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Checks come from all over the country: $ 200 from a charter school director from New York, $ 100 from a Silicon Valley employee, an additional $ 100 from a leadership consultant school in North Carolina.
The money, more than US $ 150,000, boosts the number of candidates on the DC board – relatively obscure and powerless positions in the district.
Nevertheless, school board races in the district have become symbolic battlegrounds for the future of public education, an expensive phenomenon that is being played elsewhere in local races. Advocates of the mainstream public school system clash with supporters of a rugged charter school sector. And funders of publicly or privately funded school charters who educate nearly half of the public school students in the district often bring in a lot of money from outside the city.
"I was shocked," said Emily Gasoi, a Ward 1 Education Council candidate from the Ward 1 constituency whose opponent had collected close to $ 60,000 in August, either more than three times more than Gasoi. "I did not know it was going to be a race around money."
While the mayor and the attorney general face no serious candidate for the re-election candidate this year, the education council of the nine member states is proposing three competitive races in November. A special election for Ward 4's seat is scheduled for December. School board seats – all nine are not election candidates this year – are supposed to be non-partisan and candidates do not participate in the primaries.
A measure of the intensity surrounding this year's races: on August 10, candidates had received as much campaign contributions as candidates for the full election cycle four years earlier.
The city's elected school board lost almost all of its power in 2007 when its mayor, Adrian M. Fenty (D), took over the school system. Today, the school board is limited to defining general rules governing graduation conditions, academic standards, and teacher qualifications.
Disputes arise as the school system struggles with controversy and municipal leaders debate whether the mayor, who appoints almost all of the city's education officials, should be better controlled. The Judicial Council is considering taking measures that would deprive Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) of the power to appoint the Superintendent of State for Education and to establish a center for research on education. beyond the competence of the mayor.
In most races organized by the National Board of Education, candidates are divided on whether the mayor should keep control of the schools, with a charter advocacy group supporting candidates supporting the school. 39, authority of the mayor.
The neighborhood race 1 is one of the most controversial and expensive. The current incumbent does not seek re-election.
Jason Andrean, a CFO on the Board of Directors of a charter school, faces Gasoi, a former teacher who sends her daughter to a language immersion charter school. Both candidates received more than half of their donations from outside the district.
[Can schools be fairly ranked on a five-star system?]
But Andrean, who raised nearly $ 60,000 on Aug. 10, was examined more closely because of his ties to the world of the Charter. It has endorsed the chapter of Democracy for Education Reform, a rights advocacy organization that promotes charter schools, mandate reform and other policies. that teacher unions have always fought.
Andrean resigned from the board of Democrats for Education Reform in January to run for a vacancy.
Gasoi has been approved by the Washington Teachers' Union.
Democrats for Education Reform is reputed to have helped the decision of low-participation boards in December 2014, and supporters of the traditional school system fear that this will happen again.
"There is no doubt that national actors with an agenda are investing thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to guide the most local elections we have, namely education," Matt said. Frumin, an education activist of the city.
Josh Henderson, Acting Director of the Democrats for Education section, said this did not include his group. He did not donate to any of the four candidates he sponsored – although the DC Section received over $ 350,000 in contributions between January and mid-August, most of them from outside the district. according to the financial reports.
Instead, said Henderson, the candidates tapped into their own networks for contributions. Although the organization extolled its endorsements in e-mail newsletters, Henderson said it would mainly support candidates by helping them to prospect in neighborhoods.
Henderson said that, in addition to supporting the mayor's control, his group supports a new ranking system throughout the city, which assigns one to five stars to charter campuses and traditional public school systems based on performance. The initiative, due to be launched in December, is controversial as critics say it relies too much on standardized test scores and fears that neighborhood schools with a high concentration of students from low-income families do not succeed badly. The State Board of Education has narrowly approved the grading system this year.
"Our candidates have deep roots in the world of education," Henderson said. "I do not think it's that they do not get support from D.C. They're just getting support from elsewhere, too."
Andrean said his money was flowing to the old. The native of New York said that he had picked up a phone and sent emails to everyone he knew.
Everton Blair, a Georgia resident, donated $ 200 to Andrean and Zachary Parker, candidate for Ward 5 State Council. (Parker did not receive approval from Democrats for Education Reform, but his opponent , Adrian Jordan.) Blair said he was befriending Andrean and Parker while he was attending a White House Scholarship in the city three years ago. He was impressed by their leadership.
"These are two colleagues in which I believe deeply," said Blair, a candidate for a position on a school board in a suburb of Atlanta. "There are many division problems in education that do not need to divide it. We are all talking about ensuring that our children have access to quality education in high quality schools. "
The Ward 6 candidate, Jessica Sutter – a Democratic Party candidate for education, engaged in a fierce battle against incumbent President Joe Weedon – said that with the exception of one With a handful of donors, she knew the people outside the district who had contributed to her campaign. Sutter, a former teacher who wrote her thesis on the closing and reopening of charter schools, raised about $ 20,000 in August, more than double the amount of Weedon.
Sutter said that although she spoke of charter schools, she also supported the traditional system. "When almost half of the children are on a charter, they are not a marginal element," she said.
But Weedon, who has two children in the mainstream public school system, said his connection to the schools was as a local parent and he did not have the same outside networks to solicit donations. He said the $ 10,000 he had raised in August represented double what he had amassed for his 2014 bid.
"It was a field business," said Weedon. "Make sure people know that I'm on the ballot and I attend community events, as I always do."
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