Richmond Community High School photography students in the late 1970s hold handmade pinhole cameras. Pictures they took with the cameras were sold as part of a 40th-anniversary fundraiser in June. (Photo courtesy Friends of Richmond Community High School)
Barbara-lyn Belcher, the “lead teacher” for an experimental high school in 1977, wanted a proper name for the effort beyond the pilot program’s unwieldy bureaucratic title: “Secondary School Experiential Learning Community.”
She put the question of what they’d prefer to call their school to the first 40 students, making the governing directors a bit nervous.
“And what they came up with is Richmond Community High School,” Belcher recalls, chuckling at the memory. “Entirely appropriate and a defining moment that demonstrated how the students would be involved and invested.”
RCHS’ DNA came from the work of Virginia State University professor Margaret Dabney, who wanted to bring specialized education to advanced students in underserved populations. She didn’t find much enthusiasm for the idea in mid-1970s Petersburg. The concept — shepherding the energies of curious and restless intellects, primarily from disadvantaged majority African-American neighborhoods, and guiding them toward college — instead took root here.
Public education in Virginia and Richmond had recently passed through a tumultuous period that included school desegregation and busing of students, a racially motivated annexation of a chunk of mostly white northern Chesterfield County and the election of Richmond’s first majority-black City Council.
Downtown Richmond enthusiast and civic leader Nina Abady introduced Dabney to energetic businessman and philanthropist Andrew Asch Jr., who came from a New York City middle-class Jewish family and attended public schools. After his experiences in China and Burma (now Myanmar) as part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, he returned home to New York and got into the business of industrial refrigeration. This ultimately brought him and his then-wife, Pat, to Richmond, where he opened the Refrigeration Engineering Co. of New York (RECONY) on Belle Isle. Asch sold the business and retired at age 50, but he became active in the community, in particular for the reclamation of historic architecture that rejuvenated Shockoe Slip and Shockoe Bottom.
Asch and Dabney became friends with a shared vision for improving the city’s schools. This began a round of discussions that led to a grant from Asch to help found the school. Dabney found a supporter in Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Richard Hunter, who was a friend of Asch’s.
“It may not have worked at any other time and with different people.” —Pat Asch
“It may not have worked at any other time and with different people,” the late Pat Asch explained in a 2010 oral history. “He really admired Margaret and her husband. He thought of them as an incredible couple. Their connection made the school work.”
At first, they didn’t have a way to explain what it was.
“We were a public school using private funding,” recalls Belcher, who eventually became the school’s principal. “We didn’t know what a charter school was. There was some language of a ‘school inside a school,’ except our benefactor didn’t want this curriculum getting subsumed into another program.”
She applied for a position at the new school-without-a-home. Classes convened in former offices above the police training academy in what was then called the Mosque (now Altria Theater). Packed RPS file cabinets crowded the rooms, and Belcher admits to thinking twice about what she’d gotten herself into.
Tracy Brower enrolled at the new school in 1977 as an honor roll student from Albert Hill Middle School. After an information session and a battery of tests, he entered classes.
“I wasn’t sure about what the experience would be like,” he recalls. “My mother was very insistent. Neither of my parents completed high school, but they believed in education.”
Brower says that not many people knew classes were underway in the old offices at the Mosque. Monroe Park became a classroom where karate lessons were offered for physical education credit. During world history studies, the class played what became a renowned module, “The World Peace Game,” developed by social studies teacher John Hunter. At year’s end, the class trip to New York City included a visit to the United Nations and a public General Assembly session. Their “Future Studies” class syllabus included George Orwell’s “1984,” and environmental studies incorporated a camping trip along the Chesapeake Bay. The RCHS experience included a weekly “off-site lunch,” where students visited nearby eateries, and school “family meetings” featuring discussions among teachers and students about the school and its processes.
A group of students on the steps at the Carver Elementary School building in the early 1980s (Photo courtesy Friends of Richmond Community High School)
After two years, the school moved to the Carver Elementary School building. RCHS then occupied space in Maggie Walker High School, followed by a stint in the former Westhampton Middle building from 1990 to 2010 and finally a relocation to the former Chandler Middle on Brookland Park Boulevard.
The school received criticism, too, for perceived elitism and for draining good students from the public schools.
“If you have a new idea, you have to be conscious of who is threatened by it,” Dabney said in a 2010 oral history. “If society provides real opportunities for all children, including minority children, to become what they are capable of becoming, then the present status quo is threatened.”
Barbara-lyn Belcher congratulates a graduate at the 1983 commencement. (Photo courtesy Friends of Richmond Community High School)
Since its inception, about 96 percent of the school’s graduates have gone on to college. Members of the class of 2018 were awarded more than $9 million in college scholarships. The Jackson Foundation, founded by Asch in 1981, continues to support the school.
Brower graduated in 1981, and the ceremony was held at the Scottish Rite Temple on Hermitage Road. He went to Oberlin College and later transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University, where he finished with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. He works for the Richmond Public Schools Education Foundation, where he manages RVA Future, a college- and career-planning program for high school students.
“I’ve come full circle,” Brower says. “Through the foundation, we have college scholarships, and this year I presented three at my alma mater.”
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