On a busy Monday afternoon, with students rushing to turn in their DC Reads applications before deadline, Program Director Nathanial Roloff met with The Hoya to answer some questions about education reform in the District. After D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray bested Mayor Adrian Fenty in last Tuesday’s Democratic primary, the future of the D.C. public school system and programs like DC Reads hangs in the balance.

Before you arrived at Georgetown, you worked at a similar program at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. What were the similarities and differences between the two school systems?

There are a lot of similarities. When I first graduated from college, the No Child Left Behind act was first coming into effect, and it was affecting urban schools in a lot of different ways. The difference between DC Reads and the program run at the University of Minnesota was that at the University of Minnesota we worked with community-based organizations, while here at Georgetown, we operate as our own CBO, that operates its own systems and after-school programs.

The similarities I saw between Minneapolis and D.C. is that urban public school districts are reeling from No Child Left Behind and what it is doing to schools, when it takes teachers and funding away. It hurts those schools in the areas that need that funding the most. However, in Minneapolis, the situation is much worse. Part of the reason for that is Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of [DCPS]. She started creating nets to catch the schools that were failing, rather than letting them fail and deal with the consequences and results of flunking No Child Left Behind. That has led D.C. to be a much healthier educational system than other cities I have worked in.

What will Fenty’s loss mean to the D.C. school system?

I have seen the effects of Michelle Rhee’s efforts, and the majority of those efforts have been positive. It is because of that so many people have been questioning Gray if he will be able to keep Rhee. The effect [of Gray’s election] will be that Rhee will leave, and some of the funds that were helping out D.C. schools will leave with her. The Race to the Top funds [funds tied to plans drafted by the schools that must be strictly followed] will stay. About half of what Michelle Rhee pledged to do will continue after she leaves.

How will Gray’s victory affect college students?

It will affect college students in a couple of ways. Our opinion was that we could engage the chancellor and the mayor during Fenty’s administration all the time, because [D.C. colleges] are such a big community and Rhee was very open about ways to engage DCPS.

Vincent Gray will be a different scenario. I don’t know who he will put up to be the chancellor of DCPS, and I don’t know how many of the leaders of DCPS will leave if Rhee leaves. I think it will be a substantial loss. It will mean also that Gray will be more visible. He didn’t run on changing Fenty’s policies, but rather on changing the interactive qualities of the mayoral position. It’s not necessarily a good or bad thing. D.C. is a tough place to get things done in; Fenty got things done by doing things without asking; Gray wants to get things done by asking everyone questions and hoping there’s some form of consensus.

You also worked for Get Ready, a program modeled similar to Gray’s proposals for disadvantaged youth nearing college age. Could you compare and contrast the two?

We don’t have anything like that in D.C., it was a state- and grant-funded program that addressed at-risk youth student intervention, which doesn’t exist here in D.C. We have funding from higher levels (federal) that go to things that are similar, though. I would be surprised if there is greater college engagement now, with Fenty and Rhee lost, only because there’s a lot of college students at federal universities in the city, that really engage that kind of leadership that Fenty and Rhee displayed. I don’t know as many college students at Georgetown or [The] George Washington [University] who would find consensus-building a very attractive option.

Why was DC Reads first created?

DC Reads was a grant to react to the America Reads Challenge, a bill signed in 1993 to get college students to help students in their area, by using work-study funds. What it does is that it allows programs like ours to send students in community work, social justice work, for 100 percent work-study funds, which means we don’t need huge budgets to run social justice projects. The idea was that we weren’t engaging our at-risk youth, especially in gaining reading skills, and what we need is a lot of support from college students with reading skills, and can contemplate on what you’re doing, and invest that back into the community.

What are challenges and successes you’ve encountered while working with DC Reads?

One challenge you run into regularly is funding and resource restraints. I can only hire so many tutors, because of funding, transportation and schedule issues. Those can be really challenging, especially when we have a demand for about 300 jobs, but the resources to only use half of those. The great successes are that college students can go out, develop that program, and make changes in the community that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. At many of our schools, we’re the only CBO operating there. That means it’s either just one of us teaching these students how to read above their current level, or they’d just be playing. When we have kids who don’t know how to read, or sound out letters, we can’t let them play all day, we have to engage and intervene, and this program has shown me that we can do that by asking college students to act in our programs, to ask more from college students.

What do you think will be the effects of Gray’s victory on DC Reads?

The encouragement we got from Fenty was not words of encouragement, because that’s not who he was, but he created programs that allowed us to grow and prosper within them. The new Out-of-School Time Program at DCPS allowed us to create partnership, build relationships with schools, and demonstrate our value.

The Gray administration will give us more words of support, and less formalized systems that would allow us to succeed. I’m not saying Vincent Gray is going to be a bad mayor. What I am saying is that our system was built off of the last four years of DCPS and Fenty, and I am anxious to hear if the mayor’s office will continue to build up our projects and opportunities.

What is your ideal vision of DC Reads, barring logistical and time issues?

y vision of college students’ programs like ours is that college students will reflect on the values they were given, and the resources they have, and try to transmit some of those assets to the environment around them. We’re surrounded in this urban environment by massive inequality, and college students are perfectly positioned to fit into that scenario and make changes in the system. If resources were no problem, what I’d like to see is a massive collegiate movement where students acknowledge their responsibility to level the field for all students coming out of elementary and middle school, for the students who normally would not have college as a future option. They would be resources for students that would normally not have any resources.

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