Gail Dixon, Candidate for
Wards 7 and 8 Board of Education Representative in the
November 7, 2000, General Election
Parents United for DC Public Schools questionnaire, October 2000

What are your three highest priorities for the Board? What will you do about them?

I must recognize that circumstances have set my priorities for me. First, the next Board must select Mr. Vance's successor as Superintendent, a decision of crucial importance. Secondly, we must build on the momentum of the Facilities planning process, and actually start delivering new and renovated buildings. Finally, recent governance decisions have, I feel, badly undercut the ability of parents and taxpayers to use the political process to improve DCPS. Therefore, public involvement and parent participation have unprecedented importance as a focus of the work of the five elected members of the Board of Education (and this area is, I feel, one of my personal strengths).

I suspect that these priorities are Parents United's priorities too; two questions below deal specifically with facilities and parent involvement, and a third touches on the relationship between Board and superintendent As a result, much of my answer to this question will be found lower down in this questionnaire, and here I will focus an the question of selecting a new Superintendent and then working appropriately with him or her.

I look for three things in a Superintendent or candidate for that job:

First, the understanding that he or she is a public servant who is and should be accountable to the people of this city.

Secondly, a superintendent must be committed to transparency and openness in the conduct of the public's business. The people of this city can judge success and failure and provide direction to their public servants only if they have access to all the relevant information, good and bad. (And in the past so much effort has been wasted on keeping things hidden that it would have been easier to remedy the failures rather than hide them.)

Thirdly, he or she must have proven professional expertise as an educator and a previous track record of high-level accomplishment. Our city isn't New Haven; it's Broadway, as far as I am concerned.

The first two criteria are those to which Board members should be held also. We must (as the Emergency Trustees did not) write a clear compact with the Superintendent, specifying the expectations of the Board, the criteria for judging success in meeting these criteria, and a schedule for periodic review of progress. Then we must do all in our power to build cooperation among all members of the public and all their public servants to accomplish our goals.

And I have a fourth personal goal as well, utopian as it may sound. When we can get the trains (or busses) running on time again, I want to be able to pursue one of my first interests in DCPS as an advocate for arts in the schools.

What is the role of parents in the DCPS at both the individual school and city-wide? Should the Local School Restructuring Teams be continued, and if so, how can they be made more effective?

The difference between real parent involvement and apathy is -- quite simply -- the difference between success and failure. In the worst of times, we have seen local communities of parents, school staff, and neighbors create and keep excellent schools. If only they had had the support of "the system," think what could have been accomplished! Think of the energy that Parents United itself had to expand simply to see that schools were not firetraps!

I see the LSRTs as a key institution in greater parent and citizen involvement. Unfortunately, many of our schools do not yet have well-functioning, take-charge LSRTs (or PTAs) I hope that Parents United will be able to extend your on-going efforts to get LSRT members together to share experiences. In fact, I hope you would be able to take a very active role in recruiting, training, and supporting parent members of LSRTs. You can count on my support in such an effort. I think that an organization such as P.U. is best able to take this lead in this effort.

What is your view of the facilities planning process now underway?

I think that the facilities planning process now under way under the leadership of the elected Board has been unprecedented in its involvement of parents and taxpayers in the planning process. I don't think that the public at large knows yet how much effort has gone into citizen involvement, and how much good work has already been done by citizens. It is also a new day in the District to have what appears to be firm consensus in favor of a programmed multi-year capital budget. Only by committing to a long- range and property funded construction and maintenance program can we make up for the years and years of neglect, when school capital budgets took back seat to such corporate welfare as the MCI Arena. We even neglected the maintenance of what we had, guaranteeing that we would have to spend a dollar today rather than pennies yesterday. Because so many parents and local communities had lost faith that the facilities planning process could be made to work, we still have efforts to cut special deals and to circumvent the orderly process. The loss of Paul Junior High, due to inappropriate congressional interference, is a case in point. I hope that we can restore faith in the process and produce the results that we all want so urgently.

What has been your personal involvement with DC public schools? Have your children been enrolled and for how long? Why are you interested in this position?

My daughter, now a college graduate, attended DC public schools -- Janney, Deal, School without Walls -- all the way through graduation. I first got involved in school issues as Stephanie's mom, and as a musician who wanted to see the arts made a central part at her education and everyone else's too. I had some early experience in education activism that taught me a lot. I was a founder, fifteen years ago, of the Alternative Schools consortium, which focused on smaller DCPS schools and those with special programs. I learned then that we can never allow ourselves to be put into a position where one school or one community is pitted against another. We're all in this together. Education is too important for us to allow our energies to be diverted.

I am running for the Board again because in my two years of service so far, I think that I have kept my promise to the voters that I would be tireless in empowering them and in harnessing their talents and energies for the improvement of our schools. This has often been a frustrating effort, because of the Rube Goldberg Powerlessness Machine created by the Control Board. But it has also been a very emotionally satisfying experience to have my fellow citizens use me to do what needs to be done for our children.

How can you avoid the acrimonious relationships between board members, and between the School Board, Superintendent, Mayor and council that have prevented a concerted effort to bring to our children's schools all of the resources needed to provide the high quality of public education our children need and our city needs for them?

If I was going into surgery and found out that my surgeon and the nurses and the anesthesiologist and the hospital administrator and the cleaning lady were all squabbling and sabotaging each other, I know just what I would do. The people of this city must insist that their public servants work as a team, each with his own assigned role. Of course, this means that they have to have good and timely information about how things are really being handled, and this is even harder to come by in our city lately.

As a member of the Board of Education in August of 1999, I advised my colleagues against internecine disputes, and voted accordingly. I have come to believe that ambition for better paid office is a dysfunctional motivation in our entire governance system. I have no ambition for any other office; for me, no office is higher than that of Board of Education member.

Parents, taxpayers, and their organizations (such as Parents United) must play an active role in seeing to it that all public servants work together. By informing the public, you will empower them to insist on this. Reward those of us who put accomplishment first; punish those who put children second to personal ambition or political expedience or grandstanding.

And please, be sure to address this question to candidates for Mayor and council too. Let them know that parents United demands collegiality, mutual respect, and accomplishment from all public servants.