Perry Stein and Valerie Strauss wrote about a D.C. charter school that descended into chaos, with no meaningful oversight to protect its students.
Officials at the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which oversees the city’s charter schools, acknowledged long-standing problems at Monument and said they believe they addressed those issues appropriately…
Still, unlike many charters, there was no dedicated security staff on the Northeast Washington campus of Monument — a weekday boarding school for middle school students, many of whom struggled in traditional schools.
At a public meeting of the charter school board in May, a member revealed that more than 1,800 safety incidents classified by Monument as serious were reported during the 2018-2019 school year. Those incidents included sexual assault, physical altercations, bullying and property destruction…
But the city’s charter school board did not direct the school — or Monument’s governing board — to take measures to ensure student safety.
“It is always appropriate for us to intervene when health and safety concerns emerge but not always in a public meeting setting,” Pearson said. “We were not prescriptive about what exactly they should do because we do not think that is our role.”
The handling of Monument by the charter school board — which prides itself on giving the 120 campuses in its sector autonomy — opens a window onto how the board operates. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run, and although they are subject to local and federal laws, they are not bound by the rules and bureaucracy of publicly funded school districts.
Monument’s governing board voted June 4 to close the school — more than six months after it said it realized that financial and academic issues were probably insurmountable.
Even then, that decision was not final: Monument, which serves about 100 students, reopened Aug. 7, partnering with another charter school operator. The campus remains a boarding school, where students live five nights a week.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I worked in a residential school for “emotionally disturbed” children my first three years out of college and it was insanely difficult even with the resources we had. It cost nearly $100,000 per kid, which paid for about a 1-1 staff-student ratio. We had multiple psychologists, art therapists and social workers on staff. Class sizes and dorm sizes were capped at 8. Classrooms had a teacher and a teaching assistant and dorms often had “shared shifts” in which two staff members worked together, and there was always a senior level “coverage” person on duty to provide back-up support if kids got out of control. We also had regular consultations with outside psychiatrists and veteran educators. The counselors and teaching assistants were all college graduates pursuing advanced education in psychology, social work or education.all received group and individual supervision.
We spent a great deal of effort working on managing the environment to help keep the kids calm rather than managing the kids themselves. The schedule, the decor, the presence or absence of certain items (classroom scissors and how to manage them, for instance, was a perennial topic), how staff interact with students (tone of voice, touching/not touching, punitive vs. supportive responses), etc. Behavior was always to be viewed as communication and therefore there was no such thing as “misbehavior”.
The school has been through some changes since I worked there, but ultimately it’s still there (now run by the head counselor from my days) with the same mission and basically the same approach. I don’t imagine costs have gone down any.
So if we’re going to educate and support children like these, we have to be willing to spend the effort and money to do it right. Our funding was a combination of private pay (only a handful of kids), school district funding and DCFS (Illinois’s child protective services) funding. Are Americans willing to spend this kind of money? I’m doubting it because we’re too stupid to see that the costs of not spending the money are much higher. But until places like this become the norm we’re going to keep having conversations about places like Monument.
When you’re talking about traumatized children, you can’t half-ass it or you only traumatize them more and make the problem worse. But then, I’m starting to think that making the problems worse is intentional. The worse things get, the more people beg for the security/surveillance state to keep them “safe” (i.e., controlled).
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In a school with such needy students, the safety of all should be a primary concern. All that supervision costs a lot of money, and these students should be getting legitimate therapy along with adequate student supervision .
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This was my favorite comment at the article [comments now closed], by PLMichaelsArtist-at-Large 2 wks ago: “PLMichaelsArtist-at-Large” 2 wks ago:
“By any stretch of the imagination, a school like Monument is a Special Education School – just about the highest tier, by the way.
“SpEd Services are generally ranked by the time spent in restricted settings; (may not have all the levels right currently) Level 1 a child is in a regular school, but pulled out for a class or two, Level 2 a child is spends more classes in a resource)SpEd class, Lev. 3 most of the day is spent in SpEd classes. LEVEL FOUR, the student is in a school that only serves Special Needs Students, but just during the day. LEVEL 5 is Special Education but also boarding.
“So, can we not dance around the topic of what these students need if they ate not to wind up on the streets or incarcerated or dependent on Society for the rest of their lives?
I’ve been retired for awhile, but I did spend 26 years of my career in Private Special Education Schools that were largely funded by the State because it is SO. DAMN. HARD. To meet the Educational and Emotional needs that Students with various disabilities and poor life circumstances require.
“So let’s stop quibbling about whether schools like Monument ate Charter, Private or Public*; and that really is what is going on here. I don’t know anything about Monument personally, but there are other schools in the area who do similar work and- though few boarding schools – it would be more productive to find out how those other schools are handling things, and what, exactly, ate the other needs that Monument doesn’t have? If it were my child being recommended for such a school, I would want to know the Philosophy and Programs being implemented (Physical exercise, Art & Music) number of School Psychologists, SpEd Teachers, Therapists, Tutors, class size, and the staff on board for the night – also the amount of experience and specialized training.”
*I disagree w/ “let’s stop quibbling about whether schools like Monument are Charter, Private or Public.” It seems to me charters should be forbidden to undertake such a task. Charter law in any state is lax enough that the key reqts for success— safety, stability, and therapy– cannot be assured or in many states even monitored. This involves building safety, qual/#s of staffing/ procedures for safety, ample counseling, generous funding, sound financing/ accounting practice. Dienne paints a picture above of just how this should be done. Monument is a twofold example of how not to do it: (a)on the cheap, (b)improperly monitored/ supervised – both possible because, well, it’s a charter school.
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At my mostly-white, mostly-middle class public middle school, chaos often breaks out when kids are together without a structured activity and close supervision (and sometimes even when there is a structured activity and supervision). Kids hurt one another, they damage property, they steal from one another, they get sexually active, they use their phones inappropriately, they bully. The meeker kids cower and can’t wait for it to be over. It’s no coincidence that William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies was a middle school teacher. One reason I like to limit talking in my classroom is that so often the talking involves kids verbally harming each other. A quiet, orderly classroom is a rare safe harbor for the quiet and gentle kids at a raucous middle school.
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Here is another account of the chaos that is not behid a paywall. The incompetence of the person put in charge of this school and the many meetings to salvage it clearly show that the word “chaos” is the right word.
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Thanks for this excellent link, Laura. It has a detailed dive into the lack of transparency, total disconnect between board & community, reckless/ feckless choice of completely inexperienced founder [still in place as leader in the latest iteration of this school]– & asks the key question: why is the public spending so much $ here despite continual & numerous reports of unsafe conditions, & even criminal incidents?
Particularly hair-raising are the linked letter & tweets by people who worked in the boarding program. One tweet: “It [Monument] was beyond saving from the start and created a dangerous faux foster care system that was unaccountable, unreliable and unsafe.” My mind jumped immediately to 2 similar situations I was in back in the ‘70’s.
In my 1st yrs of teaching, I & then-husband (at the ages of 20 & 21!) were in loco parentis for a dorm corridor of midsch-aged boys at our priv acad [about 20% boarding studs]. In general things were far milder than at Monument, bec the kids were, well, only as troubled as one is when well-to-do parents farm you off to boarding sch to get you out of their way. But the few incidents we did have were reckless stunts resulting in hospitalization, plus some observed sub rosa behavior by other ‘dorm parents’ that suggested sexual abuse [we were too young to register it as such much less report it].
2 yrs later– still wet behind the ears & never parents; then-husb was in lawsch & I working FT– we signed on as foster parents in a brand-new [untried] soc welfare program that billed itself as providing nuclear-family-like halfway houses for mildly-disturbed teens making the transition from group homes back to their own families. The kids assigned to us were neither. In retrospect, I realized they were put in the pgm only bec they were seen as “not violent,” so perhaps $ could be saved by hiring cheap untrained newbies [vs the hard-duty security & counseling folks staffing group homes], supported only by monthly mtgs w/prgm head, until they aged out of foster care. We had to bounce one out after a few months bec he was nightly threatening the others /w a knife. Another was a psychopath in the making: he wet the bed nightly & his nascent violence was revealed when he used a brick to break the leg of a stray nbhd kitten. I could go on… to nutshell it, these were kids w/deep-seated psych issues deriving from traumatic family sits.
Shepherding even ‘normal’ teens in a boarding-school is a job for vetted & seasoned veterans of either parenting or teaching. Providing in loco parentis for severely-disturbed/ deprived/ traumatized kids is a job for seasoned MSWs or clin psychs, buttressed by security staff & facilities w/surveillance cameras locked-down at night. Anything less & you’re endangering the welfare of your charges.
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Amateurs need not apply for this job. Trying to do it on the cheap is a fool’s errand.
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I will write this again: “CHARTERS are BAD!”
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Charter schools will never be effectively held accountable because they exist because someone bribed a politician who is expecting more of the same so long as that school keeps getting taxpayer money.
Accountability would cost politicians campaign donations now and lobbying jobs later.
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“The charter school that descended into chaos”
Could you be a little more specific?
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