The Future of D.C. Public Schools: Traditional or Charter Education?

And Janey last year promised more autonomy to the principal and parents at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in Tenleytown after parents upset about budget cuts discussed converting the school to a charter.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), who supports the expansion of charters, said he has tried to protect the traditional system by increasing its budget and authorizing $1 billion to modernize aging facilities.

Still, some public school parents look at the gleaming facilities, freshly hired teachers and other amenities at charters and complain that officials are doing little to help traditional schools compete.

"What I'm angry about is why is it so easy for them to get funding when it's so hard for us to get funding at the local schools, the schools that are working, the schools that are doing well," said Maureen Diner, a parent at Ross Elementary who is on the waiting list at Capital City. "Parents aren't going to charter schools because of the philosophy. Parents are going to charter schools because they know there will be art and phys ed and no teaching to the test."

The notion that traditional schools are being shortchanged is at the heart of the Save Our Schools lawsuit. The suit claims that school officials helped the mainly white and middle-class founders of Two Rivers avoid predominantly African American neighborhood schools. In addition to other support, school officials permitted Two Rivers to move into half of a building occupied by Eliot Junior High, an underenrolled school near RFK Stadium.

When the charter opened in 2004, the contrast was stark: Two Rivers students, many of them white, passed through a bright blue door to a freshly renovated space filled with art, bright lights and highly motivated teachers. Eliot students, all of them black, passed through a separate door into a dim and dingy building with roaches in the cafeteria and a stench in the bathrooms.

Two Rivers Principal Jessica Wodatch, a D.C. native who attended city schools, denies that the school was founded for white children. Instead, she said, parents wanted to create a place free of bureaucratic red tape where teachers could focus on educating children.

Two Rivers has attracted a diverse student body of about 200 children, about half black and a third white, and has a waiting list of 400. Among the students are Sondra Phillips-Gilbert's two children. She said she pulled her son out of nearby Gibbs Elementary after classmates assaulted him three times. The school was also plagued by mold and mildew, she said.

At Two Rivers, Phillips-Gilbert said, her son is thriving and the school welcomes her involvement.

"I don't have money for a private school. If you get rid of charter schools, you're telling the poor children that they're going to have to be locked up in this incompetent school district that doesn't care about them or their parents," she said. "Don't punish the charter schools because our children have an option. If you don't like to see thousands of students leaving DCPS, then do something."