Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Different poster- from my lamb experience with ED turnover- I just don’t think it’s a good idea for staff to dictate that an ED must go.

Eventually the staff at lamb ran the show. Some teachers were excellent. Some teachers were terrible. You could do very little if you had a terrible situation. The current ED stays afloat hiding from issues and avoiding taking a position. You don’t want that, especially in a high school. It’s vital to have an ED that makes hard and often unpopular decisions.

Like making custodians come in to mop clean floors over spring break just to get their full paycheck?

Anonymous wrote:The clock-in issue is one bullet point in a six-page letter that documents potential legal violations, a nepotism concern, a $56,500 executive bonus while aides took home less than last year, 37 special education staff departures affecting nearly 500 students with IEPs, and an ED who made a documented false statement to a community member.

If the only thing in that letter were the clock-in policy, you'd be right to dismiss it. But it isn't and the repeated focus on that one point while ignoring everything else isn't engaging with the actual case being made.

And the letter isn't objecting to accountability. It's objecting to deductions applied in increments as small as 0.1 hours for arriving six minutes late when staff have no in-person duties. That's not accountability. That's punitive micromanagement designed to make people miserable enough to leave.

The letter asks for staff and parent voice in the process, not staff control. Those are different things. A search committee with community representation is standard governance practice at healthy schools.

On your LAMB experience: one bad outcome from a flawed process isn't an argument against community involvement in leadership searches. It's an argument for doing it better. The alternative you're describing, leaving it entirely to a board that appointed an investigator with a 6-figure financial relationship to the school, is not obviously safer.

Anonymous wrote:Different poster- from my lamb experience with ED turnover- I just don’t think it’s a good idea for staff to dictate that an ED must go.

Eventually the staff at lamb ran the show. Some teachers were excellent. Some teachers were terrible. You could do very little if you had a terrible situation. The current ED stays afloat hiding from issues and avoiding taking a position. You don’t want that, especially in a high school. It’s vital to have an ED that makes hard and often unpopular decisions.

Anonymous wrote:"Basic professional standards" and it's humans with lives who are being threatened with docked pay and consequences if they experience human needs like flat tires, cranky kids who won't move quickly in the morning, late busses. I'm on the outskirts of the DCI community but also in the DC education world, and I've NEVER heard of a school with a clock in system for grown adults. And that's just one aspect of admin infantilizing staff. The school used scare tactics on staff when the opportunity to unionize came up, spreading lies and making staff members feel like their jobs were at risk. The ED took a massive salary while working to ensure support staff like facilities barely make a living wage. The admin has a history of disrespecting their teachers and showing no faith in them. Saying that none of this appears serious is very much misunderstanding the matter and showing the same disrespect to staff that admin is doing.

Anonymous wrote:Different poster- from my lamb experience with ED turnover- I just don’t think it’s a good idea for staff to dictate that an ED must go.

Eventually the staff at lamb ran the show. Some teachers were excellent. Some teachers were terrible. You could do very little if you had a terrible situation. The current ED stays afloat hiding from issues and avoiding taking a position. You don’t want that, especially in a high school. It’s vital to have an ED that makes hard and often unpopular decisions.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:On IB degradation beyond personnel: the staff letter provides quite a bit of specific evidence.

Here’s what it documents:

The MYP Coordinator resigned in February with no succession plan and no communication to families. Community and Personal Projects, which are IB requirements not optional programming, are currently operating with little to no guidance for 8th and 10th grade students right now.

IB coordinator roles have been restructured to include unrelated coaching duties, in some cases supervising double or triple the number of teachers they previously did. This directly reduces their capacity to manage IB program requirements, which are substantial and non-negotiable.

Teachers no longer receive consistent IB-specific training. The IB has very specific professional development requirements that must be documented and verified at program evaluation. The letter describes the process as having become “convoluted and difficult to maneuver.”

The French language track has had multiple phases collapsed into single courses that the letter says serve neither set of language learners. Current middle school students are not receiving the same degree of target language instruction as previous cohorts and will arrive in DP years at a deficit. The board presented biliteracy outcomes at the March meeting as evidence the program is strong, but the letter points out those outcomes reflect students who were taught under the old model. The current cohort is a different story.

And what we do know about the DP Coordinator is that he had a history of only strong performance evaluations per the staff letter, that 744 students signed a petition to reinstate him, and that the ED told an alum inquiring about his status that conversations about his future at DCI were ongoing when verifiably no such conversations were happening.

Here is why the personnel and the IB program degradation are not separate issues: the DP Coordinator oversees the Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge, and the full diploma candidacy process. The MYP Coordinator manages Personal and Community Projects. These are not general administrator roles.

They require IB-specific training and certification and years of program experience. Losing both simultaneously, with no succession plan, at a school with an IB re-evaluation coming in 2027-28, is not a personnel matter. It is a program integrity matter.

This long post shows me that as a middle school parent, I know precious little about the IB model for MYP, much less for high school, and how it's meant to be implemented.

I personally think that the school needs to work much harder at educating parents and bringing families on board to support the school. They do almost nothing. That is one role an ED should take on, via their coordinators. It's one sign that is a red flag to me.

At one point, I attended a Zoom meeting for incoming 6th grader families in which a couple of fairly young professionals who led the MYP but were about to leave the school presented a slide show. That is about it for the information on the IB model.

This school has so much potential and so many eager parents ready to chip in and support almost anything. They do not engage and already the kids in 6th are discussing how they can try to get into Walls and other schools, amongst themselves.

I also am a LAMB parent and I know what the other poster means by years of instability. I also know the signs that a set of teachers is ready to leave or rebel against an ED, and this is not a good sign. But at least at LAMB, there are many opportunities to learn what Montessori is all about, and the school does make an effort (less so now than before, but it happens) to educate parents on the model itself and bring them frequently into the building to learn what's happening. Of course, it's a much smaller school, but something needs to happen. Letting go of the ED with a succession plan and perhaps pushing out the Board chair are a start, but only if someone with vision is on the horizon. One of the issues with the changes at LAMB are that the initial vision of the school has been lost to an extent, since the subsequent new leaders were not particularly visionary. It matters. Where do you locate the vision and heart of a school with turnover? With the longtime staff and most dedicated teachers.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:On IB degradation beyond personnel: the staff letter provides quite a bit of specific evidence.

Here’s what it documents:

The MYP Coordinator resigned in February with no succession plan and no communication to families. Community and Personal Projects, which are IB requirements not optional programming, are currently operating with little to no guidance for 8th and 10th grade students right now.

IB coordinator roles have been restructured to include unrelated coaching duties, in some cases supervising double or triple the number of teachers they previously did. This directly reduces their capacity to manage IB program requirements, which are substantial and non-negotiable.

Teachers no longer receive consistent IB-specific training. The IB has very specific professional development requirements that must be documented and verified at program evaluation. The letter describes the process as having become “convoluted and difficult to maneuver.”

The French language track has had multiple phases collapsed into single courses that the letter says serve neither set of language learners. Current middle school students are not receiving the same degree of target language instruction as previous cohorts and will arrive in DP years at a deficit. The board presented biliteracy outcomes at the March meeting as evidence the program is strong, but the letter points out those outcomes reflect students who were taught under the old model. The current cohort is a different story.

And what we do know about the DP Coordinator is that he had a history of only strong performance evaluations per the staff letter, that 744 students signed a petition to reinstate him, and that the ED told an alum inquiring about his status that conversations about his future at DCI were ongoing when verifiably no such conversations were happening.

Here is why the personnel and the IB program degradation are not separate issues: the DP Coordinator oversees the Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge, and the full diploma candidacy process. The MYP Coordinator manages Personal and Community Projects. These are not general administrator roles.

They require IB-specific training and certification and years of program experience. Losing both simultaneously, with no succession plan, at a school with an IB re-evaluation coming in 2027-28, is not a personnel matter. It is a program integrity matter.

This long post shows me that as a middle school parent, I know precious little about the IB model for MYP, much less for high school, and how it's meant to be implemented.

I personally think that the school needs to work much harder at educating parents and bringing families on board to support the school. They do almost nothing. That is one role an ED should take on, via their coordinators. It's one sign that is a red flag to me.

At one point, I attended a Zoom meeting for incoming 6th grader families in which a couple of fairly young professionals who led the MYP but were about to leave the school presented a slide show. That is about it for the information on the IB model.

This school has so much potential and so many eager parents ready to chip in and support almost anything. They do not engage and already the kids in 6th are discussing how they can try to get into Walls and other schools, amongst themselves.

I also am a LAMB parent and I know what the other poster means by years of instability. I also know the signs that a set of teachers is ready to leave or rebel against an ED, and this is not a good sign. But at least at LAMB, there are many opportunities to learn what Montessori is all about, and the school does make an effort (less so now than before, but it happens) to educate parents on the model itself and bring them frequently into the building to learn what's happening. Of course, it's a much smaller school, but something needs to happen. Letting go of the ED with a succession plan and perhaps pushing out the Board chair are a start, but only if someone with vision is on the horizon. One of the issues with the changes at LAMB are that the initial vision of the school has been lost to an extent, since the subsequent new leaders were not particularly visionary. It matters. Where do you locate the vision and heart of a school with turnover? With the longtime staff and most dedicated teachers.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When lamb removed their ED after the Fernández situation, we were in a long period of instability. Then we got a truly awful ed who was eventually fired. Then more instability. Then our current ED who I don’t like at all. None of them ever resolved the many issues parents brought up over the years.

I still feel it was worth removing Diane as ED. She made catastrophic choices. But for years we had instability and the school declined. I don’t want to deal with years of that. I am fine with dci’s ED but I do want them to address the points on the parent petition.

Also fyi when they removed the EDs from lamb usually the Board chair becomes ED. Do you want Pardo in charge, even in the short term?

Issues are rarely ever just the responsibility or fault of the LT, let alone a single member. As your experience shows things often get worse, not better.

I think the ED can handle things better but so much of it is HR issues- you can’t comment on staff terminations, and you can’t say much more than “hiring is difficult and we want to find the right person. That takes time.” I’m not sure the people complaining will be satisfied with that.

Note: it’s not clear he’s said either of those things.

Anonymous wrote:I agree what you’re saying PP. no good solutions. But I would be cautious to fire the DCI ED right now without a good plan.