DC School Exclusive

DC Mayor Adrian Fenty and his new school Chancellor Michelle Rhee would have given themselves a lot more breathing room if they had come out earlier and said "The City's schools are even worse off than we imagined'.

That's the position they've assumed with about three weeks to go till the start of classes and after a week of touring school basements, storage rooms and the warehouse where for years new books and supplies have been arriving and not going out to classrooms where they are needed in many instances.

A high ranking Fenty official tipped me off this week that a visit to Shepherd Elementary at 14Th street and Kalmia road in Northwest was in order.

This was after Chancellor Michelle Rhee had inspected the school the day before.

News Photographer Keith Williams and I found not one, but several incredible scenes inside the building.

The good news is that nearly a million dollars in long needed repairs, from the roof to the cafeteria to the playground are being made.

But, in a room marked "cafeteria workers only" we found books stacked from the floor to ceiling. New books and old books and lots of books that were never used. Math, reading, English, science, language, dictionaries...The principal, Dan Robinson has been at Shepherd for three years. He says the books go back a lot longer and he can't get anyone from downtown to come pick them up for use at other schools in need of textbooks.

It gets worse. In the basement of Shepherd, which they refer to as a crawl space, the size of half a football field, we saw tons of discarded supplies. Desks, computers, monitors, tables, and Robinson said these items should also have been carted away ...beginning as far back as twenty years ago..for use in other schools. Maintenance workers were already on the scene the day we showed up to clear the crawl space out.

Chancellor Rhee said what she saw at Shepherd, one of the city's better academic schools, is indicative of what's wrong with the system.

Problem is there isn't much of a system when it comes to books and supplies in the DC schools. A source checked for me and found there was no record of Shepherd school having surplus books or computers or desks that needed to be returned to the warehouse for use by some other needy school.

I was also told there are but two, (not one, as the Washington Post reported)employees at the Warehouse responsible for getting books out to schools. They have been swamped by textbooks coming in with no "distribution orders" and no one bothering to call or collect or inquire about a delivery. So the books just sit.

It should also be pointed out that most new textbooks are ordered to cover five year periods. This means the warehouse is far more crowded in the first and second years (this is the time the Mayor and Rhee visited) than at the end of the five year period. They also carry spare books to replace those that are lost or stolen.

Turns out that Eastern high did not receive ELEMENTARY school textbooks this year as Rhee claimed during a press conference. The Eastern Principal has sent a letter to the warehouse manager disputing the claim; And French books where found at MM Washington school where French isn't being taught; but a source says French had been taught there in the past.

Rhee has promised that new systems are on the way to sort all this out;In the future she may have publishers deliver new books directly to the schools.

Click here to watch on what we found at Shepherd Elementary School.