D.C. schools with a high percentage of low-income students would see a boost in funding under a proposal from D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson. The chairman announced his proposal ahead of a first vote on the city’s 2023 budget set for Tuesday.

Mendelson is also proposing that some of the money Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed for the construction and preservation of affordable housing be redirected to housing vouchers for families at risk of becoming homeless again, that D.C. double the number of planned housing inspectors, and that undocumented workers be able to take advantage of a generous tax credit for low-income residents.

The council chairman — who is up for re-election this year, and facing challenger Erin Palmer in the June 21 Democratic primary — is also proposing that the council repeal a budget provision from last year that slowly pulls police out of schools through 2025. Bowser has aggressively pushed lawmakers to allow police to remain in schools.

The proposals are included in Mendelson’s final tweaks of Bowser’s proposed $19.5 billion budget, which the council has spent the last two months assessing and making changes to. Lawmakers who chair specific committees offer their own changes to the budget, leaving Mendelson to put together a final proposal that the legislative body votes on.

Funding for at-risk students

Likely the single biggest change Mendelson is proposing involves funding for at-risk students, defined as those who experience homelessness, are in the foster care system, collect benefits like food stamps, or are more than a year behind academically where they should be. Almost half of the city’s 95,000 students in D.C. Public Schools and public charter schools are at-risk, and for almost a decade schools have received additional funding for each at-risk student to address specific needs and challenges they face.

Under Bowser’s proposed budget, the base funding per student would be $12,419, and at-risk students would each get $2,981 more. But Mendelson is proposing even more funding above and beyond that, targeted at schools that have a high concentration of at-risk students. He wants schools where more than 40% of students are classified as at-risk to get a funding bump, and schools where 70% of students are at-risk to get another increase above that.

Hendley Elementary in Ward 8, for example, has the highest proportion of at-risk students of any school in the city: 91% of its 290 students. Bowser’s proposed budget for the school for the 2022-23 school year is $5.9 million, of which $710,864 comes from the additional funding for at-risk students. Under Mendelson’s proposal, Hendley would receive another $131,031.

And in another change, Mendelson would also send that money directly to the school, instead of pooling it all through DCPS’s central office. For years advocates have argued that the at-risk funding isn’t supplementing existing funding as intended, but rather supplanting it.

“I think it’s going to be a game-changer,” said Mendelson of his proposal, which would cost $10 million a year, split evenly between DCPS and charters

Family homelessness

To address homelessness, Mendelson is proposing an additional $13.6 million for 400 new housing vouchers targeted at homeless families in the rapid rehousing program, which offers time-limited rent subsidies before expecting participants to be able to cover their own rent payments. Advocates for the homeless have long been critical of the program, and say that 913 families are likely to be evicted this year because their subsidies are expiring but they can’t yet afford to pay their own rent.

“To reduce the homeless population the city puts families in rapid rehousing and there they stay for six months and they get extended for another six months and they’re evicted,” Mendelson told DCist/WAMU, expressing frustration with the program. “It keeps the homeless numbers down but doesn’t help those families.”

He had hoped to include a more significant overhaul of rapid rehousing in the budget, but was told by the city’s chief financial officer that any such move could cost more than $100 million. Advocates for the homeless expressed mixed emotions with Mendelson’s proposal on Monday, saying that while it would help families it was a fraction of the 1,000 vouchers they had requested.

“We are really grateful for the increase in [vouchers]. Every single voucher funded keeps a family from being evicted,” said Amber Harding of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. “But it’s not enough to end the cliff for families and we will see hundreds of families evicted this year and more next year unless the council does pass legislated reform and funds a lot more vouchers.”

Mendelson’s proposal could draw opposition from Bowser, largely because it pulls funding from her proposed $500 million investment in the Housing Production Trust Fund, the city’s principal tool to pay for affordable housing.

Police and public safety

As part of her budget, Bowser proposed $30 million to hire and retain 347 police officers next year, which after usual rates of attrition would amount to a net gain of roughly 35 officers. Councilmember Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who chairs the judiciary committee, gave her most of what she wanted, only scaling back some funding for hiring and retention incentives he said MPD hadn’t shown it could spend.

Mendelson said he was leaving Allen’s changes untouched, though he was splitting from him on one issue: police in schools. Last year the council passed a provision that pulls police out of D.C. schools through 2025, which Mendelson supported until earlier this year. Bowser had proposed repealing the council’s provision, and Mendelson said he now agrees with her.

“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback,” he said, citing a letter from the union that represents school principals asking that police not be removed from schools.

Speaking during a mayoral debate on WAMU 88.5 last week, Councilmember Trayon White (D-Ward 8) said he wants police to remain in schools, while Councilmember Robert White (D-At Large) says he would like to see them pulled out. On WAMU’s The Politics Hour on Friday, Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At Large) said she believes police shouldn’t be in schools.

“The students of this generation … they experienced something over the last two years that we haven’t experienced … the trauma, the upheaval. It came from the students. We didn’t make this up on our own,” she said of the council’s initial decision to start pulling police out of schools. “They feel like their schools are a police sub-station.”

A tax credit for excluded workers

As the council scoured Bowser’s budget proposal, advocates for excluded workers — those who are either undocumented or work in the informal economy — had a big ask: $160 million in financial assistance to make up for what they could not get during the pandemic. The council isn’t providing that, but it is expanding eligibility for the existing earned-income tax credit to 21,000 undocumented workers.

The EITC — a federal tax credit with varying local matches — has been touted as one of the city’s most effective tools to help low- and middle-income working families, and last year the council increased its match and turned the credit into a monthly allowance instead of a once-a-year lump-sum payment. Seven states already made their version of the EITC available to undocumented workers, and advocates had been pushing D.C. to follow suit.

Still, the coalition that represents some excluded workers said an expanded EITC was not enough. “We are excited about this program, but it leaves behind the other excluded workers like returning citizens, cash workers, and other folks who are documented/U.S. citizens but still excluded,” it tweeted.

Previously: 

In Budget Proposal, Bowser Aims To Hire More Police And Dramatically Increase Funding For Housing