AU's Community Development class protested over the last two weeks throughout D.C. to tell the D.C. Board of Education and Mayor Adrian Fenty, D, to repair the poor physical conditions of the city's public schools.
The protests occurred as Fenty won final approval from the D.C. Council to take control of struggling 55,000-student public school system last Thursday.
While the D.C. School Board was "slightly unresponsive" to the class's protests of the city's poor school conditions, the class received much greater support from the public through their recent rallies on AU's campus and at L'Enfant Plaza and Dupont Circle.
Heraldo d'Almeida, a second-year graduate student in the School of International Service who is in the class, said 84 percent of D.C. Public School system buildings were in "very poor conditions," according to a 1998 study by the Army Corps of Engineers, the most thorough study conducted to date.
The poor school facilities include lead in the water; mal-functioning toilets, heating and air conditioning and ceilings falling apart, according to Miguel Carter, the professor and creator of the course.
Carter said the purpose of the grassroots mobilization assignment was to "help [students] understand from the inside what mobilization is all about as one of the many tools for community development."
Brittany Aubin, a junior in SIS and the School of Communication and Eagle contributing writer, who is in the class, said they decided to mobilize around the issue because they were a stakeholder in the D.C. Public Schools.
"It is an issue that doesn't get very much attention and is a good thing to mobilize around," Aubin said. "Having clean facilities in public schools is something that everyone can agree on."
One of the main problems with D.C. Public Schools, according to d'Almeida, is that all the stakeholders are doing is "repairing what's not already working," as the average age of the D.C. Public Schools building is 65 years.
"It's not like they're tearing down the old buildings and putting something new up," d'Almeida said.
The class made two Papier Mache wearable toilet bowls, posters and a writ of petition and rallied at L'Enfant Plaza and Dupont Circle to protest school conditions. They received a lot of public support at both locations, Aubin said.
Last Wednesday, Aubin gave a speech to the D.C. Board of Education, with support of her classmates. Aubin said 13 percent of the city's public schools have lead in their water and that D.C.'s lead poisoning rate is four times the national average.
However, she said the school board seemed unresponsive to her speech and the class's writ of petition, which included over 700 signatures of people who urged the board to uphold their promise to fix the public schools.
Carter said the class "didn't get a sense that there was a great willingness [from the school board] to acknowledge what we had to say." He also said it was an "overly formal environment" and "it didn't seem like it was a place where [the board] accommodated voices from the community." The class "walked away not thinking very highly of the school board," Carter said.
The students who protested and danced with their toilet costumes outside of the meeting were more successful. Carter said the students got 80 people to honk their horns in support of fixing D.C.'s public schools, and said "the issue struck a sensitive nerve in the D.C. population."
"While the school board was slightly unresponsive the actual people were agreeing with us and saying that this was an issue that needed to be drawing more attention," Aubin said.
Carter said the class will also give their petition to the mayor to "reinforce the public concern that we were able to gather." Carter said that Fenty's take over of the school system is "going to be helpful."
"We're hopeful that the mayor is going to fulfill his promises and if he doesn't he'll have to be held accountable," he said.
The system's centralization of the authority in the mayor's office will solve the previous problem of there being "too many stakeholders" and none of them were willing to "take the blame," according to d'Almeida.
Fenty will now control the D.C. Public Schools' operating budget and its $2.3 billion capital program. Current plans include the building of 23 schools, the renovation of another 101 and the closing of 19 buildings, according to The Washington Post.
