Cropp Shifts On Control Of Schools

Cropp said she would demand that developers replace affordable housing units destroyed by development; redistribute some of the police force among neighborhoods; and support new hospital facilities -- especially focused on trauma and emergency medicine -- in Southeast and far Northeast. Cropp's campaign said she would be releasing more details on those issues and others in the next few weeks.

In her education platform, Cropp also said she would seek to provide pre-kindergarten education to all 3- and 4-year-olds, expand vocational education, create a principals training academy that would provide internships with business executives and courses at area universities, and help school system employees buy houses with government credit and mortgage assistance. Expanded pre-kindergarten education and vocational programs also have been championed by other mayoral candidates.

One of them, Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), has proposed appointing a deputy mayor for education and said he would consider pushing to take over the full school system if schools continued to underperform, but he would not do it piecemeal.

"If you do it, you do it the Bloomberg model," Fenty said, referring to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R), "where you establish the department of education and run the system."

Former Verizon executive and mayoral candidate Marie Johns has said that as mayor, she would seek to assume the day-to-day management functions of the school system related to ordering supplies and fixing buildings, but she would leave the role of education to the superintendent and school board.

Johns said Cropp's potential takeover of schools does not make sense because it is not clear what would happen to the schools once they were under the control of the administration.

"That may sound intriguing and have a nice ring to it," Johns said, "but I do not know what the heck it means."

Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), who chairs the council's education committee, said she is not in favor of an administration takeover. She said, however, that she is open to the idea of giving more responsibilities to the city's State Education Office, which was created four years ago to handle education functions usually associated with state governments. The Williams administration oversees that office.

Darlene Allen, president of the D.C. PTA, said that her organization does not generally support a mayoral takeover of schools but that it would be open to listening to a more detailed proposal from Cropp or any other candidate.