Tagged : Kaya Henderson RSS Feed

Found 6 blog entries tagged as "Kaya Henderson".

Earlier this year, Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced the closure of DC public schools due to budget pressure and low enrollment. The final list includes 15 schools, which is more than one in 10 public schools in the District. 

The elementary schools that will be closed for the next school year are Marshall Elementary School (Ward 5), Davis Elementary School (Ward 7), Kenilworth Elementary School (Ward 7), Ferebee-Hope Elementary School (Ward 8), and MC Terrell Elementary School (Ward 8). One school currently serving students through Grade 8, Winston Education Campus (Ward 7), is also slated to close. The closing middle schools include Shaw Middle School (Ward 1), MacFarland Middle School (Ward 4), and Ron Brown Middle School (Ward 7). The only high…

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Food services in DC Public Schools (DCPS) is changing due to staggering financial losses. In the 2011-2012 school year, the food services loss for all DCPS schools totaled $14.35 million. 

When DCPS operated its own food service in the 2007-2008 school year, schools were losing about $80,000 per year. But when a new vendor, Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality, took over food service, those loses skyrocketed to $115,447, and later stabilized at a deficit of $90,000 per school each year. Other local school systems do not suffer the same losses. In fact, some like Montgomery County, profit from their food services to the tune of $2 million. But Chartwells disputes the numbers in the DCPS food services audit.

DC public schools have aggressively promoted…

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Are there armed guards in DC schools? Yes and no. DC public schools do not have armed guards, but some private schools do.

Sidwell Friends School, a selective Quaker private school with a campus in the Tenleytown neighborhood and another campus in Bethesda, employs several armed guards. These guards do not include Secret Service protection for President Obama’s daughters. Rather, the guards exist for the protection of all students who attend the school since many of them have high profile parents.

Since the Sandy Hook shootings, there has been a great deal of discussion about armed teachers, administrators, and/or guards in public schools. However, DC Public School (DCPS) Chancellor Kaya Henderson is opposed to guns in her schools. She believes that…

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A new Education Committee was recently established by the DC Council. For the first time in six years, the DC Council has created a stand-alone Education Committee chaired by David Catania, an Independent who holds an at-large seat. In his first couple weeks as chairman of the Council’s Education Committee, Catania has already had meetings on organizational development, budgets, truancy, free lunch, and more.

Catania wants to bring transparency to the school budgets.  He bemoans the “total absence of transparency in our budgets. These numbers don’t add up, and you can’t track them.”  Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Kaya Henderson, says she is excited to work with Catania and wants “to be as transparent as possible. I want people to know where our money…

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DC school boundaries are a hot topic of debate. In fact, the chancellor of DC public schools, Kaya Henderson, says that the boundary issue is “the thing that, I think, I fear most.”

The boundaries define which children go to which public school. So children who live within the boundary for a particular school have the right to attend that school. If there are any openings after all the in-boundary children select a school, then others have the opportunity to apply. 

The existing DC public school boundaries and feeder patterns have been in existence since the 1970s. But the city of today is quite different than it was even 10 years ago, let alone 40!

As a whole, DC public schools have not been known for stellar academics, prompting many parents to…

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DC public school closings were announced in November of last year. At that time, the organization’s proposal included the closure of 20 schools due to low enrollment. 

Yesterday, on “The Kojo Nmandi Show,” the chancellor of DC public schools, Kaya Henderson, called the plan “a proposal around consolidations and reorganizations.” According to Henderson, the final list of DC public school closings may or may not include 20 schools, but the original 20 were identified due to under utilization and under enrollment. A school with low enrollment has the same expenses as a full school -- heat, janitorial services, security, overhead, administrators, non-classroom teachers, etc. So Henderson’s goal is to eliminate these facility expenses, and use the money to…

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