The new Richmond High School for the Arts, which is under construction next to the old George Wythe High School
Allen and Rosa Rodríguez Finch, who live in the city’s Maymont neighborhood, have watched all three of their children navigate through Richmond Public Schools. Santiago — their middle child — graduated from Open High School in 2023 and is now in his junior year at Virginia Tech, where he’s pursuing a degree in engineering.
But Allen imagines how their son might have been helped if RPS had offered a specialty school geared toward math, science, technology and engineering. He points to programs such as Clover Hill High School’s math and science center, in the Chesterfield County Public Schools system. “I think he would have excelled in something like that,” Finch says.
The difference it would have made, he says, is that Santiago would have been better prepared before starting his college career. “Because he did not have that opportunity, his first semester was a bit of a struggle, honestly,” Finch says. “He went to Open High School, which is a good, strong magnet high school, but it's a little bit more of a broad education. ... It didn’t have that laser focus on STEM that might have benefited him moving into the engineering school.”
That will soon change. By fall 2027, RPS will begin welcoming students to its first of five new programs, which they call selective admission schools.
“The plan is that our high school redesign for learning — part of our strategic plan — will add specialized programs that align to industry careers in the region,” says Lucas Hostetter, director of enrollment, placement and planning for RPS. The Passion4Learning initiative in the strategic plan is designed to increase student engagement through theme-based learning experiences throughout middle and high schools, following the trend of career-path education that’s well-established in other school districts in the region and beyond.
Each of the new comprehensive high schools, Hostetter says, will have a dedicated theme, or focus, that points toward industry careers. These are: the arts; government, public service and law; business and languages (through a global lens); emerging technology; and health and human services.
The Richmond High School for the Arts will be the first to open. Its overarching theme, Hostetter says, will be “Express.”
Construction of the new $140 million school, on the site of the former George Wythe High School, is underway and expected to be complete this winter. “After that, we’re hoping to bring other schools online shortly thereafter,” Hostetter says, “though we’re still very much in the design phase of the timeline, so we haven’t exactly finalized when the other schools will come online.”
In mid-January, RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras gets a progress update on the new High School for the Arts from Alan Cramer, lead superintendent with S.B. Ballard Construction Co.
'On-Ramps and Off-Ramps'
Details of the remaining four schools, including specific timelines and locations, are in a formative phase. Hostetter and a team of planners are building an adaptable framework for the theme-based selective admission system, which will allow a variety of “on-ramps and off-ramps,” as he describes it, so that students have the flexibility to explore various fields of study along a more self-directed path.
The term “selective admission” refers to students’ ability to shop the RPS-themed options they’d like to pursue and to apply if they choose. “Those programs won’t be selective in the same way [as other alternative schools],” Hostetter explains. “It would be an application where a student would express interest, but it wouldn’t [require criteria such as] grades, essays, etc., that the current group of selective admissions have.”
Another evolving element of the district’s plan will be development of a “technology campus” at a South Richmond property on Maury Street, donated in 2017 to RPS by Altria. The city’s career and technical education program would relocate to the new campus, which would carry the theme of “Create,” and the facility would include a variety of programs and spaces, such as labs, enabling students across the district to interact, Hostetter says.
In a presentation to the Richmond School Board in May 2025, Hostetter said that feasibility studies were in process for the approximately 290,000-square-foot site, and that a request for proposals to design and build the project would follow.
As specialized schools go, RPS is the region’s latecomer to the concept, as both Henrico and Chesterfield counties have sustained specialty centers for decades. Henrico’s first focused program was its Center for the Arts, which opened in 1990. Chesterfield opened its first specialty center, now known as the Mathematics and Science High School at Clover Hill, in 1994.
Specialty centers in the counties are magnet programs located within high schools, alongside students in the general education population. “One of the things that I think differentiates how [RPS is] approaching school themes is, it is a whole-school theme,” says Alyssa Schwenk, communications director at RPS.
Beyond its international baccalaureate program within Thomas Jefferson High School, RPS operates three alternative high schools: Franklin Military Academy, Open High School and Richmond Community High School. Two regional schools also operate in the city and are open to RPS students by application: Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies and Code RVA Regional High School.
Equity Guardrails
As RPS enters new territory, Richmond School Board members and others have questioned how RPS will guarantee equity throughout the system.
In 2021, the School Board created the 18-member Enrollment Equity Commission to study imbalances in the RPS open-enrollment, governor’s schools and specialty school selection processes. From its research, the commission identified overrepresentation of white applicants vs. underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic applicants, proportional to their populations, across the board.
A co-chair of the commission, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, recalls performing research to help the panel form its recommendations to RPS. Siegel-Hawley interviewed RPS families and found gaps in how they were informed of open-enrollment options and details of the process. “Often the information has been siloed in social networks that have the most power and resources,” she says.
Meanwhile, because students’ open enrollment to nonzoned schools didn’t include transportation, opportunities remained limited. “You can’t make the choice if you can’t get to it,” Siegel-Hawley says. “We don't get integration without some intention behind it. Otherwise, we usually replicate segregation.”
During a visit to the new High School for the Arts in mid-January (under construction next to the former George Wythe High School), RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras said transportation and seats for underprivileged students will be guaranteed.
“I think it just takes intentionality to make sure that the experience is as integrated as it possibly can be,” Kamras said, adding that 50% of the seats in specialized programs will be reserved for students from low-income families. “We’re going to start small with the specialized program, like the intensive program, to make sure that we can fund it, that we have transportation for it, get proof of concept now and then grow it from there.”
With its massive footprint and student population compared to Richmond’s, Chesterfield County faces a bigger logistical challenge managing equity across the district, says Jennifer C. Coleman, CCPS coordinator of student engagement. Chesterfield, at 437 square miles, has approximately 64,000 students as of fall 2025; Richmond, at 62 square miles, has a little more than 21,500 students.
Coleman says the county made a shift in 2020 to follow a more balanced enrollment process for specialty centers. That year, she moved from her position as principal at James River High School to her current role as CCPS simplified its application system to a more efficient online portal. “So, we have it electronic now,” she says “but when they did that, they also moved to an allocation model per school. Each middle school has an allocation [of seats] at every [high school] specialty center.”
The number of allocations is based on a ratio of one eligible student per 100 in a school’s eighth grade class, with a maximum of four specialty center seats per class, per school. Before upgrading its application system in 2020, CCPS offered specialty center seats to the top students in a districtwide ranking of scores, top to bottom, “regardless of where those students came from, which middle school they came from,” Coleman says.
In the first year after updating its application system and school-by-school allocations, she says, CCPS recorded a small increase of diversity — 1% — in its specialty centers. “By using the allocation model at middle schools,” Coleman says, “we are ranking students with like peers,” acknowledging a variance of educational experiences across the county.
Chesterfield’s more than 30 years of offering specialty programs has produced a formula for superlative results by academic measures, according to CCPS. Since 2022, the county’s 13 centers have achieved a 100% graduation rate, with many students completing high school with advanced studies diplomas. Comparatively, the overall on-time graduation rate for CCPS was 89%. There are more than 2,200 students enrolled in the county’s specialty programs this year.
Siegel-Hawley sees the promise of open-enrollment high schools and RPS’ emerging programs relying on several key pillars: how well families are informed and engaged during their exploration of school options; access to transportation systemwide; a focus on diversity goals; and “the kids choosing the school instead of the school choosing the kids.”
Hostetter says RPS will begin accepting applications for Richmond High School for the Arts, the first in its five emerging schools, late this year, with events and communications preceding to engage students and their families. Plans for the other four schools are still coalescing, he adds. “We haven’t finalized exactly when other schools will come online.”
