Tichi Pinkney-Eppes, an outspoken former president of the Richmond City Council of PTAs who currently is on staff with Community in Schools serving as health-center director at George Wythe High School, says she hopes to replace outgoing 9th District School Board representative Evette Wilson.
Wilson previously announced that she would not seek re-election.
Pinkney-Eppes, notable for challenging the status quo during her tenure with the PTA council, says she plans to continue her call for reform even as she seeks to change the tone of the debate.
“We need to approach this with some civility,” says Pinkney-Eppes. “I think everybody recognizes that this has not been a perfect school system. I think I can get in there ... and change the language, change the dynamics and work to build the relationships with the City Council and the mayor. We all agree that the educational system should be the No. 1 priority in the city.”
But with civility needs to come a dose of reality, she says, lamenting that too often the school system proclaims achievements in the classroom by presenting complimentary data, while studiously overlooking statistics that show a different story. “I think it was Einstein that said, ‘If we continue doing what we’ve been doing, we’re going to continue getting what we’ve been getting.' The data reveals itself.”
So far, Pinkney-Eppes is the only candidate to have officially declared her School Board candidacy in the 9th District.
When calling for change, part of what Pinkney-Eppes says she means is in how we view the perceived problems faced by an urban inner-city school system.
“While we talk about the challenges our families have to face, and ultimately the students coming into the schools, what they’ve always said is there’s an expectation that the schools need to do everything. I don’t think the schools have embraced the fact that it’s not that they have to do everything, they do have to provide a system that allows parents and teachers to address those challenges.”
She points to the recent war of words between the school system and City Council over a $24 million budget imbalance that the School Board failed to close before submitting its budget request to the city. In that battle for public opinion, the School Board has claimed it may be forced to cut teacher jobs and resort to classroom austerity measures if Council refuses to fill the gap.
“What I think is important for parents to know is that the mayor and Council, while they may appropriate the funds, our School Board members — with the superintendent — make those decisions.”
Instead, Pinkney-Eppes says, the district should be owning up to its failure to plan by getting better at planning. That means innovative thinking.
“Too often our teachers are working in fear of having their positions cut,” she says, instead suggesting that the district recognize excess capacity in many of its school buildings — the district’s student population has dropped precipitously over the past decade — and consider consolidating buildings. In other words, cut wasteful space, not kids and teachers. “Why not put two teachers in each class and increase class sizes?”
The idea isn’t far-fetched. Innovative and successful schools in other cities — typically charter schools — have gotten positive results from team teaching to larger classrooms, especially in the elementary grade levels.
And she points to recent controversy surrounding the district’s International Baccalaureate program, as well as its rehiring retirees and paying them both a pension and a per-day rate that sometimes has meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional pay.
“How do you explain to a child you have a superintendent who makes $170,000 a year, and they don’t see the promise to achieve the same thing coming through the education system she’s in charge of?” asks Pinkney-Eppes. “It’s not easy for me to explain it to a student — or a teacher.”
She looks to other area IB programs, like Hanover and private schools with IB programs, as a model for improving rigor in classroom offerings. In those schools, while IB diploma earners are enrolled in the IB program, any student is allowed to take individual IB courses. “Those advanced-level courses should be open to all children.”
Meanwhile, she says, “this school system divides itself.” She points to Lucille Brown Middle School, where the IB program students attend a school within the school, sequestered down a separate hallway. That school, she suggests, offers a metaphor for a system where not all schools are equal in terms of quality of education. “Why is it people want to go to Fox and Munford [elementaries] instead of Blackwell and GH Reid? At the end of the day, it has to be about us building civil relationships.”
In addition to her current post with Communities in Schools and her previous PTA experience, Pinkney-Eppes also serves on Mayor Dwight C. Jones’ Sustainability Committee and co-chairs his Mayor’s Communication, Participation and Action Team. She is a member of the council of Initiatives of Change’s Hope in the Cities and was a former assistant district director with the Virginia PTA.
But it’s her seat on the advisory board to the Patrick Henry School for Science and Arts, the city’s first charter school, that gives Pinkney-Eppes hope that change can come to Richmond’s schools. Initially, the district noisily opposed the school, but in recent months the school system seems closer to embracing Patrick Henry, she says, citing Superintendent Yvonne Brandon’s recent announcement that she would seek to convert Richmond Community High into the district’s second charter. “Patrick Henry is something that I believe this system is ultimately proud of.”
The group, an alliance of area pediatricians and children’s health professionals that organized almost exactly a year ago around a proposal to create an independent, comprehensive children’s hospital in the Richmond area, held a sort of coming-out soiree on Monday night in the dining hall of the all-girls St. Catherine's School, announcing that it would move ahead with its vision for the hospital despite an April 3 announcement by VCU Health System that it would not participate. Members of the PACKids board also announced a plan to launch a full-press marketing strategy to win public support.
“Politics can eat you alive,” said Jennifer Scott, president of Touch Points Public Relations, who has been involved in the PACKids effort from its inception. She told the group of assembled medical professionals — about 100 of them mingled and munched on jumbo shrimp cocktail before a PowerPoint presentation over dinner — that PACKids remained intentionally low-key during its first year in order to do all the due diligence necessary to ensure a children’s hospital was a viable proposal.
The time to stay quiet is over, Scott said.
“We’re going to start using the media. We’re going to start using social media. We’re going to start talking at those speaking engagements,” she said. “You’ve seen what social media has done around the world — it’s taken down dictatorships. It’s happened all over the world, and it needs to happen here. For the children.”
The Monday meeting was the first for PACKids since the group’s board had scuttled a planned summit on the heels of VCU’s announcement, and it was clear that the meeting was called with the assumption that PACKids needed to re-convince at least some of its members of the viability of the plan. The group's board solicited its membership to officially join PACKids and pledge $101 as an initiation fee to support the effort.
The event also was an opportunity to present the first phase of a much-anticipated feasibility study on the proposal. It was this study that Dr. Sheldon Retchin, CEO of the VCU Health System, cited in the decision to pull out as a participant. (To read an earlier post about VCU's decision, click here.)
The feasibility study, presented by Farzan Bhaucha, an analyst with the international consulting firm of Kurt Salmon Associates, relied on the proposed hospital being a cooperative effort by VCU, the Bon Secours Richmond Health System and HCA Virginia Health System.
The study’s conclusions relied on all three of the area health systems closing their inpatient bed capacity, allowing the new children’s hospital to open with 200 beds and a sizable medical office office building.
“That is the going assumption around all of this,” Bhaucha said, indicating that the study also assumed Medicaid reimbursement rates would remain flat.
The study looked at a fairly wide target market, stretching to Fredericksburg and the North Carolina border but drawing primarily from the immediate vicinity. Assuming 200,000 to 300,000 kids in Richmond, Bhaucha said the study estimated 50 to 100 new admissions yearly, with occupancy rates held at about 80 percent.
The cost to build and open the doors would stretch toward $500 million, with about $150 million assumed to come from philanthropy. A private donor, interviewed by Richmond magazine last year, has promised at least that amount.
“The cost works out to about $2 million a bed,” Bhaucha said. “We think that’s a little high … but we’d rather be conservative in that direction.”
In fact, he said, the study tried to be conservative in every direction, which had the unintended consequence of allowing much of the data to remain relevant even after VCU’s withdrawal.
“We have a set of financials that we think are relatively conservative, relatively realistic … based on our experience in other cities,” he said.
He cited the study’s review of 50 other free-standing children’s hospitals around the country in 2010. Of those, 45 were profitable, and the other five were in places like New Orleans, where uncontrollable and drastic outside factors came into play.
Bhaucha fielded a number of questions after his presentation, many touching at least indirectly on the issue of VCU’s withdrawal, and he acknowledged that while the study didn’t consider a plan without the participation of all three local health systems, “it was something we actually talked about a lot.”
In the end, those answers were enough to win continued support from many of the medical professionals gathered at St. Catherine's.
“It excited me,” said Dr. Henry Rozycki, an associate professor of pediatrics in the neonatology division at VCU. “This is the third iteration of an idea for a children’s hospital since I’ve been in Richmond for 25 years.”
Rozycki said this effort has been “the best for engaging all stakeholders,” and for the fact that “they’ve taken what we’ve all wanted to do and run with it — and gotten so much further.”
Still, Rozycki wasn’t without criticism. As a physician practicing at VCU, he said he understands the university’s reticence — his was one of the most pointed questions to Bhaucha regarding viability without the teaching medical center's involvement. “I tried to put it politely, but there are larger needs in the inner city … I don’t know where it would hurt them to address that up front. They’re hard issues to overcome.”
But confronting such issues is worth the effort, says Bruce P. Kupper, president and CEO of MEDARVA Healthcare, one of the area’s largest free-standing surgical centers, who acknowledges that his company may well need to cede business in order to help ensure that a children’s hospital succeeds.
“There’s a possibility I would lose volume,” says Kupper, who estimates that children account for about 20 percent of the 17,000 patients MEDARVA sees annually. “I still think it’s the right thing to do.”
So right that on behalf of his company, Kupper pledged $25,000 toward the $100,000 PACKids needs to raise in order to match an equal amount pledged by an anonymous donor. At the end of Monday night, the group had already raised about $33,000 of that total.
In three years, the program awarded just five diplomas. Meanwhile, RPS incorrectly reported to the Virginia Department of Education that it had awarded 53 IB diplomas.
“That’s a mistake that was reported incorrectly,” confirms Stephen Bolton, a spokesman with Richmond Public Schools, assigning blame for the errors to the administration at Thomas Jefferson High.
The incorrect reports, while they may have originated at the school, were signed off on by Superintendent Yvonne Brandon during each year dating back to 2008. Those reports, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Richmond magazine from the Virginia DOE, bear Brandon’s signature.
Brandon indicated in a recent interview that she was not aware of the reporting discrepancy.
“I’d have to look at that — I’d have to check it,” she said, while acknowledging that the overall IB program “could be better.”
Last month, with a budget battle bubbling over between Richmond Public Schools and Mayor Dwight C. Jones, Brandon announced that International Baccalaureate was among the flagship programs that might face the ax if the city failed to come up with an additional $24 million in funding. The mayor’s task force wound up recommending cuts that spared the program.
RPS leaders frequently highlight the program as important to attracting middle-class families, as well as convincing families of higher-achieving students to remain in the district beyond elementary school.
The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme uses a demanding standardized curriculum. In order to offer IB diplomas, school districts must maintain a staff of teachers in IB classes who have completed a rigorous training and certification program. IB diplomas are recognized by universities around the world, and the International Baccalaureate itself is a UNESCO non-governmental organziation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
RPS’ error in reporting was first discovered by Richmond magazine after requesting diploma data for Hanover, Henrico, Chesterfield and Richmond directly from the International Baccalaureate in Switzerland.
In fact, Richmond's IB diploma program may face more systemic issues than simply a failure to report its total number of diploma recipients accurately.
In order to ensure consistency in the diplomas it certifies, IB requires schools to maintain at least one IB-trained teacher in each of six subject-area categories. Four of those categories, math, sciences, English and social studies, are necessary in order to receive a diploma.
But at Thomas Jefferson, the school has gone three years without a permanent science teacher. The school’s former IB-certified biology teacher, Rebecca Moss, whose name was still listed on the school website’s staff directory until yesterday, left at the end of the 2009-10 school year. A long-term substitute hired during the 2010-11 school year left at the end of that year, according to Bolton. Biology is the only IB science offered at the school, and it's a requirement for receiving an IB diploma.
The current teacher, according to Bolton, also is a long-term substitute. He and Rodney Fout, the coordinator for RPS’ gifted programs, confirm that the teacher does not currently hold a state license or a provisional license to teach. A search of the Department of Education's website confirms that the teacher currently does not hold a teaching license or a provisional license in Virginia.
“She does have a degree in biology and for another science,” says Fout, who oversees the city’s two IB programs. “She has been to several different trainings.”
The teacher, according to Bolton, attended IB training in January at a high school in Springfield. Officials with IB, which has its U.S. headquarters in Maryland, said that the training event the teacher attended was not offered directly by IB, and they could not confirm that it took place. The program was not listed in a database of IB's sanctioned training events, but, said one official, “that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
Teachers who attend IB training receive a stamped certificate from IB indicating they have completed the program, according to the official. IB programs are evaluated every five years to ensure compliance with IB's certifying requirements. Richmond’s program faces evaluation within the next couple of years.
Colleen Duffy, a spokeswoman with IB in Maryland, says that maintaining staff who have received IB training “does matter,” and that if a program lacked trained teachers in a required core area of study, “and they were to be evaluated, that would be a red flag.”
Bolton says the district has worked actively to fill this critical gap, indicating that a letter to that effect was recently sent by Brandon to State Superintendent for Public Instruction Patricia Wright “explaining how hard it has been to find an IB-certified teacher” who also is state certified to teach high-school biology.
“Rest assured, we are going to be looking desperately to find an IB-certified and -trained teacher,” Bolton says.
The high-water mark for Richmond’s over-reporting of diplomas occurred in 2007-08, the first year that Richmond reported IB graduates to the state. The district’s numbers that year indicated 25 IB diploma recipients, but numbers supplied by IB indicate just one graduate.
Over the succeeding three years, Richmond claimed eight, 11 and nine graduates, respectively. But statistics provided by IB indicate one graduate in 2009 and three graduates in 2010. IB awarded no diplomas at all to Richmond students in 2011.
In all, Richmond reported to the state 53 IB diploma earners between the 2007-08 and 2010-11 school years.
Currently, there are more than 300 Richmond students enrolled in IB from grades six to 12, according to the Richmond Public Schools website. Each grade level typically has 50 slots available for students.
Bolton says that the city plans to provide corrected data to the Virginia Department of Education. As of today, the information available on the state department’s website remains uncorrected.
Kristen Larson, the past vice president of the charter’s board and the former spokeswoman for the school, says she will seek the 4th District School Board seat, running, she says, as the only candidate with direct experience as a member of a city school board. (
“I’m running for School Board because I think we need more advocates for the students and advocates for the city on the board,” says Larson. “Right now, I don't see a strong vision of where the system is going, and that concerns me.”
Larson cites her experience on the Patrick Henry board, interacting on a professional level with both the Richmond School Board and RPS administration officials, as important experience.
“I've been on a school board for three years,” she says. “I've looked at Richmond Public Schools as a whole, I've reviewed budgets, talked with parents. There's not going to be much of a learning curve when I'm on the board.”
The upcoming race is cast against the backdrop of Mayor Jones' task force, which is poised to make sweeping and unprecedented recommendations on the schools budget and on the future operations and management of the school system. Larson says she understands how things got to this point, with the current School Board passing a budget that was $23.8 million more than the mayor was ready to accept.
But she says that it will be incumbent on the future board to reassert its authority over its own affairs.
"I think that what has happened over the last couple of years is that … these outside entities haven't had enough confidence in what the School Board is doing," Larson says. "I think if you get a School Board that's strong enough and that's following through with its duties as defined in the state code, there's not going to be any need for other bodies to take over some of these repsonsibilities."
Larson says that despite her background with the city's charter school, she is not running on a charter-school platform.
"I think you can bring in new programs and innovative thinking without it being a charter," she says, pointing to the city's International Baccalaureate program as well as innovative programs at Open and Community high schools as worthy of expansion.
"Do we need more charters?" she asks. "I think a lot can be done without the schools necessarily being charters."
In fact, Larson sees improving all Richmond schools as imperative to the city moving forward.
"Schools are everything," she says, making Richmond Public Schools' success an economic issue. "People choose where they're living based on the schools. You have a city like Richmond, which is a great city but kind of on the cusp of really flourishing. I think the schools — the future of the schools could make it or break it.
"Where we live, my house would probably cost 25 percent more if I lived two miles away in Chesterfield County," she says. "That's significant, and it needs to change."
Already the 4th District is shaping up to be one of the most crowded races this November. In addition to Larson, at least one other candidate already has declared his intention to run.
Richard J. “Rich” Savage, a political consultant and former TV reporter, has launched a website on which he declares that he is “running for the City of Richmond School Board representing the 4th district,” and inviting voters to “join us to celebrate Rich’s birthday and kick off his campaign at Can Can next week."
Other prospective candidates whom sources say have expressed interest in the seat include Mary Blanchard, wife of Peter Blake, who sits on Jones’ task force examining the School Board budget; Brian R. Cannon, a local lawyer and director of YRichmond; and Jeff Sadler, a VCU programs manager and former music promoter and general manager of Toad's Place.
The recommendations, presented today to the task force, use about $12 million in cuts suggested by Superintendent Yvonne Brandon. An additional $11.5 million in combined cuts comes in part from previously unidentified savings made by a consulting firm owned by former Richmond City Manager Robert Bobb.
Task force co-chairman Jim Dyke prefaced the presentation by saying that while the savings identified in this year's budget are important, their task remains far from finished.
"One of the charges that the mayor laid down for us is also laying the foundation to build a better school system," Dyke said, noting that the task force had yet to adopt any of the presented cuts in its final recommendations to Mayor Jones. The task force's recommendations will be made final next Monday morning at a meeting on the fifth floor of City Hall. That meeting also includes a planned public comment period.
Until then, Dyke said, "I want to stress the fact that they [the recommendations] are preliminary."
Bobb's team approached their job with "the objective of identifiying those opportunities that minimized the impact on the classroom," according to Kevin Clinton, a member of Bobb's team who presented the majority of the proposals.
The plan outlined by Bobb's group rejects some of Brandon's more controversial suggested cuts, like scaling back the district's participation in the region's two governor's schools and the MathScience Innovation Center, as well as the district's International Baccalaureate program.
Bobb called these programs, particularly IB, "expensive to operate," but added that "they're also very important marketing tools."
He suggested that long-term, the district may even need to "invest more into these types of programs across the district."
Also declined by Bobb's group is Brandon's plan to cut funding to after-school tutoring and athletic programs.
Accepted from those initial recommendations are proposals that significantly reduce administrative staff at the district's central office, while also cutting dozens of security and janitorial staff at the schools.
School-level administrators — from principals on down to librarians — will see their contracts trimmed from 12 months to 10 months, and a recommended three-day furlough for all staff also is among recommendations that the task force also approved.
Significant among proposed savings is a plan to allow outside companies to bid against the district's school-building facilities management and student bus-transportation services. The proposal, according to the preliminary report, could save between $5 million and $7 million yearly.
But, Bobb warned, "the process would need to start almost immediately to affect these types of savings. We believe the potential savings are real, they are there."
Such a process would take three to four months to complete.
He dismissed past objections — dating to before former Mayor L. Douglas Wilder's administration — that outsourcing student transportation would not result in savings. His staff cited data indicating that privately contracted school buses cost as much as $20,000 per bus less than those operated by school districts.
"It's not unusual for school districts to look at how they can engage in a managed-competition process for these service contracts," Bobb said, suggesting that few if any jobs would be lost, since school layoffs often are mitigated through hiring by the high bidder in the private sector.
Escaping this first round of cuts are a number of suggestions from the public and from other city government officials, including rolling the school system's audit department into the office of Richmond City Auditor Umesh Dalal.
Dalal has performed a series of scathing audits of schools over the past six years, often suggesting savings of millions of dollars or discovering wasted dollars or resources amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Both Bobb and Dyke showered praise on Brandon and her staff for cooperating as the task force probed the dimly lit recesses of its budget.
But Bobb's recommendations didn't overlook the broader topic of consolidating city and schools departments to realize savings and to create efficiencies. In particular, Bobb said, the citywide budget and planning processes stand to realize improvements through consolidation — or at least better cooperation.
"It would be in both the district and the city's interest to have a more collaborative budget process going forward into the future," he said. "The school district should be an integral part of the city's long-term financial planning."
Such collaboration would aid everything from finding grant and federal money to the city's comprehensive planning process.
"As the city develops its plans for investment in neighborhoods and communities, the school district should be an integral component of that planning process," Bobb said.
The recommended cuts also do away with trailer classrooms. The district has maintained dozens of trailers on a lease basis, some for more than 20 years. That contract costs the district $300,000 annually, despite complaints from city and schools officials, again dating back to before the Wilder administration, that many school buildings were under capacity for student population. The district's annual daily membership — its student population — has dropped over the past six or so years by thousands of students.
Bobb warned the task force that phasing out trailers would take time: "We believe this couldn't be fully implemented this year, but you could make progress on this."
Notably, Bobb's group indicates that it continues to review a number of possible cost-cutting measures that could amount to millions more in potential savings.
Top among them is a $4.6 million contract with Community Education Partners, the private firm that operates the Capital City Program alternative-education school. That program contributes significantly to the district's ability to maintain its state SOL achievement gains by removing hundreds of difficult — often low-performing — students from regular education classes and subjecting them to separate, lower standards to be considered passing the SOLs.
Clinton called CCP the district's "largest contract" but did not indicate that there was immediately any likelihood that the contract would eventually be recommended cut.
Some proposals in Bobb's presentation would create revenue for the district, including leasing out school property for the placement of cellular phone towers. Bobb, who estimated $320,000 in new revenues, called this "an opportunity that school districts across the country" are using to make money.
Bobb called the recommended cuts so far identified "student-centered," but warned that, like the bus and facilities outsourcing ideas, some of the proposals also "will require moderate or considerable effort to implement before the start of the next school year. "
Bobb discredited claims that "$30 or $40 million" in schools budget money remained unaccounted for each year, a charge leveled on occasion by some members of City Council.
"If it's there, we can't find it," Bobb said, suggesting that his group was open to outside help in locating such money.
While students received top consideration, Bobb says, his group's review of the district's $308 million operating budget also had a softer hand toward employees.
"The [superintendent's] recommendations that we looked at impacted about 390 employees," he said. "Our recommendations impact about 90.
"What we put out is real," Bobb said of his group's preliminary report, indicating that it's up to politicians to decide whether politics allow them to accept the sometimes difficult choices such a report often contains. But regardless of how the report is received, he said, "we're willing to stand behind it."
