School's in session, but for some it's nearly over.

The new DCPS school closures list came out, and man am I glad our school wasn't on it. My son's school's absence from the list is sure to upset the local busybodies who want to close the school for one of the two following reasons:

• they hate public schools and especially the local public school.
• they are neighbors and don't like -- and I quote -- "the sound of children screaming" on the playground.

To the second, I say, well you shouldn't really have bought or rented across from a school that's been sitting there far longer than anyone who's now alive on this earth, and if you describe the sounds of children at play in that way, then you are a sad, sick individual, and you have my pity.

To the first, I say, tough luck to you and your reactionary friends. Go start a chapter of the Objectivists Club or something, loser.

Other schools, however, are closing as early as next summer, which means many students and parents will be looking elsewhere as their neighborhood schools shut down. In many ways, I'm ambivalent about DCPS: I am a huge supporter of public education and I know that many schools even in this system are working well; however, DCPS and the School Board have been for years utterly disfunctional (case in point being the year several schools couldn't open on time because of fire code or other safety violations) and I can tell you as a parent activist in our school, you have to fight and fight again the bureaucracy of DCPS.

It's these years of ineptitude that set the stage for Congress declaring DC a great experimental zone (none of the Senators or Representatives wanted to make their own districts into laboratories) for vouchers and charter schools. Speaking of which, the head of that Mephistopholean organization, "Friends of Choice in Urban Schools," who had been salivating over the destruction of the traditional public school system, expressed disappointment over the pace of the superintendent's program:

Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a charter school advocacy organization, said he was "disappointed and upset" at the possibility of not getting the buildings in 2008. "If this is the case, the superintendent is not acting in a way to justify the faith the council put in him when they gave him the $2 billion for his program," Cane said.

I've spoken to people from this office and if you've never met the devil before, you might want to talk to them, too. Like most of literature's Fausts, these imps speak in measured, reassuring tones and sound reasonable enough, until you hear the little undertones and catch-phrases that reveal them to be not so interested in children and quality schools as they are in dismantling government and teacher unions. That's when you realize that you're only a pawn in their game.