front page - editorial archives  - search - community

Native Intelligence
	Do you care about others' kids? (Published June 14, 2004) By DIANA WINTHROP

In June 2000, I attended Spingarn Senior High School's graduation with my husband to watch one of the young men in my neighborhood receive his diploma.

There were 119 students who received their diplomas that spring. It was also the same month that Mayor Anthony Williams was furiously campaigning for his proposal to reconfigure the school board by giving him authority to appoint half of its members.

A few weeks after the graduation ceremony, the mayor's plan narrowly won approval by 843 votes. It was also an election year for some members of the D.C. City Council, the school board, Congress and the president.

On June 9 of this year, I attended the graduation ceremony for Spingarn's Class of 2004. I watched the last of the young men we mentored receive his diploma. This time, there were only 61 students receiving their diplomas.

I know the great literary scholar; poet and civil rights activist Joel Elias Spingarn -- for whom the school was named in the early 1950s -- would have been disappointed.

Spingarn Senior High exists because of dark times in our history, when we had two school systems in the District -- one for African-Americans and another for white children. When its doors opened in the fall of 1952, it was part of an education complex in Northeast Washington that included an elementary school, a middle school, a vocational school and a high school.

In 1954, Spingarn's first class graduated. While the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, handed down that year by the U.S. Supreme Court, did not affect the quality of their education, it should have had a profound impact on the quality of education for the students who graduated this year. Sadly it really hasn’t.

The Class of 2004 entered the ninth grade when Mayor Williams said education was his top priority. What we have seen the past four years is that the well-being of our children has taken a back seat to politics and the stature of our elected officials. The mayor has spent more time dismantling public education in the District than building a quality system.

During the past four years, Spingarn students have been saddled with little parent involvement because -- in part, according to some parents -- the school's principals have been hostile to parents. The alumni association took its lead from the principal. According to one officer of the alumni association, they group "didn’t get involved with the education side in the school."

What few residents will openly admit is that Spingarn’s students, who primarily come from working-class families, are considered politically expendable by this mayor and city council. The Spingarn Alumni Association has provided financial support for trips, sports uniforms and worked hard to help the students obtain scholarships for college. But they have been silent about the quality of education the young people receive at the institution.

Attending Spingarn during the past school year was unbearable, according to some of the students, because students from Phelps Career Senior High were moved into the school while renovations occurred at their vocational school. It was either too hot or too cold. The education complex, which was once known as "a shining city on the hill, overlooking the historic Langston public golf course, is now a sad reminder of what Joel Elias Spingarn once advocated.

The rumor du jour on the street is that Spingarn and the entire education complex sit on one of the last prime land parcels in the District. That, say some neighboring residents, is the reason why Spingarn has languished and why the students graduating from the school are ill-prepared to meet the challenges in a competitive society.

Parents in better-off neighborhoods also have been all-too-silent until recently, when the mayor’s "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" suddenly affected their neighborhood schools. A walkout and protest at Banneker Senior High, one the District's excellent schools, and a recent protest by the Capitol Hill Cluster schools received more public attention than any complaints from less-well-off schools during the past four years.

Let’s face it: Money, votes and white parents' concerns are -- sadly -- what receive attention from this mayor and the local news media. Why not just admit that children from working-class families aren’t as important as those from better-off ones? That’s the attitude that the mayor and council have displayed by their actions in the past four years.

Spingarn students receive little or no attention from the mayor or the city council or even the school board. The politicians have all been bickering too much. And council members such as education committee Chairman Kevin Chavous, D-Ward 7, and Sharon Ambrose, D-Ward 6, made it clear that they are more concerned with early childhood education. In essence, they behaved as if it were too late for the kids who are teenagers. Our elected officials would not publicly say it -- but it's fairly obvious -- that they have given up on young people like the ones attending Spingarn. By not focusing enough on these kids' concerns, they show that they think these kids are disposable.

New D.C. residents who have been buying up housing and renovating in some neighborhoods, such as Shaw and parts of Northeast Washington near Capitol Hill, have not shown any interest in improving existing schools. Instead, they have moved to open their own charter schools while leaving the other children behind.

If only those new residents of the gentrified Northeast neighborhoods had spent some energy during the past four years advocating for quality education for the Spingarn students as well as their own, we all would be better off as D.C. residents today.

I hope that parents, residents and, especially, the young people entering Spingarn in the fall receive a better deal. They deserve much better -- and a community that cares as much about their futures as those of young people in other sections of the city.

***

Diana Winthrop is a native Washingtonian. Contact her at diana@thecommondenominator.com.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator