Schools the City Can Build On

As Another Year Gets Underway, System Looks To Use 3 Campuses as Models for Improvement

At Brightwood Elementary in Petworth, kindergarten teacher ValJean Blanco receives a warm welcome from her former students on the first day of classes for D.C. public schools. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

At McKinley Technology High School in Eckington yesterday, students celebrated the first day of school by walking on a makeshift red carpet as they entered a building recently transformed into a first-rate technology center. The specialty-school model will be replicated when the D.C. school system revamps several struggling high schools.

Uptown, officials at Brightwood Elementary in Petworth welcomed students to a newly renovated building, a $15.5 million showcase that will serve as a guide for the system's ambitious plan to spend $1 billion to refurbish dozens of dilapidated buildings.

And at Scott Montgomery Elementary in Shaw, last year's 24 fourth-graders enrolled as fifth-graders at KIPP DC: Will Academy, a new public charter school housed in the same building. The first-of-its-kind partnership will allow the high-achieving Knowledge Is Power Program to share teaching methods with Montgomery, a traditional public school with decreasing enrollment.

The schools are three examples of unprecedented changes that thousands of District youths encountered yesterday as they returned to a school system determined to improve student performance and its public reputation.

The 58,000-student system faces perennial problems such as dismal test scores and enrollment decline. And education is a top concern of voters who will elect a new mayor, D.C. Council chairman and school board president in November.

D.C. school leaders say they are introducing programs this year that will raise the quality of instruction, give students and teachers clean and updated schools and spur the type of innovation that can make a difference in the classroom.

"It's the year of reclamation," Superintendent Clifford B. Janey said yesterday. "We want to reclaim in a very real way the pride and success that we hear about D.C. public schools back in the day."

During an unusually hectic summer, school officials had to manage the regular duties of ordering replacement textbooks while repairing 10 newly consolidated schools and preparing teachers to introduce more rigorous science and social studies curricula.

The relatively smooth opening of 141 schools had a few mishaps.

Libraries in 43 schools did not open yesterday because renovation work was delayed after carpet was not installed on schedule, said Thomas M. Brady, the system's chief business operations officer. Until the libraries reopen late next month, he said, the schools will either convert another room into a temporary library or cart books to classrooms.

Officials said that water fountains at Watkins Elementary on Capitol Hill were shut off because of a problem with new filters but that bottled water was brought in.

McKinley Technology High

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At McKinley, returning students and teachers got the red-carpet treatment -- a strip of red plastic taped to the brick front walkway surrounded by balloons. Some strutted and others walked slowly, beaming with pride. A parent thought of the idea to celebrate the first senior class at the remade technology school, which will have 800 students this year.