If you didn’t know there was an election today, you’re far from the only one. In the special election for District I school-board representative, writer Mary Lord was the only candidate on the ballot, and her campaign for a body eviscerated by Mayor Adrian Fenty’s schools takeover hasn’t elicited much turnout around Wards 1 and 2.

In the three years Arnold Goldberger has worked the polls at the Marie Reed Learning Center in Adams Morgan, he usually sees three or four hundred voters by the early afternoon. By that time on Tuesday, he’d seen eight.

“Normally when we open the polls at 7 a.m., there’s a line to the front door,” he says. “People in this precinct, they’re active. They vote.”

By 2:15, only six people had voted at Garnet-Patterson Middle School.

Brent Beemer, a 37-year-old government employee who lives in Logan Circle, was one of the few who turned out to vote. He says not knowing Lord couldn’t stop him from fulfilling his civic duty.

“We yell about our voting rights in this city all the time,” Beemer says. “So when given the chance to exercise them, I think that we should. It’s just the right thing to do.”

Louise Green, the precinct captain at Metropolitan Baptist Church and a 30-year-veteran poll worker, described the voter turnout for the special election as “very low.”

But there was some excitement to be found. Arlester Brown, precinct captain at Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, had seen more action than most in his ward. By 4 p.m., he’d processed a whopping 17 voters, and he’d even witnessed a protest. A voter came to the polls, took his ballot, and then refused to vote, according to Brown, saying he was protesting the polls being open for just one candidate.

Board of Elections and Ethics spokesperson Bill O’Field says he won’t take the protest of the $250,000 election personally. “It is an undervote, basically,” he says. “That’s the voter’s right.”

Back at Marie Reed, Goldberger didn’t get nearly so much action. “We’re going to petition the board…to give us extra pay for boredom,” he says.

References Available for Comment

When you’re a young, inexperienced administrator jumping into a demanding job, it’s always nice to have some good references. It’s even better if they are available for comment at your job announcement.

When Acting D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was introduced to the press today, Mayor Adrian Fenty made sure her patron was on hand. In response to a reporter’s question, Fenty said that the recommendation of New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein “carried great weight” in his decision to hire Rhee.

Klein later said that Rhee is “a visionary with a passion about civil rights.” He also endorsed Fenty for a second term saying that he hopes Rhee and Fenty can work together “for the next eight years.”

Rhee, 37, has never managed anything bigger than the 120-person nonprofit she works for called the New Teacher Project.

Fenty Forgets His Own Takeover

Robert Bobb still seems like he can’t pass on a chance to stick it to Fenty.

When it came time for Bobb to speak at the press conference introducing Rhee, Fenty introduced him as “School Board President Robert Bobb.”

Bobb was quick to correct Fenty when he stepped to the microphone. “Actually, Mr. Mayor, after 12:01 a.m. today I am president of the State Board of Education.”

As the Washington Post reported Tuesday night, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s school-takeover bill has cleared the Senate only to find another hurdle. The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics has ruled that D.C. resident Mary Spencer will have “about one week” to gather enough signatures to force a referendum on the question. She needs 20,000 of them, all by registered voters.

Good for her.

Only in a jurisdiction where people are used to having their rights trampled could an elected official snap his fingers and vaporize an elected instrumentality—yes, granted, with the help of the city’s legislature. The deal is this: I voted for Robert Bobb last year, and if city leaders want to strip him of the authority that I and many thousands of D.C. voters vested in him, they should have to do more than just rush a package through the council. This is not an alley-closing or a ceremonial resolution recognizing the accomplishments of the Turkey Thicket Citizens Association.

Ex-councilmember Vincent Orange wasn’t the only D.C. dealmaker who felt it necessary to be seen at the International Council of Shopping Centers convention.

Board of Education President Robert Bobb was on hand. According to sources, he was there to mingle with several of his consulting-gig clients. Ubiquitous lobbyist John Ray wouldn’t miss a chance to schmooze with the D.C. power brokers far away from the scrutiny.

And for the first time in a long time, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s frat brother and campaign worker Sinclair Skinner was seen chatting with his buddy the mayor and circulating among the conventioneers.

Resigning District 1 school-board rep Jeff Smith will be joining a local nonprofit:

Dear Friends, Colleagues, Supporters and Citizens:

Allow me to first thank the many of you who have forwarded encouraging words and well wishes to my family and I following my recent resignation announcement. Forgive my inability to answer them each individually. I write to provide my new contact information and to assure each of you that even following my departure tomorrow from the D.C. Board of Education, you will still have an equal partner in the ongoing struggle for our children’s right to self-determination. Despite various and attractive offers to apply my advocacy and educational experience to more traditional, yet socially less rewarding settings, I shall remain with the many of you who have chosen to leave the line to purchase a ticket on the bandwagon of complacency and indifference and instead pursue my continued path of service and agitation in an new venue.

Effective, Monday April 23rd, I will be assuming the post of Executive Director for another local bastion of educational advocacy with whose work many of you are probably already familiar – DC VOICE. The experience, contacts and community friends I have gained during my time on the Board of Education have assured me that the movement to improve public schools within the District of Columbia is an undertaking which I must commit my full time and energies. As Executive Director for DC VOICE, I will look to work with other community advocates and educational scholars to take this city to another level of educational organizing and provide the community with the information and tools it needs to continually hold the city accountable for educating its children.

The distance between the platform where I now sit and the slave plantation from which my ancestors escaped, is considerable, yet the difficulties to be overcome in reaching the next plateau are, even by comparison, not slight. In doing, we must remind ourselves to continually pay tribute to our children’s struggle. Our language of correction must be lead by language of compassion. And while we shall never accept it, we must work, at least to understand the atrocities being committed upon our youth by their communities, their society and even themselves.

Beginning Monday, I can be reached by emailing jsmith@dcvoice.org, by telephone at (202) 986-8548 or by visiting www.dcvoice.org .

I look forward to writing the next chapter of this city’s life alongside all of you.

Thankfully,

Jeff Smith

Despite a huge build-up by local media outlets, the council easily passed Mayor Adrian Fenty’s schools-takeover legislation with little drama. A second, final, vote on the bill is slated for next month.

Only At-Large Councilmembers Phil Mendelson and Carol Schwartz voted against the measure.

Fenty’s strategy of pushing the schools bill in the first few months of his administration is paying off. Mayor Anthony A. Williams didn’t go for the school takeover until he had been in office five years—just enough time to piss off a critical number of council colleagues.

That school vote became a referendum on Williams, not on the schools-takeover plan. He lost.

Lucky for Fenty, he hasn’t been in office long enough to screw anything up. The last big thing councilmembers can remember about the mayor is a simple Election Day tally: Fenty 56 percent; Cropp 31 percent.

When D.C. school board President Robert Bobb was lured to D.C. from Oakland, Calif., he brought along a few loyal subjects to make sure he had some friends in the city administrator’s suite.

Now that Bobb has moved from the bureaucratic to the elected realm, he’s decided one of those Oakland followers should come along too. Last week, he informed the board that he was hiring long-time confidant Ed Reiskin to serve in the newly created position of chief of staff for the Board of Education.

Reiskin is pretty comfy working for Bobb. He started with him as an assistant city manager in Oakland in 2000. He arrived in D.C. the same day as Bobb in late 2003 and rose through the ranks to eventually serve as deputy mayor for public safety and justice. “I’ve been with him almost seven years,” says Reiskin.

In an e-mail to board members last week, Bobb announced that Reiskin would be coming on for the next 110 days. Apparently, Bobb is looking for some short-term help for a period that is expected to be anything but relaxed.

“What I see is it’s a pretty intense time right now and there are a lot of demands being placed on the board,” says Reiskin.

Yeah, like a possible elimination of the body as we know it. Reiskin plans to leave the battle over who will run to schools to others. “Despite all the larger issues, the board was elected with a mandate to get things done,” he says. “That is what I expect to do.”

One candidate running in the May 1 special election for the D.C. School Board can at least claim to have luck on his side.

When Sekou Biddle showed up at the auction and raffle for Janney Elementary School in Tenleytown on Saturday night, he wasn’t making a campaign stop. The candidate for the vacant school board seat representing Wards 3 and 4 says he was really just looking to catch up with some friends and contribute to the school fundraiser.

Biddle plopped down $50 for one raffle ticket. “I was thinking I might win a toaster or something,” he says. “I was talking with a friend, when somebody came up to me and said, ‘Hey, they’re calling your name up there,’” says Biddle.

He was declared the winner of the top raffle prize of $5,000. Biddle hadn’t even looked at the ticket.

“I don’t know what to do with the money,” says Biddle, who isn’t exactly getting rich on the campaign trail, seeing as he took unpaid leave from his job to campaign. For a moment, Biddle considered staking all the money on another wager. “The other thought I had was to take it as a sign and dump it all into the campaign,” he said.

After the gamblers rush faded, Biddle decided it was no time to let it ride.

“I think I’m going to give some to help fund the dual-language program at my son’s school [Shepherd Elementary],” he says. “I might cover the expenses for another child.”

He also plans to make a contribution to Janney Elementary, but he doesn’t think it would be wise to give back the entire $5,000. “I would want to stay away from any perception that I am giving money to Janney to get votes from parents,” he says.

To kick off her campaign for the school-board presidency, Carolyn N. Graham had the perfect setup.

For her June 14 announcement, the current board vice president and ordained minister picked a venue with a killer view: McKinley Technology High School. She illustrated her campaign motto, “Together We Can,” by traveling around town and greeting parents as they scooped their children up on what was the last day of school.

Graham, a former D.C. deputy mayor for children, youth, families and elders, even had a chance to top off her big political show by running a scheduled board meeting the day of her announcement. The current president, Peggy Cooper Cafritz, after all, wouldn’t be around. She’s attending that serious overseas education policy conference called the FIFA World Cup.

But when the 3 p.m. meeting time rolled around last Wednesday, Graham was missing. She was out pressing the flesh while the board she hopes to lead conducted business, leaving the gavel to Secretary Victor Reinoso.

“That was the last day of school. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to be around children,” she says. “I wanted to launch before school was out.”

In other words, had Graham rushed back to the boardroom to chair the meeting, those photo ops with the kids would have had to wait until the fall. “I’m committed to changing the conversation. I wanted parents to know that before children went off in the various sundry directions for the summer,” she says.

The candidate claims she was intimately involved in discussions with board members about the main item on the June 14 agenda, a proposed partnership between the KIPP public charter school and Montgomery Elementary in Ward 2. The plan was approved 5-1.

Graham calls her no-show an aberration. “Look at my record,” she says. “I am rarely absent from board meetings.”

Photograph by Darrow Montgomery

As the administration of Mayor Anthony A. Williams winds to a close, his right-hand man, like the rest of the executive staff, is plotting his next move. Speculation about a possible political future for City Administrator Robert Bobb has run rampant ever since his boss said “No mas.” Most of the buzz was about a possible Bobb Squared mayoral run.

Now it’s time to add another possibility to the list of Bobb career possibilities: a run for school-board president.

On May 2, Bobb invited a handful of local education leaders to breakfast at the J.W. Marriott, ostensibly to talk about one of his passions: improving urban schools. Two of those munching on bacon and eggs were representatives of EdAction, a group of D.C. education professionals focused on recruiting and electing high-caliber candidates for the D.C. Board of Education. The group was behind the successful bids of former school board member Julie Mikuta and current board member Victor Reinoso.

EdAction member Abigail Smith, of Teach for America, is pretty clear about Bobb’s table talk. “He certainly was interested in what we were doing and what we are looking for in candidates,” says Smith. “The impression was he is open to lots of different options after he leaves [his current job].”

Kaya Henderson of the New Teacher Project broke bread with Bobb that morning, but she was reluctant to say how much of the meeting involved talk of a possible Bobb candidacy. “He is taking a broad look at what his life will look like, post–city administrator,” she says.

Other sources say a run for the school-board presidency is among the options being weighed by Bobb. The breakfast meeting involved more political talk that the participants are letting on, these sources say.

Bobb would bring some experience to an education job—he’s a 2005 graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, a rigorous executive management program designed to prepare senior executives to lead urban public school systems. Last spring, rumors swirled that he was being considered for the top schools job in his old stomping grounds of Oakland, Calif. At the time, he denied ever being a candidate for the job.

A superintendent’s job would certainly appeal to his pocketbook more than heading the Board of Education. In 2004, D.C. Public Schools Superintendent Clifford B. Janey signed a three-year contract that will pay him $250,000 per year plus performance bonuses. The school-board presidency, on the other hand, is a part-time position that pays $16,000. Bobb’s current $185,000 salary is the highest in the Wilson Building, according to city records.

As usual, Bobb is tight-lipped about his plans. He has a very logical explanation for breakfast with EdAction. “I wanted to talk to some people who know a lot about urban education,” he says. “Every one knows I have a strong interest in the schools.” Asked whether he was exploring a run for school-board president, Bobb says, “When I get ready to do something new, I’ll call you all and make an announcement.”

He refused to rule out a run for the school-board presidency but did rule out one future job prospect: He says he will not serve as city administrator under the next mayor.