Thinking About Christmas
I called around to some of the Hill powerhouse businesses, institutions and individuals to see what each are planning for the Christmas holidays for those amongst us who are in need of a helping hand.

CHAMPS, the muscular community business organization, is working with the Business Improvement District (BID) and Barracks Row Association to promote business on the Hill with Saturday, Dec. 8 as a date when there will be a Santa on Eighth St. from 4-6 with a tree lighting in the Metro plaza at 6:00 a.m. in honor of National Capital Bank’s George Didden, Board co-chair and one of the founders of Barracks Row Main Street.

St Peter’s Parish, founded in 1868, has its St. Nicolas Club, a twenty year tradition of decorating multiple trees in the rear of the Church with over one hundred tagged ornaments that identify particular children’s special holiday needs including ages and sizes. The children are chosen by Friends of Tyler, a tutoring and mentoring program. In addition, the parish includes about 10-15 shut-ins and another dozen or so of the homeless who congregate in Seward Square.

Capitol Hill Community Foundation (CHCF) plays Santa Claus twice a year with bi-annual grants to community groups. Sixty Fall 2007 grants totaling $142,000 were just announced. This is in addition to having collected over $450, 000 from the Hill community to support the Eastern Market merchants after the fire, and the $2.5 million CHCF has raised which has been used to completely renovate and upgrade the libraries of eight local public schools. Under the driving, no nonsense leadership of Nicky Cymrot, CHCF, if not exactly providing toy for tots, is a daily supportive presence in the lives of Hill families and their children.

Council member Tommy Wells’ office uses its constituency fund, money that is left over from his campaign, to assist people on a daily basis. Chief of Staff Charles Allen reports that the fund is “modest” and that it is mostly used to help constituents with emergencies like threatened utility cutoffs, but only after attempts to find other solutions.  Allen does add that through the holidays he has no doubt “Wells will be handing out a turkey or two.”  Wells has personally gathers hundreds of toys for the past years for the Holy Comforter-Community Action Group (CAG) Christmas party.

The Community for Creative Non Violence (CCNV), a homeless shelter at the edge of Ward Six that is too easily forgotten, houses 1350 people temporarily. Spokeperson Deborah Tibbs reports that giving during holiday times is overwhelming, adding that although there are no longer children at the shelter, the general public’s generosity is enormous and gifts arrive “by the truckloads.” There is a huge Christmas dinner for 2500 held in a nearby parking lot under a tent with over 600 volunteers. Regrettably, the one gift that eludes the residents of CCNV is a permanent place to live. “Home,” Robert Frost once wrote. “ is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”

Rhee: Promises, Promises
I was watching our new school Chancellor testifying before the City Council on her proposal to change the employment arrangements between the 934 workers who work in the central administration offices and the school leadership. Rhee is risking abandoning the protection of due process and seeking the authority to fire “at will.”

She talked at some length about the kind of person who would be subject to instant dismissal and cited some powerful examples of people who are letting the “kids” fall though the cracks by not returning parents’ calls or not completing vital paperwork. She cited the millions of dollars that the District loses when these administrative matters have no follow through.

On one matter that we know of too well we wonder if Rhee and her newly hired staff  just might be one of those people she described.

In October, I wrote about a young special needs student, Patrick Campbell, who attends Duke Ellington HS. Due to his diagnosed arterial venous malfunction (AVM), he requires a special aide and transportation to school, accommodations to which he is legally entitled. During the three years since he was diagnosed, DCPS has been unable to meet his needs, or to reimburse his family for the money and time they have spent filling DCPS’s shortfall. Patrick’s father, Frances, personally took his son to school for a full school year and acted as his aide (2005-06) and has intermittently resumed this practice when necessary, all of this at some great personal expense to the Campbell family.

On October 2, Frances Campbell forwarded my October Hill Rag column to Chancellor Rhee to which she responded: “Thanks for the information.” End of contact. Weeks later on October 25, in a meeting arranged by Councilmember Wells (who did take action), Richard Nyankori, Special Assistant to the Chancellor, one of the highly paid, newly hired members of Rhee’s team, contacted Campbell and according to Campbell, after a brief discussion told him that “nothing you have asked for seems unreasonable” (compensation for being his son’s aide and transportation reimbursement) and that he would be back in touch with Campbell in “two weeks.”  End of contact.

On November 7, Dan Gould of DCPS called Campbell and told him that he would be the person to contact in the future and to submit the paperwork necessary for resolving the outstanding financial issues to meet the compliance requirements for a compensation review. Campbell was also told for the first time that the $2800 originally authorized for Patrick’s neuropsychiatric evaluation which led to a plan for his recovery would possibly be reimbursed. Since then Campbell has attempted to call Gould twice and neither call has been returned.

On November 14 at the start of a MDT ( multidisciplinary team)  meeting, Campbell was informed that the $2800 had been approved and that he merely had to submit the paperwork to the Compliance Division, which he indicates that he will do for the fourth time. Right before Thanksgiving,  Campbell was further informed that the compensation for being his son’s aide was under even more scrutiny as DCPS worked toward a solution. Finally, DCPS indicated that it was cutting a check for Patrick’s tape recorder ($130. ) and Dan Gould reappeared to tell Campbell that Patrick’s books were being put on CD.

Frances Campbell has begun the paperwork and remains “cautiously pessimistic.” His thoughts on the current situation? “So far I’ve heard a lot of talk” and adds he is “disappointed in the new Chancellor.” All of this activity according to Campbell is because of the Hill Rag article.  

Oh yes, you were wondering about Patrick? He is “doing just fine” according to Campbell, but the required full time aide leaves at 3:00 each day although Patrick attends school till 4:00. And the bus that takes him to school daily arrives at 6:30 a.m., arriving at Ellington at 8:30 a.m. Patrick is returned home each evening after 6:30.

The Campbells have dutifully worked their way around and through the DCPS’ hurdles for three years. Rhee, a whirling dervish of pep talks and community outreach, repeatedly tells the school community to bring these issues to her personal attention, giving out her email and cell phone number freely. At this point we are waiting to see if Rhee can be given a grade of C or a D on the very important matter of Patrick Campbell’s education. .  

Metropolitan Police in Cyberspace
We’ve come a long way in policing since the days in the early ‘90s when our police community liaison, Sgt. Burch, from station house (1D1) told those of us at a Beat 24 meeting that not only was there no copy paper and a shortage of forms to perform the functions of police work, including papering arrests, but that the copying machine was broken with no likelihood of being fixed. He added that police officers often trudged up to Pennsylvania Ave.’s Kinkos to make copies. He told us that on one particular day there was only one serviceable squad car for patrolling all of Capitol Hill. He suggested half facetiously that bullets might be rationed as a next step.

Inspector Marcus Westover, originally a Hill native, who was recently promoted to Director of Court Liaison, whose function is to screen and give clearance to arrests as they are brought before the judicial system, recently took me on the magical mystery tour of papering an arrest.

Westover, who joined the police “to make a difference” is now leading an IT charge that is revolutionizing this papering and making it, if not easier, then certainly more accurate and streamlined which is in everyone’s interest and at the same time giving some needed relief to those officers. With the average arrest taking up to two hours of an officer’s time it also is getting the police back on the street much quicker.

I sat in Westover’s office with his assistant, Lt. Jacqueline Davis-Hamm, and tried to keep up with the confounding array of forms that are required in making a good arrest. A DUI? Try PD-163a. Evidence? PD-81. Sexual assault? Reach for a PD-163. A drug arrest? PD-163& PD-81 & a DEA-7. And with juveniles it gets even more complicated with categories for truancy and curfew, but the PD-379 is where you start. Of course there is the familiar PD-251. That is for any and all contact in an incident or offense, meaning simply calling the police.

But these forms, once all paper, have moved in a new electronic direction. The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has been electronic for a little over a year. All arrests, now entered at the booking station house, are done by computer.

And now there is a pilot program in District 3 for misdemeanors along with a city wide pilot in drug and prostitution arrests under the Narcotics Special Investigations Division (NSID that allow an officer, once the arrest has been made, to be freed up, thanks to electronic records from repeated and redundant “face to face’ appearances at the courts or police central headquarters.

So far the results are exactly what MPD had hoped for. More accuracy and efficiency and greater precision in what was a cumbersome system with the near term possibility looming that someone arrested might well be dealing with magistrates and arraignments via videoconferencing in the very police station that they are being booked in.