Why this Columbia Heights elementary school is facing massive budget cuts

Earlier this year, the staff at Harriet Tubman Elementary School in Columbia Heights heard rumblings of bad news: the city was considering a significant cut to the school’s budget for the next school year. But when the school finally received word of the proposed cuts, no one was prepared for how big they would be:  $1.2 million, or nearly 10 percent of the previous year’s budget.

Janelle Whittaker, a pre-k teacher at Tubman Elementary, couldn’t believe the massive slash initially. “Budget cuts happen all the time. So I feel like we're always sort of prepared to be scrappy,”  Whittaker tells The 51st. “But truly my initial thought was like, ‘That's not real. It's a mistake.’”

After a public outcry that included a rally in front of the school, D.C. Public Schools allocated $300,000 back into the budget, but the school is still facing almost a million dollar slash. The cuts could require the school to let go of around eight teachers and staff, teachers say, though DCPS says the school should be able to hang on to 97 full-time employees and remain appropriately staffed. Teachers worry that Tubman students – of which a considerable number qualify as vulnerable or “at-risk” –  will have fewer services and opportunities available next year. 

“It’s not fair to our kids,” said Nasya Bethea, a kindergarten teacher at the school.

In a statement to The 51st, DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee said the cuts remain in line with accepted practice when a school is losing students, as Tubman expects to next school year. “Through the initial budget allocations for the next fiscal year, DC Public Schools (DCPS) is committed to ensuring every school has the funds to support achievement," the statement reads. "Tubman Elementary School’s initial Fiscal Year 2026 budget reflects a projected enrollment decrease of 156 students. The school will remain appropriately staffed through mechanisms including sustainability funds and budget assistance, maintaining 97 full-time employees to teach and support the approximately 405 students the district anticipates will enroll for School Year 2025-2026.”

Tubman does expect enrollment to drop – but teachers say that enrollment loss stems from the school’s relocation to a temporary swing space while the original location undergoes a two-year-long renovation.

The swing space, in the former Banneker High School building, is roughly 0.7 miles away from Tubman’s permanent campus. For families who walk to school and live west of the campus, that’s at least an additional 15 minutes to their commute. Some students enrolled in closer schools as a result, teachers say. DCPS declined to provide transportation to the swing space because it’s not at least a mile away from the original campus, per their policy.

The transition to the swing space has presented other issues that teachers believe are further driving down enrollment. Tubman lost one of its main aftercare providers, CentroNía, when they moved into the swing space because it was too far — which led to 20 families opting for another school that could provide this service, said the Tubman Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) in a letter to DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee. 

“It's hard to find a job that you're done before 3:30 p.m.,” Whittaker says. “So our enrollment may go down further, because parents need aftercare or before care, or both sometimes.”

Tubman Elementary serves a significant number of vulnerable students – 55 percent of its students are labeled “at-risk,” meaning the students are eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, are homeless, or in the foster care system. Fifty percent are also English-language learners, and many Tubman students belong to immigrant families who may be under particular stress amidst the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant deportation policies. Additionally, nearly one fourth of students have a disability.

Public school budgets in the U.S. are often determined by enrollment numbers. But it can be counterintuitive for preserving stability in schools, particularly for communities with a lot of at-risk students, says Scott Goldstein, executive director of local education advocacy nonprofit EmpowerEd.

“If a student population is going down, you actually need to pump more money into that school to make sure that school doesn't enter an enrollment spiral,” Goldstein says. “If we base it only on enrollment, we're not protecting against that.”

DCPS does allocate additional dollars for at-risk students, English-language learners, and students with disabilities. But if enrollment goes down, schools are probably going to see these types of students leave too — resulting in less funding.

Goldstein also adds that in the case of Tubman Elementary, and for any school being relocated into a temporary swing space, reducing the budget doesn’t make sense because the school system knows that relocating will decrease enrollment while the original location is undergoing renovations. “We should absolutely always make sure that if a school is undergoing a swing space transition, that there's no reduction in funding in those years,” Goldstein added.

Sam Bertocchi, a first grade teacher at Tubman Elementary, agrees. “I think that when a school is in a swing space… that should be a time when people say, ‘Wait a minute. This isn't actually a decrease in enrollment. This is a change in circumstance.’”

Tubman Elementary teachers also say that when they’re back in their original location in the fall of 2026, enrollment numbers won’t just return to what they were prior to relocating — they actually expect to have even more students attending the newly renovated school.

“We know there's going to be a drop in enrollment during the swing phase,” says Bethea. “But we also know once we return to the renovated space, our numbers are going to grow. So why not keep that budget stagnant?”

‘A highly destabilizing process’

Historically, budget season has been a stressful time for schools as they brace for cuts and prepare to appeal for more funding. The DCPS Chancellor allocates funding for individual schools, and sends schools these budgets in the late winter. The Local School Advisory Teams (LSATs) at each school review and revise the budget before sending it to the Mayor Muriel Bowser's office for her proposed budget (though the mayor doesn’t always integrate the feedback given from schools). Once the mayor publishes her full budget — which includes DCPS funding — the D.C. Council looks it over, makes changes as members see fit, and votes to approve it. 

The mayor has not yet proposed her budget for the next fiscal year, but the chancellor has already allocated schools their proposed funding.

In 2022, the council passed a law called the Schools First in Budgeting Act (Schools First), which mandated that DCPS’s proposed budgets for schools can be no less than the previous year’s budget. Prior to this, DCPS could cut up to 5 percent of a school’s budget, including schools that had little to no enrollment change.

But even under the new Schools First legislation, enrollment numbers still matter. Under the law, a school budget “may be decreased, incrementally, if the school's projected enrollment for the next school year is projected to decline” and if this decline is “great enough on the grade or subject level to eliminate a classroom or warrant elimination of instructional or school-based support personnel.” 

For Tubman Elementary, DCPS’s proposed cut was nearly double the 5 percent change seen in the past.

Apart from the stress of funding cuts, budget season for schools is also “a highly destabilizing process,” Goldstein says. Despite the passage of Schools First, Goldstein says that the mayor’s office and DCPS haven’t always funded schools at 100 percent of their previous year’s budget. In the past, the council has revised the budget and reallocated money to abide by Schools First before submitting it back to the mayor. All of this typically happens between March and June — right as the school year wraps up.

“We passed the laws and they’re supposed to follow them,” Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau told The 51st. “We consistently have this problem every year, where we’re calling DCPS in to testify about why they’re not following the laws that we put into place.”

While schools wait for final budgets to be approved, administrators are left unsure of what cuts they’re facing, which makes personnel decisions difficult. Schools could be forced to eliminate some roles, only to ask for those teachers or staff back later if part of their funding is restored. Students could unnecessarily lose teachers they have built relationships with and are used to seeing.

“One of the things I love about Tubman is that even though it is a school of over 400 kids, the adults know everybody by name,” says Tara Sun Vanacore, a parent to two students at Tubman Elementary and member of the school’s PTO. “Even teachers who have not had my kids greet them by name.” And when Vanacore went through cancer treatment in 2022, she said her kids were able to see the school counselor, who has continued to check on them since then.

Administrators, teachers, and PTO members at Tubman Elementary are still working to restore some of their budget and reduce the number of eliminated staff roles. They say they’re having conversations with councilmembers about how to receive more funding, and are trying to raise awareness around the issue.

Once the mayor’s full budget is released in the coming weeks, public hearings will take place. That gives teachers, parents, and students an opportunity to testify about how the proposed funding will affect them as the council puts together the final budget. Because of congressional intervention that has left D.C. with a $1 billion hole, the budget may not be finalized until late July, Goldstein says.

If the budget includes this large cut to Tubman’s budget, Vanacore says it’s going to hit them hard.

“It's going to be devastating,” she says. “Not just for the kids, but for all of the adults who are connected to those kids.”

This story was updated to correctly attribute a statement from the city about the budget cuts to Harriet Tubman Elementary School.