Board Watch 9.12.22 (Pt 2)
Welcome back, Board Watchers! Thanks for your patience this week while we took our time processing a 6 hour, 19 minute meeting. If you missed Part 1, click here to catch up on all the latest Curriculum drama.
NextUp RVA
To be honest, I totally glazed over during the initial NextUp RVA conversation during the 8/15/22 reopening update. There was extensive Q&A, and everybody seemed to be talking right past each other.
The misunderstanding seems to be… we have two services that run at the same time: after school. The Board appears to have lumped them together, and that’s causing a LOT of confusion.
The first is a childcare program. This service is operated by Parks & Rec and YMCA, coordinated by the City’s Office of Children and Families, and hosted in RPS schools. This serves elementary students, giving them a safe space to have a snack, structured activities, and play with friends until parents can pick up their children after work.
As part of the pandemic response, RPS offered this programming to all students for free in 2021-22 as part of it’s Extended Day Initiative. Pandemic relief funds (CARES/ESSR) covered this expense. The School Board did not make renewing this service a budget priority for 2022-23, so families are paying for it again. This is obviously bad timing, since the pandemic forced many families to eat into (or exhaust) their savings, and inflation costs mean their paychecks don’t stretch quite as as far as they used to. Continuing free childcare would be a welcomed relief. Unfortunately, these one-time COVID funds are drying up, too, and it’s just not feasible to extend this service.
The second is enrichment programming for middle schoolers. The programming varies by school, per collaboration with principals, to meet the specific needs and interests of each school community. Dozens of local entrepreneurs, small businesses and nonprofits are matched with division middle schools to increase student exploration into STEM, arts, sports, and career/leadership development. Ordinarily, the administrative costs (like marketing, one-stop registration, logistics planning for food and transportation services) are too cost-prohibitive and labor-intensive for these parties to put on this sort of programming independently. NextUp RVA is a backbone organization that does this work, and enables greater participation from community partners. NextUp RVA is a non-profit: self-funded with donor dollars, grant funding, and city funding.
The programming they facilitate comes at no cost to students/families, or the district, and includes in-kind transportation from RPS.
Last year only - RPS contracted NextUp RVA to scale up its organizing efforts, and expand services to include pre-K extended day, summer school, the STEM academies at Henderson and MLK middle schools, and more. This was also paid for with pandemic relief funds. This was (and is) an acknowledgement that the burdens of pandemic learning loss and the resulting economic hardships families are facing is too great a demand for city government to satisfy alone. City youth need “all hands on deck.”
Both of these services are crucial to Richmond families, but their objectives are not the same.
Here’s the confusion:
2nd District Rep, Mariah White, thinks NextUp RVA makes terrible childcare. (Because it isn’t childcare.) It’s inconvenient for working parents that sometimes the programs take holidays, and she’s dissatisfied that programming ends at 4:30PM (although, this was designed by the district and specific to Henderson.)
White also believes NextUp should not have received pandemic relief funds. (We do not actually know that NextUp has received or is receiving pandemic funding.) She believes their programming did not address learning loss. Though the NextUp RVA presentation offers a detailed list of their paid contracts in 2021-22, including a summary of these expenditures, the 2nd District Rep instructs the superintendent to bring an itemized list of the district’s payments to NextUp RVA. It is unclear what she’s looking for.
The Chairwoman says “I just don’t see [academic?] outcomes” for students. In the presentation, the NextUp RVA coordinator explained that these after school programs are a positive intervention to chronic absenteeism. Exciting programming encourages students to come to school and stay in school. The students then perform better academically, even if for no other reason than they are attending school. See the positive impacts in the graph below.
The Chairwoman doesn’t understand why RPS can’t organize all of this programming internally. Note: It doesn’t cost RPS any money to work with NextUp RVA. It WOULD cost RPS money to hire staff to do this work internally. It’s also incredibly relevant to point out: central office is riddled with vacancies, especially in the academic office, and they are also asking this same skeleton-staff to develop a new curriculum, too. The willingness to overburden central office staff likely stems from the common mythos that this staff is over-paid and/or irrelevant. It is distressing to see this false narrative perpetuated by our elected School Board.
5th District Rep Stephanie Rizzi, opposes the program on ideological grounds. NextUp RVA and some of their nonprofit partners are (partially) funded by corporate donors. She’d prefer the city government redirect (nominal) taxpayer funding to public services like Parks and Rec. As a School Board Member, she can neither levy taxes nor direct where city council allocates its spending. She appears motivated to sever the RPS/NextUp partnership in a sort of protest vote against the mayor and/or capitalism, despite the fact that doing so would leave principals and their students without valuable programming, and we’d still have capitalism. It is also unclear if Parks and Rec is available to be a NextUp RVA replacement. It’s unlikely they have the capacity to do so, since the city already passed its budget months ago based on the School Board’s final budget. If this transition is successful, RPS would be walking away from all the private money currently subsidizing these programs, because government agencies like Parks and Rec cannot take donations.
Mariah White instructs the chair to add a next step to the agenda for the upcoming meeting. It is added to board action items, because she intends to make a motion. All indications are that she will move to sever the RPS/Next-Up relationship - a decision that would have a negative impact on student achievement and overall well-being, and seems to be rooted in a series of misunderstandings, mistrust and mischaracterizations. Parents of the 500+ students actively participating in Next Up-coordinated programs ought to take note; so should the elementary parents who want this free programming available to their children when they get to middle school.
Like school construction and curriculum development, this Board is poised to bring after school programming in-house… even if it means they’ll (we’ll) pay way more ($3-to-$1) to do it.
Nicole Jones asks “What is the statement we are trying to make?” - reflecting an awareness of the shift from presentation-to-interrogation. Her choice of the pronoun “we” doubles as a reminder that her colleagues conduct impacts the reputation of the whole Board. It also, also, illustrates that they continue to operate as a board of individuals (with a few scattershot alliances), and not as a collaborative body finding common ground and leading the district in the best direction for student outcomes.
Everything Else
Because of the hour, they really blazed through the rest of the critical agenda items. (Everything else was pushed until the upcoming 9/19/22 meeting.)
The Auditor, Mr Parker, states that there will be an audit of all school activity funds, as well as a “turnover audit” for schools that have new principal leadership. The Chair thanks him for his service, a nod to his recent resignation.
The Superintendent shares a reopening update: It “was the smoothest in years.” He’s grateful for the Board-approved increase in bus operator pay: the district has zero driver vacancies. This means RPS had no “double-backs or triple-backs” - the practice of drivers running multiple routes back-to-back when there is insufficient staff to run the routes simultaneously.
Young motions (again) to strike the mask mandate, citing distress watching students wearing masks. It gets no second, and fails. (NOTE: it has long been the case that parents can opt their children out of mask use. The remaining mandate is for teachers, and the 4th District Rep is well aware that the administration will revise this in November, based on COVID conditions at that time.)
The Director of School Construction gives an update on Wythe and Fox.
Wythe - She expresses gratitude for the instrumental role of recently-deceased Principal Parker. “It was truly his trophy, and will continue to be”
Wythe - A planning meeting is scheduled for the following week, where the team hopes to get the blessing on the conceptual drawings.
Fox - Debris cleanup continues with SB Cox. Design firm, Quinn Evans, have started field work. Their structural engineers are crafting a plan to “weatherize” the building with a temporary roof.
Fox - the design phase is on track and expected to take 9 months.
8/9 Board Members green light the Admin’s personnel update. There’s no explanation for Ms White’s lone “no” vote.
There's a budget transfer, including the repurpose funds earmarked for student tuition to regional schools like CodeRVA and Maggie Walker. From what I gather, a student (or students) unenrolled, and these schools do not accept mid-year transfers. Admin recommends the transfer so that money doesn’t go to waste. Nevertheless, Young votes no because he wants “more students to be afforded opportunities to attend schools of choice.” It’s a protest vote that misrepresents the admin’s request.
After 6 hours and 19 minutes, the Board goes into closed session to discuss the proposed surplusing of unused land around Carver and Holton… at 12:43AM.
Things we’re watching:
All the evening’s pushed agenda items:
The Latino Community Taskforce
RPS Foundation Update
Update on Legal Council for the Board/City Arthur Ashe Jr dispute.
Results of the Teacher Survey on Curriculum
The fate of the NextUp RVA partnership
There’s one more piece for today, before we’re back next week with another round of Board Watch and Scorecard for the 9.19.22 meeting. It is, unfortunately, tragic news.
While this meeting was playing out, RPS lost another student to senseless gun violence. Media reports that Tynashia Humphrey, a 15 year old Armstrong student was a “sweet girl with a contagious smile.” Our thoughts and prayers are with her family, her classmates, and the whole RPS community.
RPS recently established the "Honoring the Memory Fund" that aims to support families of RPS students who pass with funeral expenses, mental health support, missed days of work, food, and bills. You can donate to the fund by clicking here and selecting "Honoring the Memory Fund" in the drop-down menu.
