Deanna Fierro addresses the Richmond School Board on Monday. (Photo by Sarah King)
When Deanna Fierro was a middle school math teacher in Richmond Public Schools, she says, there was a phrase she heard a lot: “Just pass the buck.”
It meant teachers should keep their heads down and not disrupt the flow of business as usual, she says, even at the expense of ignoring systemic issues hindering student achievement and ultimately reflecting on their educators. The phrase coincided with another common culprit: “Stay in your lane,” meaning "don't tell me what to do if it's not your job,'” says Fierro, now a teacher in a different school system.
She is among the former RPS teachers who left the system, discouraged by what she describes as a workplace culture of intimidation, bullying and retaliation “from the top down” that in turn affects the learning environment. Fierro is pursuing her master's degree in educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University and says she hopes to eventually return to the Richmond school system as an administrator.
Fierro shared her thoughts in an interview Monday, before the Richmond School Board voted 8-0 to pass a resolution affirming free speech for school staff, a gesture that teachers and advocates hope leads to broader reforms.
“It's the culture,” Fierro says, citing an example that sticks out her in her mind. A former math teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School and then math department chairwoman at Albert Hill Middle School, she says the eighth grade is a pivotal year for students.
“Eighth grade is the big transition into high school,” she explains. “They have moving on ceremonies that are huge, huge, dances — they're like prom — and some of the things you hear from people at all levels is, 'We let them have a big party, the kids, because this is as far as some of them will go.' ”
She lets the statement sink in.
At Monday’s School Board meeting, 4th District representative Jonathan Young expressed his support for the resolution, initially introduced by 3rd District representative Kenya Gibson.
“My only critique relevant to the free speech resolution is that it doesn’t go far enough,” Young said. “The folks on the front line know best.”
His support was echoed by Gibson and 2nd District representative Scott Barlow — who said he applauded the courage of teachers who felt comfortable enough to approach the board about the resolution.
“To make history, we need the teachers and we need to empower voices,” Gibson said. “The culture that folks are talking about has been here for some time; we’re really going to have to overcompensate … We can’t fix these schools if we don’t know what’s broken.”
One entity working on behalf of teachers is the Richmond Education Association, the district-wide union for school staff. Sarah Pedersen, a history teacher at Binford Middle School, is an active participant in the REA with her husband, who is the organization’s vice president.
“There's been a culture in Richmond Public Schools — and not just RPS, there's a culture probably across Virginia public schools — that gag teachers and staff from speaking out about conditions they're working under and therefore conditions kids are being exposed to,” Pedersen says.
But the fact that Pedersen feels comfortable speaking out about issues she encounters has less to do with the free speech resolution passed on Monday than her school-level administration.
“When I first started speaking out about facilities issues or School Board meetings or organizing with other teachers and organizations — I felt pretty comfortable because I have an excellent principal,” she says, adding “that's not the standard across the district.”
One way that principals will intimidate teachers and staff, she explains, is through the teacher evaluation system — so a teacher won’t be fired or reprimanded for voicing concerns, but because of a performance review.
“So, if you're speaking out about something like mold in your classroom, or George Mason [Elementary School] where crayons are melting on the floor,” Pedersen says, “our facilities issues are something that RPS teachers are still really nervous about talking about — for more reasons than just retaliation; the fact is, we don't have a solution for them.”
While teaching at Albert Hill Middle School, where many former Carver Elementary students attend, Fierro says she tried to raise concerns about students' SOL scores before the recent cheating scandal unfolded at Carver, but to no avail.
“As department chair, I was saying, 'Hey we've got some red flags with our data, we're not going to make our marks,' ” she recalls, adding that her concerns were rebuffed. That year, Fierro says she calculated the Hill students would only hit a 68 percent pass rate; when the scores came back, “we got 69 percent. Right on the money.”
Pedersen notes that in large part, the longstanding fear of speaking out is grounded in “a lot of centralized power.”
“But teachers are starting to figure out they can step into their own power and they can make their administrator protect them,” she says. “I think we're starting to see teachers stand up in Richmond in particular because it's — it's been able to be shown through some, though not all, advocates that when RPS teachers stand up and stand up together, there isn't much the administration can do about it.”
She says there have been steps in the right direction under Kamras’ leadership, too. For example, she says the recently installed teacher and principal advisory boards are promising outlets, and that Kamras’ administration does seem more open than past leadership in listening to and addressing staff concerns.
She points to one example being a new attendance policy requiring teachers to be in the school building for eight hours each day, in addition to 90 minutes of staff development each week. The change came just two days before the start of the school year, and was not well received by many RPS staff who had no prior knowledge of the new policy — many had to quickly change child care and other after-school plans to accommodate the new rule.
But after the REA organized and teachers voiced their concerns about the lack of communication, Pedersen says Kamras rolled back the policy. Even so, at many schools, principals have mandated the rule still take effect, although it doesn’t apply districtwide.
“[The association is] very serious about ensuring that our members, and not just our members, but all staff, are protected. and not just protected by filing a grievance, but protected in that nobody would even think about coming forward or bullying teachers for voicing a concern because if that were to happen, the other teachers stand up with them,” Pedersen says.
But advocates are seeking further protections than the resolution passed Monday night. Some ideas are whistle-blower protections, such as those implemented in Baltimore and Seattle Public Schools. Other ideas include a grievance hotline, championed by another former RPS teacher, Emma Clark.
Now a teacher in Chesterfield County, Clark spoke at a news conference outside City Hall last Wednesday, about what she confronted when trying to raise issues and concerns she had at her school.
“When I consulted with colleagues, I was discouraged,” Clark says.
She went on to say that she was told two things by almost everyone she spoke to about her concerns. One: that nothing would be done, and two: that she would face retaliation for bringing it up. Clark says her colleagues were not wrong on either count.
“Teachers should not have to fear speaking up on behalf of students whose education is being neglected, speaking up about intimidation of Latino students, about lead in our water,” Clark says. “Staff should not have to fear for their job when filing a bullying report against an administrator, or having to sleuth out who someone’s friends are before deciding whether or not it is safe to speak out.”
At Monday’s meeting, only five speakers approached the dias during public comment. Three, including Fierro, addressed the free speech resolution, speaking in support.
REA President Antuane Moore called for the board to pass the agenda item, to “protect us from such dangerous behaviors.”
“In return, we, the REA, affirm our commitment to you and other staff throughout the city,” Moore said.
Pedersen did not speak during public comment — she and her husband have a 1-year-old at home — but during an interview, she stressed the importance of the issue: "It's only through having transparency and having honest conversations that we can begin to address the multitude of problems that we're dealing with in Richmond Public Schools."
