I caught up with Maria P. Jones, one of the chief anti-school closure activists, this morning. Jones is currently visiting family in New Orleans. But she still had some thoughts–and a lot of anger and perhaps wishful thinking–on Fenty’s revised school closure plan.

“He’s still playing games,” Jones said meaning Fenty. “That’s not doing anything for the people. You still have all of the schools that will remain open will be weakened by all the closures around them. Our stance is still the same. And that stance is: we are calling an immediate cease and desist of all the school closures. What we want to happen is to have a conversation that does not solely focus on school closures. The conversation—if it is about school reform—then all the major stakeholders should be involved. The teachers, the principals, the city council people, the parents, the students, the school board members, the chancellor. Everyone should be involved in that discussion. There are so many things we need to look at before we get to school closures.”

Among the items on Jones’ agenda:

*Equitable distribution of funds across all schools.
*To make sure the modernization money is allocated properly
*To look at the buildings, all of the vacant buildings where we could move DCPS staff and administration into those buildings.
*To put a cap or moratorium on new charter school openings.

“When we have a discussion like this, school closures may not enter into the conversation,” Jones says. “We’re going to help the Fenty Administration by changing the conversation.”

What about future protests, I asked.

“We’re always planning,” Jones said. “You are definitely going to see increased resistance.”

Stay tuned!

Still waiting for Hizzoner to show up here at Ron Brown Middle School in Northeast, but school honchos have passed out a press release detailing their school closure plans.

The skinny: Six schools will remain open. They are Bruce Monroe ES, Burroughs ES, Smothers ES, Brown JHS, Shaw JHS, and today’s host, Ron Brown Middle.

But! Four have been added to the closure list. They are Benning ES, Park View ES, Garnet-Patterson MS, and Merritt MS.

The early read is that this is a big win for Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans and a blow to Ward 1’s Jim Graham. Evans fought hard to keep Shaw open, and Graham is getting two additional schools closed.

More to come.

A week ago this evening, the D.C. Public Schools held 23 simultaneous meetings to discuss school closings. Afterward, DCPS put out a press release announcing that “more than” 411 people had attended. Here’s a breakout of those numbers, according to data provided by DCPS.

Of note: No one chose to testify at three of the meetings. Sixteen of 23 meetings were over in less than an hour. The hotspots seemed to be in Wards 1 (Bruce-Monroe ES), 2 (Shaw MS), and 5 (Young ES).

On the morning of Jan. 17, teachers and staff at Garnet-Patterson Middle School in Shaw thought their school remained safe from the dreaded D.C. public schools closure list. Hours later, their outlook changed.

Around 3 p.m., Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham placed a call to Garnet’s principal, Veda Usilton, letting her now that the plan to close Shaw Junior High School and ship its students and a gifted program over to Garnet could be in jeopardy. Schools Chancellor Michele Rhee, he said, was considering a swap: Shut down Garnet, keep Shaw open.

With a few hours to go before Rhee’s 23 simultaneous school-closure hearings—the public’s last chance to testify on the proposal—Graham wanted Garnet to stand up and show some muscle.

“I had advised her that I believed it was important that some support be established in the record,” he says.

That night, after Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans and a variety of other community figures testified on behalf of Shaw, a group of Garnet supporters spoke about how they were blindsided by their school’s potential closure.

“The good people of Shaw have had upwards of three months to gather support from the community. We had three hours. Here at Garnet-Patterson, we need the same time to gather our community members,” said one Garnet teacher.

Toward the end of the meeting, Rhee showed up and confirmed she was considering moving Garnet to the closure list. If the switch were to take place, she added, the Garnet community would get an opportunity for its own hearing.

Fisher assesses the low turnout at last night’s school meetings. He seems to think that this means there is little opposition to the school closings. You can read our own coverage of the school meetings here.

The Examiner reports that a bomb threat has closed the World Bank.

Prince of Petworth hates on some new development.

D.C. Public Schools honchos just put out a press release touting that “Hundreds Gather to Testify at DCPS Community Meetings.” Just how many? Well, “more than 411″ is what they say, which means that an average of (”more than”) 17.9 people showed up at each meeting.

At the meeting I went to, at LaSalle Elementary in Riggs Park, about 25 people showed. Only about a half-dozen chose to speak, however, and the meeting was over within 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, at the “People’s Meeting” at the John A. Wilson Building, organizers—who called for a boycott of the official DCPS meetings—touted a crowd around 200.

Possible spin for Chancellor Michelle Rhee: DCPS succeeded in keeping the meetings intimate!

Prince of Petworth posts a picture of a sweet porch sofa.

The Post reports that Fenty and Co. plan to hold 23 public hearings at the same time on January 17. Each meeting will address a school slated for closure.

Hitchens writes the most honest assessment of Bhutto (at least that I’ve seen). You can read it here.

DCist settles some X-mas-time parking enforcement issues.

Shadow Sen. Paul Strauss has made no bones about the fact that he’d like spots for him and his daughter in the city’s Verizon Center skybox for the Jan. 7 Hannah Montana concert.

Well, he asked. And he’s been denied.

“Neil Albert told me there’s no room,” Strauss says, referring to the deputy mayor for planning and economic development. That means Strauss won’t be sitting with Albert, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, City Administrator Dan Tangherlini, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and offspring.

Strauss says he’s moved on to Plan B: Appealing to the Verizon Center itself for any spare seats.

“I haven’t given up hope yet,” he says. (There’s always Plan C: A glimpse at StubHub reveals that two nosebleed-section tickets could be his for $240 apiece.)

Strauss says he’d love to take his daughter to future skybox events. “She’s 9,” he says, “so I hope there’ll be other opportunities.”

The D.C. Council earlier this afternoon approved the legislation reclassifying most DCPS central office employees as “at will,” meaning schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee can start firing them soon.

Voting against: Marion Barry, Phil Mendelson, Harry Thomas Jr.

The Post reports that Rhee’s proposals to give her authority to fire non-union employees at the DCPS central office and shutter nearly two dozen schools will pass through the council.

Prince of Petworth reports Marvin is set to expand. Do we have to now write something about the New U?

And, Now Anacostia offers a rundown of the Poplar Point proposals.

The Washington Business Journal has an interesting piece in this week’s issue about the development potential of school properties on the closure list. “At the top of the list might be Hine Junior High School, a 131,300 square-foot Capital Hill building at the corner of Eighth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE that is set snuggly among Eastern Market, the Metro station of the same name and the Barracks Row retail corridor,” writes reporter Jonathan O’Connell. The article also mentions three sites in the prime-for-development Brookland area. (And O’Connell did track down one developer, Jim Abdo of Abdo Development, willing to go on record saying he was “very interested in looking at what’s available.”) At least four buildings look safe from bulldozers, according to the article, the Ward 8 schools: Wilkinson Elementary, Douglass Transition Center, Green Elementary, P.R. Harris Educational Center.

Photo credit: Darrow Montgomery

Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee just took the mike at today’s D.C. Council school-system oversight hearing. Council Chairman Vincent Gray’s preamble, of course, took Rhee & Co. to task for the school-closings plan but started a line of questioning on the DCPS budget.

What came out early: The schools are facing an approximately $100 million shortfall on their nearly $1 billion budget just two months into the fiscal year. About $81 million of that would be covered by a supplemental appropriation asked for earlier in the fall (assuming the council grants it). The rest of the $20 million, however, is going to be harder to find. Between $5 million and $8 million, Rhee said, will likely come from taking currently vacant job positions off the books. For the rest, she said, her people are “looking at sort of supplies, furniture, that sort of thing.”

At-Large Councilmember David A. Catania picked up on Gray’s line of questioning and noted that this is nothing new for DCPS budgeting: “Almost every year, we seem there is a 10 percent ‘ask’ after the budget is passed,” he said. And, like only Catania can, he found a way to get a dig in at the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and its beleaguered chief, Natwar M. Gandhi. He noted that a CFO worth his salt would point out as soon as possible that the school system was outspending its budget. Not happening in this case, Catania alleges.

Now Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry’s putting Rhee through the paces: “She is doing some of the same things that got us in trouble before.”

I guess we can call the Rhee honeymoon officially over. Five months—not bad!

UPDATE, 2:10: Weak defense from Rhee on the botched school-closings announcement: “If I could control what the Washington Post writes, than we wouldn’t be in this position.”

Barry lays into her (rightly), pointing out the leak must have come from someone in her office. The Mayor-for-Life seems especially lucid today.

Gray’s point on finding the closings plan in the Post: “It’s simply become a symbol of the lack of communication with [council] members.”

Right now, a whole bunch of union leaders are lined up in front of the council dais to smack down on the plan from Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to make hundreds of employees at D.C. Public Schools headquarters “at will”—i.e., that they can be fired at any time for any reason management sees fit.

Call it the first big roadblock for the Fenty/Rhee juggernaut since the mayoral takover of the school system last spring. Several councilmembers have already expressed skepticism of the administration’s plan.

Most of the labor leaders—which include representatives of the Washington Teachers’ Union, the Metro Washington Council of the AFL/CIO, and locals of the Teamsters and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees—put forth a slippery-slope argument. None of the affected employees are unionized, but the concern among the union honchos is that their members are next.

Josh Williams of the local AFL/CIO council adapted the famous line of Lutheran minister Martin Niemöller about the Holocaust: “They came for the management workers, and we were silent. They came for the nonunion workers, and we were silent. Then they came for the unionized workers and we were on our own.”

A particularly interesting case in the WTU, whose members’ contract expired recently and is soon to begin negotiations with Rhee on a new employment agreement. President George Parker and General VP Nathan A. Saunders both testified against the legislation, citing a meeting Tuesday where more than 200 WTU members voted “overwhelmingly” to oppose the central-office firings. Last month, Saunders sent a letter to union leadership urging them to fight the “at-will” bill.

But there’s plenty of support out there, too: A previous panel at the hearing, composed of parents from Ross Elementary School in Dupont Circle, each strongly endorsed passing the Fenty/Rhee legislation.

Also of note: Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray took a pretty big smack himself at Fenty. Gray noted on the dais that mayoral aides wanted him to attempt passing the bill as emergency legislation at next Tuesday’s council meeting. (Emergency legislation goes into immediate effect after a single council vote.) When he refused, Gray says, mayoral staffers approached other councilmembers, trying to get someone else to introduce an emergency bill. No one bit, apparently.

Doing emergency legislation, he says, “would have been an incredibly disingenuous way of dealing with an issue of serious importance.”

This photo, from Wednesday’s announcement that the city will be spending a portion of a budget surplus on the D.C. Schools, is currently in rotation on the front page of dc.gov:

I know the Mayor & Co. don’t want to look too gleeful when spending taxpayer money, but jeez–turn those frowns upside down!

Look up, guys–you got a $155 million surplus! It’s not so bad!

This morning, more than 3,000 D.C. Public Schools teachers flooded into the Washington Convention Center for a “Welcome Back D.C. Educators” event put on by the city and the Washington Teachers’ Union.

After a continental breakfast (muffins, poppyseed bread), the teachers—who were paid to attend in lieu of finishing preparations at their schools—were treated to 90 minutes of speeches from the likes of Mayor Adrian Fenty, Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso, Council Chairman Vincent Gray, WTU President George Parker, and schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

Early on, in between their various platitudes, the speakers seemed to be jockeying to tell the virtually SRO crowd who had the most DCPS bona fides. Reinoso started out by immodestly mentioning his degrees from MIT and Georgetown but promising teachers that, in fact, it was his public-school education that meant the most to him. But when he mentioned Monday would be his oldest kid’s first day of school—”In so doing, I will become a DCPS parent”—he managed to win big applause. But Gray had him beat soundly on the chest-beating front, noting not only that he was a native Washingtonian and a “proud K to 12 product of the public education system of the District of Columbia,” but that his mother and wife are both teachers. It was Parker, though, who got the biggest rise out of the teachers, when he had them perform a Stuart Smalley-style affirmation: “I am a teacher. I am proud to be a teacher. Support me. Respect me….Pay me.”

After viewing a lengthy clip from the documentary Ballou, Rhee went through her own résumé: “In case there’s any confusion, I’m Korean. I’m 37 years old. And, no, I have never run a school system before. But…I used to be a teacher.” And that seemed to be good enough for the crowd, especially when she threw out red-meat digs at lazy, uncommunicative DCPS bureaucrats and those who suggest that installing air conditioning might be a waste of money. Afterward, she took questions for more than 20 minutes, and teachers swarmed her after she left the podium.

Rhee got kudos for her question-taking: “Didn’t have a book before her. Didn’t have anyone whispering in her ear,” said teacher Mary Penn-Beveney of Miner Elementary in Stanton Park.

After the big shots finished their spiels, teachers were scheduled to hear a keynote from West Virginia governor-turned-education activist Bob Wise, then to breakout into smaller sessions based on subject area. (Among the offerings: “So You Are Using School-Wide Data, But Are You Using the Data?”, “Managing Differentiated Instruction: Why, What and How,” and “Constructive Chaos”—that’s science tutorial, not a management seminar.) And they’ll be doing it all over again tomorrow.

Rick Stern, a special-ed teacher at Kramer Middle School in Anacostia, says that the event was worthwhile and that he likes what he’s hearing from Rhee. “It’s good she’s holding the central office accountable,” he says, though he’s concerned about losing two days to seminars. “Our classrooms are not prepared. Being here for two days is really going to screw you.”

At least they got a goodie bag out of it: a red tote emblazoned with the DCPS and WTU logos filled with file folders, three kinds of envelopes, sticky notes, and pens.