Charter School in Talks to Join Regular System

For years, Hospitality searched for a more suitable location, meeting with brokers, D.C. Council members and public school officials to seek access to empty school buildings. All of the locations either were too expensive, unavailable or lacking adequate space, Durso said.

Janey's master education plan, his blueprint for raising student achievement, calls for the creation of several specialty high schools, including one focused on hospitality and tourism. About 120 students at Roosevelt take hospitality classes, and they could choose to participate in the new program, said Robert Kight, the school system's director of career and technical education.

"This is a win-win for us," Kight said.

Hospitality High is a special case, said Robert Cane, executive director of the charter advocacy group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. He said the arrangement highlights the difficulty charter schools encounter when applying to the school system for access to empty school buildings.

The school system considered several proposals from charter schools to lease or share space in six traditional schools that were closed last year, but none of those proposals was recommended by Janey to the school board for approval. By contrast, in November, the board authorized Janey to "take whatever steps are necessary" to open Hospitality as part of the school system in August 2007.

"If the charter school has something that DCPS wants, then DCPS finds the space," Cane said of the public school system. "But most charter schools don't have what DCPS wants; they just represent competition, and then all of a sudden, DCPS doesn't have any space."

Like all charter schools, Hospitality had to adopt the same graduation requirements as the school system, and students take citywide standardized tests. But Hospitality had flexibility to design elective courses around work experience that counts toward graduation.

In the past two years, Hospitality, in the Penn Quarter in Northwest, has had a 100 percent graduation rate and has sent more than 80 percent of its seniors to college, Durso said. Because the school has the strong support of the hotel industry, the students who didn't go on to college had job offers, Durso said.

Meanwhile, Hospitality continues to make do. On a recent day, 17 students had a lesson in answering hotel phones in a professional voice. The students practiced through role-playing, although they were without phones or a mock front desk.

"I try to make the lessons interactive," teacher Akoshia Yoba said, "since we don't have the actual equipment."