It's That Time of Year

You may have been tipped off by the increasingly blustery afternoons, or the quickly darkening skies at 4 in the afternoon. Or maybe it’s the slow reemergence of scarves and closed-toed shoes on the fashion-forward DC workforce that made you take note. And what better urban harbinger of seasonal change than your neighborhood Starbucks? The Chinatown store on 7th and H St. has already brought back the pumpkin spice latte, and in this neck of the swamp, that’s a dead giveaway: it’s fall.

Even sitting in our small Chinatown office, I can spot more seasonal signifiers. My old navy blue hoodie (now officially a “Brainfood” shirt) has acquired a new constellation of bleach spatters around the waist, most likely the result of an overzealous student wiping down tables. A quick sift through the recycling pile reads like The Brief History of Sugar and Butter: Sugar Cookies, Muffins, Banana Cake, makes 25 small cookies, makes 2 9-inch round cakes. Scroll through my camera, and there’s a new batch of faces, shy smiles, and floury hands holding trays of pillowy sweet potato biscuits. And, waiting ever-so-patiently at my side, sits a faithful, silent, and rather pungent work colleague, my bag of dirty kitchen towels. It eyes me beseechingly, as if to say, “Didn’t you miss me? Isn’t it time to spend some quality time with your laundry this weekend?”

And thus, we have begun. It’s a relief to get back into the rhythm of after school classes after an August and September that was decidedly not routine. While we were busy with the Summer Institute, local shakeups in the DC Public School system left plenty of schools scrambling to open their doors on August 25th. In some schools, evidence of change and transition was welcome, as new classrooms were available, and freshly painted walls and lockers greeted incoming students. The administration changes and addition of After School Coordinators to many school staffs, however, made for a challenging recruitment period. We lost some of our closest school contacts and vocal Brainfood advocates, and we had to rethink our traditional recruitment process to reach students in schools where finalizing schedules and distributing textbooks took a necessary precedence over after school programming. In a city where the issues that affect commuters and Hill interns routinely gain more press than issues that impact residential life in the District, it is promising that DC’s public school system has a prominent role in the national conversation on urban education. Chancellor Rhee’s aggressive approach to achieving results in DC has certainly received media attention, and more recently, a brief exchange on vouchers vs. public charters in DC popped up in, of all places, the final presidential debate.
It’s in this environment of the perpetually political, however, where we find ourselves facing the often unpopular task of steering clear of the education bandwagon. It’s easy to have an opinion on the public school system in DC, now that the mayor and chancellor have staked their careers on education reform. It’s a trickier task to advocate for increased support for organizations that promote life skills, youth empowerment, community development, even though healthy communities and a thriving public school system produce similar successes by promoting the same values.

Sorting through the politics of education reform in DC is quite a lot to digest on a daily basis, but on our end, we’re just happy to still be able to offer programs, fill classrooms, and recruit students however we’re able. Once the classes are full and students start coming in, that’s when we can relax a bit, knowing that at least, for one more year, we’ve managed to successfully navigate the changing landscape of DC schools and fill our after school program. It’s one more thing to be grateful for. And it makes the prospect of a weekend spent washing dirty Brainfood towels slightly (but only slightly) more manageable.

- Carina