Not good

In that same story in the Washington Post by Lori Montgomery about which I wrote in a previous entry, there was an alarming account of mal-eduction. If it’s true, the story deserves much greater play. Here’s the segment of the story that alarmed me:

This spring, Deanwood community activist John Frye pulled his 12-year-old stepdaughter out of Kelly Miller Middle School, which opened in 2004 in Northeast Washington. Frye noticed that the seventh-grader wasn’t doing homework. She said her class didn’t have books.
Frye complained to Principal Robert W. Gill Sr., then went to Kelly Miller to check things out. What he saw appalled him, he said. The teachers were at a training session, leaving children to run wild in the halls.
“It brought tears to my eyes,” Frye said, “to see a whole generation of young black people out of control like that. No supervision. I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
Gill called the incident unfortunate. “It’s like when you invite somebody over to your house, and the lights go out,” he said, adding that school system administrators quickly agreed to modify the teacher training schedule.

Could there be something missing in this account? Apparently there was no emergency that caused the principal to summon everyone at once, else why would administrators modify the schedule. Since when is it good administrative practice to pull teachers from classrooms for what sounds like in-service without assigning other supervising adults? Was this common practice in DC schools?

Link to Ms. Montgomery’s article.