School Principal's Reflections on Autonomy

"For as long as I have been at Lafayette, each successive administration has announced that schools that demonstrated a history of academic success would be given ‘autonomy,’ or the ability to make local school decisions with a minimum of central office interference. I’ve been on various committees that looked at what autonomy would look like and how it would fit into the other DCPS regulations. Models from other school districts were discussed. For a few years Lafayette, along with several other schools, received additional federal funds to use with flexible spending as a designated high achieving school. But with the continuous revolving door of leadership at the top of the school system, that grant money and discussion of autonomy disappeared.

"In many ways, Lafayette has just taken ‘autonomy’ when it best fits our needs. I have very little trouble getting our budget and staffing plans passed, even when they don’t contain all the required positions. I have become very good at writing justifications for what we want to do and always get them approved. After staffing the school, there isn’t much money left over in the budget for much of anything except basic school supplies. It’s your help as members of the Home and School Association that get us so many of the extras. We use the adopted DCPS curriculum materials but have been supplementing them for as long as I have been here with extras like our Wordly Wise vocabulary series. Many of the novels your children study are selected by the teachers themselves and not from a DCPS list. Parent-teacher conference days are supposed to run from 12 noon until 7 p.m. I let the teachers set their own schedules. As I have often said to many different people, it is very easy to go your own way in a dysfunctional school system. There really is no one to check up on you, and with our continued outstanding results, I’m not sure anyone really wants to upset what is happening at Lafayette.

"At a February meeting, Lafayette was again identified as a school eligible for autonomy. Five areas were listed, budget, instructional programming, professional development, textbooks, and scheduling. Some things Lafayette already does will no longer need an approval process. No more budget petitions or staffing justifications, but we will still have to use the DC procurement process. We can have an arts integration school and arrange our own professional development activities, exactly what we are doing now. When a new textbook series is up for adoption, we can decide if that is the program we want to use or if there is another one that better meets our needs and get the funding for our choice. And setting our own conference day schedule or moving our professional development time to the late afternoon instead of December 21-22 which we did last winter will no longer need to go through the chancellor’s office. Or at least that is what was told me. So I submitted the application and we are waiting to hear when our school review will take place.

"I told the staff that I really don’t see where much will change. Our partnership with the Kennedy Center will still be in place next year. We have already ordered next year’s copies of Wordly Wise. There are no new text materials up for adoption. We will continue to do what works at Lafayette. It will be nice though to have a little framed certificate hanging somewhere that does give us permission to make some of these changes and not worry about some downtown person walking through wondering what is going on here. I can’t imagine that we won’t be chosen as an autonomous school. The designation won’t get us any additional money or staff. But it will get us the recognition that this school knows how to plan, implement and achieve at the highest level for all its students."