Have a problem with your DCPS or charter school? Now there’s someone who will listen

After a 4-year hiatus, DC has a school ombudsman again. Joyanna Smith, a lawyer and former charter school administrator, is now fielding parents’ complaints and facilitating their resolution.

Parents and students who encounter problems with issues like bullying, school discipline, and special-education services can once again bring them to the Office of the Ombudsman for Public Education. While Smith has no power to enforce a particular outcome, she says the intervention of a neutral party often turns up solutions that schools and parents aren’t able to get to on their own.

Although the ombudsman’s office was created in 2007 as part of the mayoral takeover of the schools, the first ombudsman quit a year later, and the office closed in 2009. In 2012, the DC Council moved the position from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education to the State Board of Education (SBOE) to help ensure its independence, and last year the council allocated the funds to hire someone to fill the job.

Mayor Vincent Gray opposed re-establishing the ombudsman’s office, saying there wasn’t enough demand to warrant expending the money. But Council Chairman Phil Mendelson and Councilmember David Catania disagreed, saying that parents and activists were clamoring to resurrect the position.

Smith, who has been on the job almost 3 months, says that she’s received “well over 75” complaints so far, some of which were waiting for her on her first day. And she and the SBOE are still working to publicize the existence of the office, so the volume of inquiries will probably increase. The office is in the process of hiring an assistant, but for the time being Smith does everything herself, from answering the phone to formally mediating disputes.

Complaint process

Smith, whose jurisdiction covers both DCPS and charter schools, begins by asking for basic information about the problem. Usually the calls or emails come from parents, but Smith says she’s also been contacted by students themselves.

“There are some very sophisticated middle-schoolers that I’ve heard from,” she says. Students under the age of 18, however, need to get parental consent before Smith can pursue their complaints.

Once Smith has a grasp of the issue, she asks parents whether they have already spoken to the school and what their desired resolution is. She wants to make it clear that her office can’t resolve problems unilaterally, and also that she can’t violate any school policies.

But sometimes a solution isn’t that difficult to find, she says. One parent who contacted Smith was frustrated because his daughter was having academic difficulties in one of her classes. He had approached the school repeatedly but felt officials there weren’t listening to him.

Smith then facilitated conversations between the parent and a couple of the school leaders. As a result, the school agreed to let the student audit the class that was causing the problem, since she was doing well in her other classes.

Sometimes it’s hard for the parties to come to a resolution like that on their own, Smith says. Parents are often angry, and school officials may be too busy to focus on the problem.

“I’ve found principals and teachers do care about students,” Smith says. “Sometimes it’s helpful just to remind them of the policies.”

But facilitated conversations won’t always yield a satisfactory resolution. The next step is for Smith to provide a more formal mediation, if the school agrees to it.

As a neutral facilitator or mediator, Smith doesn’t function as an advocate for either side. But beginning next fiscal year the SBOE will also house an Office of the Student Advocate, which will represent students’ interests before the ombudsman, among other duties.

Part of Smith’s job is to report annually to the SBOE on what complaints she’s gotten and what trends they suggest. The SBOE can then recommend changes based on that data, said Jesse Rauch, executive director of the SBOE. The reports will also be made public, probably on the ombudsman’s website.

School problem-solver

Smith says her background has prepared her for what some would find a stressful job. Her experience as a lawyer for two DC government agencies has helped her identify issues and formulate solutions. And her tenure as an administrator at Excel Academy, an all-girls charter school in Southeast, has familiarized her with school-level problems and how to resolve them.

“I would just stand in front of the school during arrival and dismissal,” she says of her time at Excel, “And parents would start to share their problems with me.” She became an informal problem-solver at the school, she says.

One thing Smith hasn’t yet had experience in is mediation, and none of the complaints she has fielded so far have called for her to do that. But last week she participated in an advanced mediation training.

The ombudsman position may have been allowed to lapse for so long because elected officials preferred to accentuate the positive about DC’s public schools. But problems are inevitable in any large system, and ignoring them won’t make them go away. The relocation of the ombudsman’s office to the SBOE should help insulate it from politics.

Let’s hope Smith is able to resolve most of the complaints she gets. But whether she does or not, the mere fact that she’s hearing them, and reporting on the patterns she sees, should help the government and the public get a handle on what tends to cause problems at the individual school level, and what can be done to address those issues in a systematic way.

Smith can be reached at 202-741-0886, at ombudsman@dc.gov, or through the ombudsman office’s website.