Back to school on a summer day

A new school leadership welcomed students as they returned to class in the District yesterday, while a new piece of technology awaited students in Montgomery County.

Photo Gallery: Back to school

In the District, the past 10 weeks of planning for the new year under Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s new school administration have been an overall success, city school officials said yesterday.

“The bureaucracy and the layer of confusion about how decisions have been made and will be made have been eliminated,” Mr. Fenty said at a press conference at River Terrace Elementary School in Northeast. “We’ve hired a world-class team to run our school system.”

Mr. Fenty’s administration took charge of the city’s 141 schools over the summer.

The school system has 20 new principals and 410 new teachers. There were 49,390 registered students yesterday, school officials said.

“This year students, parents and teachers will know that education is a top priority,” D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said. “I am committed to ensuring teachers have the supplies and resources they need for student achievement as we embark on this important period of transformation.”

Mrs. Rhee said the system has filled 99 percent of the schools’ textbook and education material needs, a month after a mix-up threatened to leave half of students without them. Throughout the transition, the central warehouse delivered 54,000 books to schools, school officials said.

Yesterday, several parents said they were happy with the improvements.

Malika Walters, 30, of Northeast, enrolled her 5-year-old son in kindergarten at Young Elementary School in Northeast after she was dissatisfied with her son’s experience at a charter school last year.

“I’m confident in Rhee,” Miss Walters said. “I’m looking to see their vision for the school year.”

Still, others faced familiar disorganization while trying to register their children for class.

Carmen Douglas, 40, of Southeast, waited more than three hours to register her son for ninth grade at Ballou Senior High School in Southeast.

“If they were more organized during the registration process, they could focus on some other issues,” Miss Douglas said.

Ballou Principal Karen D. Smith said this year she got staff from the school system’s central office to help but still had to wade through an influx of late registrations.

“The problem is you have 1,400 students registering and a lot of people decided to do it at the last minute,” Miss Smith said.

Washington Teachers Union President Nathan Saunders said feedback on the new administration from teachers since June has been overwhelmingly positive.

“There’s evidence that these are not purely political musings,” Mr. Saunders said. “When you see the amount of time and energy and the areas of focus, you see the uptick.”

Mrs. Rhee said she will shift focus to closing the achievement gap between poor, black students and richer white students by assessing where the students are academically.

“Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in this country,” Mrs. Rhee said. “I saw that was not the case in Washington.”

As for improvement on school facilities, Mr. Fenty said last week that he will ask the D.C. Council for $12 million from the city’s reserves to begin work on heating and cooling systems. So far, schools with central cooling systems got upgrades over the summer and about 670 new air-conditioning units were installed.

Mr. Fenty said he also will likely ask the City Council for another $108 million from the schools’ capital improvements budget to repair the schools.

In Rockville, nearly 800 students returned to Parkland Magnet Middle School for Aerospace Technology with a new gadget: a small gray and orange pod — about the size of a grapefruit — called the Promethean.

The handheld pods allow students to punch in answers to teachers’ questions and allow teachers to track who is successfully learning the course material.

“We don’t want our teachers just to lecture to them,” said Benjamin OuYang, acting principal of Parkland, which was rebuilt and outfitted with high-tech gadgets in every classroom. “We want for them to have the ability to be a part of that whole process, so that they’re active learners.”

Students got a kick out of the new gadget.

“It looks fun, and is very educating at the same time,” said Alex Song, a seventh grader at Parkland.

Administrators said the new technology will be in 42 classrooms at Parkland by the end of the year and in 14 of the county’s 200 schools. The school system has more than 137,000 students.

Also, Arcola Elementary, a new school in Silver Spring, opened its doors to students yesterday. Arcola will serve about 400 students.

School officials said the new school year got under way without any problems yesterday.

“When that bell went off, everybody went to class, hallways were cleared, and teachers were teaching,” said Schools Superintendent Jerry D. Weast. “And that’s pretty amazing. We live in a day and age where that doesn’t happen everywhere.”

In Carroll County, Md., nearly 60 school buses were found with flat tires yesterday on the first day of school there.

The vandalism at three bus parking lots caused delays of up to two hours on some routes.

Valve stems were removed from the buses’ tires to flatten them, Maryland State Police said.

Classes began in Prince George’s County last week. Most schools in Northern Virginia will open after Labor Day.

n This article is based in part on wire service reports.