RPS RECAP: Jan 25 & 26, 2023
Happy weekend, Board Watchers! I’ve got not one but two RPS meetings this week to catch you up on. The second, a joint meeting between City Council and RPS, is essentially my Super Bowl. (Nerd alert!) There’s a lot to cover - so I’ve organized these meeting summaries into 5 themes. As always, you’re welcomed and encouraged to skip around to the essays that most interest you:
Pretend there’s “Fat” to Trim in the RPS Budget
Confusing RPS for a Business
Redundant Redundancies
The Only Way Out is Up
Next Steps
Pretend there is “Fat” to trim in the Budget
For a third meeting in a row, “systems person”-by-trade Nicole Jones, asks the superintendent to identify what “isn’t working” in RPS. She wants to make sure we’re not still funding ineffective initiatives before she agrees to fund new ones.
Of course, this assumes that things “aren’t working” because they’re bad ideas. But sometimes good things don’t work because there’s just not enough of them. (Paint is still the right tool for the job, even if you need to apply more than one coat.) We see this in RPS - with our “mindfulness rooms” that could improve student mental health, but we don’t have the metrics to prove it because we don’t have enough staff to operate them.
In any event, Kamras is clear: “We’re pretty streamlined already.” He hasn’t had the luxury of keeping programs that don’t work. Case in point: they’ve cut 119 central office positions during his tenure in order to “hold schools harmless.”
“We work very hard at RPS to put every penny into our schools.”
Still, the Board has often overruled his budget priorities, and some of those decisions are drawing attention now.
Both Rep Page and Councilwoman Lambert side-eye the Richmond Virtual Academy. This pandemic-era program cost the district $2.8M last year. Does it have the enrollment numbers to justify continuing it? If so, does it need all 30 staff members? Neither elected follows up these questions with a proposal to cut the program… yet.
Rep Young has his eye on facilities. He wants to see the district close 5 RPS schools. This makes financial sense for a couple of reasons: selling these properties could bring in extra revenue; and, offloading crumbling, money-pit facilities would allow the district to better maintain their remaining schools with limited CIP funds. (He says he’ll elaborate at the next meeting.)
Rep White (and others) want to cut the extra seats to Governor’s Schools and Code RVA. (This is truly unfortunate timing, because RPS students are actively applying to fill those seats.) This idea is fiercely opposed by Rep Young, who is willing to make a lot of cuts - but not to “school choice.”
Any of these “cuts” will be unpopular. (Cuts always are.) I suppose the problem for politicians is that sometimes they are necessary.
Councilman Addison says this is the “tough job” that our School Board has now. He says of his peers on Council:
“We’ve stepped up. And we’ve met your asks and needs to the best we can with a budget that has not grown to the capacity that your asks have been.”
He holds up a (figurative) mirror to the Board, who have often been the loudest opposition to City economic development initiatives that would provide the revenue that Council needs to fund RPS’ hefty draft budget.
This brings me to the theme I’ll call…
Confusing RPS for a Business
Over and over again we hear members of both bodies ask “where’s the return on this investment?” This is Ms. Jones’ quest for metrics to justify mental health investment, it’s Vice President Nye’s question about Dreams4RPS, and it’s Rep Young’s surprising admission that he would not support this budget if he were on council, because RPS hasn’t delivered taxpayers the best “bang for their buck.”
This is standard business talk. If that flavor soda isn’t selling, cut it loose. *Adjust your monopoly-man monocle.*
But government doesn’t produce goods. It provides social services. It should not and cannot be run like a business because their job here is not to increase shareholder profits - it’s to make sure that Johnny can read, and Susie can write.
This is Richmond politics’ longstanding Ying/Yang: Do we support Communities? Or Commerce? Unfortunately, the business community often has a heavy, well-funded thumb of the scale. They’re also usually blind to the consequences, too, because they do not live in (or educate their children in) Richmond.
Nevertheless - finding a healthy balance between these interests is critical, because we cannot morally or legally deny Virginia’s school-aged children their right to a ”high quality” education.
Students aren’t failing to meet outdated, pre-pandemic academic benchmarks because of bad investments in their education, they’re struggling because of the explosive growth of student needs. To emphasize this point, Ms. Burke runs us through the numbers again (which now far exceed those reported in October):
13 shootings
175 threat assessments
125 neglect and abuse reports to CPS
180 suicide risk assessments; and
So. Much. More.
In fact - the Superintendent largely stands by his strategic vision for the district, Dreams4RPS. The pandemic delivered a “massive hit” on academics, social emotional health, etc, but the current strategy is moving every ‘failed’ metric in the “right direction.” Rather than disinvest, he encourages the politicians on stage to “reconsider our [division] goals for the current moment.”
Still, Councilman Addison’s earlier point stands: there isn’t revenue to pull this off. And there’s no shrinking students’ needs. If these covering bodies are going to meet them, they’ll need to find a different solution.
Redundant Redundancies
Vice President Nye channels Councilwoman Lynch - head of the Education and Human Services committee, whose flight back to Richmond got stuck in Texas. She says that City Hall and RPS operate in isolated “silos” that create many blind spots and inefficiencies.
Nye proposes an “audit” of sorts - a study, or review - to see where city programs and RPS needs overlap. A Parks and Rec collaboration is low hanging fruit - it can help meet student’s social and physical health needs. But there may also be services the City provides that Principals don’t know about; or reforms the city should consider to make those programs more accessible. Council would like to bring in a team of outside consultants to find gaps in social services, overlapping efforts, and potential areas of collaboration. They should be able to share their findings in the next 4-6 weeks.
Nobody needs to make any decisions tonight, but “we’d really like to work together on this issue.”
The mention of an analysis or review immediately makes some RPS Board members bristle. They appear to receive this news as unnecessary oversight, or an indictment of the work they’ve done.
Chairwoman Rizzi asks “You’re hitting us with this tonight?” She wants to see the offer in writing.
The former Chairwoman Harris-Muhammed is confused, and goes on to explain why she doesn’t believe this “audit” is necessary: “The school division needs to be able to understand the services we have in-house before we go ask a third party to unpack what we have.”
She insists there’s not many areas of overlap between City and Schools: “city social work services, and public education social work services are very different.” (The nurse seated beside me violently shook her head in disagreement.)
Dr. HM wants to keep a separation between city and schools, but appears to talk herself into a possible exception for after school programming.
Rep Nicole Jones thinks we’re making the assumption that parents aren’t already utilizing all city services. Sometimes “duplicative services” are really about offering parents “choices” - like choosing between school-based after school programs or ones offered by Parks and Rec.
This hesitation - resistance? - was clearly not what anyone expected. Council largely sat wide-eyed on the stage. The audience burst into whispers of “Why would the Board turn down this help?”
Vice President Nye does her best to de-escalate a conversation that has clearly gone off the rails. “City Council isn’t putting this out there as a mandate. We’re asking ‘where can we work together?’”
She exposes some City vulnerability (a strategy Addison also used throughout the meeting) - owning that City Hall is not perfect. They’re struggling with blind spots and redundancies, too. She repeats: “City and Schools are silo’ed. And within City Hall, our departments are also silo’ed.” Everyone could benefit from this exercise.
In contrast, Rep Young says the City’s offer “makes all the sense in the world.” His colleague, Rep White shares his optimism. She thinks City and Schools can collaborate around mental health and gun violence.
These bodies have considered cooperation like this before - it was the whole premise of the Mayor’s Education Compact. (An initiative that both the former Chair Harris-Muhammed and Vice-Chair Gibson - who was absent for this joint meeting - actively opposed.) But egos and talk of sovereignty usually stop these efforts dead in their tracks.
The School Board often perceives the City as interfering with their work. (Sometimes Council - or the Mayor - earn that reputation.) But over the last 1-2 years, this Board’s skepticism and mistrust has continued to grow. They don’t want to outsource any work to any one - not curriculum writing, after school programming, or school construction.
The friction here is - the School Board has been busy writing checks that City Council cannot cash. Council cannot fund $28M worth of RPS growth.
If the Board wants to follow through on promises like collective bargaining, or provide much-needed mental health support for students, then they’re going to have to find their inefficient or duplicative services, and yield as many of them as possible to City departments that have the capacity to better execute them.
Had Rep Doerr been present at the joint meeting, perhaps she’d have shared a familiar refrain: audits are a tool to show us where we can grow - they are not meant to be used as a punishment. And the only ones with a record of using audits (Chromebook, Screentime, Financial) that way are the same members on stage resisting the City’s offer now.
The Only Way Out is Up
Both these budget meetings operated in the shadow of State influence.
Over a decade ago, the State imposed a limit on their funding for school support staff. Year after year - the City stepped in to fund the rest.
The State keeps mandating teacher raises, but they do not fully fund them. The City has born ⅔ of these costs. This is why Superintendent Kamras is grateful: “The City of Richmond has been good to RPS.”
But now, we’re 50 years and one extremely disruptive pandemic into funding schools with the State’s LCI formula, which “does not recognize the unique circumstances of Richmond and other divisions with high concentrations of poverty and tax-exempt properties.” (Source) Neither City or Schools can penny-pinch their way out of this chronic disinvestment, which lost RPS $10M last year alone.
Superintendent Kamras says we need more from the commonwealth, and we need to advocate together. This is true - and backed up by REA in their recent address to school board. But these calls are absolutely lacking in action words.
What does it mean to advocate? Are we marching? What bills are we supporting? Who are we wining and dining? What do we need to do to make this change? Every elected official on stage has an expansive reach - why aren’t they leveraging their positions to lead the community in action?
Councilwoman Lambert wonders aloud if the city’s lobbyists can help. Certainly, RPS’ 119 central office cuts have undermined the district’s lobbying efforts. Our sole lobbyist has been bogged down wearing too many other (unrelated) hats - like serving as the IT guru streaming Board meetings, and answering press calls. City reinforcements would be nice.
If the State broke public education, and the State alone can fix it, then our district needs a stronger advocacy presence. We need someone(s) to raise their hand and offer to organize. So far, no elected official, in any of the past month’s meetings, has offered to do this.
Meanwhile, the General Assembly is also considering amendments to their own budget right now. The window to influence their FY24 education investments is rapidly closing. And we’ll be in a real pickle if we miss this chance.
For more on GA Advocacy, see this recap from the administration’s Jan 17 presentation.
Next Steps
I do not know what - if anything - the Superintendent does with the notes from these first couple of meetings. There has been very little consensus about what programs to cut. Some chopping-block items (like, more seats in Governor’s Schools, and the Richmond Virtual Academy) were Board mandates. Striking these from the draft budget would require Board action to undo them. This is true of collective bargaining, too - which makes up $24.2M of the additional $28.3M the Board is asking of City Council - though there haven’t been any talks of walking back this commitment. (This would also be a spectacular break of faith, especially amidst a teacher shortage.)
Maybe at Wednesday’s (2/1/23 @ 6PM, MLK Middle) budget meeting we’ll see the administration present on their “division-wide strategy” to address mental health that Rep Jones keeps asking for. I don’t really understand this ask, to be honest. The answers she’s received so far are:
There isn’t one, because we do not have the capacity to staff consistent wellness programs at each school; and,
That’s probably not a reasonable priority right now, because Director “Angela [Jones] can’t actually spend the time to ensure consistency of experience for kids because she’s running from school to school handling shootings and child abuse allegations…” (Kamras)
I sure hope cooler heads prevailed Friday morning, and (at least) our new Chairwoman reached out to Vice President Nye to accept Council’s collaboration proposal. We know she knows the power and impact her Council counterparts have on student achievement, or she wouldn’t have made this plea:
“We need help from City Council for a lot of these quality of life issues that our students are facing. When you’re hungry or scared, or you don’t know where you’re going to lay your head down each day - It’s really hard to focus on academics.”
I do expect more joint meetings, though. Both because…
The Board spent 21% of Thursday’s meeting talking about when and how often they should have joint meetings. This whole episode felt more like a group therapy session than efficient policy-making, particularly in contrast to Council, who rarely repeated ideas that had already been shared, and actually stuck to the agreed-upon agenda.
Council President Jones is committed to doing things differently:
“We want children to be successful - we want you to be successful. Tonight is just the beginning… We want to do things differently. Tonight wasn’t perfect outside the one thing that is perfect: the fact that we can sit down and talk and find a pathway forward…
I’m pulling for these kids. I see what they’re going through because we’re all going through it together.”
Is it just me, or do these smiles say “we’re willing to collaborate!”?
I am growing concerned that there won’t be any meaningful investment (or even discussion) addressing the needs of English Learners. We’ve not heard from the RPS/LULAC committee yet, nor has the proposed $1.2M EL investment had any vocal support from School Board or Council members. I surely hope our electeds surprise me.
It’s too early to despair, though. Budget season has just begun and our leaders have weeks of troubleshooting left ahead. These meetings (oddly) don’t allow for public comment, so be sure to email your feedback ahead of time. School Board emails are here, and City Council’s are here.
Anyway - I’ll keep you posted! These budget discussions are getting repetitive, so I’m not sure there’ll be much to report from Wednesday’s work session. At a minimum we’ll live tweet, and you will for sure hear from me again after the February 6 Board meeting.
Thanks as always for keeping up with local government. Enjoy your weekend!