River City Middle School opened in September 2021 well over capacity, with 1,626 students. (Photo by Scott Bass)
Perhaps it was a cry for help.
During yet another marathon meeting of the Richmond School Board on Monday night, Superintendent Jason Kamras sat quietly for roughly an hour as debate whipsawed over a rezoning proposal for River City Middle School, which opened in September 2021 with 1,626 students. It’s a beautiful new school in an aging retail corridor on the city’s South Side, off Hull Street Road near the Chesterfield County line. The problem? The school was built for 1,500 students and is already bursting at the seams.
With the overcrowding causing all kinds of consternation — teachers lack classroom space, there aren’t enough bathrooms, and the swollen student population is proving difficult to manage — time is running out. During Monday’s work session, Michelle Hudacsko, the school system’s chief of staff, explained that the rezoning proposal on the agenda was the board’s last opportunity to rezone River City prior to the 2022-23 school year. Otherwise, the school would again open in the fall with more than 1,600 students.
But after nearly five months of community meetings and handwringing over what to do — the rezoning committee for River City has recommended shifting 450 students to Boushall, Binford and Lucille Brown middle schools — the proposal died in roll call. Citing concerns over cost, transportation and the impact on open enrollment, Chairwoman Shonda Harris-Muhammed, Vice Chairwoman Kenya Gibson, along with members Mariah White, Stephanie Rizzi and Jonathan Young, voted it down.
A clearly frustrated Kamras had heard enough.
“It is unconscionable for us to open up River City next year with 1,600 students. It will be dangerous, and it will be a dereliction of our collective duty to our children,” Kamras said, choking back tears. After the vote, Rizzi offered what seemed like an olive branch, requesting more information on the rezoning’s budgetary impact and a “comprehensive transportation plan” for the board’s next meeting on May 2. Perhaps with more information, the nine-member board would be willing to reconsider?
“We will work around the clock to provide as much information as Ms. Rizzi requested by May 2 if that will satisfy the need for an execution plan such that we can move forward with the proposal that was presented tonight,” Kamras said. “But if that’s not going to change anything, there’s no sense in doing all of that work. And we need to live with what I think is the very bad decision that was just made.”
Emotional outbursts are becoming fairly routine at Richmond School Board meetings. After the vote, there was an angry exchange between Rizzi and fellow board member Dawn Page, who, along with colleagues Liz Doerr, Nicole Jones and Cheryl Burke, left before the meeting adjourned. Ironically, the episode came on the same night that City Council finally approved funding ($7.3 million for early construction and design work) for a new 1,800-seat George Wythe High School after months of disagreement and infighting between the School Board and Council, and the mayor, over the size of the new school. Adding to the irony, the board’s majority wanted a smaller school, for 1,600 students, while City Hall pressed for a capacity of 2,000 to accommodate projected growth at Wythe.
The brouhaha over River City also overshadowed another victory, the efficient and expedient sprucing up of Clark Springs Elementary for incoming Fox Elementary students, who were displaced after a fire at the Fan District school in February. RPS administrative staff managed to complete more than $700,000 in repairs and improvements (new doors, ceiling repairs, HVAC work, painting, etc.) at the previously shuttered Clark Springs in less than four weeks. It’s now ready for occupancy, and on Monday the School Board approved moving Fox students on May 9 from their temporary home at First Baptist Church on Monument Avenue to Clark Springs, located in the Randolph community near Virginia Commonwealth University.
For a school system in the early stages of taking over new-school construction, RPS’s newly hired three-person construction team got the building ready in short order. It may not be the same as procuring a new high school, but it’s encouraging nonetheless.
The board’s decision to deny the rezoning proposal for River City didn’t appear grounded in “principled opposition,” says Richard Meagher, a political science professor at Randolph-Macon College. “You have this nominally progressive board fighting for progressive principles … and yet this decision, on its face, seems to be shortchanging kids of color.”
During Monday’s meeting, School Board member Jonathan Young made clear where he stood on the rezoning. Redistricting 450 students from River City would require eliminating 270 open enrollment seats at two schools, Lucille Brown and Binford, according to an earlier presentation by school officials, which Young said would “decimate open enrollment in the middle schools.” (The earlier proposal, presented to the School Board on April 11, represented enrollment figures over a three-year period. The proposal on Monday recommended a one-year rezoning process, but it was unclear as of press time if the shortened time frame would change the number of available open enrollment seats at Binford and Lucille Brown.)
During open enrollment, families are allowed to apply to send their children to schools outside their residential zones; selections are made via random lottery. The proposal, which would leave all of the affected schools at roughly 75% capacity, simply “made no sense,” Young said.
Four members of the School Board, meanwhile, argued that prioritizing open enrollment, which benefits mostly white, higher-income families, over a school overcrowded with minority students on the city’s South Side smacked of racial inequity.
In a statement released after the meeting, the board’s established minority bloc — Page, Jones, Doerr and Burke — scolded the board’s majority for voting down the rezoning proposal: “We must fight the ugly stain of racism and inequality that interferes with the decision-making of this board. Often leaders have to grapple with difficult choices in order to balance the world as it is and the world as we wish it could be.
“We may all wish there were unlimited open enrollment slots to provide access to popular programs like the one at Binford, but is that wish more important than the day-to-day educational experience of the entire River City student body?”
Gibson, the board’s vice chair, argued that the rezoning of students at River City would likely have a broader impact that wasn’t being discussed.
“I think having a conversation about open enrollment and equity, and all of that — let’s do that. I wish we had done that,” she said. “As a board, we voted on a strategic plan that included passion for learning, and that was all about bringing specialty programs through the district. … This is what the community was demanding. So we have to own that this choice is undoing that, some of the success we’ve seen, and we have to be thoughtful about it. Because here’s the truth: We cannot afford to lose more students in this district.”
The implication is that reducing open enrollment seats at the middle school level would lead some parents to leave the school system entirely.
The door, however, hasn’t closed completely. The board is expected to take up the issue again on May 2, which threatens to push back the lottery process for open enrollment seats for the 2022-23 school year even further. Due to the unresolved rezoning issue, the earliest open enrollment can conclude is May 9; typically, the lottery opens in March.
Some worry that the growing rift among School Board members has already inflicted too much damage. “Democracy is messy, I get that. But if it’s so messy that you can’t make basic decisions … that’s dysfunction,” Meagher says. “It just seems to reflect an unwillingness to engage with just the realities of running a school system.”
Taikein Cooper, executive director of Virginia Excels, a Richmond nonprofit that advocates for racial equity in education, is holding out hope that the School Board can come together, but he’s growing increasingly worried about the future.
“The intra-politics of the board are extremely strained. I don’t think it’s productive,” he says. “I’m really concerned about where do we go from here? … You have to find a way to work together. At the end of the day, the children are the ones who are suffering.”
