In the face of hardships, Richmond Public Schools students are the role models for their communities, demonstrating the power to embrace difficulties and overcome them, Jason Kamras told the audience inside Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School on Tuesday night — the superintendent's first State of the Schools address since taking the helm of the school system a year ago.
The address was well attended, with traffic backing up the Leigh Street bridge — which recently debuted a mural dedicated to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — as streams of cars made their way into the East End school’s parking lot by 5:30 p.m., a half hour before the event was scheduled to begin.
“This is a complicated place, and I’ve certainly made my mistakes — but I love Richmond Public Schools and the city of Richmond,” Kamras said. “And I thank you for the opportunity to serve you; thank you for allowing me to do so.”
He began with highlights, noting that “we jumped right in” and after a year, “for the first time in recent memory,” RPS is ensuring that all five comprehensive high schools will offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses in calculus, biology, Spanish and literature.
“We can’t expect greatness from our students if we don’t raise the bar,” he said, noting that someone who exemplifies this every day is Rodney Robinson, who couldn’t attend the night’s address because he was in California with other national teacher of the year finalists.
“I’m betting just about anything he’s gonna win this whole thing,” Kamras, the 2005 teacher of the year and an advisor to the Obama 2008 transition team, said coyly, adding that Robinson, too, exemplifies another important aspect of education RPS has included in its divisionwide strategic plan, Dreams4RPS: more minority male teachers in the classroom.
“I wasn’t sure where to begin tonight, because it’s been such a quiet year at Richmond Public Schools,” Kamras said, which — after a split second — caused the whole room to erupt into laughter. “How many times did we grace the front page?”
As he spoke, a slideshow image flashed a stack of Richmond Times-Dispatch newspapers piled high on top of an office table.
“That is not a joke,” Kamras said, referencing the dozens of stories authored by education beat reporter Justin Mattingly, one of Richmond’s most enthusiastic public meeting attendees (who just launched an education newsletter called High Stakes).
“It really is a fascinating time in education, both across the state and here in Richmond, so covering that is truly remarkable,” Mattingly said of the State of the Schools reference. “There’s no shortage of stories and I’m just thankful for the people who are willing to tell their stories and share their opinions about the large amount of issues facing children, teachers and everyone else — which means everyone — impacted by the fate of our schools.”
Kamras’ tone then shifted to a more somber note.
The superintendent said that earlier that day, the Virginia Department of Education signed off on Phase One of the school system’s efforts to repair inaccurate student transcripts. After first addressing the issue last April, Kamras had said that his team would meet a Feb. 1 deadline for seniors’ transcripts to be error-free.
“We’ve made more than 1,500 corrections,” he said Tuesday, adding that the new, correct senior transcripts will go out by the end of next week. “This was a Herculean effort and we’re actually just getting started,” Kamras said.
Another Herculean effort, no doubt, was the unfolding of a separate VDOE investigation into the Carver Elementary School cheating scandal last spring, wherein the former Blue Ribbon School lost accreditation, in a system where more than half of the schools lack full accreditation.
“There is nothing broken about our students,” Kamras insisted. “We, the adults, have not yet provided them with the opportunities they deserve — we’re on the hook for those statistics, not them.”
Other news included plans integral to the division’s new strategic plan, Dreams4RPS — a copy of which each attendee was given at the door of the auditorium — aimed at addressing those statistics.
Pointing to three demonstrations led by schools stakeholders during the past year, Kamras cited “one against gun violence and two more for more state funding.”
Thousands of education supporters took part in a #RedforEd march that ended in a rally at the Virginia State Capitol on Jan. 28. Participants in the national grassroots movement are calling for better pay for teachers and increased funding for public schools. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Kamras added that in the wake of the December March4More and last month’s Red4Ed marches to the State Capitol, the community must not forget that nearly two dozen RPS students have been victims of gun violence.
“Over the last 12 months, more than 20 RPS students have been shot,” he said inside the East End middle school that serves three of the city’s public housing communities, “of which six have died — most of our teachers were never trained to help such young people facing such tremendous trauma in their lives.”
New initiatives aimed at integrating trauma-informed best practices into the school day include restorative justice pilot programs in three schools — among them Albert Hill and Martin Luther King middle schools — that incorporate meditative and talk-therapy-style approaches to addressing student learning outcomes and behaviors, particularly within a population of students exposed to higher levels of trauma — spanning food insecurity to gun violence — than their peers across the state.
Kamras shared anecdotes from some of the students he met with at Hill last week, including one who said he felt “like he knew his classmates better,” and another who “could share her feelings for the first time and made her feel peaceful at the start of the day.” Community partnerships such as the latter, he said, are why “almost 500 more students are coming to school every single day.”
As for the facilities, they enter?
“It’s criminal that our students and staff walk into buildings that have mold, leaking tiles,” he said. “We simply have to do better.”
The PowerPoint next flashed to images of invested community members participating in last summer’s bathroom blitz, groundbreaking ceremonies for three new schools after the passage of Mayor Levar Stoney’s proposed meals-tax increase last year and the renaming of J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School to honor Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president.
But the new strategic plan — a digestible, colorful pamphlet — has more academic and career readiness initiatives in the works, too.
Kamras announced Tuesday that the first goal, branded Passion4Learning, will “reimagine our comprehensive high schools” by ensuring that each graduate leaves high school ready to enter one of three paths: college; a living-wage job; or national service. Each school will also offer at least three AP courses in science and math, including labs and internships — plus a paid summer internship for each student — and educators will begin being paid and trained in making home visits to students on a fairly regular basis.
“Of course, there’s a lot of details to work out,” he noted.
Kamras also touched on obstacles to making the school system’s strategic plan a reality, among them inadequate facilities, uncompetitive teacher and staff pay, and, apparently, a 1980s IBM computer system harking back to the era of floppy disks (to which one RPS student in the audience recoiled and asked “What’s that?’”).
“We just can’t prepare kids for the third decade of [the] 21st century … using tech from the 20th,” Kamras said, adding that the cost would be roughly $150 million across five years to accomplish the goals laid out, the product of more than 170 community meetings comprising over 3,000 attendees.
He ended by sharing, with permission, a story from a middle school student, Yasmine, who had a tough 2017-2018 school year. She missed 70 school days between fights and suspensions, he said — but, “much like RPS, she is rising.”
Through the newly installed restorative justice pilots (“a safe space to share her feelings; work through her emotions and develop new bonds with staff and students”) and commitments from Yasmine’s administrators not to suspend her (“instead the staff have wrapped her in love and support”), things have taken a U-turn, and now Yasmine has support outside school, too, he said.
“Now, she attends every class every day, she asks for support when she feels herself getting upset,” Kamras said, “She’s on the honor roll and wants to be a teacher when she grows up so she can help students just like herself.”
When the superintendent asked Yasmine to stand up for the audience, she received an enormous standing ovation.
“Hold the bar high and expect greatness of our young people … there is literally nothing we can’t achieve,” Kamras said of Richmond Public Schools. “Like Yasmine, we are rising — and we’ve just gotten started.”