The Kids Are All Right [unfortunately, it’s the adults who’ve been acting like children]

The following is a work of fiction, I’d say “science fiction” but, American’s don’t really believe in science these days.

How much of it is true, or could become true, is up to the people of Dayton, who’ve been fed sh*t for so long and told it was steak that they don’t know any better.

It is also my confession, that the David Lawrence I thought I knew, bears no resemblance to the guy now in charge of Dayton Public Schools. It saddens me greatly. It should also serve as a warning to anyone considering hiring this sociopath to run their school district. I didn’t believe the stories out of the STEM school after his 1 year trial there- to those I didn’t listen to, I’m also sorry. It’s the same story, just on a grander scale (the PhD has magnified his pettiness and pompousness).

The closing of the East Branch library after school from 2:30 to 5:30 was just the first warning to the general public that things in Dayton Public Schools aren’t working. When the Dayton Daily snooze released a story showing redacted video of a giant fight, and cited the number of problems at the downtown library as well, some folks went to def con 5. Of course, it didn’t help that there weren’t any white kids discernable in the videos, where kids were jumping up on tables to get better video for TikTok or Snap.

The original botched communication from Dr. Lawrence talking about “kids from other schools” was a clear denial of his responsibility for dealing with this. The library scheduled a community meeting to discuss the issue soon after local citizen journalist David Esrati wrote a post questioning who has answers:

The recent events at our Southeast Branch have created an opportunity for us to have a community conversation regarding the safety of our patrons, staff, and the communities we serve. Please join us for an important community conversation with representatives from the Dayton Metro Library, Dayton Police Department, and Dayton Public Schools about keeping our libraries safe and open. Join the conversation at the Main Library in the Eichelberger Forum (215 E Third St., Dayton Ohio) at 6pm on October 22. Submit your questions and suggestions before the event here: DaytonMetroLibrary.org/news/safe-libraries

Esrati, had followed his original post, with the one you are reading now, before the meeting. It started a chain of events (in an alternate universe- where people aren’t sheep or stupid enough to vote for Trump)

A group of concerned students stumbled upon Esrati’s website, read the post, and started digging. They found a few posts and videos that got their attention- including one that was an elaborate April Fools joke from 2018– where he suggested a new school would be opening, one that did things differently- including having a Bill of Student Rights. That the website, https://daytonpublicprep.org/ was still up, made them curious. They reached out to Esrati, and met with him the Sunday before the meeting at the library. The realization that this was a battle against poverty as much as it is a battle for their future was enlightening.

The formation of the Student Union

He suggested that they form a “Student Union” and demand some changes in the district, starting with the adoption of the Bill of Rights, but which also swelled to include the following demands:

That Dayton Public Schools adopts the transportation plan outlined in the video, “There Ain’t No F in Dayton” With dramatically reduced stops, due to neighborhood collection points and drop offs, the district actually can bus all their students with existing resources. They also want an activities bus service running close to dinnertime, post after-school activities- like band, sports etc so that they can get home after participating in structured programming.

The second request stupefied those at the meeting. They wanted to have a residential school- or at least a school run dorm system to give them options to get out of group homes where they feel like they are being exploited by people unqualified to parent. Some schools have as many as 30% of the kids living in barely regulated group homes.

This was also suggested in Esrati’s video. It had struck a chord.

They see the group homes as another Republican solution to funnel tax dollars into private citizens hands, with little oversight and regulation, much like charter schools. They would prefer professional staff, running modern day “orphanages” that look more like private boarding schools. If boarding school was good enough for Donald Trump, why can’t it be an option for them?

They also asked for a district wide convocation of all students in grades 7-12 to question the school leaders, the school board, and the city commission why they were living in a city that is so dysfunctional- where millions of dollars are spent demolishing homes that were allowed to rot- instead of keeping open the many rec centers we used to have? Specific questions about what happened to the waterpark at Roosevelt, and why it was out of operation, and why the pools were barely open- without a single outdoor one, demanded answers.

How did the city go about selling off the Bomberger Teen Center pioneered by Commissioner Bootsie Neal, to the Turks, and then also handing over the Stuart Patterson rec center for chump change to the same folks? Where were the solicitations for bids? Where were the proposals?

Did any of the “City Leadership” think about them, and their needs?

The fact that Esrati had guilted the city into investing in the basketball courts with his free green nets campaign was one of the reasons they trusted him with their grievances. He’d actually done something for them that made a difference.

At the library meeting were some other community activists, who were firmly against solving this with more SRO’s and police officers. “This is how the school to prison pipeline operates,” said a elegantly dressed gentleman who said he was re-starting Racial Justice Now, an organization that started in Dayton but hadn’t been seen or heard from since before Covid.

A new political voice

The reality that the kids weren’t going to allow the politicians to silence them, or lock them up, or try to threaten them was starting to set in.

“We may not be able to vote for you now” said a Belmont student, “but we know that an election is coming next year, and we’ll back folks to put you out of office” looking directly at Dayton Mayor Jeff Mims (they’d been briefed on the “Culture of Corruption” and how Mims and Lawrence came as a package deal by Esrati).

Then another bombshell, the head of the Dayton Education Association, Neil Mahoney, stood up and informed the collective brain trust on the dais, that the union had held a ballot over the weekend and had voted no-confidence in Lawrence. Ten of the other 11 bargaining units leaders  followed suite, each citing Lawrence’s perchance for playing favorites, exhibiting cruelty to those he didn’t like, and then the nuclear explosion- allegations of improprieties. Not quite Diddy sized, but significant.

The School Board called yet another emergency meeting to discuss issues pertaining to personnel issues for the upcoming Saturday. When they came out after a relatively short meeting for them, 3.5 hours, they announced that Dr. Lawrence would be separating from the district immediately, and that they were appointing the business manager, Dr. Marvin Jones to be interim superintendent. This was a repeat of what had just happened 2 years ago, when Dr. Lolli resigned unexpectedly, after just signing a new contract, and they had moved the business manager, Lawrence, in as interim before later naming him permanent superintendent, albeit with only a 1 year contract.

This time, Lawrence wasn’t going to receive a dime of compensation (he’d already been ousted from the district once- taking a sweet buyout package and moving on to get his PhD while working as an elementary school principal in the Northmont school district). The quid pro quo was that the district would remain mum on anything concerning his term as both interim and as superintendent.

Dr. Jones inherited a coven of Lawrence’s ladies who had served as his executive team. It had become apparent that if you were female- and had worked with him in the past, you got promoted. (Or in the case of the only male Lawrence picked, his former college roommate). The fact that the org chart and pay scales for administrators had been in constant flux for the entire time Lawrence was in charge was one of the symptoms of the dysfunctional leadership of a megalomaniac. Never mind the awarding of no-bid contracts to his buddies for supposed HR expertise (See the $50K contract to Charlton • Charlton & Associates).

The election came and the Library levy failed by a slim margin. The students had dug into the budgets of the library system rebuild and matched vendors with political donors and cost overruns that were obscene, as was the recent raise for the new library director. It didn’t help that they found it odd, that when Esrati was sent packing from the library- they couldn’t deliver video for over a year and a half– but when it was kids misbehaving the video was available instantly. The library director was fired and the board reconstituted.

Jones immediately set out to transform the busing system, following the hub and spoke system that Esrati had proposed years ago. He also immediately went to work to identify if the former Marine Corp reserve center on Gettysburg could be acquired from Sugar Creek Packing, as well as the Job Corps Center on Germantown. The number of students that needed a safe, positive environment were outstripping the resources available at these two facilities, so he also sought backing to take over the downtown YWCA and the facility in Huber Heights that was recently put in limbo.

The students pitched the Mathile Family Foundation, asking the dog food dynasty why only single moms with young children should have the kind of residential support systems provided at the Glenn at St. Joseph. The kids walked out of that meeting with a $35M seed pledge.

In the meantime, the Student Union had gained traction and was holding weekly planning sessions. Some other ideas came up:

Returning drivers education to DPS – at no cost to students or their families. The money would be provided from the State- since in order to get to jobs they needed to be able to leave Dayton to get to the suburbs where the jobs were. They’d lost faith in RTA.

They pitched taking over the Link Dayton bike share system and expanding it city wide- with a partnership with UD and Sinclair. The way they saw it, transportation is fundamental to economic mobility as much as it is to personal mobility.

The Student Union goes to Washington

Further probing into RTA’s leadership and oversight by the students found gross mismanagement and a top-heavy administration. They went to Washington to meet with the Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, and made the case for making public transit in Dayton free to make up for the economic wrongs of the past caused by the institution of forced busing in Dayton in the seventies and the sprawl it caused. Buttigieg, realizing that actual fares account for less than 10% of operating revenue saw this as a plan worthy of testing for economic impact. They also got the funding to expand the return of Link.

The fact that a majority of Dayton is an SBA HUBzone made it easier to justify the funding. The Student Union also proposed for 2 light rail lines as the backbone of the new system. An East-West line from the Dayton VA on the West Side all the way to Wright State on the East with spurs to the Air Force Museum- and to the main base gates. The second line connected the two Dayton airports, Cox up North and Dayton General South, bringing connectivity to the distribution jobs at the airport in Vandalia, to downtown and past the Fairgrounds/MVH/UD heading down past Fuyao to connect the Dayton Mall and Austin landing all the way to the South Airport. “If we’ve got millions to pump into flying taxis, we should be able to have reliable transportation to major job hubs in the region.” Buttigieg loved it and worked with JP Nauseef at Jobs Ohio to begin to implement these job connecting lines. Completion target was set for 2030. The project was a major win for the region and was projected to cost over $1.3B- with a majority of the money being plowed right into the local community- for the community.

Local adventurer/real estate mogul/charter school/astronaut founder Larry Connor was so impressed with the visionary moves of the Student Union, that he made commitments to support their residential housing imitative and also made a sizeable contribution to expand the Challenger Center that DPS has been wavering on for years.

Rebirth of Isis

The students also realized that the current expenditures on filling the landfill with the homes we’d let rot was just burying the taxpayers dollars in the demolition companies and landfill operators pockets. They asked for a moratorium on demolition and to restart Ann Higdon’s Isis project– where teens were taught to rehab and build homes. This time, funding wouldn’t be dependent on the sale of the homes, but on the “economic development” dollars that we always seem to have for developers pet projects. New guidelines would severely limit the handing over of public tax dollars to private developers if they had more than a 10-1 pay ratio between their highest and lowest paid employees/ownership.

They formed a research team, working with the Dayton Bar Association and representatives of the Treasurer’s office, the Recorder’s office and started tracking down owners of derelict properties and filing lawsuits to force them to pay for either rehabilitation and occupancy, stabilization or demolition. They also forced the city to identify every piece of city owned land that wasn’t actively being used for the public, and put up signs seeking proposals/offers for reuse. The amount of interest was stupefying. They even packaged entire blocks for redevelopment by local developers who would hire DPS students as apprentice trades people to rebuild our city.

The final demand by the Student Union was that Dayton back a public hospital to compete with the duopoly that has controlled health care in Dayton. A citizens group, the Clergy Community Coalition,  has been trying to put this on the ballot, and the students pledged their support to help get signatures. They believe that affordable health care for people who live and work in the city would be a much better investment to spur economic development, than; flying taxis, a new hotel next to the convention center, more handouts to create downtown housing with tax breaks to the developers.

They also realized that it was time to disrupt the local democratic party, and worked with kids in other districts to elect enough precinct captains to end the rule of the Monarchy of Montgomery County. Mohamed Al-Hamdani after getting beat for Treasurer, was now also out of the chairman’s seat for the party.

As the students found their voice, violence in the community among our youth dropped like a rock, attendance at DPS went up, and enrollment grew at a record pace.

In less than 6 months, Dr. Jones had been able to fill teaching positions that had been unfilled for years, the DEA became the single union for the district, and test scores and attendance soared.

4 school board members resigned, after further investigations turned up improprieties in contracting and purchasing, which were shown to be inside deals. One was sent to jail, another escaped charges by collaborating with investigators, but was forced to resign from their full-time government job.

The Student Union was on a tear, and also demanded a say in the SportsPlex project that was going to be built at Kettering fields. Wielding their newfound power, they found Esrati’s old ideas for the area– to include an afterschool tutoring hub, along with a monorail connecting the sports plex with Boonshoft and Wegerzyn Gardens and the Dayton Playhouse to be a much better plan. The region gained its first indoor-outdoor Olympic pool complex, an indoor football training facility, a triple ice rink with 5000 seats in the main arena, a velodrome, and a basketball complex that would make Phil Knight cry- and Venice Beach jealous.

In the fall election, Mim’s lost his seat to an 18 year old leader of the Dayton Student Union and Dayton became the first mid-major city to have a Mayor who wasn’t old enough to drink.

After their success with the library investigation, they turned their sites to focus on the Educational Service Center, that had hired Whaley’s husband, and now was where Lawrence was drawing a paycheck as his divorce filings got very messy. The student’s wanted the .25% of the income tax that was going to “learn to earn” and the “pre-school promise” to actually go exclusively to Dayton schools- not Kettering, Riverside or Huber Heights et al. They also made the public aware of how much this quasi-governmental slush fund was just a playground for double-dipping former superintendents. The speed at which the ESC fell was unbelievable, from the time they presented their findings to the shutdown was a matter of weeks. Now kids were free to learn to learn, and pre-school, as well as childcare was affordable for all Dayton residents.

The FBI and DOJ were also prosecuted for their illegal coverup of of Joey Williams crimes and allowing him to run for re-election despite having been caught accepting bribes. The tapes Esrati had been seeking for the last 4 years that were played to the Grand Jury were released, and former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, Dayton City Manager Shelley Dickstein, and a bunch of other mid-level bureaucrats were sent to prison. Citywide Development was shut down, as was the Downtown Dayton Partnership. Investigations into Montgomery County ADAMHS also resulted in indictments.

The students started a push for unigov- as outlined on www.reconstructingdayton.org and the creation of only one legal police department. The idea that hospitals and universities and park districts had people running around with guns- yet reporting to ceo’s and college presidents seemed like a real public safety issue- especially if you are young, black and political. They also found that the redlines that caused the institutional racism in Dayton were still alive and well- it was just called suburbia. By moving to unigov- some of the injustices of the past could be slowly healed, but more importantly, the inefficiencies of duplication could free up funds for their brand of economic development- social empowerment and vital public services such as health care, child care and public recreation programs.

Dayton Public Schools implemented a new Olympic style athletics program, where the entire district fielded one team for state play with the best athletes from Dayton making “travel” squads in every major sport representing Dayton, not any of the high schools individually. The rest of the athletes would compete in an advanced intramural tiered system. Dayton went on to win every single state sports title in Ohio- and started producing more Olympians than anywhere else in the county. With the new SportsPlex state of the art training facilities downtown on the old Parkside homes site, kids from the suburbs were actually trying to open enroll in DPS for the first time other than for Stivers.

What? You’re still reading this? Do you think anything like this could really happen?

Isn’t imagination and creativity an amazing thing?

But, the real question is, when are we going to respect the kids we’ve demonized due to our failure to do the right thing?

Let’s hope the kids can pull this off. Because, it’s pretty obvious, the grown ups we’ve elected and put into power don’t have a clue.

Song “The kids are alright” by David Esrati