Barely a month after promising a swift, low-cost fix of the city’s stricken schools, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration is quietly conceding it may take tens of millions of dollars more than initially projected to rescue the system from decades of neglect.
Allen Lew, the mayor’s school construction czar, is scheduled to hold a news conference next week and will announce that the $200 million budgeted for school reconstruction over the next two years won’t be enough, two top aides to Fenty told The Examiner.
The aides also said that Chancellor Michelle Rhee is expecting a shortfall in the schools’ operating budget, which is separate from construction funds, before the end of the fiscal year.
The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because the Fenty administration still hasn’t figured out how big the budget gaps are.
In recent years, the schools have been short up to $40 million, one aide said.
It’s not clear if the Fenty administration will ask for more money or cut other parts of the schools’ $1 billion plus budget.
Victor Reinoso, deputy mayor for education, told The Examiner that the Fenty team learned about construction cost problems shortly after taking over the $75 million summer repair “blitz.”
The blitz was designed to fix the most immediate problems in the schools, from leaking roofs to broken ventilation systems, and was approved by the Board of Education and former Superintendent Clifford Janey.
Fenty’s aides said that some of the schools in the “blitz” were underfunded by up to half of the actual costs.
Part of that was awful planning, one aide said: More than 560 windows have been replaced in schools this summer, but most of them were in principals’ offices.
And Janey’s staff estimated the construction costs based on the square footage of the buildings, not on the actual damage done to them, another aide said.
Fenty won formal control of the schools in June and immediately assured the public and the D.C. Council that, though the schools’ problems were practically bottomless, he and his team could handle them without breaking the city’s bank.
His proposed budget for 2007 actually cut funds to the schools because the Fenty administration expected their enrollment to fall.
Now, though, aides to the mayor are saying that “cost pressures” may require a deeper investment than was previously promised.
Fenty’s spokeswoman, Carrie Brooks, said the mayor inherited the problems from the school board and Janey.
Some skeptics of the Fenty plan aren’t so sure.
D.C. Council Member Phil Mendelson, D-at large, was one of only two members who voted against Fenty’s takeover.
“In the spring the administration justified the takeover by saying that more money was not the answer,” Mendelson wrote in an e-mail to The Examiner. “I hope there is a good explanation.”
Anyone with information on the Fenty administration can call Bill Myers at 202-459-4956 or e-mail [email protected].
