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Upbeat Superintendent Offers Plan to Improve Richmond Schools

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Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras delivered an optimistic message in his first State of the Schools address — even though the district has the worst graduation rate in Virginia and more than half of its schools lack accreditation.

“I wasn’t sure where to begin tonight because it’s been such a quiet year at RPS,” Kamras said Tuesday, laughing as a picture of a nearly two-foot-tall stack of newspapers showed on the stage’s screen. “How many times did we grace the front page? Well … there you go,” Kamras told more than 200 people in the auditorium of Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.  

Jokes aside, Kamras celebrated the steps RPS has taken in the last year to improve several issues plaguing the district. These efforts included renovating bathrooms in deteriorating buildings, working to correct student transcripts, improving chronic student absenteeism (down 2 percent from last school year), engaging in advocacy measures and increasing teachers’ salaries by 2 percent.  

“Perhaps most powerful of all, we renamed J.E.B. Stuart Elementary to Barack Obama Elementary,” Kamras said. “School names are just symbols, but symbols matter, especially when it comes to Richmond’s history, and present, on race.”

Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras

Despite the progress made, Kamras said the district still has work to do. Fewer than half of RPS schools are accredited, and Kamras said the city’s graduation rate is the lowest in Virginia.

“There is absolutely nothing broken about our students … We [the adults] are on the hook for those statistics, not them,” Kamras said.

Dreams 4 RPS is the five-year strategic plan born from 170 community meetings and input from over 3,000 participants. “This isn’t my plan. It’s not the board’s plan … It’s our plan because it reflects the hopes and dreams of everyone in the RPS family,” Kamras said.

Dreams 4 RPS  features five priority areas: teaching and learning, staff, school culture, family and community, and infrastructure. Each priority is divided into action steps, 40 total,  that outline specific goals like hiring more male teachers of color and introducing hands-on and engaging curriculum.

“We can’t expect greatness from our students if we don’t ask greatness of them, and we’re going to raise the bar and ask greatness of our students a whole lot more in the coming years,” Kamras said.

The plan also explains the need for increased trauma-informed care. Kamras said 20 RPS students were shot and six were killed in the past 12 months. “Most teachers were never trained to help young people deal with those kinds of tragedies,” Kamras said. He said providing that kind of training is necessary for both student and staff support.

The fully implemented plan will cost $150 million over the next five years, which covers training programs, building improvements, school resources, salaries and more. Kamras said though RPS can and should act more wisely with finances, “We must continue to advocate for more.”

In December, RPS organized the March for More, and last month, the district participated in another march called Red for Ed. Kamras said continued pressure on the General Assembly is necessary to increase school funding.

With a strategic plan in place and problems to solve, Kamras is upbeat as he looks to the future.

“If I were to sum up the state of our schools in one word, I would say we are ‘rising,’” he said.  “We are rising together, and nothing can stop us.”

In Unique and Destructive Weather, Richmond-Area Schools Work to Adapt

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When Ashley Walton started her fifth year working at Highland Springs High School, at the semester’s start, she was in high spirits. She’d been impressed by the efforts of new principal Ken White to raise morale, and looked forward to interacting with an energized faculty and student body in her role as an instructional assistant. A few months into the semester, Hurricane Florence left public schools throughout Henrico County to serve as shelters for nearly three hours, on September 17. Walton is still confident in Highland Springs’ future.

“That was interesting, especially with the population I work with, because they’re not used to major changes,” Walton said, “They’re used to getting out of school at four o’clock. It was a strange adjustment, but I will say that everyone in the building handled it extremely well.”

Walton’s experience is one of many, in a school region learning to adapt to the new challenges created by the effects of climate change. The havoc caused by Florence in Richmond was only a prelude to the fall semester, which saw schools from preschool to college-level contend with intense bouts of weather. Almost a month after Florence passed, Tropical Storm Michael resulted in an abbreviated day on October 12 for many high schools and colleges — and a completely canceled day the following week for some, including Highland Springs.

But through it all, Walton remains positive: She credits Highland Spring’s administration for their work to reorganize class schedules when forecasts predict dangerous conditions. These efforts ensure that closures won’t cause students and teachers to lag behind in their instruction.

Similar measures seem to be in place for the Richmond Public School (RPS) system, according to Communications Director Kenita Bowers.

“Our facility services team routinely monitors weather forecasts to ensure that they prepare and protect buildings across the school district. At the first notification that a storm is approaching, a storm team is activated and on alert,” Bowers said. “Once the storm passes, property and building assessments are made, and necessary repairs are implemented immediately, to prevent delay of the students returning to school.”

For Amelia County Public Schools, the effects brought about by Tropical Storm Michael proved to be longer-lasting than most — and meant that schools had to resume normal schedules, despite multiple roads in the area being severely damaged or blocked.

While the extent of damage done to all of Richmond’s schools is difficult to estimate, Bowers notes that hurricanes aren’t always required to create problems: The weather that comes with the fall season can exacerbate already weak and old infrastructure.

“As a school district with so many aging facilities and budgetary constraints, extreme shifts in temperatures can be challenging to contend with,” Bowers said. “At times, when the temperatures shift unexpectedly, it can have a negative impact on school operations; so school leaders always do their best to accommodate the needs of students, to the best of their ability.

“It is also important to note that RPS currently only has 5 HVAC technicians that are assigned to 44 buildings, which makes it difficult to maintain and ensure that equipment is managed appropriately.”

The state of Richmond’s schools will likely continue to be a frequent topic in the political sphere, as the city prepares to seek more RPS funding from the General Assembly in 2019. For now, though, the semester continues. Those on the ground floor for any future forecasts — students, faculty and administrators — are seemingly prepared to take these incidents in stride.

“I definitely think everything’s looking good so far,” Bowers said. “Luckily, these things are happening in the beginning of the year. I know for my students, change can be difficult, but I think that they are handling it as well as they can.” 

Post-Accreditation, Former and Current Teachers Assess the City’s State of Education

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Richmond’s public schools are deep into the 2018-2019 semester, with midterm exams on the horizon for some, and the long shadow cast by the condition of the city’s education hanging over all.

That condition, detailed in a report released on September 27 by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE), revealed that less than half of Richmond Public Schools (RPS) met the state education standards required to be awarded accreditation. Additional data released by VDOE also showed RPS had statewide lows in on-time graduation rates and attendance, and statewide highs in dropout and absentee rates at a middle school and high school level. The sole omission was George Washington Carver Elementary, who became embroiled in a cheating scandal earlier this year.

For Gladys Wilder, a retired teacher with 30 years of experience in RPS primary, correctional, exceptional and special education that includes establishing an annual “book tasting” event at Swansboro Elementary, the effort to meet state standards is still fresh in mind.

“It was a struggle to get there. But Swansboro broke out because of leadership,” Wilder said. “I mean local leadership, in-school leadership, principals and assistant principals. It was a whole school effort.”

“No child, no human learns the same way. There’s no box where you can put every child and this is it. Our philosophy, and I’m sure the philosophy now, is every child can learn, every child can achieve. You just have to meet that child where it is.”

RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras seems to share some of Wilder’s beliefs.  In a statement published following the report’s release, Kamras was adamant that any cause for the data’s findings didn’t come from the learning ability of RPS’s students, instead serving as “a reflection of our failure to provide them with the education they deserve.”

My administration is committed to changing this – once and for all – for every young person in RPS, Kamras said.

Wilder, for her part, stressed the importance of not placing guilt for educational failures on individual error, including parents and educators, something she felt may been implied in the wording of Kamras’ response.

“To me, is that like placing the blame on those who are in the trenches, the teachers? I will not do that,” Wilder said, instead drawing attention to the curriculums teachers are expected to abide by — and may occasionally have to veer away from to ensure all students learn what they need.

True to her skillset, Wilder referenced Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade in describing this situation RPS teachers are placed in.

“There’s blame all over,” Wilder said.

The state requirements for accreditation, recently updated in 2017, include increases in academic performance and decreases in failures in advancement, with special focus for high schools on absenteeism, graduation and dropout rates, in addition to the Standards of Learning (SOL) pass rates that were the sole criteria for accreditation in the past.

The continued presence of SOLs, and the challenges they bring to education, was a point of concern for both Wilder and Sharonda Ragland, an instructor in Virginia Union University’s Department of Mathematics.

“We need to stop teaching to the test,” Wilder said. “If you just teach to the test, and if the words in the test are not what you’re teaching, the kids are going to fail. Teach the child.”

Joining the conversation, Ragland adds, “And they don’t learn at the same rates, but they’re expected to take a standardized test that all of them may not be prepared for.”

Just because it works for one doesn’t mean it’s going to work for all. You’ve got to see what works for your school.

The topic of preparation for students is one Ragland is familiar with, serving last year in a math and science summer program designed to act as a “stepping stone” to college-level coursework for high school students, complete with college credit, improved study habits and early connections with other students. Virginia Union is also home to the Upward Bound program, offering graduating high school students in the RPS system a brief but direct experience at college-level courses and residential life.

Referring to her experience in the summer program, Ragland said, “The ones that have come in through that bridge seem to retain better versus the ones just coming from high school to college without any preparation. It makes a difference.”

The question of how RPS moves forward following this report is one with a number of answers. Tinkhani Ushe White, Ed.D., whose experience stretches from RPS teacher to principal in the Henrico County Public School system to School Improvement Specialist with Chesterfield Public Schools, suggests a path forward may lie in greater cooperation between state authorities, school divisions and the schools themselves. However, White acknowledges the difficulty this method may have with solving “issues outside the school’s control,” like absenteeism or poverty.

“The big thing there is for schools divisions and states to work hand in hand with their schools to try to figure out the issues that are preventing schools from reaching those minimum benchmarks, and then working to supply those needs and close those gaps,” White said.

Gary Broderick, an advocate for Richmond education and School Board candidate in Richmond’s 7th District, had his own ideas in his diagnosis of what he described as a “moral crisis for our city” in a statement to RVA Mag. Broderick wrote that fair funding and compensation should serve as parts of creating an ”atmosphere of support that makes long term investment in RPS a sustainable choice for teachers.”

Gary Broderick, School Board Candidate. Photo by Gary Broderick

“The path forward is clear,” Broderick wrote. “We must exert the political courage to demand corporations pay their fair share of taxes, so that we can staff our schools properly and wholly counteract the racist and systemic defunding of our schools.”

Some measure of Broderick’s recommendation may be coming to RPS, as Richmond City Council prepares for an uphill battle in requesting greater state support for public education as part of the city’s legislative package during the upcoming General Assembly session.

Meet the 7th District School Board Candidates

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In Richmond’s 7th District, three candidates are running in a November special election for the school board seat vacated by Nadine Marsh-Carter after the death of her husband in 2017.

Schools in the district suffer from chronic underfunding and maintenance issues, placing them amongst the most-dilapidated in the city. A majority of students attending qualify for free or reduced meals, indicating high levels of poverty at home. Students in the district face significant challenges, and whoever is elected to the seat will face strong public scrutiny.

The candidates include the current representative, Cheryl Burke, a retired principal of Chimborazo Elementary School who was appointed as an interim last October. Also vying for the seat are Gary Broderick, a Richmond education advocate who worked as a learning assistant in Durham, N.C., and Bryce Robertson, a lawyer with Dyer Immigration Law Group, in Henrico County.

RVA Magazine interviewed each candidate to learn more about their backgrounds, why they want to serve the district, and their vision for Richmond’s schools. The candidates are listed alphabetically below.

Gary Broderick

Broderick comes to Richmond with deep ties to education advocacy. His work began in earnest after he learned that the city he lived in, Philadelphia, Pa., was going to close 37 schools. He was part of a group of 19 that participated in civil disobedience in favor of keeping the schools open. He would later move to Durham, where he worked as an educator in an elementary school and volunteered as an advocate with the Durham Association of Educators.

When he came to Richmond, Broderick continued his work in education advocacy. With A New Virginia Majority, Broderick ran a successful campaign to push the school board to adopt a needs-based budget, and won democratic reforms to the Mayor’s education compact. He also served in a volunteer leadership role with then-candidate Kenya Gibson, who was elected to serve the 3rd District last year. Broderick would like the school board to be more active in demanding funding for schools. He would like to see Richmond’s elected officials at the city and state level push for raising Virginia’s corporate tax rate, which is one of the lowest in the country, and hasn’t been raised in 40 years.

Broderick has not accepted any corporate contributions because he believes one person, one vote is important for true democracy. In a video by his campaign, Broderick pointed to how city council voted against a cigarette tax bill that would have given more funding to schools.

“We’re actually fighting for the pie to increase from those who can most afford to chip in, we’re not just having different people in need fighting over the same kind of pie that’s too small,” Broderick said to RVAMag.

Broderick is concerned about the recommendation from schools to the juvenile justice system in the 7th District. He envisions restorative justice programs in schools and wants a community negotiation with the Richmond Police Department to discuss the role of School Resource Officers.

Broderick said poor funding is how these problems manifest, but they originate within anti-black racism, opertalizioned by corporate interest and donors groups in Richmond with interest in lower taxes.

“Our schools are so understaffed that the schools don’t have as many options as they should have before they reach out to law enforcement,” Broderick said. “Our schools need enough funding that they can handle challenging situations in-house and that requires more support staff and more funding.”

Cheryl Burke

Burke, who worked in the Richmond Public School system for 38 years as a teacher and then become an administrator, said she was a born teacher. Coming from a family of teachers, she said she’d been teaching since she was two years old.

“Some teachers are made, some teachers are born, you’re talking to a born teacher and I’m proud of it,” Burke said.

Burke said she mimicked her mother by making everything hands on. Eventually, one school she taught at, Clark Springs Elementary, gave her two classrooms to teach in. For her, the most difficult thing was discipline. She had to learn to be an entertainer.

Burke became an important part of improving Chimborazo Elementary as principal. She helped clean up the school to make it welcoming for students, attempted to lift up the community and making sure the students had enough supplies and support.

“I was glad that I was taught that no matter how much you have, someone else has more and someone else has less and it’s important to meet people where they are in order to take them where we all need to go,” Burke said.

She said her goal is to make sure students have the opportunity to excel. In the past, she tried to help students focus on their books and nooks by implementing an optional dress code, wrote grants and worked with a partnership with Yale that had three principles: collaboration, no-fault and consensus. Burke retired four years ago but said she has stayed engaged in the community

Burke said she is continuing her legacy and working with her constituents. She wants to continue to build relationships as she works to make the school system better because she believes the school district can do better.

“We have to do better than this,” Burke said. “We can do better than this. We want our children to learn and listen and follow expectations.”

Bryce Robertson

Robertson is a Richmond native. In fact, Burke was his former principal. Robertson hopes to expand English as a Second Language class, trauma-informed care, access to programs similar to universal pre-K, the use of technology and forming a collaboration in the community. He said he has a good context of the trauma and pain students feel because of what he has seen in his job.

“It’s one of the things that encourages me to make sure that in our schools we do our best for young folks,” Robertson said. “This is my primary concern. This is where I stand. I have a commitment to this role and uniquely this role, being on the school board, being in the community and seeing kids succeed in their dreams in terms of education.”

He hopes by looking at disciplinary processes and making sure there are enough opportunities for students to do well in school and be successful. His goal of expanding collaboration into community, he said, could provide resources that schools might be lacking, such as nurses. He said these partnerships and mentorship opportunities could give hope to students.

Robertson served as a youth mentor in Richmond and Chesterfield. He also served on the board of Chesterfield Innovative Academy for Girls, now called the Garden School House. He would like to take this background with the community and serve on the school board and promote transparency.

“One of the things that concerns me about Richmond Public Schools, and has been an ongoing concern, is transparency in the decision making processes and the accessibility in general,” Robertson said.

Similar to Broderick, Robertson was concerned about the lack of public input on issues such as the Memorandum of Understanding and the renewal of the Camelot contract. The board adopted a Corrective Action Plan, as required by the Memorandum of Understanding, with three representatives from three districts not present. Robertson was especially concerned with the renewal of the Camelot contract; Camelot is an alternative school that Robertson has a connection to the number of students in the justice system.

“I don’t think the ways of doing things in the past are going to get us to where we need to be as a school district,” Robertson said. “I want to make sure that the leadership on the school board is prepared and ready to move us forward in the most innovative and bold ways possible to get us to the next level.”

The special election will be held on November 6, 2018, during the regular midterm general election. All regular polling places will be open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. The Registrar Office advises all voters that photo ID is required.

Beyond The Stereotypes: A More Inclusive Look At Richmond Moms

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Perhaps you saw the article on RichmondMom.com that attempted to offer an anthropological perspective on what it’s like to be a mom in Richmond. Some might have thought it funny (and it tried to be), but it brought up some things to think about as we try and generalize the “mom experience” in Richmond.

Also, I’m an actual anthropologist, so pay attention.

As an anthropologist, here is what I know: That article is only about one kind of mom. Which type of mom can find that article cute? White moms. Because that article is exclusively about the experience of white women in Richmond. It’s about the experience of privilege when you have the resources to make choices about what kinds of schools your kids go to, which overpriced grocery store you’ll shop at, or what farm to table restaurant you prefer.  

Since we’re taking an anthropological perspective, which is holistic and inevitably intersectional, let’s talk a little bit about what life is like for the many moms in Richmond who were not represented in that article.

Just last week, Richmond Public Schools ran out of toilet paper and other essentials. Is that covered in the article? What about the moms in Richmond public housing this past winter, who went weeks without heat during a record-breaking cold snap, forcing families to temporarily separate? What about the life of the mother of a black autistic child in distress in Chesterfield, who was treated as a violent threat and taken to the ground with excessive force?

Let’s quickly revisit the description of what the article refers to as “city folk”: people who send their kids to “a diverse mix of public, private, parochial, and charter” schools for education, or the “cool moms” in the city who go food shopping at Ellwood Thompson and Farm Fresh.

This is important because according to 2016 census data, 24.8 percent of Richmond’s 204,000 residents lived below the poverty line. And it’s well documented that 75 percent of all poor households in the US are headed by women. If you do some loose math it calculates to roughly 51,000 Richmond residents living below the poverty line, with at least 38,000 of those living in households headed by women; yep, you guessed it, households headed by moms. Academically, this is known as the feminization of poverty.  

These households are headed by Richmond moms who are not going to “Can Can” or having “girls’ nights on rooftop bars.” These households are headed by moms who are trying to support their families on less than $22,162 a year; these households are headed by the type of mom who works two and three jobs to send her kids to schools where there’s not enough toilet paper to last through the end of the school year.

Let’s also note that of the 204,000 people residing in Richmond as tallied by the 2010 census, 51 percent were black. Being a black mom means living with the stark reality that black women in the US are three to four times more likely to die in pregnancy-related death compared with white women. On top of this, racial disparities in access to healthcare are widely documented, and barriers to appropriate health care for people of color are real, pervasive, and disproportionately affect black moms and their babies. And if mothers of color successfully birth babies? They are three times more likely to suffer from postpartum depression.

If we are not going to speak about this reality of motherhood, then we have failed each other as moms and women.

The experience of motherhood is a physical and mental exercise in simultaneous terror and joy, and as moms attempting to help our unruly toddlers survive to become unruly teenagers, we’ve earned the right to joke about ourselves. However, we can’t forget that not all moms experience motherhood the same way in Richmond. And that is what an anthropological look actually tells us: That even for as something as basic to our humanity as childbirth, structural and systemic racism means that for moms in Richmond, not all things are equal.  

RPS Fails to Supply Schools With Toilet Paper and Other Essentials

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Nearly 50 Richmond Public Schools are struggling to keep basic supplies stocked, such as toilet paper, paper towels, and soap, during the last two weeks of school, according to local parents.

Last Friday, World of Mirth posted to their Facebook page a call to action for anyone who wished to donate supplies to a long list of public schools across the state. The post was both in response to an online public sign-up sheet posted on Sign Up Genius by Cindy Anderson, as well as complaints from World of Mirth owner Thea Brown’s son.

My son is a 9th grader at [Thomas Jefferson High School] and he said he doesn’t use the bathroom because there is maybe one roll of toilet paper in a bathroom if you are lucky, and absolutely no soap,” Brown said. “When he got to high school, he thought maybe they just didn’t have hand soap in high school.

World of Mirth also started an Amazon wish list for anyone who wishes to ship supplies either to a school or to the store, from which they will make deliveries. Schools listed as options for donation on Sign Up Genius include Chimborazo Elementary School, Lucille Brown Middle School, and John Marshall High School, as well as 54 other public schools and public educational centers. Brown spent eight hours this morning delivering supplies to schools after dozens of volunteers donated supplies.

“I just got back from delivering to 10 different schools and I had a head custodian hug me with tears in his eyes because he had just gotten back from Wal-mart spending his own money to buy toilet paper for the kids [at Reid Elementary],” Brown said. “They were incredibly grateful. We walked into one school and they yelled, ‘Toilet paper! We’ve been waiting for you all morning!’”

According to Anderson, only five schools out of 54 on the list contacted her asking to be taken off the list, as they were well-stocked and did not want to take supplies away from other schools who may need it. Anderson is a member of the Parent-Teacher Association at Albert Hill High School, where her son attends the 8th grade.

“We don’t need folks to donate,” Jason Kamras, superintendent of Richmond Public Schools, said in a Tweet delivered on Saturday. “A couple of schools had issues on Friday. That’s unacceptable and I’ve made that abundantly clear to the RPS team. But I guarantee that every school will have supplies on Monday morning.”

Kamras then asked if anyone knew their school was out of supplies, they could message him directly on the issue. When contacted about the issue, Kamras’ media office replied that there was a delay in a supply order, but the issue has been resolved as of today. According to Anderson, 40 orders of toilet paper were backordered due to a lack of funding.

“As of right now, I have not heard anything about whether the schools have received anything from administration,” Anderson said. “What I do know is I just got a text from one of the people out delivering and every school has been very appreciative and said they were a ‘blessing in disguise.’ I just know that it’s not two schools, it was all but five [out of 54].”

Anderson began the donation list after seeing Facebook posts from local teachers on the Support Richmond Public Schools page who claimed their schools had no toilet paper, soap, and had to borrow paper towels from a neighboring school. The teacher also said children were using their pants to wipe their hands after using the restrooms.

“I cringe thinking about teenage girls in middle school and high school dealing with their periods every month,” Brown said. “We have to show to our kids and prove to them that we believe in them and that they are important, and that we are investing in their future.”

Parents continue to report complaints from their children that this is an ongoing issue, not an isolated instance. Betsy Milburn, mother of four, said her children complain every year about the lack of supplies, the disrepair of the bathrooms, as well as her daughter’s reluctance to use school bathrooms. 

“I find it frustrating when the school system tweets out that it’s only a couple schools who need supplies, and then a parent calls every school and it’s only a couple of schools who don’t need supplies,” Milburn said. “I think that RPS can do better and should do better. When the basics work, then the big things can be tackled. We can’t tackle anything big until we can do the simple things.”

The School Board is set to discuss the budget Monday night, which will include money for toiletries.