D.C. Council grills Rhee on teacher layoffs

WASHINGTON - Did the D.C. schools chancellor break the law when she fired hundreds of teachers earlier this month?

That's what D.C. Council members are saying after revelations during a very heated council hearing Thursday afternoon.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee told the D.C. City Council she ignored their mandate to cut funds from next year's summer school program and instead fired hundreds of teachers.

When Rhee and D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty announced they were firing the teachers, they said it was because of budget cuts passed by the city council.

An approximately $20 million gap existed prior to the Council budget cuts, which neither DCPS nor Mayor Adrian Fenty disclosed to the Council.

The Council also spent time Thursday grilling D.C. Public Schools Chief Financial Officer Noah Wepman.

Over a three-hour session, Wepman told the council members the $43 million budget gap that forced the firings were not entirely due to council budget cuts. Wepman said the DCPS budget was certified, despite the fact that there was a multi-million dollar budget shortfall.

After hearing the news, Council member Michael Brown said it made him think that the mayor "manufactured" the budget crisis in order to "fire union employees."

The Council did cut the DCPS budget by about $20 million last summer, but more than $9 million of that was mandated to be cut from next year's summer school program.

But rather than make cuts to the summer school program, Rhee told the council she decided to fire teachers instead.

The council members said Rhee's actions were illegal, since the budget was approved by the Council and signed by the mayor in a public process.

The only way to make changes to the school budget was a reprogramming request, which DCPS did not do, councilmembers said.

On Friday, DCPS released the following statement:

"There has been no violation of the reprogramming law as no money has been moved and no unapproved spending has occurred. While we believe that summer school is critical to ensuring that DCPS students have every opportunity to succeed, DCPS has no plans to spend any money on summer school until June 2010.

Additionally, DCPS did not create budget pressure by over-hiring. In July we identified a FY10 budget pressure related to unplaced excess teachers, just as occurred last year. And just as in the previous year, the reduction plan for this approximately $13M pressure was to cover the cost through Central Office budget cuts; these savings are clearly identified in central office department reductions prepared during the summer."

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