D.C. Public Schools Play Catch-Up in Area Athletics

$10 Million Rehabilitation Project Gets Underway

From weight rooms like this one at Dunbar to sub-par playing facilities and antiquated administrative processes, District schools hope to rally. (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

At the beginning of each high school sports season, Allen Chin surveys the foot-high stacks of papers piled on a conference table or balanced on a couch or chairs serving as makeshift file cabinets in his office -- a converted first-floor classroom at Hardy Middle School in Northeast Washington -- and starts what he calls the most taxing part of his job as the executive director of the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association.

The papers are eligibility forms for the more than 13,000 students citywide, from elementary through high school, who want to participate in scholastic sports. Most school districts have a computerized database that weeds out the ineligible from the qualifiers; D.C. Public Schools asks Chin, 57, to certify students by reading through every form.

"Would I like to see some changes?" Chin said. "Sure. But you've got to deal with the hand you're dealt. . . . We do have an antiquated system."

That system is just one of the obstacles facing the DCIAA with Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) taking over the city's schools this week. Interviews with administrators, coaches and officials inside and out of the DCIAA point to three key areas that need to be addressed to get D.C.'s public league on equal footing with those in the rest of the region: management of facilities, an outdated system for determining eligibility and an expansion of the administrative staff.

"There will be some changes, and I'll leave it at that," Fenty said this week when asked how his takeover will affect school athletics. "But there will also be a large commitment of resources. We have some great coaches, but we have to give them more support."

Resources have long been the primary issue for the DCIAA, which uses a $3.188 million budget to sponsor interscholastic sports for grades 4 through 12 at more than 140 schools. More than one-third of the students in those grades participated in an athletic program in 2005-06, the most recent school year for which complete information is available. No other local school district provides interscholastic athletics below middle school.

By comparison, in Prince George's County, the budget for athletics at 31 middle schools and 22 high schools for this past school year was $4.107 million. In Montgomery County, nearly twice that amount was budgeted for athletics at 26 public high schools. Anne Arundel County spent $4.131 million for sports at its 12 high schools.

Fenty's administration has changed the approach to upgrading and maintaining the DCIAA's facilities. It started a month after he took office when Abdusalam Omer, chief of staff to former mayor Anthony A. Williams, was hired as the DCPS chief business operations officer. Part of his mandate is to focus on upgrade and repair operations.

The need for such a mandate was underscored in October when The Washington Post detailed the dilapidated conditions at Dunbar shortly before the Crimson Tide was set to host Coolidge in a football game broadcast live on ESPNU. In the wake of the coverage, then-superintendent Clifford B. Janey pledged $10 million to rehabilitate the grounds at Dunbar, as well as four other schools -- Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley, Coolidge and Wilson. Fannie Mae has agreed to fund a similar project at Ballou.

No action was taken for six months. Several school athletic directors said officials representing different DCPS divisions visited their schools, asked the same questions about the state of the facilities, but never set in motion any plans to renovate.

Noting that DCPS Office of Facilities Management had projects at nearly every city school, Omer looked elsewhere for help. He called Allen Y. Lew, the chief of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, who was spearheading construction of the Washington Nationals' new baseball stadium. Lew agreed to take on the project on the condition that DCPS budget funding for upkeep of facilities be vastly improved.

"The history of the schools system is that they don't maintain" the improvements, said Lew, who this week was appointed by Fenty to oversee the $2.3 billion schools modernization program. "We were willing to consider doing it as long as we'd maintain [the fields] the first two years or so, because my guess was they wouldn't maintain it."

Each of the six schools is promised a synthetic-turf playing field, new regulation-size track, new lighting, new bleachers and announcer's box, updated lockers and, for those that need it, a new scoreboard.

Ground was broken yesterday at Dunbar. The goal is to have all six schools completed by the end of September, perhaps half of them in time for the start of fall practice in mid-August. Chin said plans are underway to secure alternate fields for the schools whose home turf won't be ready for the start of practice.

Upon unveiling the blueprints for the renovations at a meeting at RFK Stadium on June 6, Lew told a group of DCIAA coaches and athletic directors, "We don't want any mistakes this time."

The DCIAA's eligibility process came under scrutiny last fall, when rumors surfaced in mid-October questioning the academic qualifications of two Ballou football players. There was speculation that the Knights, one of the city's most talented teams, would have to forfeit victories and not be eligible for the playoffs.

An investigation followed, and on Nov. 17, the night before the league semifinals, Janey's office announced the Knights would be allowed to play. The reason? A somewhat obscure DCPS bylaw that stated eligibility challenges must be made within the first 12 days of an advisory period.

"How many turn themselves in?" Chin asked rhetorically this month. "There's no other state or county that does [eligibility] this way. Administrators will not turn in their kids. They will support their coaches. . . . I want to be like the [neighboring] counties -- give me the eligibility lists and I'll trust you. But I can't trust them."

Chin, who taught social studies at Anacostia for 18 years, said the "human element" of reporting grades is the biggest problem. He said it is common for teachers to give a student an "incomplete," with the ability to change it later. But in the District's computerized database of student records -- D.C. STARS -- if an incomplete is not changed within 10 days, it automatically becomes an "F," rendering some students ineligible. Several DCIAA coaches and athletic directors, who asked not to be identified for fear of backlash from colleagues, said regardless of whether the failing grade was legitimate, students always challenge it. Often, the students -- or even the coaches -- try to persuade the teacher to give a grade that will maintain eligibility.

"It's a lack of integrity among the coaches," said one high school assistant principal. "When you want to win at any costs, you do what you want to do. People will close their eyes, and when they close their eyes, anything can happen."

Staff cutbacks are an additional problem facing Chin's office. When Chin took over city athletics in 1991, he had a full-time staff of seven to handle scheduling all transportation and games, providing security for events and hiring officials.

Today, Chin's staff numbers four, including himself and Jamila Watson, who is serving as the DCPS interim coordinator of athletic health care. Watson also is the athletic trainer at Wilson and Spingarn. Meantime, Chin has added the roles of ensuring all facilities and fields are in game shape, including marking the boundaries for each field, serving as the business manager for all DCIAA funds, and ordering and disbursing athletic supplies for all schools.

After speaking this week with auditors from the two consulting firms hired by Fenty to identify bureaucratic overlaps, Chin said: "They were really shocked that there were athletics below the high school level. They were unaware of the extent of our program. When they saw our budget, they couldn't believe it."

In most other school districts, athletic directors have responsibilities commensurate with an assistant principal. In the District, ADs must teach as well, and are not given the administrative responsibilities, which often fall to Chin's office. "They are grossly under-resourced and you see that in the administration of the programs," D.C. Council Chairman Vincent M. Gray (D) said. "It's always at the last minute. You've got to have an adequate number of people in there and you need people with creativity."