Around 10:00 AM, on Thursday, January 18, 2024, an Anacostia community member called 911 about a gas leak near the DanAkil Convenience Store on Marion Barry Avenue SE.  Next door to the convenience store is the Baby Einstein Child Development Center.  The staff at the childcare center quickly began packing up all of the children and rushed them to safety at a local business outside of the safety zone before the Fire/EMS arrived.  

“One of Dr. King's most radical speeches, given at Riverside Church in Manhattan, 1967.

This is the speech that linked war, poverty and corrupt economics. This is the speech that talked about America being " the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and on "the wrong side of a world revolution." This is perhaps the speech that helped get him killed--assassinated exactly one year to the day after delivering it.”

D.C. government does not require schools to educate black students as well as white students according to a complaint submitted to the U.S. Department of Education by a D.C. resident.

Note from the editor:

This complaint was submitted just two days before the release of the Supreme Court’s decision on Affirmative Action admissions to universities. The author of this complaint, Jeff Schmidt, is a long-time DC resident and father of a student who graduated from DC public schools and then went on to graduate from college. Schmidt is a boomer, cisgender, white man, with a PhD in physics from the University of California, Irvine, who takes an active volunteer role in assisting DC public school science and math teachers in creating better curriculum.

It’s entirely possible for a student to get a good education in the DC public school system but it’s no easy task.  According to the NCES’s National Report Card, only 17% of DCPS 8th graders are proficient at math.

After reading DC’s Education ESSA Plan, he sent the following letter of complaint to the US Department of Education.  In it, he asks that they consider applying the same standards used in schools and classrooms with significant numbers of white students to every school and each student. Why don’t we do that?  Why should we accept year in and year out that Black kids and white kids won’t be treated equally?  Long after Brown v Board of Education, racism in DC public schools continues to be baked into the system.