Despite the recently beautiful weather beckoning to everyone to spend their days outdoors, it is an exciting time to be a student in Baltimore. For years, students and teachers have complained of dreadful facilities — from broken equipment to roach infestations to undrinkable water, Baltimore schools were not a safe place to learn. Transform Baltimore, an agency determined to update all Baltimore school buildings through an aggressive $2.4 billion loan and rebuilding plan by 2020, has been organizing students, parents, teachers and legislators to follow a funding model to change the face of schools in the city.
Sound Familiar? Baltimore is in the middle of another long-term plan to change a social issue. While Transform Baltimore is an eight-year plan and The Journey Home is a ten-year plan to end homelessness, both are ambitions road maps to change. Unfortunately, as I have mentioned before, we know that one of them is not really working. As Baltimore’s Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness passes its fifth birthday, there are more people experiencing homelessness in Baltimore than when the plan began. A new draft of the plan was released earlier this year, but the new draft so greatly disappointed service providers that the city council needed to intervene and ask for revisions.
Will the bright futures of improved Baltimore schools go the way of the plan to end homelessness? It is possible that the next few years could see failed development, unfinished renovations and continually crumbling existing schools, but something tells me it won’t be that way. Transform Baltimore has taken impressive steps to ensure that it can succeed. Even though The Journey Home is approaching middle age, its authors could learn a lot from Transform Baltimore.
• Communication: Transform Baltimore began with community organizing. It has over 30 member organizations that represent youth, parents, educators, and community members. Meetings began in 2011 to gather ideas and plan for rallies and demonstrations. This organizing allowed for the perspectives of multiple stakeholders to share ideas and get involved in the project. While the first draft of Baltimore’s Ten Year Plan involved stakeholders, the rewrites failed to make use of the many experts on homelessness in Baltimore. The Baltimore City Housing Authority has the most housing resources in the city, but was not invited to comment or contribute to the plan’s rewrite.
• Best Practices: Baltimore’s strategic plan is based on a model that has been successful in three cities. Indianapolis, Buffalo, and Greenville, South Carolina are each in the process of dramatically updating their school buildings. It was by examining these school districts that Baltimore was able to create a financial plan that would provide necessary funding for this project. As I have lamented before, Baltimore has stayed woefully close to home when planning to end homelessness. While the consultant for the plan was actually Canadian, there is little evidence that practices from any other city struggling to end homelessness were ever discussed.
• Funding: In early April, we learned that Transform Baltimore lobbying has been successful. A bill that would commit $1.1 billion for school building and renovation passed both the house and senate, and is on its way to Governor O’Malley’s desk. The new draft of the Ten Year Plan fails to demonstrate where much of its funding will come from. Funding for ending homelessness has primarily been focused on keeping shelters and existing agencies running, rather than on new solutions.
Baltimore students and educators deserve nothing less than excellent school facilities. It appears that Baltimore might be on the way to providing this, making the city a true leader in education reform nationwide. If this plan is successful, it will mean supreme growth for the city’s young people, but also a strong model for the city’s population experiencing homelessness. A road map for social change is a valuable asset, one from which other advocates might learn.
