said it was structurally unsound and
— for the foreseeable future —
uninhabitable.
So Ochoa’s son Alex turned on his
phone’s flashlight and made a bee-
line for his room. Ochoa’s brother,
Jose, rustled open a plastic trash
bag. Ochoa looked at the apartment,
with its pale-yellow walls and fake-
wood flooring, its wooden crosses
and paintings of tulips. This was the
place where her three children had
SEE DISPLACED ON C5her building and two others had
been cut off soon after the incident.
Stepping into her home of 33 years,
she felt an urge to open the windows
and let the smoke out.
But there wasn’t time.
Residents had 30 minutes to re-
move what they wanted, the proper-
ty-management firm had s aid. There
would be no extensions and no
moving heavy furniture, because
even though building 2411 hadn’t
been razed like 2405, engineers stillKLMNO
METRO
SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/LOCAL EZ SU C
JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON
To celebrate the 12th
annual Squirrel Week, a
few wild tales (tails?) of
the rascally rodents. C3LOCAL OPINIONS
Full D.C. control of Duke
Ellington School of the
Arts could erode its
quality, alumni fear. C4OBITUARIES
Memoir of Holocaust
survivor Gerda
Weissmann Klein, 97,44 ° 51 ° 55 ° 53 ° became a lauded film. C9
8 a.m. Noon 4 p.m. 8 p.m.High today at
approx. 5 p.m.57
°
Precip: 0%
Wind: WNW
10-20 mph“radical” expansion.
“Do not double down on ex-
tremism and murder of the un-
born,” Del. Rachel Parker Muñoz
(R-Anne Arundel) said. “I prom-
ise that if you do, history will not
look back on you kindly.”
Democrats said the new law
doesn’t expand when someone
can seek an abortion, only in-
creases the number of people
who could provide it so that
SEE OVERRIDE ON C8pregnancy or fetal abnormalities.
They invoked God, freedom, the
history of oppression of women
and, regardless of their party,
hope for a different future.
Republicans noted Maryland
already has some of the country’s
friendliest abortion laws, which
allow the procedure until the
fetus is viable and afterward in
cases of fetal problems or a dan-
ger to the mother’s health. They
characterized the new law as aa stand on issues he had largely
been able to avoid. The lawmak-
ers created a paid family leave
program to subsidize 12 weeks off
work, put in new restrictions for
gun deals and barred police from
interrogating children unless a
parent or lawyer is present.
Maryland’s abortion debate
has been emotional, as lawmak-
ers on both sides of the argument
publicly revealed personal stories
of still-birth, rape, adoption,rush to pass restrictions in case
the Supreme Court strikes down
the right to abortion.
Hogan vetoed the legislation
Friday evening, saying that it
threatened women’s w ell-being to
remove a long-standing restric-
tion that prevented anyone but
physicians to perform abortions.
The Democratic supermajority
in the General Assembly prompt-
ly overrode him on several liberal
priorities that forced him to takepolicies to cover the entire cost of
the procedure. The state is among
a small minority to advance abor-
tion protections this year as manyBY ERIN COX
AND OVETTA WIGGINSMaryland enacted the most
sweeping change to its abortion
laws in three decades on Satur-
day, as Democratic state lawmak-
ers overrode Republican Gov.
Larry Hogan’s veto.
The new law puts Maryland at
the vanguard of abortion rights
nationwide, expanding access
and requiring most insuranceLawmakers override Hogan to expand abortion access
NUMBER OF ELIGIBLE
PROVIDERS GROWS12-week Md. family-leave
measure also passesBY PERRY STEINCommunity groups are calling
on the District to expand the
definition of who is considered at
risk for academic failure, spur-
ring discussion about which stu-
dents would benefit most from
extra funding.
It’s not a question that city
leaders are poised to tackle this
budget cycle, but a coalition of
more than 40 groups say the need
is urgent, particularly after the
turbulent year of virtual learning
appears to have worsened the
city’s already wide achievement
gap between White students and
students of color.
“The past two years have been
a collective trauma for our stu-
dents, schools, and communi-
ties,” the DC Students Succeed
Coalition wrote in a letter to top
city leaders, pushing for more
education funding. “Layered on
top of the deadly pandemic that
wrought so much personal pain
and loss, our students experi-
enced disrupted learning, acute
mental health challenges, social
isolation, and an upheaval of
their childhood.”
Currently, D.C. distributes ex-
tra local dollars to educate stu-
dents who are homeless or in
foster care, whose families quali-
fy for food stamps and to stu-
dents who are in high school and
have been held back at least one
year. Based on this criteria, 47
percent of the city’s more than
95,000 public school children are
considered at risk. The at-risk
money — nearly $3,000 per stu-
dent — is one slice of a complicat-
ed school funding formula and is
distributed on top of the stan-
dard money that is allocated to
each student.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D)
proposed in February a massive,
$2.2 billion education budget — a
5.9 percent increase over the
current year that amounts to a
base-level funding of $12,419 per
student.
The groups want the at-risk
funding to extend to students
who have an incarcerated parent,
and those who are connected to
the Child and Families Services
Agency, even if they are not in
foster care. They also want stu-
dents who are undocumented
immigrants or whose parents are
undocumented to be included.
While schools are prohibited
from asking children their immi-
gration status, advocates say the
city has enough information to
properly target these funds to the
right schools and grade levels.
And if advocates get their de-
mands, the biggest change to the
at-risk pool would be the inclu-
sion of adult learners — older
students who are in specialized
public programs to receive their
high school diplomas or certifica-
tion in some trades. The city’s
more than 3,000 adult learners
receive a base funding of around
$11,000.
Families do not typically know
if their children are considered
“at-risk,” but the majority of the
money is supposed to follow the
students to the traditional public
or charter school they attend.
“A lot of my students have little
kids and helping the parents of
at-risk students helps at-risk stu-
dents,” said Nicole Hanrahan,
SEE AT RISK ON C6Coalition:
Students at
risk need
extra funds
BY LUZ LAZOThe District is advancing a
$123 million project that promis-
es to turn a busy stretch of K
Street NW into a haven for public
transit and bicycle users while
altering traffic patterns for mo-
torists.
Design of the K Street Transit-
way between 12th and 21st streets
NW is on track to be completed
this fall, followed by construction
beginning early next year, city
officials said. The redesign of the
mile-long corridor will eliminate
K Street’s decades-old service
roads, which transportation offi-
cials say confuse motorists, slow
traffic and leave pedestrians
scrambling between medians.
Transportation officials and ex-
perts say they hope the street’s
redesign will help to lure back bus
riders after years of declining rid-
ership that was exacerbated by
the pandemic. The project, they
say, responds to rider demands
for more timely and reliable buses
— and a level of service that could
help transit and downtown Wash-
ington make a stronger comeback
after the pandemic lull.
“A bus system that is more reli-
able and faster won’t just serve
the people who ride today better,
it is also going to attract new
customers,” said Laura Miller
Brooks, a co-leader of MetroNow,
SEE TRANSIT ON C2Next stop
for stretch
of K Street:
transit hub
She had to pack her life.
She got 30 minutes.
BY REBECCA TANEven before she walked through
the front door of Apartment 103,
Yanira Patricia Ochoa could smell it.
The smoke clung to her tablecloth
and her bedsheets. It l ingered o n her
couch. It hewed onto her daughter’s
cotton dresses — the ones that made
Laura Velasquez feel pretty and
calm and happy.
It had been two weeks since a
building maintenance worker at
Friendly Garden Apartments acci-
dentally cut a gas line, creating a
large bubble of gas in a basement
that exploded with two loud booms.
Clothes, shoes and bicycle parts
were flung onto the branches of
nearby trees as fire spread through
the Silver Spring, Md., complex, the
latest of the nation’s low-income
housing developments to go up in
flames.
By noon, the four-story building
opposite Ochoa’s had flattened. Lau-
ra, who has Down syndrome, was at
home with her brother and care-
giver when the explosion happened.
She escaped wearing pajamas and
sandals.
Now, as Ochoa, 58, returned, their
three-bedroom apartment was dark,
the air cold and still. Electricity forYanira Patricia Ochoa was
among dozens displaced
after an apartment
complex gas explosionBILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POSTBONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP: Yanira Patricia Ochoa, right, and her daughter, Laura Velasquez,
after a March 3 explosion and fire, caused by an accidentally cut gas line,
displaced them from their home at Friendly Garden Apartments. ABOVE:
The aftermath as firefighters responded to the explosion. Several floors
collapsed. Local officials said it was a miracle there were no deaths.D.C. school
trip seemed
out of reach
— at first
As Merlin Adynn
Pecos listened to
his teacher
describe a school
trip she was
planning for him
and his classmates
to the nation’s
capital, he didn’t
believe her.
“I thought she was lying,” the
13-year-old said on a recent
afternoon. “It sounded fake.”
The Native American teenager
attends a school on a reservation
about 50 miles from
Albuquerque. Many of his
classmates have never left the
state or flown on a plane. The
trips he’s taken have always been
by car and weren’t the type to
include organized tours.
D.C., he thought as he listened
to his teacher talk, seemed too far
and too pricey.
“Even the name sounds
expensive — the nation’s capital,”
he said.
Science teacher Patricia
Ferguson knew affording an out-
of-state trip would pose a
challenge for many of the
students at the San Diego
Riverside Charter School on the
Pueblo of Jemez reservation. She
also knew how badly they needed
one. The pandemic had taken
much from them. They had lost
SEE VARGAS ON C6Theresa
Vargas