment. It is not an exaggeration to describe the feeling of working at a school that may be shut down at the end of the academic year similar to someone with their head in a guillotine waiting for the blade to drop.
It is important to note that many of the schools on the list have been on the chopping block for years. Not surprisingly, these schools usually have the least resources with the highest concentrations of academically and behaviorally challenged students. In most of these schools parent participation is minimal to non-existent and, therefore, unlike other schools with more involved and more well off parents who can raise tens of thousands of dollars (if not more) a year, these schools at risk for closure are not able to raise outside funds to supplement the schools’ budgets. Plus with low enrollments and DCPS recent per pupil spending cuts many of these schools do not have the adequate staffing and support needed for their high needs populations. With such uncertainty there are increased numbers parents jumping the sinking ship. Why stay in a school that is dying a slow death?
Instead of seriously trying to support these schools, most of the time it appears as if the chancellor makes a half hearted effort for show because in reality she wants . . . → Read More: Stay Tuned: DC Public School Closings Imminent
By Liane Scott, on November 12th, 2012 For pacifists and folks on the left generally, Veteran’s Day is not something we make a big deal about. One doesn’t want to appear to glorify war. Frankly, we do enough of that already here in the United States. On the other hand, one can look at Veteran’s Day as an opportunity to look at war for what it is, rather than glorifying it. Talking to veterans is one way to do this. This is the eighth segment in a series of videos of my fabulous Uncle Joe who joined the ancestors on June 18, 2012. He made it out of the Korean War without serious injury but he never forgot those who weren’t so lucky.
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