“Where are your clothes at?”
Henderson Middle School Principal Allen Vernon is greeting students in the bus loop on May 29, the last day of school, when an eighth grader steps off wearing sandals and shorts. Vernon is wearing his Sunday best, as are most of the students: dresses, white shirts and black pants, some with ties, sport coats and shimmering gold chains.
Except for one. “Black pants, white shirt. Son, that’s all in the email that went home to your parents,” Vernon barks at the young man. “You can’t walk onstage with no shorts on today. You better get on the phone and call your people.”
In a couple of hours, the student will be among 130 or so eighth graders who will line up and walk over to John Marshall High School next door for a “moving on” ceremony. A former lineman and football coach, Vernon has a gruff, no-nonsense disposition, but he’s also something of a teddy bear. As the student pleads ignorance, Vernon softens his tone and explains the young man can keep the shirt but should contact a family member to bring a pair of pants to the school.
Appearances matter, after all.
Henderson Middle’s principal, Allen Vernon, greets students in the bus loop on the last day of school.
“The recent incidents that you’ve seen the last two days at graduation, it’s giving the city a bad look, you know,” Vernon says of two fights that broke out during and after ceremonies at the Siegel Center on Broad Street, one on May 27 involving students at John Marshall and the other involving Richmond High School for the Arts, formerly George Wythe, the next day. “I’m hoping everything goes well, because I think I’m the last middle school doing this today.”
For Vernon, keeping Henderson on the straight and narrow isn’t just about protecting students. It’s about bridging the gap in a changing community.
Located along the city’s northern border with Henrico County and wedged between the Bellevue, Ginter Park and Washington Park neighborhoods, Henderson was once the centerpiece of a proud middle-class Black community. But in the last two decades, this part of North Side has undergone a massive demographic shift. An influx of wealthier, mostly white families is reordering the neighborhood dynamic. There’s an economic and racial diversity that didn’t exist before, and it’s beginning to show up at Henderson Middle.
And Vernon couldn’t be happier.
Since the 2023-24 school year, Henderson has seen its white student population more than double, increasing from 29 students to 70 students this year. During the same three-year period, the number of economically disadvantaged students declined from 74% to 66%. Six years ago, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Black students made up 94% and white students 2.1% of the school’s population; in 2025-26, Black students accounted for 77% and white students 15.6%.
Since taking over as principal two years ago, Vernon has met with roughly 30 white families who have expressed interest in the majority-Black school. Some had questions about safety, academics and school culture. Henderson, he told them, has everything the other middle schools have and then some: the extracurriculars, the STEM program, the swim and soccer teams.
“I’d like to have every kid that’s zoned for Henderson come to Henderson,” he says, adding that he wants to grow by another 100 students over the next three to four years. “I want all of my kids to belong to me. I don’t want to lose kids to another middle school because of perception or because they have a program we don’t have. So, we beefed up our offerings. Once you have everything that all of the middle schools have, then why not?”
It’s a question that has dogged Richmond Public Schools for decades. Since desegregation in the 1960s and white flight in the 1970s, city schools have harbored the most poverty and the least diversity in the region. More often than not, affluent parents opted not to send their children to RPS. Henderson, long one of Richmond’s “double-segregated” schools — meaning at least 75% of the students are economically disadvantaged and 75% are part of a single ethnic minority — was no exception.
Until recently. After meeting with Vernon, those 30 families all chose Henderson.
Henderson parents Molly Brannan and Theresa Kennedy say sending their children to racially, economically diverse schools is about building community.
‘The Reality of Richmond’
When Melissa Yeager and her husband moved from a neighborhood near Texas Beach to Chamberlayne and Westbrook avenues in 2011, literally across the street from Henderson, she was warned about the schools.
“I was part of a group of friends, all of whom were having their first kids and were very aware of school districts — you know, where they lived, what schools they were zoned for,” recalls Yeager, who had just had her first child. “More than one person said to me, ‘You’ll be fine for the elementary school,’ — we’re zoned for Holton — ‘but what are you going to do for middle school?’ And, honestly, I didn’t even really think about it at the time. I thought, ‘That’s 10 years away.’”
Yeager now has four children — ages 9, 12, 14 and 16 — one of whom currently attends Henderson and two who recently moved on to high school. Her 9-year-old is a rising fourth grader at Linwood Holton Elementary, a few streets over at Laburnum Avenue and Hermitage Road.
Yeager recounts the story while sitting on the front porch of another Henderson parent, Theresa Kennedy, along with two others, Molly Brannan and Rachael Deane, in mid-June. Ali Faruk, their Richmond City School Board member from the 3rd District, also stops by. It’s a shady, 3,200-square-foot foursquare in Ginter Park that was built in 1918, with a wraparound porch and an expansive front yard, typical of the streetcar suburbs of the time.
“I think people label ‘good schools’ and ‘bad schools,’” Yeager says. “And while people might, on the surface, place those labels on schools that are successful in getting kids into selective high schools or get good results on state testing and things like that, underneath it, the ‘good’ schools have a bunch of white kids, and the ‘bad’ schools do not.”
During the rezoning debate over how best to integrate city schools in 2019, Yeager says, she and other parents started to reframe their school choices through a social justice lens.
While the debate went nowhere — the chief proposal, paring racially different schools as part of a single zone, sparked considerable pushback — Yeager realized something: “I don’t want to speak on everybody’s behalf, but for us, this is a school that we’re paying for with our taxes, right? How can we expect our schools to be good schools — whatever definition of ‘good’ you want to use — how can our students thrive and be successful and be part of a flourishing civic life in our city, if our kids aren’t in them?”
Such civic engagement is critical to building a thriving, equitable city, the parents say. And it is exactly what academics argue is needed to create more diversity in urban school districts like Richmond. Research has consistently found that children exposed to those of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds grow into more empathetic adults.
“That kind of cross-racial contact and friendship reduces prejudice,” says Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University who has spent most of her career studying school segregation. “There’s longitudinal research on white students who went through court-ordered school desegregation. They see racial inequality, they understand it, and they’re much more willing to support policies that address it later in life as adults. Those are all crucial outcomes for a multiracial democracy that we’re trying to hold onto.”
For some parents, that’s precisely the point.
Rachael Deane, an attorney and the chief executive officer of Voices for Virginia’s Children, a nonprofit that advocates for disadvantaged youth, says sending her 12-year-old to Henderson — he’s a rising seventh grader — was as much about social equity as it was academics. Her 7-year-old, a rising third grader at Linwood Holton Elementary, is also expected to attend Henderson.
“Our biggest motivation was that our child needs to understand or get some sort of perspective on the reality of Richmond, where he grows up, and the reality beyond his two working parents, who are both lawyers and well connected,” Deane says. “It’s as important to his development as the classes he takes and the grades he makes.”
The other porch moms agree. They want their children to be exposed to other children who don’t have the same lived experiences.
“I think we all would recognize how much unearned privilege we have by nature of being white, being raised middle class, all the things — like being college educated,” says Theresa Kennedy, who has a 12-year-old entering seventh grade at Henderson. “We are part of a community. What we have access to, we need to share. … We don’t want to be part of upholding structures that set about the inequalities that we are facing today.”
Rasheeda Creighton with her daughter, a rising seventh grader at Henderson Middle
‘A Feeling of Takeover’
All that newfound diversity in the area, however, wouldn’t have happened without substantial displacement. As wealthier families began moving into North Side in the early 2000s, housing prices began to skyrocket — pushing out many lower-income and even middle-class Black families. From 2010 to 2019, the number of Black residents living in several neighborhoods zoned for Henderson declined between 20% and 30%, according to a 2024 study by Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia.
The pattern is familiar in a city that’s been rapidly gentrifying since the late 1990s. In 2000, Black residents made up 57% of Richmond’s overall population; today, it’s roughly 41%. During the same period, the city’s white population has increased roughly 30%, growing from 76,000 in 2000 to more than 100,000 today. For the first time since 1970, in fact, Richmond now has more white residents than Black residents (42% to 39%), according to the 2020 U.S. census.
Despite the shift, city schools have remained overwhelmingly low income and majority Black, even after displacement picked up in the mid-2000s. As families left, the school system shrank. While other factors certainly contributed to the drop — a declining birth rate, the city’s increase in empty nesters and younger couples without children, for example — many chose to send their kids elsewhere. Even with a rapid uptick in Latino students, Richmond Public Schools saw a 22% decline in enrollment from 2000 to 2025, dropping from roughly 27,500 to 21,500.
That’s beginning to change. Across the city, white families are increasingly sending their children to public schools. Since the 2021-22 school year, the white student population at RPS has increased 17%. While the overall numbers remain small — in 2025-26, there were 2,661 white students in total — the trend is unmistakable.
Born and raised in North Side and a graduate of Henderson, Rasheeda Creighton sees the changes as mostly positive but worries that the influx of new, mostly white families may alter the cultural ethos of RPS. For Black children, it’s especially important to be exposed to Black teachers, she says.
Her 12-year-old daughter, a rising seventh grader at Henderson, attended Southampton Elementary as a kindergartner, where she had a Black teacher, but Creighton opted to send her to private school for two years after the pandemic hit. She and her daughter lived on the city’s South Side at the time.
“I personally made a promise to myself that I would never let her be the only Black child in her class or in her grade,” says Creighton, who was part of the first graduating class at Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School in 1995. “Psychological safety is important, and we understand it as adults. But the downstream impact when that is not the case, when you’re a child, can be detrimental for a long time.”
After Creighton moved into a multigenerational house with other family members in the Forest Hill area earlier this year, her daughter is no longer zoned for Henderson. Creighton decided not to move her to another school until she finishes the eighth grade. “Mr. Vernon and his entire AP team are amazing. The teachers are phenomenal. She is thriving,” she says of her daughter. “Henderson feels like it did for me.”
Creighton grew up in Battery Park — her father was a CPA and ran his own accounting firm, while her mother worked as a business consultant — and attended Henderson in the 1980s, when the school had a strong academic and athletic culture. It was and is a feeder school to John Marshall next door, long a high school basketball powerhouse.
She recalls attending an informal community meeting with other, mostly white parents considering Henderson two years ago, when someone questioned why the school needed a cheerleading program.
“I was offended. I was so mad,” Creighton says, explaining that cheerleading was an important part of the school’s sports culture. “I’m not mad that we have soccer; I’m not mad that we’ve added those things. I think all of that is fine. Kids being involved in sports is hugely valuable across the board, but it’s like they come and they want what they want, and they dismiss the culture and the heritage.”
This is the ultimate challenge, Siegel-Hawley says. The city’s economic revival, fueled by a growing tax base thanks to widespread community reinvestment, also exposed longstanding racial and economic inequalities.
“Often, one of the benefits of white families reinvesting in their local public schools is that the per-pupil money that hadn’t been with [RPS], if they exited for private schools, is coming back in, so there’s more money in the pot for everybody,” she says of the state’s public school funding formula, which is based on the district’s student population.
“But there are pitfalls that come with that, too. As white and/or affluent families come into the schools and bring in more resources … they also tend to think that earns them power and say-so over the resources in ways that then don’t benefit the whole school,” she says. “It creates sort of a feeling of takeover and us-against-them.”
As those resources get reallocated, she says, it can also lead to “tracking,” or clustering, where nonminority, affluent students wind up in separate academic cohorts.
“As the school building becomes more racially diverse, which has learning benefits that extend to everybody, you might see more white and well-resourced families advocating for different tracks for coursework, for more advanced coursework,” Siegel-Hawley says. “If you let the tracking take hold in a really rigid way, you end up reinforcing racial and social hierarchies in the kids’ minds. … Certainly, reinforcing prejudice is not what anybody wants to do in terms of the social outcomes.”
RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras says he’s well aware of the challenges and is working to ensure the district is creating schools that are “attractive to every family: families that have been here for generations, new families, families in transition, families from other countries — everyone.”
He points to the increase in AP courses now available at all five of the city’s comprehensive high schools, for instance, and the availability of algebra at all middle schools, which wasn’t the case when he took over as superintendent in 2018.
“When I became superintendent, you could not take algebra at Henderson Middle School; you could not take algebra at MLK,” says Kamras, whose two sons both attended Henderson. “The only places you could take algebra were at Albert Hill or what was then Binford [now Dogwood Middle], and that was one of the clearest examples of institutional inequity that one could find.”
By ensuring all students have access to rigorous coursework, Kamras says, “you prevent the kind of balkanization by race or class — you raise the bar for everyone.”
Henderson Middle students enjoy a little free time on May 28, the day before school lets out for the summer.
Practicing Empathy
So far, it appears to be working. Kennedy, Deane, Yeager and Brannan all say they won’t push for any program that isn’t available to all students, nor do they have any interest in changing or “taking over” the school. Important as well, they say, is working to involve more minority parents in the school’s recently revived Parent-Teacher Association, which has seen its membership increase dramatically in the last two years, growing from roughly 10 members to nearly 100.
“We haven’t changed anything, but we have brought resources,” says Brannan, who has two children at Henderson, an 11-year-old in sixth grade and a 13-year-old eighth grader, and recently served as treasurer of the PTA. “If you don’t like something at the school, then get involved and try to fix it. … See how you can help and support it.”
Vernon says the new parents have so far taken more of a “What can we do to help?” posture. “The parents that I have spoken to that want to spend time and resources [at Henderson], they are very conscious of things being for all students,” he says. “Even on the PTA, they really want to make sure the African American parents are involved.”
Creighton, for her part, says the school’s new diversity is good for all children, but she often finds herself frustrated by the little things — PTA meetings held during after-school pickup, for example, and assumptions about how to rally support and fundraising for the school. Henderson, she says, has a large contingent of proud Black alumni who “love that school to its core.” They would gladly contribute if asked, she says.
“I think they’re cognizant of not taking over and wanting to be inclusive, but what they are missing is that Henderson has a long, established culture that started when Henderson started in the 1970s,” she says of the new parents. “But they often don’t see that.”
Still, how the parents manage the cultural divide isn’t as important as what the students experience. Amanda Lopez, a seventh grade English teacher, started working at Henderson fresh out of graduate school three years ago. Unlike when she first stared, she now has classes where the racial makeup is nearly split between Black and white students.
Meanwhile, she says the school administration has stabilized since Vernon took over. There’s been less turnover, a recurring problem at many city schools, and the faculty is working to guard against things like tracking. “I think Henderson is very careful with that,” she says. “I mean, we have a Black administration, so they are very aware of inequities.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Although diversity has increased, the white and Black students still tend to socialize in separate groups. Earlier this year, when Lopez and another teacher launched the school’s first after-school drama club, the idea was to create a cross-racial activity where students could experiment with role-playing and artistic expression.
The drama club finished the year with a dozen students, most of them white. Lopez says the goal is to increase its diversity in the upcoming school year. The club, she says, has the potential to be an important outlet, a way for some children to work through trauma and “practice empathy in a completely different way.”
For kids from different socioeconomic realities, trauma means different things. This spring, when Sadie Terry, a 14-year-old eighth grader at Henderson, was shot and killed along with her brother, Zion, an 18-year-old senior at John Marshall, the students expressed varying “degrees of shock,” Lopez recalls. The siblings were killed during a domestic dispute April 21, a day when the school was closed for a special election.
Some of Lopez’ white students were “upset” that they had to come to school the next day. “Some of the white kids seemed more shocked, seemed more like, ‘Why are we at school, how could we possibly go on another day?’” she says. “They were angry. I remember this one boy in particular who asked, ‘Why are we even here?’”
The school needed to remain open as a safe space for students, Lopez explained. For some, feeling unsafe at home was likely a foreign concept.
“She was killed or shot on a day that we didn’t have school,” Lopez says of Sadie. “And so, as an educator and recognizing how important it is to create a safe space ... that was so painful. If she had been at school, would this have even happened?”
The path to understanding is hardly smooth or painless, but it’s required work to achieve a truly multiracial society, Siegel-Hawley says.
“To learn together, be together and to extend the sense of belonging to all of the kids in the school community, it’s going to be a continuous process,” she says, “but it’s a deeply important one.”
