Spent the middle of my day volunteering for Hands On DC at Spingarn High School, part of a DC For Democracy outreach effort. Even though the day was beautiful, sprite, Elitist John and other friends all rolled up our sleeves, grabbed paintbrushes and did a little bit of painting in the halls of a D.C. public school.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been in a D.C. public schools facility, but it was the most time I’ve spent in one. The situation is sad: old infrastructure, inadequately maintained and in need of a lot of help. What we did – painting doors on the second floor – wasn’t much. As John said, it was “putting a band-aid on a gaping wound,” but the on-site maintenance people were really grateful to have extra sets of hands. There are many issues with the D.C. public schools, including perpetual mismanagement (no matter how the school board is made up, they seem to be up to the same ‘ol, same ‘ol), misguided and often inadequate funding, low teacher and administrator morale, and students who have many life pressures to cope with other than school. One in our group pointed out that the honor roll at Spingarn consisted of less than ten students out of over 700 enrolled. It’s a very sad statistic.

Tonight it’s margaritas (and maybe mojitos) at Michael and Julia’s “Siete de Mayo” bash. They may even have a mariachi band, which is cool in all respects.