This article has been updated since it originally appeared in print.
As Jason Kamras toured the new 183,759-square-foot River City Middle School on the city’s South Side this fall, the soft-spoken Richmond Public Schools superintendent beamed while talking about the opportunities that the state-of-the-art building could offer the city’s kids.
“It’s absolutely beautiful, and it demonstrates our motto, which is to teach with love, lead with love and serve with love,” Kamras says of the school, which can hold 1,500 students and replaces Elkhardt-Thompson Middle School. “This building shows that we truly love the students of RPS.”
One of three new Richmond school construction projects completed this year, River City Middle offers specialized classrooms, computer labs, and dedicated art and music rooms. But on the first day of school, there were no teachers welcoming students into the building, no tweens or teenagers milling around its halls, and no morning announcements sounding through its speakers.
The gleaming but empty classrooms served as a reminder of the challenges presented by RPS’ pivot to virtual instruction in the wake of the pandemic. Approved by the Richmond School Board in mid-July and extended in December, the city's schools will continue relying on remote learning through the remaining 2020-21 school year.
Since starting as superintendent in February 2018, Kamras has contended with long-standing issues during his tenure that include poor conditions in aging school buildings, low graduation and accreditation rates, and uneven building utilization across the district — and that was before the novel coronavirus turned public education on its head last spring. Reflecting on the hundreds of emails and public comments that school leadership received on both sides of the reopening debate prior to the school board’s ruling last summer, Kamras calls it “the hardest decision of my educational career.”
“There were teachers [and] families … that were ready to come back, and so we were really trying to weigh whether it was possible to safely do that,” he explains, detailing the lead-up to the marathon five-hour meeting where the board opted to keep schools closed this fall. “On the other side of the ledger … was the fact that being fully virtual is very helpful for health and safety, but very stressful and creates enormous challenges for families. It is not the best way to learn, and particularly [for] kids and families living most at the margins.”
RPS was among the first districts in the area to close schools for the fall term, committing to a full online semester rather than a nine-week or phased approach like neighboring counties. Now, as Henrico and Chesterfield schools delay reopening plans after COVID-19 cases began climbing this fall, Richmond's school board voted on Dec. 7 to finish the 2020-21 school year virtually after an RPS poll indicated that a majority of teachers and parents overwhelmingly preferred that option.
"It won't be easy. In our tug of war with COVID-19, we're already exhausted, physically and emotionally. But if we hold tight, stand shoulder to shoulder, and pull hard together, we will prevail," Kamras wrote in his RPS Direct newsletter after the board's decision.
Facing a full year of remote instruction, how has the superintendent steered the city’s already embattled school district through unprecedented shifts triggered by the ongoing pandemic?
Kamras poses with RPS faculty Sherina Gilpin (left), Kimberly Bailey (right) and students at a Black Lives Matter children’s march that was held in Chimborazo last June. “I was incredibly proud of our students for getting out there and using their voices,” he says. (Photo courtesy Jason Kamras)
Reopening With Love
These days, it’s not uncommon for Kamras to rack up 14-hour or longer workdays as he splits his time across a slew of regular video calls with members of his administrative team and advisory councils, school board meetings, regular COVID-19 briefings with Mayor Levar Stoney, writing a daily email newsletter, and occasionally sitting in on an online class.
During a pre-pandemic school year, he’d expect to devote a large part of his schedule to school visits, treasuring the opportunity to watch classroom discussions unfold and get to know students across the city. Of course, this has been far from a normal school year.
“On March 1, 2020, [if I told you] ‘Hey, I have an idea. Let’s become a fully virtual school system next year,’ they probably would’ve thrown me out of town,” he says. “Even if folks were excited about it, they would’ve said, ‘No way, it’s not possible,’ and yet here we are.”
RPS comprises 25 elementary schools (including one charter school), seven middle schools, five high schools and three specialty schools. According to Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) data, the school district served more than 25,000 students during the 2019-20 academic year, more than 85% of whom were students of color.
Despite the challenging circumstances, a motto emerged across RPS’ social media channels this summer as its faculty prepared to welcome students back virtually: #ReopenWithLove. Kamras says the hashtag illustrates their efforts to provide support, care and a sense of normalcy for students amid extremely unusual conditions.
“I’ve really tried to be in relationship with as many people as I can, because at the end of the day, it really is about those relationships, that sense that we’re in it together, and that everybody’s voice matters and is worthy of being heard,” he says.
However, the superintendent is the first to admit that each day of the virtual semester creates new challenges.
After Kamras announced that the city’s schools would close temporarily in early March — a week before Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam ordered all schools in the state to close for the remainder of the 2019-20 academic year — RPS employees quickly mobilized to establish food distribution hubs at city schools. Since then, the meal program has expanded, with deliveries to more than 1,095 daily stops along regular school bus routes Monday through Friday. To address uneven access to technology at home, the district distributed 16,000 Chromebooks to students in the spring and summer, though a delayed order for about 10,000 additional laptops forced the school district to instead purchase Android tablets as a stopgap. The additional shipments began arriving in October.
“We have literally reinvented our school system,” he says.
In the weeks and months ahead, Kamras says his focus will be on bolstering outreach efforts to RPS students in need of core resources such as stable housing, steady meals, mental health care and other social services.
“As we get further into the fall and weigh whether we’re going to be able to come back in the spring, I do stay up at night sometimes thinking about our kids who face the greatest challenges in their lives,” he adds. “For some kids, home is just not a very safe place. That’s certainly a minority of cases, but that’s the reality.”
When asked about the stress of the job, Kamras admits it’s been a heavy load to navigate uncharted waters.
“I feel like I’ve been working 20-hour days for several months, and it’s not like I was working eight-hour days before the pandemic,” he says. “It has been exhausting and stressful, but honestly, compared to what some of our families deal with on a day-to-day basis, it’s really nothing. I’m blessed with so much in my life, and we have a lot of young people who really are struggling to make it through the day.”
Though teachers this semester can rely on a blend of live sessions with their classes and individualized work that students complete at their own pace (“synchronous” and “asynchronous” learning), Kamras and the school board opted in September to shorten virtual school days when parents voiced concerns around the hours their children were spending in front of the computer.
Under the new plan, schedules for elementary and middle school students were shortened by an hour or more, while high school schedules were adjusted to leave two class slots open for asynchronous work. Through the change, former Richmond School Board Chairwoman Linda Owen says, Kamras and his administration worked to patch issues quickly and collaborate with the board on solutions.
“I think he has done everything that he could to work well with the members of the board and members of city government, which is a really nice change, I think, because before he was there, that wasn’t really the case,” she says. “I think he’s also worked really well at bringing the community along, letting everybody know what’s going on.”
Often credited by teachers and parents for his availability and willingness to solicit feedback on proposed changes, Kamras says keeping in touch with RPS community members has been a crucial part of his job throughout the pandemic. In his daily email newsletter, RPS Direct, he highlights recent school board decisions, school news and gives kudos to teachers and staff members who go the extra mile for their students. The newsletter also has served as a channel for Kamras to alert community members about RPS employees who have tested positive for COVID-19 — as of early November, more than 20 had contracted the virus, and one member of the district’s transportation staff has died from COVID-19. He also uses the daily email to solicit feedback on everything from proposed scheduling changes to this summer’s protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd.
“It’s more than just one-way communication, it has created an invitation to the community to share their thoughts back with me,” he says. “I really enjoy that back and forth, and I do feel like I have the whole community as an advisor, as it were, as we’re thinking about these things.”
Communication with the RPS community has been a hallmark of Kamras’ leadership style, says Katina Harris, president of the Richmond Education Association and a teacher at Boushall Middle School. As the parent of one current and four former RPS students herself, Harris calls it a welcome shift from past administrations.
“There’s always room for improvement, but I think that his willingness to just be transparent [has] been helpful,” she says. “That feedback structure is definitely very helpful, and we can email Mr. Kamras at any time.”
For RPS parent Wendy Rufrano, the changes that the school district has implemented during the pandemic have been encouraging but still fall short for her three sons, who would normally attend Cardinal Elementary School.
“I think they’re all doing what they can,” she says. “This is new for everybody, so it’s really hard to say who the bad guy is in a situation like this. … At the end of the day, I do feel that they’re doing an all-right job in a situation that nobody’s ever been in.”
The Kamras family, like most, has tried to make the best of a difficult situation. His sons Ezra, 11, and Akiva, 9 — who attend Henderson Middle and Holton Elementary, respectively — have struggled with extended time away from classmates, while his wife, Miwa, has had to balance their needs with her own responsibilities working from home as an education consultant.
“It’s hard,” Kamras says. “It certainly has been taxing, and so I have just a profound empathy for our families, many of whom are less well off, struggling to make this all work.”
River City Middle School on Hull Street Road was one of three new schools built in Richmond this year, funded by a meals tax increase approved by Richmond City Council in 2018. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Righting the Ship
Kamras’ City Hall office is adorned with photos of family members, friends and former students he’s kept in touch with, alongside various awards and keepsakes that he’s accrued over a career in education spanning nearly two and a half decades. Amid the plaques, picture frames and books that surround his desk, on a wall hangs a print of the Hebrew phrase “Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof.” Kamras, who is Jewish, explains that it was taken from a passage in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy, and it translates to “Justice, justice, shall ye pursue.” It reflects his steadfast belief in education as a pathway toward equity and healing.
“I think it is that notion of doing whatever you can to make the world a better place, and for me, that’s at the center of what it means to be Jewish,” he says. “To be able to do that here in Richmond, which has experienced so much injustice, is particularly meaningful to me.”
Born in New York and raised in Sacramento, California, Kamras says his mother, who worked as a schoolteacher in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and his father, a physician, imparted the value of education on him and his two brothers from an early age. He was also inspired by Alvin Mund, his maternal grandfather, who dreamed of becoming a physician while growing up in the 1920s and ’30s but was initially denied entry to medical school due to discriminatory quotas on Jewish students.
“I really do think [education is] the most powerful lever we have in America today to give every kid a shot in life, and the truth of the matter is, the system is rigged against a lot of kids [such as] kids of color [and] low-income kids,” he says. “We have to work two, three four or five times as hard to give them the opportunity that they deserve.”
At an October school board meeting, RPS Chief Schools Officer Harry Hughes revealed that about 1 in 5 Richmond students are on track to be chronically absent. As of the 20th day of the school year on Oct. 5, 4,444 students — 21.2% of RPS’ enrollment — missed at least 10% of the school year, a 3% increase over last year’s rate during the same time period.
The increase was driven mostly by 13 elementary schools and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where the number of students on track for chronic absenteeism jumped by 10% or more. Hughes explained that the increase can be linked to a series of factors that include a lack of adult supervision for young students with working parents. Though RPS saw a reduction in its chronic absenteeism rate during the first year and a half of Kamras’ tenure, reaching 14.8% during one 20-day period in the school year, the metric jumped to 18.2% during the same 20-day period last year.
“COVID has exacerbated an existing problem and made it much worse,” Hughes told the board.
New VDOE data also shows that Richmond schools had the lowest on-time graduation rate for students who entered the ninth grade in 2016. According to the department’s annual on-time graduation rate report, just 71.6% of Richmond students who started high school during the 2016-17 school year graduated four years later, falling well below the statewide average of 92.3%.
Kamras, who outlined goals including 100% school accreditation, increased graduation rates and decreased absenteeism in his five-year Dreams4RPS strategic plan, says that while on-time graduation rates are disappointing, the district is still recovering from a drop in 2018 after a VDOE investigation revealed that student transcripts dating back to at least 2015 were being rubber-stamped, artificially inflating graduation rates.
“We have begun the climb back up to where we hope [graduation rates] will be, which is as close to 100% as possible,” he says, citing initiatives implemented earlier this year to help students who have dropped out of RPS obtain their GEDs and to retain students who are recent immigrants and English learners.
Kamras and 8th District School Board member Dawn Page try out a touch-screen whiteboard in one of the new River City Middle School classrooms. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Teacher Turned Superintendent
Amid the ever-present stress and confusion that surrounded the pandemic’s onset last spring, Kamras sought comfort in the familiar. The 46-year-old, who arrived in Richmond after a lengthy tenure in Washington, D.C. Public Schools, decided to begin teaching a daily virtual class in mid-March called “Mr. K’s 30 Minutes of Math.”
“It was such a sad and hard time, and I really thrive off of being able to be in schools, see kids, spend time with teachers, so this was a little bit selfish, frankly,” he says.
For Kamras, who was named National Teacher of the Year in 2005 during his time as a math teacher at Washington, D.C.’s John Philip Sousa Middle School, it was a comfortable return to his roots. After studying public policy at Princeton University, Kamras joined Teach for America and was placed at the school in 1996.
“I really do think [education is] the most powerful lever we have in America today to give every kid a shot in life.” —Superintendent Jason Kamras
Wendall Jefferson, a former student, was skeptical of Kamras at first but was quickly won over after seeing how committed he was to the job. Jefferson says he’d regularly see Kamras’ green Jeep Cherokee parked in the school’s parking lot when he’d arrive there at 7 a.m. for basketball practice before school. When Jefferson left his afternoon basketball practice at 6 or 7 p.m., Kamras was still there, helping students or prepping for the next day’s lesson. “I think that was one of the testaments for me and the reason why I wanted to be around him, and we just hit it off,” he says.
Jefferson, who graduated from Temple University in 2008, now works as an engineer for Northrup Grumman.
Kamras visits with Aleighya Lee, a second grader at Barack Obama Elementary School, during a stop of the RPS Lit Limo, its mobile book distribution service. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Restoring Trust
As 2020 nears its end, Kamras and the city’s school board will continue navigating the virtual learning landscape for at least one more semester. In an interview before the school board's decision, he said they'll need to bolster its supports for students and seriously consider year-round schooling to bridge educational gaps widened during the closure.
Prior to the school reopening decision, Kamras said his biggest challenge would be restoring trust in what RPS can achieve, a priority that has spanned his entire tenure in Richmond. Kamras was hired in late 2017 and earns a base salary of $250,000 under his contract, which is set to expire on June 30, 2021. Now, as school leaders grapple with the possibility of a full year relying on virtual instruction, he hopes to continue guiding growth in Richmond. “One thing I’ve learned in public education is that these efforts take time,” he says. “You have to build step by step, brick by brick, and you just need a long runway to be able to do it, so I hope I have the honor of serving here for a long time.”
