Reply to DCI Parent Petition

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Many DCI parents have written to the Board expressing their concerns about the damage Rosskamm is doing.

Here's the letter my husband and I sent:

Dear Members of the Board of Trustees,

We are writing as DCI parents. And as LAMB parents who lived through the events of 2017.

We want to be very direct: We are frustrated and angry to find ourselves in this position again.

Nine years ago, our sons were students at LAMB. Today, our daughter is there and our sons are now at DCI. We are heartbroken that another school community we love is in crisis, that another Board is being asked to choose between an executive and the institution it governs, and that the parents and staff who are sounding the alarm loudly, clearly, and at significant personal risk are once again being met with deflection instead of action.

What we know from living through the LAMB crisis is that the parents who show up in moments like this are not troublemakers. They are the school's most committed advocates, and their urgency is a measure of how much they believe DCI is worth saving. We share that belief completely and we are here, again, because of it.

When Mr. Fernandez was arrested we initially defended the LAMB administration. We believed in the school. We trusted its leaders. We gave them the benefit of the doubt because we could not imagine that the institution we had entrusted with our children had failed so profoundly. That instinct, to protect the school by protecting its leadership, felt like loyalty. It was not. It was blindness.

What changed for us was the evidence other parents and staff shared. The repeated red flags that had been ignored. The staff who had raised concerns and been disregarded. The children who had been harmed while the administration operated from a posture of self-protection rather than accountability. When we finally saw clearly, we joined all the other LAMB parents in demanding that the Board act, independently, decisively, and in the interest of children over institution.

The LAMB Board ultimately did act. They acknowledged that their administrators had failed and they removed the Executive Director. They chose the school over the administrators who had led it astray. LAMB survived and now it thrives.

We are now watching the DCI Board face the same choice LAMB's Board faced and we are watching it make the wrong one.

On the surface the situations are not identical. Mr. Rosskamm has not been accused of criminal conduct. But the pattern is familiar and it is damning: staff raise concerns, leadership dismisses them, the concerns compound, the culture deteriorates, and the Board, the body whose sole obligation is to the mission and to the community, protects the executive instead of the school.

Ninety-four percent of DCI's non-supervisory staff have voted no confidence in Mr. Rosskamm. Over 125 staff have departed since SY23-24. The IB Diploma Coordinator's contract was not renewed. The MYP Coordinator resigned abruptly. These are not personnel inconveniences. These are structural warnings.

And yet the Board's response or lack thereof, especially at the March 19th public meeting and in the communications that have followed, has been to suppress dialogue, deflect accountability, and allow Mr. Rosskamm to manage his own consequence through town halls and listening sessions that result in no change and that his own staff have already declared they do not trust.

We want to be direct about Board Chair Pardo specifically. Her conduct of the March 19th meeting, the deliberate foreclosure of public comment, the alignment with Mr. Rosskamm's framing, the failure to treat the staff's extraordinary vote of no confidence as the serious governance crisis it is, was not neutral. It was a choice. Chair Pardo has not demonstrated the independence this moment demands, and her continued leadership of this board in this crisis is itself a barrier to resolution. We are calling for her to step down as Chair.

We say this not with hostility but with clarity born of experience. At LAMB, the Board's willingness to act over the objections of an administration that had failed is what saved the school. What would have destroyed LAMB was a Board that prioritized protecting leadership over protecting the community it existed to serve.

DCI is a remarkable school. Its IB for All model, its language immersion programs, its diverse and committed community are worth fighting for. We are fighting for them now, as we fought for LAMB then.

The staff have done their part. They documented their concerns. They exhausted every formal channel. They took the extraordinary step of a vote of no confidence at significant personal risk. Nineteen staff members abstained from that vote not because they lacked an opinion, but because they feared retaliation. That is the culture this Board has allowed to take root.

Our daughter is sitting in a LAMB classroom right now. We chose LAMB for her because of what this family of schools represents and because we believed that what we went through in 2017 had made the school stronger and more accountable. We need this board to prove that belief was not misplaced.

You have a decision to make. You can choose, as LAMB's Board ultimately chose, to place the mission above the executive. You can remove Mr. Rosskamm, reconstitute Board leadership, and give this school the chance to rebuild trust and retain the extraordinary educators who have not yet left. Or you can continue on the current path and watch DCI become a cautionary tale told by the next generation of DC education advocates.

We have seen what happens when a Board finds its courage too late. We have also seen what happens when it finds it in time.[/quote]

A bit too AI sloppy, but I was also there at LAMB back then + DCI now and this also has been a bit triggering.

Still, I'd love to have one of those town halls where the board and admin stand in front of an angry mob of parents and staff and try to explain why they're not doing anything about a major problem.

While I agree with others above that there still aren't enough tangible details as to what this ED has been doing to make the climate so bad, it does seem clear that we're in trouble because we need the top teachers and staff to STAY on board! That is the key ingredient to a good school, which we found out at LAMB. The staff/teachers also turned LAMB upside down when the pandemic ED was there and she wasn't well liked and they began leaving and being pushed out. Thankfully quite a few have returned. Veteran quality teachers MATTER to parents and kids way more than some ED. [/quote]

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