Fixes for DPS can't come fast enough — literally
Say this for more than a month of "sick-outs," unofficial strikes staged by Detroit Public Schools teachers — they've brought the district's horrors clearly into focus: a dead mouse in one elementary school, classrooms so cold that children expect to wear coats until noon; pictures from another school show a profusion of mushrooms growing out of a wall.
Deplorable conditions in the state's largest district are nothing new. But knowing the district is in tragic disrepair is different from seeing it in vivid color, from understanding that there are rooms with standing water or teachers juggling 39 kindergartners in one class.
And yet ... here's something almost as awful as the conditions in which we expect Detroit children to learn, and judge them when they do not: There is no help coming, not any time soon.
The district has spent the bulk of the last 15 years under state oversight intended to remedy its financial and academic problems. It hasn't helped. It's gotten worse. The district has too much debt to operate effectively, it continues to lose students at a staggering rate, and tensions between the district's management and its workforce are at an unbelievable high.
Attention in the state in recent weeks has, rightly, been focused on the City of Flint, where thousands of residents have been exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water because the state failed to properly regulate treatment of water pumped from the Flint River.
But the needs of the 47,000 children in Detroit public schools are pressing — and what plans do exist to improve the district's situation offer no immediate relief.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan toured some schools last week, and has said he'll have inspectors examine the remainder, a four-month process undertaken with a view toward using the city's building codes to compel the district to make repairs.
DPS spokeswoman Michelle Zdrodowski wrote in an e-mail that among the district's 97 buildings, "complete disrepair" is the exception, not the norm. The cash-strapped district addresses problems "based on the resources available, in as timely a manner as possible." For instance, DPS officials said Friday, the mushrooms pictured growing Fixes for DPS can't come fast enough — literally: