Author: Mary Filardo

D.C. Charter Closings are a Public Concern

it is the responsibility of the Council, not the PCSB to “safeguard funds, ensure positive outcomes for students, and provide for an efficient closure or asset acquisition”—the stated purpose of the Closure Amendment. The PCSB should have a role in this, but this proposed amendment is over-reach for PCSB and should be a worry to charters and to the public.

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DC Facilities Master Plan Testimony

Here we are, with substantial data, but still without an educational facilities plan.  I would like to suggest a way forward, which I think will provide tremendous promise for our city and schools. Give up on cross sector planning.  The charter sector has been more than clear—they do not want to coordinate planning and they are not required to collaborate….

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Modernize Existing Banneker HS

The $143 million in the District’s capital improvement plan (CIP) for Banneker HS could fully modernize the Euclid Street facility for 700 students AND provide a modern middle school at the Shaw site for families.  This option is educationally sound for Banneker and Shaw families.  It can be implemented the quickest, and is the most fiscally and environmentally responsible.  Let’s…

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Response to Recent Coverage of the District’s 2018 Educational Master Facilities Plan

Today the Washington City Paper published “D.C.’s Master Facilities Plan Will Shape the City’s Balance Between Neighborhood Schools and Charters,” a feature story on the District’s educational Master Facilities Plan (MFP). The article, written by freelance reporter Rachel Cohen, highlights many troubling aspects of the Mayor’s plan process, specifically failure to follow data transparency requirements in the Planning Actively for…

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Opportunity Zones Should Help Modernize Public School Facilities

Mary Filardo, 21st Century School Fund Jeff Vincent, Center for Cities + Schools In 2017, we founded [Re]Build America’s School Infrastructure Coalition (BASIC), a non-partisan coalition to advocate for a ten-year $100 billion investment as part of the nation’s critical infrastructure package. But reducing inequity in our nation’s public school facilities will take a variety of tools. These tools are…

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DC Legislation Aims to Ensure Objective Priorities for DCPS School Modernizations

The District of Columbia’s $3.7 billion initiative to modernize all DCPS school buildings, which began in the late 1990s, has not equitably allocated its school construction funding.  Schools in more affluent areas have had far greater investment than those in less economically privileged neighborhoods.  This problem is illustrated below, in the comparison of the lifetime budgets (FY1998 to FY2021) by…

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D.C. Auditor Releases Report on Duke Ellington High School’s Modernization Costs

May 31, 2016, the Office of the District of Columbia Auditor released a report on the DC Department of General Services management of the modernization of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. The Auditor found that the cost of the modernization project grew from $71 million to $178 million without a comprehensive review by the D.C. Council—the decision making…

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Mapping DC Capital Spending for Public School Facilities

21CSF examined actual and planned capital authorization for DCPS and public charter schools for the fiscal years 1998 through 2021. We partnered in this effort with a handful of generous and skilled free-lance volunteer coders from Code for DC to bring this data and information to the public on a webpage, For Generations to Come. The Code for DC volunteers…

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National Planning for PK-12 Infrastructure

The 21st Century School Fund and the Center for Cities + Schools at the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council and the National Council on School Facilities have launched a national initiative to find solutions to the equity and adequacy gaps highlighted in their recent 2016 State of…

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