(The “More Room On the Outside Interview” with Maria Jones won a DCTV Viewers’ Choice Award for “Best Community Focused Program.”)
At the height of their power, former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee closed 23 schools. The Fenty/Rhee goal had been 24. The parents at John Burroughs Elementary School in Northeast D.C., however, refused to allow their neighborhood school to be closed. Appearing on “More Room On the Outside” on DCTV this past June, Maria Jones, an activist and John Burroughs parent, discussed the effort to save the Ward 5 school.
“From [the moment we heard the school was slated for closure] to the point where Adrian Fenty made an announcement and said John Burroughs would remain open, we never slept, we barely ate,” Jones said. “My husband now has health problems because of the physical nature of that struggle. It was really a physical fight. It was mental, it was emotionally draining. We did everything that we could to get that school to remain open.”
Jones said, “Once I got passed the shock of it and we were just sitting there, just kind of absorbing it, then the wheels started turning, ‘Okay, what should we do?’ One parent said, ‘We’ve got to all get together and have a meeting.’ So we took her suggestion and we immediately called for an emergency meeting the next day, it was not even 24 hours later… What we did was we kind of ranted and raved for a little bit. I said, ‘Okay, let’s do about 20 minutes of this.’ And then… we said, ‘Well, let us strategize. What should we do? What do we need to do?'”
The group prepared for an upcoming town hall meeting with Rhee. Jones said, when Rhee explained “that John Burroughs would be closed and moved to Taft [the] crowd went crazy. We had our signs. We weren’t having it. We wouldn’t even let her talk. And the format of the meeting was set up in such a way where we were not allowed to ask questions, but she was just supposed to lay this plan out and we would sit there like dummies and accept it. There was no way. How could we do that? We had the moral obligation to ask questions for our youth.”
“This is a stabilized, beautiful, family school,” Jones said. “Historically it’s been in the community for years and years and years, and has been an institutional lynchpin… There’s no way that we’re just going to let you ram this down our throats. So we went crazy. We just changed the whole thing [up] and we managed to ask questions… we dominated. We snatched the mic from her and we let them have it. We were like, ‘No, John Burroughs will not be closed. You’re going to have a huge fight on your hands if you try to do that.’ We were called indignant by the Post. But, we got the media’s attention. And that’s what we tried to manage to do throughout the duration of the fight… stay in the media’s attention… We did what we had to do as far as media coverage to get our story out there, to let people know we were being unfairly targeted.”
“Our enrollment [at John Burroughs] was very strong. We had 250 students at the time. Our AYP scores were great,” Jones said. “We were twelfth in reading and I think fifteenth in math, all around the city out of 81 elementary schools.” But it wasn’t just John Burroughs that was unfairly targeted, said Jones. “Most of [the closed schools] were doing fairly well, the enrollment wasn’t that bad, maybe 200, 250 kids. But look at charter school enrollment, comparatively speaking. Some charter schools have thirty or forty kids, but they exist in a huge DCPS building. That’s not fair.”
Jones decried the lack of resources African American students in DCPS receive as compared to white DCPS students. “There is no [public] middle school in Ward 5. Not one… They’re all K through 8 or pre-K through 8. But now, if you look at Ward 6, okay, Ward 6 is in the middle of middle school reform. They are feeding resources – when I say ‘they,’ I’m talking about Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty – are pushing resources, feeding resources to these middle schools to embolden them, to strengthen them. They’re being offered International Baccalaureate programs in all of the middle schools.”
“So what is this disparity?” Jones asked. “Now, I’m sorry, Capitol Hill, Ward 6, is predominantly white… Ward 5 is a majority African American ward. Why the disparity? Why does this ward not have any middle school? It’s like South Africa… We don’t have anything. We don’t have resources, but then Ward 6 has everything… It’s unjust and it’s racist.”
(Directly following her June 29 appearance on “More Room On the Outside” on DCTV, Maria Jones sat down for a 15-minute audio interview, part of which aired on WPFW 89.3 FM Pacifica Radio.)
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