Everyone is Right: The Superintendent’s Interview
I got a horrible grade on a creative writing assignment once. I had turned in a story with a real goon-of-a-character that my professor criticized as one dimensional. He was right.
It was this realization, that nobody is the villain in their own story, that took me out of the know-it-all teen years and into a more critical view of the (very messy) world.
I have always viewed RPS through that lens - stubbornly holding to the middle ground while the many loud tribal alliances have pulled me to be “Pro Mayor,” “Pro Kamras,” “Pro School Board Member,” or “Pro teacher.” And all this journey has ever taught me is that everyone is always kinda right, even when they’re a-lot-of-wrong.
Keep this in mind as we dive into the story below, and recap the Superintendent’s interview with investigators.
Some of you will turn away early and call this a “puff piece” because I’m not drawing horns and a pitchfork on Jason Kamras’ yearbook photo; but I encourage you to read past that to get to the discussion about how RPS is failing, and how he’s failed to stop it.
The Superintendent
We don’t often hear from Jason Kamras. He’d rather read to a class of smiling students, or high five them as they skip into school than hang out with literally anyone over the age of 18. He routinely ducks the media, and hides away in City Hall where he is surrounded by building staff who adore him and a cabinet who desperately want to make him proud.
Anyone with eyeballs can see that he is trapped in a perpetual game of “Heads, naysayers win; Tales, the superintendent loses” that has worn him down and made him frail. This city - this School Board - have robbed him of half his hair and even more joy. (This is what the cover photo is meant to depict, by the way - it is not a jab.) He spoke to this once last Fall when he delivered positive enrollment numbers - which inspired a couple members to make baseless accusations of data manipulation.
“I think we can both be honest about where [RPS has] fallen short, and take the opportunity to celebrate where we are making gains. I lament sometimes the reflexive focus on only that which is not working at RPS - there is clearly plenty of that - but this is an unalloyed growth in student enrollment.”
This is what Richmond does to superintendents. It chews them up and spits them out. If it’s not a death-by-school-board-micromanagement*, it’s a death-by-Mayoral bullying, and it never seems to matter if they’ve been successful serving children or not. (*Chapter 6; Pgs 133-127)
In the 28 years between 1985 and 2013 - RPS cycled through 8 superintendents. Then there was Bedden. Then, 4 years later, there was Jason Kamras. That’s an average tenure of 3.8 years. Kamras has lasted longer than most, but he lives with the constant reminder that he’s on borrowed time.
I cannot tell you if he is a great superintendent. I can’t even tell you if he is a good one. It’s hard to have any opinion of him, really, since it’s been so long since he’s been able to do anything at all. All I can tell you for sure is that he works really freaking hard, and that he looks like an alien when you see him in cargo shorts running errands at Lowes.
“It feels like the mantra is: Fix everything, but don’t change anything.” Jason Kamras
Richmond readers outside of the school system will recognize this toxic trait. There is always a large part of this city that will say “no” to every new idea - downtown stadium, casino(x2), meals tax, Navy Hill - even if they do end up passing by the skin of their teeth.
Anyway. This is the guy sitting opposite the Sands Anderson investigator on November 3rd, 2023.
Kamras is sick as a dog. He’d been out for days and, if I recall correctly, had to reschedule a meeting with the REA to discuss some sort of mold/fire resolution compromise. The only reason he’s meeting with investigators now is that this Altria/Huguenot/Monroe Park report is due in 3 days, and they’re scrambling.
“There are a few pieces that we’re just kind of doing - some last minute…things”
Things like this interview with the superintendent. The transcript of which won’t make it into the disorganized mess that is the 1,132-page evidence document and spur even more conspiracy theories. What is he hiding?
Investigators already have a “whole picture” of the events that played out, and are “just kind of looping back to get [the superintendent’s] thoughts or impressions of information or concepts that [they’ve] already started to wrestle with.”
The lawyer starts with questions about (the former) Huguenot Principal, Mr. Rob Gilstrap. His colleagues had called him “checked out.” A Huguenot parent friend of mine called him a “ghost.” And there’s an obvious concern about the implications of that.
This was news to Kamras - who had spent the months prior working from a desk in the halls of George Wythe, trying to support the new principal there (the former Huguenot Assistant Principal, Kevin Olds), and literally manning the “dang side doors” that students were using to skip school, hang out in the parking lot, and - on one unfortunate day in April - shoot a peer.
Investigators sum up my zillion-word essay on this investigation in one simple sentence:
“There was - um - a lot of movement internally with senior staff within the HHS building as well as the structure that would have oversight of secondary principals.”
This was not news, though. The excessive staff turnover and vacancies in key leadership positions had been on a lot of radars at the time - including the VDOE’s Office of School Quality (OSQ) - who emailed the RPS administration with concerns about the blind spots these excessive vacancies had created in OSQ oversight. As then-Chief of Staff Michelle Hudacsko explained - RPS was “down not only Chiefs, but also notable staff” - including a Talent Office that was operating on 68% capacity and juggling maybe the largest wave of teacher turnover in the history of public education in America.
“We simply are, in many cases, trying to keep our head above water.”
The VDOE’s Dr. Ortiz was so alarmed that she told then-Chairwoman Harris-Muhammed:
”…the Office of School Quality continues to have concerns regarding the progress/submission of artifacts regarding essential actions… We are also aware of multiple vacancies within the leadership team, among other challenges within the division. We urge you, as the school board chairwoman, to revisit the [corrective action plan] as a board and in conjunction with the superintendent to seek understanding of the essential actions and necessary steps needed to assure progress for the 2022 - 2023 school year.”
Ortiz also flagged the Board’s chaotic curriculum motion - which violated the division’s MOU (re:VDOE oversight of curriculum) and the Board’s own governance manual, and served as the catalyst for the exodus of even more central office staff.
Dr. HM - who has a habit of only respecting authority when she is the authority - responded with a curt “thanks for the feedback” and a lecture on Board member freedoms, then gave a fiery interview with local news that produced this *chefs kiss* headline.
Richmond School Board Chair says VDOE has no 'space' to indicate how she governs: 'Like it or not'
Either she was too absorbed in the curriculum crusade and the OSQ’s questioning of her leadership decisions to make much note of their vacancies concerns, or they hadn’t been compelling enough for her to reconsider her earlier stated position:
“The majority of the school board recognized that this is not the time to fill positions with very high salaries just to fill positions.”
(Generally speaking, this talking point is pandering to the REA, who came to public comment just this week to encourage raises for the real heros in Central Office - specifically excluding supposedly-overpaid leadership.)
OSQ concerns also didn’t stop Harris-Muhammed (a few months later) from publicly humiliating the Safety Director’s “foolishness” - a gross display of Board behavior that forced his resignation and left another gaping hole in RPS leadership. I’m also 90% sure she didn’t vote to fill the Chief Talent Officer position in 2023 because the administration was courting Yours Truly to provide the necessary swing-vote to pass that hiring request. (Those votes happen outside the public eye.)
All the OSQ could do about all this was send some real “suck it up” energy to RPS Admin.
”Trust that we understand you all are running on steam and limited capacity…Work may slow down with limited capacity, but when serving students, the work also continues and doesn’t stop.”
Back in the room with Kamras and the investigators, we learn the impact of this suck-it-up period - and that Dr Harris-Muhammed wasn’t the only one failing to heed prescient administrative warnings.
Investigators ask Kamras about the Huguenot assistant principal vacancy - the AP overseeing 12th grade - and if, in general, there is a formal process for delegating employee responsibilities.
”…my sense of how it has generally worked is it's more of an understood or kind of implicit kind of thing. Like you're over this department, so you handle this, you're over this, so you handle this… And I think that's something that, certainly as we've learned through this process, we wanna be much clearer about.”
I’ll be honest. This makes me cringe. When the Council of Great City Schools audited RPS in 2018, they explicitly advised the administration to:
”Collaborate with the Office of the Chief Talent Officer in reviewing and updating job titles and job descriptions to provide a more realistic portrayal of duties, responsibilities, and expectations.”
Without these controls in place, RPS staff resorted to “frustration and finger pointing,” and operated within internal communication “silos” and without “clear lines of authority and accountability.”
Right? Thus the cringe.
This was 4 (very chaotic) years ago.
In early 2018, the VDOE had basically put a “Welcome to RPS!” Gift basket on Kamras’ desk where the backside of the card said “PS we discovered a cheating scandal at Carver elementary school. Good luck with that!”
The second half of 2018 saw inordinate attention on campaigning for city approval of a Meals Tax to fund new school construction.
2019 was dominated by a contentious rezoning debate that spanned from (at least) June to December and required dozens? Hundreds? Of meetings during that time - both in School Board Chambers, school auditoriums, and gathered in homes with various groups of community members. The Board - under rather vicious pressure from their constituents - kept postponing the vote on new school zones, making this matter the many-many-headed hydra they just couldn’t kill.
Then there’s 2020 and all the Covid craziness that has unfolded since, and the exodus of early-retirees, and the many teachers and administrators who fled the field of education altogether. That last part is important to our story because you can’t fill vacancies when your labor market is a ghost town.
But the silent killer here - lurking in the shadows and growing ever-bigger - was the machete that both the superintendent and the School Board have taken to central office as a result of the General Assembly’s never-ending support staff cap. The state wouldn’t pay their fair share for school based support personnel, so local school districts had to “trim the fat” in administrative positions so they could maintain all the librarians and counselors and psychologists (etc) within school buildings that they possibly could. Since 2018, a total of 119 central office positions have been cut, with their work spread around remaining (overworked) staff. (Case-in-point, our discussion last week about Solomon Jefferson.)
It’s been more than just an uphill battle. The Board, the state, fate, and a rotating assortment of privileged, self-interested Richmond residents-and-or-businesses have been at the top of the hill with slingshots and pushing boulders in the superintendent’s path.
Don’t get me wrong. That’s the job. But as far as first-time Superintendents go, his was absolutely a baptism-by-fire.
In any case - it shouldn’t have taken this particular crisis for him to consider that job descriptions and delegated responsibilities “should be more explicit than, you know, probably it has been in the past;” or that, as a division, we should not be relying on an “understood” system of “well - this is my area of work, so I'm gonna, you know, take responsibility for what needs to happen here” to ensure that all tasks are clearly assigned and that - in fact - staff take responsibility for them. Especially since this is a high-turnover school district where expectations are relayed through an accelerated game of telephone.
“The team found no deliberative, proactive succession plan, capacity building, or cross- training in critical functions to ensure continuity in the event of leave, retirement, promotion, or resignation of crucial department staff. ” CGCS
Kamras and the investigator cover a wide array of issues related to individual’s responsibilities, and clarity on policies, procedures, and expectations in general.
No, RPS didn’t think homebound students needed permission to attend their graduations. The authority on homebound policies (lost to a transcription service fail) - has since told RPS they need to follow the no-school-events for homebound kids policy. “No excuses!” as Julia Child would say.
No, RPS hasn’t always* required training on how and when staff should initiate a threat assessment. They’ve “done a lot more with that over the last few years - certainly since, Miss Parks has come on board.” Ms Renesha Parks, who just so happens to man the Chief Wellness Officer position that the Board didn’t want to fund and refused to fill until January-ish 2023. *Principals and Assistant Principals, though, take this training.
No, the transitioning of homebound program oversight to the Richmond Virtual Academy was not “clearly articulated as well as it should have been, in full transparency.” There was a “fair amount of gray” area.
No, student needs were not clearly communicated with teachers. There was a “sort of a disconnect between, you know, one office holds the information, the other office might need that information in order to provide the appropriate accommodations for that student in the educational setting… So yeah, I do think having um you know, a greater line of sight there is ultimately what would best serve kids and that's what we're trying to do.”
No, there isn’t a follow-up when complicated cases hit the superintendent's inbox and got promptly delegated to the appropriate team. “My expectation - the team knows - is that they follow up;” “there's no designated nagger who comes back around and says, hey, did you do it?”
Kamras and the investigator agree. The “concept that keeps emerging” in this story are “silos” of information. In the school building. In the academic office. In the wellness office. In the superintendent's inbox. Communication did not exist, was clear as mud, or hit a wall like a plate of spaghetti that slowly slides down in a long tomato-y streak.
This is when I imagine the investigator lets out a big sigh.
“There's not a whole lot of systemic big picture issues that, you know, that I would expect you to be able to address.”
This was an unfortunate case of many “granular” on-the-ground issues. The Wythe principal who died. The Huguenot vacancy it created. The counselor who went un-trained. A checked out principal. The email that was forgotten. The policy misunderstood. The unclear shuffle of the Homebound program…
These are all errors - some way more negligent than others - that all boil down to a weak communication and confusion.
That’s how we get to…
Everyone is Right
Jason Kamras “leads with love.” This means that everybody he oversees is expected to do their job and he’s not going to nag them about it - even when the Council of Great City Schools tells him to “improve internal communication, eliminate silos, and promote clear lines of authority and accountability.”
Some in his staff - especially his direct reports - love this.
“Many staff members in the district have a “can-do” attitude and work hard...” CGCS
Chiefs, Directors, Principals. They take pride in their work and enjoy working for a man who treats them like professionals. Some even take that respect and pass-it-down within their departments or their schools.
Security Director John Beasley sings the praises of his boss, CWO Parks, and director Anglea Jones in his Friday Zoom lunches.
Solomon Jefferson glows about the collaborative relationship he has with his partner-CAO, Dr Leslie Wiggins, and all the academic staff beneath them who stacked hands and took on more work after their department was decimated by the curriculum crusade, inspired by a mix of obligation and optimism.
COO Dana Fox and the superintendent have a mutual respect and appreciation that is evident throughout many Fox reconstruction town halls.
The elementary school principal who never runs out of sweet things to say about her AP.
The Care and Safety Associates joking with each other over bag checks on an overtime shift at the School Board meeting.
Leading with love works! At least up until leading with love gets in the way of leading at all.
Permissive leadership does not work for all the folks CGCS observed that…
Showed a “limited sense of urgency in addressing issues and challenges”
”lack of collaboration, shared ownership, and collective accountability in working toward common goals;” and
“…“hunker down” to “get through the day” and “stay under the radar.””
Jonathan Young sees the downside of a nag-free workplace:
“My hypothesis is that RPS did invite this tragedy because we adopted this very laissez-faire approach… the problem is, there’s this real juxtaposition with reality.”
That “reality” is that not everyone in RPS can be expected to do their job fully and faithfully. Some sound outright defiant and insubordinate. Others just legitimately do not know all the responsibilities associated with their job until it’s exposed that they failed to do them. The investigation sheds light on a few examples of each.
Leadership
Solomon Jefferson, now-Chief Academic Officer of Secondary Instruction, tells us that some Chiefs “just had bad relationships. They did not communicate. They did not get along. Everything was last minute.” Their conflict created issues and an internal battle against Chief of Staff Michelle Hudacsko, who resigned that Spring.
We could consider whether a particular blend of personalities was responsible for that - but the Council of Great City Schools’ audit points to a “lack of a robust position control and management system” that existed in 2018, and “created frustration and finger-pointing” then, too, that is not dissimilar to the finger-pointing we see throughout these interviews. The Richmond Virtual Academy Principal (who oversaw the Homebound program), the Huguenot Principal, the guidance counselor - all standing around like they’re reenacting the Spider-Man meme. (I make no judgment on the validity of their argument - only that any fixation on blame is not constructive.)
Principals
The “laissez-faire” approach produces a soft workplace culture that some staff abuse - especially at the building principal level.
Some - like then-Principal Gilstrap - sound like they show up to work to do the bare minimum and collect a paycheck. It was apparent to everyone - including his boss, Solomon Jefferson, who told Gilstrap to get his head in the game, but Gilstrap refused.
“Some of the comments that we got from people is that the kids ran [Huguenot]…And I had a couple of conversations [with Gilstrap] in April and May when some things popped up… ‘you know, you can lead without micromanaging, but you have to give your folks direction and vision and there has to be some progress monitoring to help folks be successful and even some coaching and modeling’, right. And so he admitted to me that he was not, like, fully present in that.”
Jonathan Young assures investigators that Gilstrap wasn’t always this way. He was a “former army guy” who laid down the hammer when he first took over as principal of Huguenot, and ran a tight ship for a while. But in recent years, he began to lose control. He’d tried to expel dangerous students, and the School Board said “nay” 92% of the time. Jonathan Young continues:
”He was in a position, his staff… were in a position where they felt like you can literally kill someone and still attend that graduation… I believe that my colleagues and our administration have developed a kind of messaging that our people at Huguenot - and presumably other schools - …have interpreted, inferred, rightly or wrongly, ‘you have to have this person [there] even if there’s a threat against their life at the event. So. You know. I’m unsure where to go from there.”
Headlines suggest this sentiment loomed large over Thomas Jefferson High School, where a student threatened to shoot a teacher in the face and a defiant school board “refused to expel them.”
It was Jason Kamras who said:
“Please don’t tie my hands behind my back and expect me to perform miracles.”
He was talking to the School Board, but he may as well have been saying this on behalf of his secondary school principals, who were offered about as much control over their students as Solomon Jefferson had over them (principals).
This is the total lack of clear expectations and accountability that the CGCS audit points to over and over again.
People try. Someone like former Chief Operating Officer Alana Gonzalez who was appointed to be a kind of bubblegum pink antacid to soothe the rebellious Operations Department. But they spit her out post-haste by leveraging their friends on School Board to make her life hell. It didn’t matter that the facilities team ghosted the fire marshall in the months leading up to the Fox fire, leaving the school vulnerable to catastrophic failure. It didn’t matter that bloody halls in the Community High School was proof of poor custodial training and insufficient oversight by the Custodial Manager (who will, more than likely, run and win to fill the 9th district school board seat to keep this cycle of insubordination going.) The Board said these things were all her fault (or hers and Kamras’) - inserting themselves into the efforts to hold staff accountable by making sure nobody ever was. They beat her down like their disciplinary rulings beat down Ghost Gilstrap - subjected her to a workplace where she felt “harassed, undermined and demeaned” - and ultimately moved to cut all funding for her position until she resigned instead.
There are classrooms in this school district where teachers exercise reasonable flexibility with their use of division curriculum, and are berated or threatened for doing so. They tried to tell the School Board in September of 2022 when they begged the Board not to ‘solve’ the retaliation problem with a curriculum-‘cure’:
“We don’t have a curriculum issue. We have a control issue at some schools.”
Ditto for the LIEP department that serves English-language learners. Staff blew the whistle about their Director violating student’s rights, subjecting them to rigorous testing designed for native-English speakers and leaving them demoralized. The Director - who had stacked her department with loyalists - squashed those efforts and encouraged their Principal allies to scatter these whistleblowers across multiple different schools. I am sure there are witnesses who would deny or defend this recounting - but doesn’t it say a lot about RPS that staff earnestly believe that retaliation and sabotage thrive in the existing workplace culture?
It’s every-man-for-themselves except in the schools and departments where it isn’t.
“There is a pervasive culture that the school district is viewed negatively. The team was told that even though salaries are competitive, RPS is not perceived as a preferred employer, which is reflected in the district’s inability to recruit and retain highly-qualified employees in critical positions.“ CGCS
This is the culture that Jason Kamras inherited. He tried to supplant it with a lead-with-love model, but it left lazy or authoritarian-leaning employees completely unchecked. The result is an RPS that is equal parts Kumbaya, and McCarthy Trial.
”It's always easy to put the blame on someone else, right? …my personal opinion is that there are multiple people that have some culpability in this.
I don't think it's fair to just point to [the] school board.
I don't think it's fair to just point to superintendent.” Jonathan Young
Departments suffer from inertia by “doing the same thing, in the same way, with the same results” without any sense of resolve to change
Jason Kamras has been humbled by this experience. He has been “forthcoming and open and transparent” with investigators, and needs a sensible, considerate, whatever-word-is-the-opposite-of-vindictive School Board to put the wind in his sails so he can make a lot of reforms in this division.
He’s going to have to (constructively) crack down on his teams. Honestly, Dr. Harris-Muhammed’s idea of an “ombudsman” to handle internal conflict is a pretty darn good idea. Way more constructive than employees using a facebook group to air their dirty laundry.
Speaking of: Chairwoman Rizzi is going to need to get her colleagues in line - namely, the ones that aggrieved school staff use as their own weapons of retaliation. They’ve been enabling the communication-collapse we see internally just so that they can score political points from the dais.
Lastly: Division staff need to be communicative and open minded. They cannot expect conflict resolution from their students, and practice none of it themselves.
The path we’re on isn’t working, and we’ve collectively paid a very high price - none more so than the family of Shawn Jackson. We need a new path now - and we’re going to need to figure out how to get along if we’re going to build it.
“I’m at a point where as, I’m not pointing any fingers. Things happen. How do we move forward…? I think collectively and with the right supports, we can move forward…
Believe it or not, the worst plan works well if you have complete buy-in. If people trust you and believe in what you’re trying to do for them, the worst plan will work.
So it’s time to move forward… because this plan right now is not working.” Cheryl Burke
All quotes above, unless otherwise stated, came from the 2018 Council of Great City Schools Audit, the first 1,100 pages of transcripts supporting the 3rd Party Altria Report , and the addendum of Kamras’ interview from the same investigation. I’m trying to strike a balance of linking that won’t get me slammed on social media. 🫠
That’s it on this topic for a while. It’s an important discussion to have, but so is “why can’t more of our kids read?!” I am always here yammering on about the board’s lack of focus on student outcomes, and it is time for me to practice what I preach. I’ll be back with a budget introduction… but, after I fold the mountain of laundry I’ve neglected for the last 10 days. Have a happy weekend!