Publications

Spring 2004 Newsletter

D.C's 21st Century School Fund Advocates Collaborative Planning For Schools

The fact that too many school districts operate independently from the cities in which their facilities lie has led to schools that do not fit within the fabric of their neighborhoods. This failure of collaboration is not limited to California. NSBN is pleased to present this interview with Mary Filardo, Exec. Dir. of the 21st Century School Fund in Washington D.C., in which she addresses the need for school districts and cities to engage in joint planning to make better use of their public assets.

Mary, as its founder, what is the mission and agenda of the 21st Century School Fund?

21st Century School Fund is a nonprofit that has as its mission to build public will to modernize and build urban public schools facilities so that they support high quality education and community revitalization. Basically, we have a three-tiered strategy.
First, we do research and analysis regarding school policy and development practices. Two, we develop projects, through innovative techniques--public-private development partnerships, utilizing information technology, and working with public agencies on collaborative planning. We're constantly looking for concrete examples of projects in which we typically get involved, mostly here in the District of Columbia. We also look for our fellow partners in other parts of the United States, like NSBN, who are also innovating.
The third thing that we do is we work for government reform in policy and practice. That's part of building the governmental capacity to do a better job with this real estate effort and with this the use of infrastructure to support educational programming and community,

The School Fund's mission makes eminent sense. So, what's the need?

School districts have tended to work very much in isolation from the rest of the municipality. 75% of school districts are fiscally independent, so they don't even have to go to their city councils or counties to get funds. The 25% that are fiscally dependent have very strong independent authority for decision-making. This has some important aspects to it, because ultimately their clients--children and families--can be politically weak constituencies, so they have these other protections. But, from the point of view of urban planning, it's a disaster. The need is to try and integrate schools into the fabric of cities so that as you are planning transit, housing, parks, and schools, you are looking at the larger picture, as well as what's happening educationally in the building.

Elaborate both on who your allies from around the country are, as well as the expected benefits of national collaboration given that education is a state responsibility.

The collaborative initiative that 21CSF started a couple years ago is called Building Educational Success Together (BEST). We found that there were some other folks out there who were doing great work, and we got together to figure out where our strategies align. We want to learn from each other in terms of our local work, but also to craft a national agenda that would support us locally as well as help other communities who weren't directly involved with BEST initiatives. So, we've been looking at state policy associated with schools as centers of community, and are currently developing model policies based on what we're finding at the state and local level. In the next year, we will be working very hard to ensure that these policy reforms find their way into states, local municipalities and school districts.

Address, if you would, the adequacy and professionalism of facilities planning, capital budgeting and oversight in our municipalities and regions today.

I'll give you an example. In a school that we're involved with right here, there's a pool that was built as part of a high school that is operated by the recreation department. The pool wall collapsed, and the high school itself is in serious need of improvement and some site master planning. The recreation department wanted to go forward and fix the pool, and didn't really want to take the time to engage the school community in a process that might actually end up with a much better pool, and a much better relationship of the pool to the high school, and of the high school and recreation complex to the surrounding community.
A lot of infrastructure work is done based on crisis planning rather than long reach planning, and it shows. It shows in the quality of what we get and in the ways some of our public schools fit in to our community.
When you raise such concerns o local officials in the D.C. area or in any metropolitan area, what's the typical response?

It's changing. There's an understanding that this is a good idea. But the processes, practices, systems, mandates and incentives that require it are still not in place. For example, when a school system comes forward with school projects in the city's capital budget, there's no requirement that they have to show that they have coordinated with any other city agency in order to see whether or not there's some way to leverage the work that they're doing in schools with any other kind of development.
So, I think there's been progress made because of the work that you're doing in Los Angeles, the work the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group is doing in Chicago, and others in New Jersey and in Ohio. But there's still a huge gap between the rhetoric, and the understanding and capability of government to actually enter into these agreements and move projects successfully through this collaborative process.

Elaborate more on the work being done in Ohio re community centered schools.

Akron, Ohio decided that it was going to fund its school construction and its municipal infrastructure together. They actually raised their income taxes in their district in order to support this effort. They're very much in the early stages and haven't yet implemented these joint projects, but they clearly have a vision of collaborative planning. I think they're going to help all of us pave some roads to figure out what it actually looks like to implement.
In terms of the community schools piece, there's a lot of understanding on the part of educators of the importance of having an integrated program and service delivery easily available at the school. But it's still being done on a school-by-school basis. In Cincinnati they have over thirty schools that they intend to plan as community schools. Here, because the city itself is bringing a great deal of money to their school construction program--it's not just state money--they have the capability to actually demand community schools that have linkages with health clinics and other kinds of after school programs and other community services.

With the Irvine Foundation and First 5 L.A. Commission supporting NSBN and the community centered school movement in Southern California, and KnowledgeWorks doing the same in Ohio, elaborate, if you could, on BEST's work and support from the Ford Foundation.

We're funded for the most part out of an education and equity initiative, but we were able to persuade them that facilities is one of the legs of the stool. There are the programs that schools are involved in, there are people who staff the schools, and there's place. Place is a very important part of what it means to be a public school.
Initially they funded our work around public-private development partnerships. But, they very much understand that conditions for teachers and for children are critical in affecting quality of education.
Part of what we're hoping to do is to actually interest the Ford Foundation's community building folks and their government reform people in our efforts, because the Ford Foundation, like municipalities, also operates in a silo-like fashion.

After years of effort and advocacy by the 21st Century Education Fund, Community Schools, and New Schools-Better Neighborhoods, what has been learned?

I have been surprised that you could get so much agreement about what everyone agree is a good idea and a win-win, but that it can be so hard to put the idea in to practice. I found that actually the political leadership was much quicker to embrace and understand the importance of collaboration and public participation, but that inside the actual agencies there was enormous resistance to cooperation out of fear that you would lose something. There was some risk associated with it, and for the most part the bureaucrats and the agencies were very risk averse. Without some real considerable financial incentives and Ford's cooperation, this is a very hard case to make. Everybody protects what they have, even if it's less, rather than share and get more, because you're afraid that you'll somehow lose what you have.
For example, here in Washington D.C. there's a public school that's very interested in doing a project using public-private development partnership with the library department. The library department had $2 million to rebuild a little library, and they could have had far more. But they didn't want to participate in this public-private partnership because they felt that the project might not work out and they would lose their $2 million. There was no incentive for them to take any risk. So, I think there have to be very concrete incentives, and to some extent there has to be glue money, so that you don't get the money if you don't work with other agencies and other community developers. Unless that's in place, people aren't going to do it.

What attention across the country, if any, is being given to California's school facilities challenges and approaches to planning?

I think there's a lot of attention being paid to California. The state and metropolitan Los Angeles now have sufficient funds not only for school construction, but also to provide glue money- planning funding to foster community centered new schools. There is certainly a hope that because of scale, model collaborations will be attempted and replicated – so that we've got some repeated lessons that can be institutionalized. For us, there's a hope that we will be able to learn from NSBN and California's well tested, best practices. The fact that so many school facility projects are either breaking ground, under consideration, or necessary in the next five years means that California is a school facilities laboratory for the entire country. Given the above, it's clear that NSBN has framed the public policy issues in a way that should make possible an array of approaches to collaboration and interagency planning. So, for those interested in promoting community centered schools, attention must be paid to California.