WASHINGTON — D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Tuesday that a review is underway after a report of possible enrollment fraud at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
Bowser held a news conference Tuesday, just hours after The Washington Post reported that dozens of families who live outside D.C. may be avoiding the tuition payments required for their children to attend the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
Two D.C. officials told The Post that a preliminary check by the Office of the State Superintendent for Education of about 100 students who claimed D.C. residency found more than half may live outside of the District of Columbia. Nonresidents can attend the school, but are required to pay $12,000 in annual tuition.
Ahnna Smith, the deputy mayor for education, told WTOP that the irregularities were discovered as part of an annual review of school enrollments that begins every October. Checking the residency documentation of each family is part of the process, Smith said; “they found a number of irregularities at Duke Ellington, and that triggered a deeper investigation.”
They’re now checking the residency documentation for all 566 students at Duke Ellington, Smith said.
Families who haven’t been paying and can’t prove D.C. residency, she said, will have the chance of either withdrawing or paying back tuition.
“We have no interest in paying for students at our public schools that are not D.C. residents,” said Bowser at the news conference. “That is why we have a very robust system of verification that has been made even more robust in the last year.”
According to Superintendent Hanseul Kang, when it comes to admission to their programs, Duke Ellington gives preference to eligible students who are D.C. residents over nonresident applicants.
The Post reported that when officials in the state superintendent’s office shared the questionable residency claims with staff in their office and the attorney general’s office, they were told to “take your time” with the investigation, adding that “it’s an election year” and such a story would be bad news for Bowser.
Kang said at a hearing with the D.C. Council’s Education Committee that she had no knowledge of such a comment, “and I would never direct a staff member to slow down our work for any reason other than what the work requires.”
This is the third scandal involving D.C. Public Schools in the past few months: In November of last year, an investigation found that teachers at F.W. Ballou High School were pressured to pass students who hadn’t fulfilled the requirements. The principal was reassigned.
And last week, Chancellor Antwan Wilson resigned after a little more than a year on the job after admitting that he received improper help getting his daughter transferred to Wilson High School — one of the city’s highest performing schools, which has a waiting list of hundreds of families. Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer Niles also resigned.
D.C. Council member David Grosso, the chairman of the Education Committee, said in a statement that “The number of scandals plaguing our education system is staggering.”
He added that he was “particularly frustrated and disturbed” by the report of “an alleged cover-up by the Office of the State Superintendent for Education, and possibly the Office of the Attorney General.”
WTOP’s Kate Ryan contributed to this report.
