Merv Daugherty visits Monacan High School to meet with parents. (Photo by Sarah King)
Chesterfield County Superintendent Merv Daugherty is starting his tenure with his boots on the ground and in schools this month with a series of “meet-and-greet” sessions where the community is invited to ask questions, share concerns and get to know the new chief of schools.
Daugherty’s contract began Nov. 1 after a three-month search comprising around 30 candidates, and this week he held the first two of four town-hall style Q&A sessions with his new community. Daugherty hails from the Red Clay Consolidated School District in Wilmington, Delaware — the state’s largest school system — where he served as superintendent for nearly a decade and was recognized as the 2015-2016 Delaware Superintendent of the Year. His annual salary is $230,000. (You can see the full contract at this link.) Daugherty takes over from Donald Fairheart, who had served as interim superintendent since the end of May, after former Superintendent James Lane was named Virginia's superintendent of public instruction by Gov. Ralph Northam.
On Wednesday evening, Daugherty spent nearly two hours fielding questions and concerns from parents at Chesterfield’s Monacan High School and sharing his perspective and opinions with them. Even when the lines of questioning pertained to divisive topics — such as armed school resource officers — Daugherty patiently listened and thoughtfully responded to each question or concern.
“You come to a parent meeting because you want them to tell you things they're concerned about and things they like, so that was good to hear,” Daugherty said afterward.
He jotted notes as attendees shared ideas and issues, sometimes asking for further information or clarifications, all the while fielding a long stream of questions spanning a host of issues: school safety, transportation, overcrowding and redistricting, budget season and his ideas for the school system.
When a woman told him that her son’s bus was consistently late — sometimes by more than an hour — Daugherty was jotting down her thoughts as she spoke, asking what bus route he was on, and agreeing that similar issues with bus routes across the district were in part the consequence of a “perfect storm” of variables, including the fact that the 61,000-student district (nearly quadruple the size of Daugherty’s former school system) is served by more than 500 school buses daily.
“Transportation is always going to be something we're looking at,” Daugherty said after the Q&A with parents. “We’re running [more than 500 drivers] a day — we're going to have issues — so how do we clean those issues up? How do we look from the outside in at what we're doing? Those are the things we’re looking at and I think that's important.”
Coinciding with the transportation hurdles are other challenges that school systems around the region face in light of rapid population growth in the Richmond metro area: redistricting and overcrowding.
“You don’t want the schools to be overcrowded, but how do you move students without too much disruption?” he asked rhetorically, with a good-natured chuckle. “And then there's, you know, budget season's coming — so I've come right at the perfect time,” he said with a laugh. “But it's good – we're just trying to really, from the district side — district staff — we're really here to serve and support the schools.”
One initiative Daugherty is introducing is the “ambassador program,” made up of district staff, the new superintendent included, who are assigned a specific school that they will visit twice a month for two hours, assisting the principal as needed.
“Whatever the principal needs: bus duty, cafeteria duty, maybe a sub for a class — we’re there to help with whatever needs to be done,” Daugherty said. “We need to know what's going on in the schools more and be advocates for the schools. ... it's tough to offer support when you're not in the schools enough, so let's get out in the schools more!”
Daugherty maintained a relaxed demeanor even during some harder lines of questioning from parents, such as whether school resource officers (SROs) should be armed in elementary schools.
“My understanding is the School Safety Board currently has a proposal for armed SROs to be going into the elementary schools, and it's my understanding that there are already armed SROs in the middle schools and the high schools,” said Nicole Subryan, a high school parent. “I'm very concerned about what message having an armed guard in schools sends to children who are 5-, 6-, 7-years-old — especially children of color. You have to think about that too.”
Subryan is a member of local grassroots group the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County, which she said was “instrumental in squashing” the SRO proposal previously, “but then it was resurrected.” A Washington, D.C., native, Subryan recalls having to walk through a metal detector at her high school each morning.
“Even though they took the gifted and put them in that school, I still had to walk through a metal detector every day,” Subryan says. “I mean — it makes you feel like you're going to jail, not school. So yes, I have very grave concerns about anything that smacks of the school-to-prison pipeline.”
Subryan’s perspective was in the minority, it seemed, among other parents in attendance on Wednesday night — but she and Arika Phillips, another member of LWCC who intends to run for the county's School Board, pushed Daugherty for his thoughts and perspective during the Q&A.
“It's always going to be a debate — do you have enough security, do you not have enough security? I'm big into security, I think it's important, so that's why I'm really working hard to make sure our schools are locked down and that there's cameras at the entrances, and we really want to make sure in the future make sure the cameras are really in and outside the interior and exterior,” Daugherty said. “But the SRO issue — of course there's always going to be a debate. Some people love it, some people don't.”
In October, the county’s Schools Safety Task force recommended a plan to place resource officers in each of the district’s 38 elementary schools over the next five years. Currently, there are armed SROs in each Chesterfield middle and high school.
The issue of differing perspectives extends beyond the local jurisdiction, however. In August, Attorney General Mark Herring issued an opinion with regard to a Southwest Virginia school district that voted unanimously in July to take the next steps to arm its teachers in response to mass shootings that have taken place at U.S. schools in recent years.
In his opinion, Herring said state law limiting guns on school grounds extends to teachers and staff who don’t meet the security or law enforcement criteria defined by the General Assembly. Herring also instructed the Department of Criminal Justice Services not to register teachers or staff as “special conservators of the peace” for the purpose of arming them on school property.
But the question of SROs is a little trickier, because the officers do meet the criteria of security and law enforcement outlined by the state legislature.
“The principal doesn't necessarily have any dominion over the SROs, because they're not part of the teaching staff,” Subryan said, noting that one of her sons recently graduated from Matoaca High School and the armed SROs have been in schools since their family moved to the area more than five years ago.
“I am most certainly concerned about how having armed officers, SROs, mentors, whatever term you want to put on it — will affect, especially, elementary school students,” said Arika Phillips. “As we talk about increasing our mental health and trauma-informed care within our schools — adding guns in there is the exact opposite of that; it's counterproductive. We know that kids are going through feeling intimidated or feeling that they don't have a place … and to continue to do that or make that worse, how are we being equitable or fair to our students?”
Daugherty addressed Subryan and Phillips’ concerns by saying in his Delaware district, he sought to foster positive relationships with school security officers, saying he thinks SROs can be beneficial to schools in a mentor capacity.
He noted also, though, that the issue may subside because of funding and/or finding enough people to fill those roles and that his key priorities for school safety would be focused more on procedure and protocol. Currently, Chesterfield contracts SROs through a memorandum of understanding with the Chesterfield Police Department, Daugherty said.
Another question from Phillips pertained to making coursework — specifically for students participating in Career and Technical Education programs — equitable for all students. Phillips explained that while CTE programs are wonderful for helping students jumpstart a career after graduating, they can still be costly or even unaffordable due to the price of uniforms and supplies.
Daugherty responded emphatically, saying “Yes! Yes!” as Phillips asked her question. He grinned, and added, “This one I can definitely answer!” drawing some laughter from the parents, and principal, in attendance.
“We're working hard to revamp what we're doing with our CTE programs and the goal is to have business partnerships at each one of our CTE programs,” Daugherty said. “They can offer programming, advice, guidance to our students and our teachers; provide internships and maybe even help with supplies and things our students need to really allow our students to take the courses.”
Daugherty told the crowd on Wednesday that he had already held some meetings with potential business partners, and more such meetings with business and local government officials were in the works. In an interview after the event, he did not give specifics as to industries or companies he’d met with, but said the local and state Chambers of Commerce were keen on the idea.
“We've been meeting … and sharing our vision with them and going to each business and talking to them and seeing how they want to be involved,” Daugherty said.
Other topics parents addressed with the new leadership included parent-teacher conferences, coursework and in one case, community-based approaches to helping students and families succeed. A mother shared her experience with Monacan High, telling the audience that Principal William Broyles is personally invested in his students and staff, so much so that he helped the family move when they were in a time of need.
Daugherty broke into a smile when he heard this — perhaps because his track record indicates he holds equity and access to education as a top priority, too. In Delaware, he was instrumental in implementing programs to help include disabled students and English-second-language learners into the general curriculum, as well as adding a full-time psychologist to each school in the district, according to news reports.
Prior to running the Red Clay district, where he was assistant superintendent for academics before he led the district as superintendent for nine years, Daugherty taught civics, U.S. history and world history for 16 years before becoming a middle and high school principal.
“We're excited to have Dr. Daugherty with us — he comes to us with a wealth of experience and knowledge,” Broyles said after the event, “and I think the other thing that's important is he worked in a school system that had a great deal of challenges and he was able to see some huge successes, so I think that's good for everybody in the school system — we have an opportunity to grow; this is a school system that has a great reputation and if we can make it even better, then we're all for that.”
