DC Mayor Adrian Fenty has this pseudo-plan called the "buff-and-scrub" program to essentially beautify schools.
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Smith, whose firm, William C. Smith & Co., spent $150,000 at Ballou High School last summer, said developers thought last year's effort was a "one-time deal."
"The city needs to get out a clear message," Smith said. "We need to get our hands around what the long-term plan is."
According to the Washington Post, the kinds of improvements that the buff-and-scrub program includes are cosmetic, janitorial. After trying my best to be a tutor with Coaching for College this semester at Shaw Middle School, I can tell you that these are not unnecessary changes - Shaw was painted in the last couple of years, it looks like a turquoise, orange, and yellow prison for the most part, with metal detectors at the entrances and brightly colored bars on the windows - but I have to say, the girls I spent time with on Saturday mornings seemed like they could benefit from something else.
The first thought I had when I went for the first time in January was that it looked like a prison. Even Shepard looked better than that. What's that maxim, if you get treated like something long enough, that's how you will begin to act before long? One of the girls I spent time with said it felt like jail. I asked why she came on the weekends for CFC if she hated it so much (we meet in the yellow and orange cafeteria in the basement of the building). She said, because she wants to leave she has to come, she wants to go away to college, so she has to come.
The entire CFC experience was interesting - frustrating, and oddly inspiring. The problems I saw with the weekly meetings became, over the course of the semester, reasons for me to not want to go. After walking back across town on yet another Saturday when my seventh-grader didn't show up for tutoring, I ranted and complained about how the program could be far more effective. I hated that I didn't want to return. All I could think about was how dedicated the coaches were, from such diverse backgrounds and interesting arrays of professions, sincere reasons why they would come week after week, and how inefficient and ineffective I felt. It bothered me how I wanted to help, but was instead frustrated. Over dinner, Alex Goolsby said, "Why don't you start your own? Fix its problems, make it better?" He is not the only one.
I don't know where to begin, except to comment on what is happening at Durham Academy this summer. Sam and I found out about this by accident, when a very effervescent Duke graduate told us about his summer. The summer program is for Durham Public Schools students, it begins for rising sixth graders to, generally, help them understand the power that they have to start their own organizations, do well in the public school system, and become leaders in their local communities. Anyone who is at all familiar with DPS could tell you this is a really wonderful cause and, from what we've seen so far, is locally mobilizing an entire regime of idealistic and motivated college students who sincerely want to create a force of change within a community that could really, really use it. Forrest, our informant, is teaching sixth-grade science this summer and two electives: martial arts and food science. He hopes that, within that environment of excitable and motivated college students, the middle school students can not only get a head start on their upcoming academic year, but start environmentally-friendly clubs and forces at their schools and in their homes.
I would like to salute the student speakers at GW's 2008 Commencement, both of whom gave very pointed remarks that mesh perfectly with the kind of life-philosophy that is developing inside my brain, up from my heart (or maybe it's the other way around). Either way, in her really gorgeous and accessible speech, Sara Ray commented on the inaccuracy of the general attitude toward our generation: that we are apathetic, reserved, quiet, distanced, and uncaring. If anything, our generation as a force is a testament to how much we do want to create change and help other people, in any way we can. Student U is just one place you can see it. I wonder if it can spread, if we could begin something like this in Washington?
In my current state of Liberal Idealist, I have to wonder if all people who end up making decisions about where money goes (re: public education) began here as well. Just like the First Lady says in Dave, do they all get involved to help people and just get caught up in bureaucracy? Lose sight of where they are going?
In Dave, Dave himself, pretending to be the president and "taking responsibility" for his illegalities (this sounds a lot more complicated than it is), comments to Congress that he was "hired to do a job" for the American people, "and just a temp job at that. I forgot that I had 250 million people paying me to make their lives a little bit better."
Ah, personal culpability, where are you now? We need you in so many places.
The other student speaker at Commencement was Christine Handy, who asked everyone to take a look at their own tables of contents, noting that we need particularly to inventory civility and integrity.
What if we could ask Mayor Fenty the most important of questions, like, "why are you closing so many elementary schools? Do you really think this is the best move for individual students?" In the same way I would like to ask the President, "would we move our military into another country if your daughters had to do it?"
