Photo by eshutt

Opponents of the planned closure of 15 schools gathered yesterday in front of the Wilson Building, where they outlined a legal strategy they hope will stop what they call a discriminatory blow against students of the city’s public school system.

In a legal memo, attorney Johnny Barnes said that the plan outlined last week by D.C. School Chancellor Kaya Henderson disproportionately targets minority and low-income students. According to numbers he cited, 93 percent of the 2,792 students that will be affected by the closure of the 15 schools are black, while 82 percent are low-income.

Citing a number of past legal precedents related to the treatment of minority and disabled students in the school system, Barnes said that Henderson’s planned closures—no matter how well-intended—more severely impacted certain groups of students than others. “These schools closings promote less educational opportunity for students of color and individuals with disabilities and at the same time continue to promote a dual and disparate school system with the D.C. Public Schools,” Barnes wrote in his memo.

Barnes and fellow opponents also rejected Henderson’s claim that smaller schools cost less and can provide better educational opportunities, complained that no substantial analysis of the 2008 closure of 23 schools has been completed and that the $8.5 million in annual savings from shuttering 15 schools will be largely illusory.

The announcement of the legal strategy took place only an hour before Henderson appeared before the D.C. Council’s newly re-formed Education Committee, which was holding its first public hearing in six years. During the session, Councilmember David Catania (I-At Large), who chairs the committee, lamented that it had been “missing in action” during its hiatus and that the D.C. public school system was approaching an “irreversible tipping point” where it would continue bleeding students and shrinking its footprint.

Catania and other councilmembers peppered Henderson with questions over how she planned to keep students in DCPS, especially when many parents with kids at closing schools might be attracted by the city’s growing charter school network. Henderson recognized that offering parents as many choices as possible was a good thing, but that the ability to choose was largely working against DCPS. (Charter school enrollment is highest in the wards that are seeing school closed; 54 percent of kids in Ward 5 attend charter schools, while that number hits 51 percent in Ward 7.)

She promised to be more aggressive in recruiting and keeping students in public schools, and said that closing the 15 schools and redirecting savings to additional programming and instruction would help her do that. In her presentation to the committee, she pushed back against claims by her opponents that smaller schools do not cost more to operate. Citing a June 2012 study by an outside group, Henderson said that small schools impose an annual “premium” of $21.7 million on the school system; additionally, small schools leave the entire system with a higher proportion of non-teacher staff than other school districts.

Henderson’s opponents said they will give her 30 days to respond to their concerns before filing a lawsuit against her plan; they did file a complaint with the D.C. Office of Human Rights yesterday and called for a moratorium on school closures moving forward.