DC Council Restores Budget, 2 Teaching Positions

Photo via @sww_hsa

After months of community-led advocacy for additional funds to maintain two teaching positions, the DC Council passed an amendment to restore the School Without Walls budget on June 13, 2024. 

The initially proposed budget, which was released in early February, prompted SWW administration to cut two teaching positions, effectively eliminating the Chinese and Theater Arts departments. Though the proposed budget for SY2024-25 was higher than that for SY 2023-24, factors such as district wide raises and increases in enrollment made it such that Walls was effectively facing budget cuts and a shortfall of $235,210. 

Upon seeing the proposed budget, members of the Local School Advisory Team (LSAT) which serves as an advising body for school administration, “immediately kicked into gear,” according to LSAT Parent Co-Chair Dana Springer. Springer worked alongside HSA president Sandra Muscasco and Christy Leavitt, the HSA liaison to the LSAT, to assemble a document with resources and further information about the issues facing the Walls budget. 

“We just started putting together a document with background issues, talking points, trying to get it out there,” Springer said. The document included resources such as templates for putting together DC Council testimony as well as advice on contacting council members.

Springer, Muscasco, and Leavitt circulated the document among the Walls community and encouraged students and parents to reach out to council members and testify before them for a restoration of the budget. 

Meanwhile, students Anna Mayer (‘25) and Hugo Rosen (‘24) focused their efforts on ensuring the student body was engaged with and responding to the issue. 

“Hugo and I coordinated between the HSA and the students,” Mayer said. During the spring semester, the pair visited every classroom, encouraging students to attend a testimony they had planned for one of council chairman Phil Mendleson’s education hearings. 

The testimony, which included appeals by approximately two dozen Walls students “was really the climax of our efforts,” Mayer said. 

Throughout the spring, Walls students and parents continued to email DC council members, an organized effort that paid off. Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin noted that council members who receive thousands of activist emails in a given week are often quick to ignore them but that wasn’t the case with the messages from the Walls community. 

“I think council members read them because they weren’t system generated. They were personal. And I thought, If there was a thing I could do to try to help here, I would want to try to do it,” Frumin said. 

Frumin followed through on his word. Alongside nine other council members he voted yes on Ward 2 Council Member Brooke Pinto’s Amendment to restore the School Without Walls budget. 

Though the restoration was largely cause for celebration among the Walls community, some saw the last ditch amendment, which passed on the final day of the budget process for the 2024-25 school year, as too little, too late. 

Prior to the passage of the amendment, two Walls teachers, Lea Zaslavsky who taught theater arts, and Xing Xing Song, who taught Chinese, had had their positions terminated.

“It was very frustrating that after Ms. Z. and Ms. Song had basically been fired when the amendment passed,” Mayer said. Mayer, who was working alongside Rosen to not only restore the Walls budget but that of other DC Public Schools such as Jackson Reed and Duke Ellington was disheartened by the fact that the restoration was a one off. 

“We have a huge advantage in that the HSA and student body is willing and able to organize.  I am still disappointed that our work didn’t translate to the rest of the community which is a long term DCPS and council issue that we have to continue fighting for,” she said. 

Councilmember Frumin also expressed frustration at the drawn out, tedious process. “For School Without Walls, the road was agony,” he said, adding that “all of that uncertainty just creates anxiety for everyone, and we really need to get out of this rut where the the the first budgets that come out are far from adequate, and then the council has to struggle in order to get the budgets to where they need to be, and the schools live with an uncertainty for a three or four month period. We need to get on the same page with DCPS so that the budgets that they come out with at the beginning of the process are, if not completely right, very close to right.” 

Frumin says that he is in the process of meeting with the mayor, city administrators, DCPS leadership, and the Deputy Mayor for education to discuss how to avoid such budget turmoil in coming years, and instead, stick to the Schools First in Budgeting amendment which passed in 2022 with the intention of preventing school budget shortfalls. 

Following June’s budget restoration, School Without Walls reintroduced its Chinese and Theater Arts department, led by new hires Yidan Xie and Olivia Tyndall, respectively.