RPS RECAP: June 5, 2023

Happy Summer, Board Watchers! Long time, no see.

Much has happened in RPS world over the last few weeks. Ordinarily I’d have reported on it all - but I had already been running into burn-out territory as June approached, and the heartbreak after the Graduation shooting officially did me in. I focused instead on my family, my veggie garden, and the logistical chaos with the premature end of the school year.

Fortunately, the fog started to lift last week alongside the return of something like normalcy, and I finally had the mental capacity to write up my essays for the Monday, June 5th school board meeting. Here we go!

  • New School Names

  • Historic Tax Cred-It’s… Complicated

  • CI-Palooza

  • Score & the Safety Discussion

New School Names

Last October, Cheryl Burke (7th) requested that the School Board consider new school names for several RPS schools that still carry the name of enslavers. The Board agreed in November, funded the measure in their FY24 budget, and sent the admin’s engagement team to begin community conversations at Ginter Park Elementary School, John B Cary Elementary School, Binford Middle School, and George Wythe High School.

The Office of Engagement held a minimum of 4 meetings per school, collected over 430 name suggestions, conducted student surveys, and then shopped the top 5 names around - literally door to door - soliciting feedback via community walks. 

Then, a couple weeks ago, at this June 5th meeting, the administration presented the following recommendations for Board consideration:

  • Binford to Dogwood Middle School (for the state flower)

  • Wythe to Richmond City High School of the Arts (for its’ new thematic focus)

  • Ginter Park to Northside Elementary School; and

  • John B. Cary to Lois Harrison-Jones Elementary School

Privately, via email, the administration also shared concerns about one name on the shortlist to replace “Ginter Park.” Yes, “Frances W McClenney” had been the school’s first black teacher and later their first female principal; but she’d also been reassigned from that principal position in 1992 after investigations by the U.S. Department of Education and the Office for Civil Rights revealed her school had “discriminated against students by segregating them in classes based on their race.”

In 1980, this inner-school segregation had been an essential part of RPS’ marketing pitch to enroll more white families. One Munford mom explained: “Whites who do attend the school are clustered in certain classrooms rather than being dispersed evenly throughout the classrooms.” (pg 96) 

But by 1993, RPS’s “clustering practice” had become a national scandal that received dis-honorable mentions in the “New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, Atlanta’s Journal and Constitution, as well as Canadian television” (and the LA Times), jeopardized the division’s $14M in federal funding, and the disapproval of Richmond icon and Civil Rights leader, Oliver Hill. (pg 118)

More importantly, it broke faith with the parents of segregated students.

“There's an old African proverb, ‘When elephants fight, ants get stomped.’ So there are the kids, you know, right there… they have no way of protecting themselves.” (pg 121)

The Board did not receive this news well. The Board’s two school administrators (also Black women) had the most to say on the subject, responding as though they were somehow personally implicated.

“I must begin by stating that I didn’t read the article in it’s entirety - but I read enough to say that I felt like I was being referenced in the article…” said Dr. Harris-Muhammed. She goes on to spend her full 5 minutes of discussion time on a tangent about her 32-year experience working in the public school system. 

“…I’m sure, for Ms McClenney in the 1990’s, it was not easy for her to serve as a strong Black female showing equity and equality and educational social justice for all students. I don’t want this Board or any of us to take an article… about ‘clustering’ as a reason not to rename a school after a woman who paved the way for many of us who are Black and female in educational leadership… I have the prayer that we will not allow an article to ruin a woman’s legacy of producing doctors, athletes, writers, poets, educators, servant leaders. She was a servant leader at heart. 

I am extremely disappointed that the article was just now found today. It’s been there since 1992.”

It’s an interesting blend of this isn’t that big of a deal, and why am I just now finding out about this?

Cheryl Burke, who had worked for both Superintendent Lois Harrison-Jones (Cary’s potential namesake) and Principal McClenney, also downplayed the scandal. Working in Ginter Park at the time, she witnessed the pattern of parents picking student’s classes. She assured her colleagues(? The administration? The audience?) that segregation “was not the climate that was intended” adding “[Principal McClenney] didn’t enslave anyone, alright?” 

Burke favors “removing some of the men’s names” and replacing them with names that are representative of RPS students “across the board.”  “We need a Hispanic name. We need an Italian name. We need Jewish names.” (She stopped there when an audience member cried out “Jewish??” in apparent disgust.)

Gibson, who represents Ginter Park, made a same-night motion to approve naming Ginter Park for Principal McClenney. It failed, as her same-night motions often do, for the simple fact that her Board colleagues insist on following their 2-read process for making changes in the school division. (It appears they have more than enough votes to rename Ginter Park for Frances McClenney.)

They will vote - as scheduled - on June 20th. 

There was no discussion about Wythe, Cary, or Binford’s proposed names. 

Historic Tax Cred-It’s Complicated

Fox reconstruction is rolling right along now that the district has secured various sources of funding:

  • $15M from the City

  • $12.4M from insurance

  • $5.6M from the State

Now, they have a chance to earn an additional $2-3M with Historic Tax Credits that the division could use on Fox - or roll over into funding other capital (aka facility) projects. For example: all the athletic investments the Board discussed/cut from their FY24 budget.

There’s just one hiccup: RPS does not pay taxes, so they cannot use tax credits. They can earn them, though, and then sell them to a tax-paying business that can use them. They’ll need a lawyer to manage all this - plus some other legal-ese nuts and bolts that are estimated to cost $700K. 

Mariah White, “the 2nd district representative for Fox,” is “not really interested” in this plan for tax credit “buyouts.” “We have the money” she says, so why is the superintendent looking for more revenue?

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Sorry, I’m being haunted by the April 17th ghosts of Shonda Harris-Muhammed and Dawn Page telling the Superintendent “You gotta find some more funding from somewhere.”

Back to Fox: Chairwoman Rizzi is nervous about risk, which the lawyer tells her is limited. 

Harris-Muhammed asks for 1-on-1 time with the lawyer to better understand the situation.

They’ll vote on this on June 20th.

CI-Palooza

Back in May, we learned some very exciting news about the division’s Capital Improvement Plan (CIP). New Chief Operating Officer, Dana Fox, submitted multiple construction grant applications to the State, 4 of which were approved! 

RPS will receive an additional $5.4M for Fox reconstruction, $20M for the trade-school-to-be on the Altria site , and our two open-concept schools - Francis Elementary and Henderson Middle - will get $1M each to build walls*. (*This was born from the January shooting in an open-concept Newport News elementary school. Some classes were left exposed to an active shooting scenario because they did not have enclosed spaces to barricade themselves. Sigh. What a time to be alive.)

At the June 5th meeting, the School Board discussed how they would like to use the funding for the Altria site. 

At least, they were supposed to.

You see, RPS used to work with the city on their major construction projects, but they had a spectacular break-up in 2021 and have (also spectacularly) failed to make much progress on school construction since:

  • On a new Woodville Elementary: The Board ignored hard questions about school size (and possible consolidation with Fairfield elementary) back in March, 2022. They promised to talk about it later - but they haven’t. 

  • On Wythe: The Board refused to use the City-provided project specs (RFP) in June 2021. They specifically opposed building the school to meet the census-recommended 2,000-student capacity, then spent nearly a year refusing to meet with City Council to explain why they thought the school should be built for 1,600 students instead. (Gibson even described Council’s concern as “the destruction of democracy” - what??) Anyways. The Board’s delay only ended after mounting community pressure (“Wythe Can’t Wait!”) forced the Board to compromise on an 1,800-student school. This plan still worries southside residents.

  • On Altria: the Diamond District Developers offered to renovate the site in a public-private partnership. They emailed then-Chair Shonda Harris-Muhammed to sort out the details, but she ignored their email for 6 months until that opportunity had passed. 

Now, miraculously, the Board has an Altria-development-do-over, but they’ll have to decide how they’d like the administration to use their $20M grant, first. 

“We have to get from conversation to action. I think the first step is for us as a school system to articulate what we hope to achieve with this property.” - Kamras

He proposes holding community engagement discussions with parents, students, and industry leaders to discuss preferred programming and potential partnerships. He asks the Board to “bless this direction” to flesh out a plan for the property.

White is not receptive: “I can’t bless anything without a plan.” 

This automatic-“no” is a Board reflex, a sign of mistrust and/or indecision. Seems we can expect them to treat the Altria project with the same urgency they’ve offered to Woodville and Wythe. (That is to say, with no urgency at all.) 

The administration will press on with community conversations throughout the fall, and use that feedback to craft a “request for proposal” (RFP) for the site’s renovation. I’ll let you know how that plays out.

SCORE & Division Safety

The “SCORE” is the Student Code of Responsible Ethics. It’s a document that outlines the division’s expectations for student conduct, and the consequences for various degrees of student misbehavior. 

Some of the SCORE is mandated by the state in order for the division to receive state funding. The rest is designed by the school district, in accordance with local community values. It’s updated - and must be approved by the School Board - every year.

Last summer, the Board’s SCORE discussion amounted to basically it’s not perfect, and where’s the limit on cell phone use?

This year, the SCORE discussion is very much a proxy battle for the discipline issues plaguing the district, and enabled by Board Members themselves. These headlines summarize that story pretty well:

Apparently, the Board hasn’t been enforcing their own (Board-approved) SCORE because the State’s requirements don’t align with the Board’s restorative justice values. 

The conversation pivots to how the Board can prevent misbehavior so they won’t have to discipline students. They, the distributors-of-financial-resources, complain that there are not enough resources allocated to mental health or to the hearing office, who are struggling to manage the volume of disciplinary cases. 

Rep. White says the Board is receiving “droves” of notifications about students bringing edibles onto campus. She asks if edibles are included in the SCORE:

Sorry, wrong tweet:

The answer is (still) yes.

Rep. Jones wants to expand upon successful restorative justice models in the district. She points to RAS (“Razz” - the Richmond Alternative School) as an example.

Chief Wellness Officer, Ranesha Parks echoes Chair Rizzi’s concerns about RPS staff needing adequate training to better respond to student misbehavior, and better meet student’s emotional needs. 

Vice Chair Burke advocates for more wrap-around services and emphasizes the role of strong relationships in classroom management.

Expanding RAS, outsourcing social-emotional work to our appropriately trained community partners, and adopting policies that strengthen teacher-student relationships are each a part of the “Safe and Loving School Cultures” plan that Jonathan Young introduced in April. (You may recall, his Board colleagues did not entertain any of this at the time. Instead, they threw it out entirely for seemingly perpetuating the idea that “all schools are unsafe, flawed, violent institutions.”) 

For his part, Young isn’t fighting very hard to win the support for some (much less all) of his recommendations, which also include things like “extending the school day for 30 minutes of play” and prohibiting phone access in secondary schools. There’s a lot of Board support for these solutions, too, but members are too distracted by areas of disagreement to see (much less enact) the changes they agree on. 

I think this is especially important to point out -  again (School Safety and Climate) - because the division continues to grapple with these very big, devastating blows to student safety. 

They insist they are doing everything they can, and doing the best with what they’ve got - all while sending kids back to schools they’ve been duly expelled from, failing to act on proposals to increase safety investments, and groaning about restorative justice without cherry-picking the relevant policy changes out of a proposal that could help meet that goal. 

The Board isn’t helpless or out of ideas. They’re just shooting down everyone else’s proposals without introducing any solutions of their own. (I mean, they even fussed when Parks and Rec asked to host “Mayor’s Basketball” nights in school gyms this summer - asking for proof that it will successfully prevent gun violence. What???) Then, when bad things happen, they totally forget all the ways they are contributing to the chaos, or delaying its resolution. 

Less than 24 hours after this Board discussion - a Huguenot graduate will be fatally shot (along with 7 others injured) minutes after receiving his diploma. Much of the Board, now trauma survivors, will immediately close schools down and abruptly end the school year. They will tell the press “we were just trying to do the best that we could do to support everyone…” but the optics suggest “we don’t know how to keep your kids safe in any school across the district.” 

Trauma literally changes brain chemistry, so I do not expect peak decision-making from our leaders in the aftermath of the Graduation shooting. But the Board meets again tomorrow, and I do expect “doing the best they can” to look different when they do. 

  • I hope they actually start reading the safety proposals they’ve received. 

  • I hope they say yes to whatever parts of them they can support. 

  • And I hope they start making their own safety proposals. 

But I will continue to debunk these claims of helplessness that are both false, and make RPS parents like myself wonder if our children are safe in their care. 

There will surely be additional conversation about this tomorrow night, June 20th, at Thomas Jefferson High School. 6PM. See you there!

Becca DuVal