Bad marks
Eastern’s hard times

With all it’s got going for it, the Hill’s Eastern Senior High School, at 19th and East Capitol streets, should be leading the way to real change for the city’s sorry schools.

It’s architecturally handsome, has an extensive campus with sports grounds and is home to teenagers from the city’s largest residential neighborhood, newly chic Capitol Hill. Its Eastern Choral Society is justly famed, and backed by Washington Post President Donald Graham.

But instead, the school is mired in a series of missteps and disgraces, making a bad joke of the motto on the front lawn, “The Pride of Capitol Hill.”

This autumn, in spite of warnings and last-minute efforts from DCPS personnel from the school board on down, the school failed to open on time and Principal Norman Smith was summarily fired. Truancy shot up, an acting principal was named, and the city quickly enacted regulations punishing truants.

Then another disaster hit: Post columnist Marc Fisher reported the system had dispatched the head of Walker Jones Elementary, Wilma Durham, to Eastern, even though her alleged doctorate was bogus. Instead of firing her, DCPS docked her pay — from $115,226 to $113,751 — and moved her to another job. The school was once again a city laughing stock.

Newly installed D.C. Schools Superintendent Clifford Janey (and interim Principal Wilma Bonner) must make strong moves to change course.

From Native America
Hill’s healing totem

“I am the one who does the knife work,” Charles Miller said last week, gazing with affection at a wooden American Indian totem-pole arch just installed at the Hill’s Congressional Cemetery.

Miller, a tall, soft-spoken Cherokee, was on hand to dedicate the first major addition to the cemetery in 100 years. It’s a weighty piece of work, crafted out of 500-year-old Western cedar, fraught with symbolism and created in the name of the 184 people who died here in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon.

The sculpture is the work of the Washington state Lummi tribe, which brought it here from Bellingham, Wash., as the centerpiece of a “memorial grove” to commemorate Sept. 11. Another Lummi totem pole will be erected on the Anacostia River’s Kingman Island; nine groves, including one for each city ward in addition to the Kingman Island site, are to be planted eventually.

As the Hill’s Ward 6 City Council member Sharon Ambrose (D) looked on, cemetery board Chairwoman Linda Harper pointed out a strong Indian connection with the cemetery, where 36 Native Americans are buried. Their graves were red-flagged and marked by symbolic cedar stakes for the ceremony, while Lummi Nation tribe members rubbed the sacred elements — tobacco, sage, and cedar essences — on the newly erected totem poles.

Thursday’s dedication drew about 100 to a sun-struck cemetery. Leading an intricate and hypnotic ceremony of prayer, song and poetic speech was Jewell Praying Wolf James, a descendant of Chief Seattle. He explained that the mission of the big totemic arch was to bring healing to the lives of Sept. 11 families. “We approached the whole thing with love and innocence,” he said. “We may be brothers after all.”

METRO