In Lieu of Planning, Patchwork

In the summer of 1995, D.C. school officials ordered maintenance foreman Jack Bond to repair half the roof at Fort Lincoln Elementary School. Bond objected, telling his supervisors that a private contractor was slated to do the same work in September.

No one listened. So his seven-man crew labored through hot, 10-hour days, stirring tar and laying down massive tiles at a cost of $600,000. They finished Aug. 28.

Two days later, a construction company ripped up their work and laid a new roof. Cost: $1.7 million. School officials confirm that two jobs went forward, but even today they have no idea why. "I wish I could say this was the worst I've seen in 29 years in the system," Bond said. "But it just keeps getting worse."

Decades of mismanagement and poor planning by senior managers -- and a lack of repairs -- have left many of the District's 152 public schools on the verge of collapse.

The poor conditions are dramatically underscored by thousands of fire code violations that shuttered District schools three times in the last three years. Just weeks ago, D.C. Superior Court Judge Kaye K. Christian temporarily closed three more schools.

But as Julius W. Becton Jr. has discovered since assuming control of the school system in November, problems run far deeper than a series of fire code violations.

The school system's new chief operations officer, Charles E. Williams, says he needs $86 million just to eliminate fire code violations. More broadly, the federal General Services Administration recently surveyed every D.C. public school -- the typical building is more than 50 years old -- and placed overall costs for repair or replacement at $2 billion.

Every conceivable problem plagues this aging stock.

James Walton, building manger for Wheatley Elementary School, has to keep the school's aging boiler system running.
(Post photo by Dudley M. Brooks)

Lead paint represents an immediate health hazard in many schools. Thirteen schools lack working air conditioners. Windows at many schools are nailed shut. Mold spores sprout in water-damaged kitchens. Asbestos, although wrapped, remains in every school.

School officials insist a lack of money lies at the root of those problems. They say that when Congress handed the schools to the District in 1968, it passed along precious few dollars to pay for the repair backlog. And they note that the schools have just $52.7 million available this year for repairs and daily maintenance.

"I need all the help I can get from anyone, starting with the White House," Williams said recently. "Our children are in harm's way."

But as Becton and Williams plead for more money, they are burdened by the legacy of past administrations.

Since 1985, analysts for the D.C. financial control board estimate, Congress and the D.C. Council have handed the schools $180 million for major repairs and reconstruction. Yet Franklin L. Smith, superintendent from 1991 to 1996, and his facilities chief, William McAfee, misspent and mismanaged much of that, according to the control board's recent report on the schools.

Beginning in 1991, Smith and his budget officials siphoned $15 million to $20 million worth of repair money to cover salaries of school bureaucrats, according to the new chief financial officer.

They expanded a Honeywell Inc. energy management contract from $1 million to $6 million. But when the D.C. schools reaped few, if any, energy savings, school officials simply canceled the contract, and Honeywell walked away. Honeywell put responsibility for the problem on the District.

"This was a partnership," said Kathy Hedin, Honeywell's director of corporate communications. "Its success depends on keeping things in operation. If people in local schools are overriding the controls, it won't deliver the results they need."

Smith and McAfee also gave a $30 million no-bid contract to ServiceMaster Corp., a private maintenance management firm. Becton recently terminated that contract, in part because reports in The Washington Post and an investigation by D.C. Inspector General Angela L. Avant found that school officials may have authorized $6 million in overpayments and double-billings to ServiceMaster.

Smith canceled an appointment to discuss that and other issues with The Post and did not reschedule or return repeated phone calls seeking comment. He also did not respond to a letter delivered to his home requesting an interview.

Abdusalam Omer, appointed chief financial officer for the schools last summer, wagged his head as he ticked off examples of wasted repair money. "What happened is really something of a moral crime," he said.

The system suffers another problem with its facilities, this one as grave as it is unlikely for a system facing such financial pressure: It has far too many schools.

In the early 1970s, the D.C. school board embarked on a massive building program -- even as student enrollment plummeted. Today, its elementary schools are, on average, one-fourth empty, high schools one-third empty and middle schools nearly half empty. The collection of half-used and vacant buildings costs the District tens of millions of dollars in energy and repair costs, school officials say.

"We needed to close and consolidate, but the school board buckled to pressure," said Edward Winner, a former deputy superintendent.

Becton, a retired Army general, pledges sweeping reform. He and Williams are examining 30 underused schools with an eye toward closing perhaps half of them by September. "Unless we can do something about demographics, and also about repair, why keep the schools open?" Becton told The Post recently.

Williams pledges to inspect every school personally in preparation for a 10-year repair and rebuilding plan to be released in the spring. It will be the first such plan in more than 20 years.

"The short-term focus will be to make the heat work and stop the leaks," Williams said. "But I'm going to require that the people who work for me operate on two levels: They must attend to emergency need and to a long-term fix."

An Eye on the Weather

D.C. school officials live in terror of the weather. Of rain that finds cracks in aging roofs and sends rivulets spilling down staircases, destroying walls and buckling tiles. And of cold that strains 80-year-old boilers and forces children in classrooms to wear coats and mittens.

During Lafayette Elementary School tour, D.C. Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), right, talks with Kate Hill of the Home and School Assoc. about the boiler system. (Post photo- Dudley M. Brooks)

Ninety percent of the District's schools are more than 25 years old; 25 were built in the 19th century. Across the District, from Lafayette Elementary School in the Chevy Chase neighborhood to Wheatley Elementary School in Trinidad to Wilkinson Elementary School in Southeast, schools are on life support.

In 10 schools, inspectors have condemned every boiler, forcing officials to rely on rented portable boilers. And principals in a dozen schools sometimes send children home because of lack of heat.

School officials note that new boilers cost $140,000 each. But a recent internal study reveals that it costs far more in the long run to rent one.

More to the point, officials neglected less costly boiler repairs. For instance, officials failed for years to replace the condensation systems in 30 school boilers. New condensation systems, which recycle hot water into boilers, cost about $12,000 per boiler. A working condensation system saves nearly $8,000 per boiler per year in energy costs -- and thus would pay for itself in about 1 1/2 years.

Such conditions exact a toll on workers.

At Taft Junior High School in Northwest, boiler engineer Raymond Sanders most days resembles nothing so much as a mad scientist, jury-rigging pipes and hoses, siphoning 220-degree water into sinks and cannibalizing a broken boiler for parts to keep two more running.

Barrel-chested, sweating as clouds of steam swirl around him, Sanders waves a fistful of unheeded two-year-old repair requests that warn of clogged pipes and exhausted pumps. "I can't take this," he said. "It's dangerous, and I'm working my damn buns off."

The view from the roofs is no better. A recent school district survey estimated that 90 roofs should be replaced.

Gloria Mathis points to a nonoperative thermostat in her kindergarten classroom at Wheatley Elementary School.
(Post photo by Dudley M. Brooks)

In the early 1990s, the D.C. Council allocated $63 million for roof repairs. But officials spent just 7 percent of that money on roofs and diverted much of the rest for salaries, control board analysts say. The school system's roofing crew -- which McAfee described as the best in the city -- has dwindled from 19 to seven since 1990.

At Marie Reed Learning Center in Adams-Morgan, 20-foot-wide puddles pool atop the school for weeks at a time because the drains sit six inches above the roof's surface. "This roof is a $400,000 birdbath," said Martin Proctor, a maintenance engineer at Marie Reed.

D.C. Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3) led the battle to replace the dilapidated roofs. Now she's chary of committing more money. "We kind of need to know where $63 million went," she said. "It says to me that there was no sound decision-making in the facilities area."

Of Roofs and Wiring

Planning, too, often eluded D.C. school officials, who frittered away millions on poorly conceived and supervised repairs, according to D.C. Council and control board analysts. A council hearing highlighted the problem.

How was it, Patterson asked in December, that school officials spent a quarter of their capital money in the last five years rewiring eight schools before replacing the roofs? Won't leaks destroy the wiring?

Brenda Dunston, deputy superintendent for facilities, allowed that it was not good planning and that leaks had destroyed new wiring at three schools. But she couldn't explain why it had happened that way.

"The electrical modifications got to the money first," she said, shrugging. "That was an unfortunate, out-of-sequence project. The roof work did not happen to go forward."

Dunston's vague phrasing is instructive. In the D.C. school system, it's rarely clear who failed to plan properly or why money was spent badly. But control board analysts say they have unearthed at least one unshakable fact: Smith and McAfee repeatedly failed to set clear, long-term priorities for repairs and rebuilding.

Three days after taking office in 1991, Smith promised to quickly unveil a blueprint to fix fire code violations. A year later, Smith spent $1.1 million on a computerized study of the condition of the system's facilities. This study, he said, would lay the groundwork for a five-year schedule of repairs and major construction.

Smith circulated the computer study privately to school board members, then discarded it, former aides say.

Three years later, parents at Peabody Elementary School in Capitol Hill asked McAfee where their school stood on his repair list. McAfee hedged, then acknowledged that no list existed. The Post reported the exchange at the time.

In November 1995, McAfee promised a school board committee that "an assessment will be done and work will be prioritized" for repairs, committee minutes show. It didn't happen.

McAfee blames systemwide chaos for leaving his promises stillborn. The District school system "was probably the worst system I'd ever seen. I couldn't ever get the money to make a five-year plan" for scheduling repairs.

His explanation failed to persuade former school employees, control board analysts and facilities experts who have reviewed his tenure.

McAfee said two former facilities employees with backgrounds in computer science made few attempts to rationalize a disordered repair system. And he submitted a $211 million capital budget request to the D.C. Council in 1994 that listed no priorities or schedule; it was merely a printout of every school repair needed.

Parent activist Mary Filard outside of Oyster Elementary School.
(Post photo by Bill O'Leary)

Mary Filardo, director of the 21st Century School Fund, an education consulting group that grew out of her efforts as a parent activist, spent much of 1995 working inside the facilities division on a master plan for the schools. She was frustrated at every turn. "They didn't want good information, and they didn't want plans," Filardo said. "It imposed a level of discipline that scared them."

McAfee left the school system for a job in the city's Housing Authority last February. He left the authority last month, at the request of the authority's receiver, David I. Gilmore.

A Decision to Build

Becton and chief operating officer Williams confront no thornier problem than how to dispose of 55 closed buildings and dozens more half-empty schools. And a chat with Lloyd Smith, executive director of the Marshall Heights Community Development Corp., reveals why so many D.C. residents distrust the intentions of school officials.

Not long ago, Smith looked at a vast and vacant school sprawled across a riverine hill in Anacostia and saw another block in the rebirth of his neighborhood.

Woodson Junior High School closed in 1993, but Smith convinced the University of the District of Columbia that a satellite campus should be opened there. A Metro stop sat across the street, a commercial strip just down the road.

The plan would "preserve a $6 million school," Lloyd Smith recalled. "It wasn't rocket science."

But in the year after Woodson closed, school officials ordered workers to rip out toilets and auditorium chairs for use at other schools. No one drained the pipes, which exploded and flooded that winter. UDC officials surveyed the mess and scrapped their plans.

Woodson sits vacant, its windows punched in, its playgrounds a graffiti memorial to dead gang members. "You'd have to pay me $6 million to take that building now," Smith said.

Woodson stands as a monument to a three-decade-old decision to embark on ambitious construction. The school board's decision seemed sensible at the time and took root in a National Capital Planning Commission study in 1967 that predicted enrollment would increase by 30,000 students to 185,000 by 1985.

But demographics made a mockery of the board's plans. Enrollment plummeted from 170,000 in 1970 to fewer than 80,000 today, leaving the District with 2 million more square feet of space than it had in 1970. And officials made one questionable decision after another about the sites. From 1991 to 1996, for example, officials pumped $2.45 million in repairs into 19 schools -- and then closed the schools.

At Armstrong School, which housed a now-defunct adult-education program, officials spent $1.3 million from 1991 to 1993, most of it on electrical modernization. At Buchanan Elementary School, officials spent $478,000 to replace boilers -- and closed the school the next year.

Vacant schools present another problem.

In 1982, the school board and Mayor Marion Barry agreed that they would lease or sell closed schools and use the ensuing income to fund capital repairs.

In 1993, then-D.C. Auditor Otis H. Troupe examined 43 leases written by school officials and dismissed the vast majority as giveaways. From 1990 to 1992, the school system collected $1.3 million from leases on 43 buildings, Troupe found.

Troupe discovered that school officials violated the leasing program by spending most of the rental income on office supplies and personnel services -- and not on school repairs.

"It was self-dealing, self-serving behavior at its worst," Troupe said recently.

School officials fared little better in their attempts to sell schools. The school board and Barry have sold two of 22 schools closed since 1989. And the board claimed the most valuable building, Franklin School at 13th and K streets NW, as its proposed headquarters.

School officials place the value of Franklin at $5 million to $8 million. They estimate that the sale of three or four other vacant schools might reap $15 million more.

Williams helped oversee the closings of military bases as a general with the Army Corps of Engineers. He has inspected 43 schools in his first 37 days on the job, and he views his civilian task as no less difficult or necessary than base closings.

"I want to make a decision based just on the facts," Williams said. "We're going to have a closure policy for schools and a revenue and reuse policy, and they'll go forward at the same time." And he vows to reexamine the plans for Franklin.

"The truth of the matter," Williams said, "is that where to put the school board is not my highest priority."

'A Power Struggle'

Reform of the system has long presented its own problems. For years, school officials treated even the most modest, parent-driven attempts to repair and build better schools with suspicion and hostility.

Thus, few parents knew what to make of Williams's visit last month to Oyster Elementary School, a decrepit school in upscale Woodley Park. He hobnobbed with parents and the school's well-regarded principal and hailed their innovative plan to allow a private developer to erect a high-rise building on the Oyster site at Calvert and 29th streets NW. In return, the developer would build a $5 million school in the new building or alongside it.

The parents even obtained grants so their project might serve as a model for public-private partnerships in Washington.

By itself, Williams's visit, and his subsequent, supportive letter to bidders, might seem unexceptional. But not in Washington.

"School officials have always said they loved the idea of finding private money," said Filardo, who founded the 21st Century School Fund as a spinoff of her efforts as a parent activist at Oyster. "But what's always been lacking is any operational commitment to move from saying, 'It's a good idea,' to doing it."

Before this year, D.C. school officials seemed willing to watch the project fail.

School officials let the specifications sit on their desks for months. They demanded the bilingual school install costly science labs -- a feature rejected by the parents. And when the school board approved the plan, officials waited nine months before requesting bids.

"It was a power struggle," Filardo says. "They [school officials] wanted to control it. . . . What they didn't understand was that they could kill this through bureaucratic inertia."

Filardo says similar partnerships could generate $30 million to $40 million in private money for new school construction in the District, helping parents to accept the closure of antiquated schools.

Such a program seems tailor-made for Williams and Becton, who speak often of public-private partnerships as the schools' salvation. "You have to demonstrate you can manage and innovate before you can put your hand out," Williams said. "But everyone in this town knows you need money."

Such words fall lightly on Filardo's ears. She enjoys the rare expression of support. But she's not ready to proclaim a new millennium, not yet. Too many have promised reform, and too few have delivered.

She notes that Becton and Williams have taken, of late, to demanding large infusions of cash as a precursor to reform -- justifiable demands but a difficult argument in the current political climate.

"Right now, Williams and Becton get credibility by being new," Filardo said. "But it's not that easy. They have to show they can walk through fire."