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| DC Statehood Greens Urge Mayor Williams to Provide Funding for 771 Threatened School Staff Members. |
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THE D.C. STATEHOOD GREEN PARTY MEDIA RELEASE WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Education activists in the D.C. Statehood Green Party called on Mayor Anthony Williams to provide the $21 million immediately to keep the current staffing in D.C. Public Schools through the rest of the 2003-2004 school year. Earlier this week, D.C. school officials announced that they plan to dismiss an estimated 771 employees by the end of January. "D.C. has the money to keep these teachers and other public school staff -- but we're spending it on a baseball stadium and on city bureaucratic positions created by Mayor Williams," said T.E. Smith, a D.C. public school parent, party member, and longtime D.C. statehood activist. "The deal for the new Mayor's mansion will ultimately cost $55 million, more than twice what we'd need to keep these positions." Statehood Greens noted that the layoffs, which will target one out of every ten teachers, will especially affect high schools. "The teachers who face losing their jobs are the ones D.C. just recently put the most effort into recruiting," said Michele Tingling-Clemmons, D.C. public school parent and member of the steering committee of the D.C. Statehood Green Party. "Losing them will dramatically increase class size. More students will fall through the cracks." "The Mayor knew perfectly well about the impending pay raises, about the looming crunch in teacher retirement, and about the number of teachers who were going to be recruited and hired at the beginning of the year," added Debby Hanrahan, Statehood Green and community representative on the Local School Restructuring Team for Ross Elementary School. "Why didn't he deal with this five months ago? He ignored public schools until the crisis broke. At the same time, the Mayor abandoned his promise to build state-of-the-art McKinley Technical High School, which should have opened in 2004, and to finance a rational maintenance program for existing public school facilities, especially those in the worst shape. D.C. parents and students have the right to be furious." Statehood Greens were appalled that Mayor Williams, along with City Council members Linda Cropp and Kevin Chavous, went behind the backs of the citizens of D.C. and sought line-item authority from Congress over the school budget, a change that would require a special amendment to the District's Home Rule Charter. "We can only interpret the Mayor's actions as a deliberate assault on the democratic rights of D.C. citizens and an attempt to dismantle our public education system and the University of the District of Columbia," said Gail Dixon, former member of the D.C. School Board and member of the D.C. Statehood Green Party's education committee. "The firings and the school budget power grab are not isolated incidents. Mayor Williams has also attempted to get control over public school property. In collusion with Republicans in Congress, he wants to impose a school voucher plan, including money diverted from public to religious schools. He wants to wrest control over the D.C. School Board by converting it from a democratically elected into an all-appointed body." Statehood Greens called the Mayor's moves consistent with the designs of many Congressmembers to destroy public education, from pre-K to college, and compared them to his dismantling of D.C. General, the District's only full-service public health care facility, which precipitated the local hospital crisis. "The citizens of Washington, D.C. must exercise their own power and deal with this crisis decisively," said Dixon. "We predicted that Mayor Williams' second term would be more scandal-ridden and injurious to D.C. residents than his first term, and this has sadly come true. If this is the way our 'Education Mayor' is dealing with the school crisis that he himself created, he's making the growing recall effort very easy." MORE INFORMATION |
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