WASHINGTON 鈥� More students, more teachers, more courses, more choice.
D.C.’s public schools are set to open with聽increased enrollment. D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson says she expects enrollment to grow to 50,000聽this year.聽Plenty more teachers will be聽in D.C. classrooms: 750 new teachers have been hired, 250 more than聽last year.
And schools will offer聽more courses, including new AP selections and new electives.聽Henderson says the choices are designed to keep kids engaged while pushing rigor throughout the curriculum.
鈥淜ids will be able to take things like African-American literature or journalism.鈥�
Henderson says recruiting new teachers to teach those added courses was not the challenge it used to be.
鈥淲e鈥檝e gone from being the lowest-paying school district in the region to being not only the highest-paying school district in the region for teacher salaries, but we鈥檙e also the highest-paying first-year teacher salary in the country.”
An indication of the change: a fourth-year teacher’s earnings 鈥� including salary and bonuses 鈥� could top $100,000.
The days leading up to the first day of school are like the days leading up to a big holiday, Henderson says.
鈥淧eople are cooking and people are cleaning and people are fixing and all of that stuff: it feels like the night before Thanksgiving.鈥�
Four more schools are coming on line this year: Brookland Middle School; River Terrace; Van Ness Elementary; and Dorothy Height Elementary School.
DCPS is introducing Cornerstones into this year’s聽curriculum: Henderson says it鈥檚 a way of deepening the curriculum that aligns with聽Common Core and the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test. She says teachers like it. One聽actually ran up to her in a hallway and hugged her, saying聽that Cornerstones was the best thing that ever happened to her.
鈥淲e took the approach that we鈥檒l provide guidance 鈥� and guidelines 鈥� but teachers still have room to get their creative instruction on,” Henderson says.
There are still many challenges: D.C.鈥檚 graduation rate hovers at about 58 percent, compared with Montgomery County鈥檚 89 percent. Henderson is used to the comparisons, but doesn’t dwell on them.
鈥淥ur kids are as smart as, and as talented as, kids in Fairfax and kids in Montgomery. Our kids, I would say, come with some additional talents and resources, like perseverance and grit and determination. We鈥檙e proud of that and we want to capitalize on that.鈥�
小萝莉影视’s Kate Ryan contributed to this report.
