R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This past Saturday, the Washington Post ran a pointed op-ed by Colbert King describing the dismal state of disrepair in one of the district’s elementary schools. With a proper amount of outrage and incredulity, King correctly asks, who is responsible for this and how do we hold them accountable?

Good questions that need to be answered immediately. Part of the trouble with facilities maintenance is that it gets little political play (compared to, say, a jump in test scores), meaning that few politicians give facilities upkeep the attention it deserves. Schools aren’t the only places this happens—the Post’s recent series of articles about Walter Reed show that our veterans also suffer from a lack of political attention to facilities maintenance.

The facilities we ask our students to learn in (and our teachers to work in)—like the facilities we ask our veterans to recover in—are a sign of respect. If we ask children to attend schools with broken tiles, unusable bathrooms, and peeling paint, what are we telling them about how much we value their education? Can we honestly expect them to respect the education system when we provide them with buildings that we, ourselves, wouldn’t work in?