OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
There’s nothing humorous about not having a home.
There’s nothing lighthearted about such a condition.
There’s nothing celebratory about it — unless, of course, it’s to thank God and the ancestors that you woke up to live another day, roof or no roof.
Mayor Muriel Bowser has a different take.
In the minds of the Bowser administration, opening a homeless shelter is something the mayor should celebrate.
The shelter, named the Kennedy, is located in the mayor’s home ward — Ward 4, which hugs Rock Creek Park and includes tree-lined streets, wonderful detached single-family homes with driveways and an upper-middle class demographic that poorer parts of the city can only dream of.
And there Miss Bowser was on Tuesday, holding sway over celebratory pomp as if homeless children had not already been given the short shrift by her administration.
The most glaring case is Jamal Speaks, a senior and student-athlete at Ballou High School in Ward 8, whose demographics hardly measure up to Ward 4’s. Jamal was benched the day college scouts came to see him play.
Long story short, one of the city’s two athletic organizations, the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association (DCIAA), said Jamal had a residency problem because he was homeless and sleeping on friends’ couches to attend school and play football.
Jamal’s personal kicker is a blessing: Temple University is giving him a scholarship, and a GoFundMe campaign has collected more than $20,000 on his behalf.
The bad news is on Miss Bowser’s side of political ledger. Last year, hundreds of D.C. students, most of them at Ballou, were cheated out a quality education by being allowed to be considered “present” were they weren’t even in school and being allowed to be given a high school diploma.
Those aren’t the only bad marks on Miss Bowser’s D.C. Public Schools system, which also oversees — guess what? DCIAA.
Clearing my throat to rid it of possible venom, let me say that Miss Bowser needs to buck up.
Through no fault of his own, Jamal lost his dad and fell on hard times, and the school bureaucracy whose money and policy strings the mayor controls punished him — when the young man (young black man) was seemingly trying to do the right thing. Stay out of trouble, go to school and aspire to college.
If things go right between now and Thanksgiving, the least the mayor could do is attend the Turkey Bowl, the annual city high school championship. There, the mayor could take the microphone, apologize to Jamal, his family and other D.C. students, homeless or not.
That is, of course, unless D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson’s report on school enrollment, accuracy and transparency reveals other troubling management problems at DCPS.
The report will be released Friday, and education has always been one of Mrs. Patterson’s favorite issues.
• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
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