(From left) Richmond School Board Chair Stephanie Rizzi, Superintendent Jason Kamras, Chief Operating Officer Dana Fox and 4th District Representative Jonathan Young (Photo by Chip Jackson courtesy Richmond Public Schools)
While Richmond Public Schools has broken ground on a $150 million high school, officials say this project only scratches the surface. About 40% of Richmond’s 52 schools and office buildings have had no major renovations in at least 50 years, and the wish list is bigger than the budget.
Dana Fox, chief operating officer for RPS, has a background in construction management. She says the challenge is managing the urgency of replacing old buildings with the current funding deficit. Demolishing George Wythe High School to pave way for the 280,000-square-foot Richmond High School for the Arts was just one of many priorities.
“We have a lot of old buildings and aging facilities that need major work,” Fox says. “Funding is a $25 billion problem across the state for school infrastructure.”
Stephanie Rizzi, chair of the RPS School Board, says Virginia has been underfunding public schools for too long. Virginia is 10th in the country for median household income but ranks 36th for public education spending per student, according to Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.
The city’s school building issues came to a head in February 2022 when the 110-year-old William Fox Elementary School caught fire late at night. To make matters worse, a faulty alarm system did not alert firefighters.
After the Fox Elementary fire, the school district upgraded the programming of its fire panels to dial numbers correctly. “The safety of our students and teachers is paramount,” Fox says.
Despite the problems, she says, RPS is better off from a capital standpoint now than in 2019, because of COVID-19-related funds received from grants as well as the American Rescue Plan and the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief III Fund.
RPS was awarded more than $122 million in federal funds and also $27.7 million from the Virginia Department of Education’s school construction assistance program. “We’ve been able to fund a lot of larger projects, like the HVAC upgrades, we otherwise would not be able to do,” Fox says.
In the last three years, RPS has spent around $41 million upgrading and maintaining HVAC systems at nearly every school.
The city has allotted $200 million in new school construction that became available to RPS in July 2023. The city also allocated $15 million for the rebuild of Fox Elementary School, which is scheduled to reopen in 2025.
In addition to opening Richmond High School for the Arts in 2026, RPS plans to replace Woodville Elementary School in the East End with a new school, as well as transform an older building into a career and technical education high school. Fox says they’ve also been retrofitting old buildings with 21st-century capabilities such as interactive whiteboards and science labs. The city of Richmond built the last wave of new schools in 2020, including Henry Marsh and Cardinal elementary schools and River City Middle School.
