Cheap Shots and Political Convenience
Why the Richmond Mayor's "Learning Loss" Claim is a Red Herring
We are not journalists and don’t claim to be. We are working educators that run a blog. This piece serves as a chronicle of our collective memory of Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney’s tenure in office. Fact checking and feedback are welcome and encouraged. Email richmondvcore@gmail.com with comments or to get involved.
Richmond Public Schools (RPS) made national news when our district’s ongoing struggle to address pandemic “learning loss,” or what could be better characterized as an education debt, was published in a Propublica story on June 19, 2023. We’ll come back to the question of learning loss or education debt later. Weighing in on the story was Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who shared the story on his official Twitter account, stating, “instead of leading boldly and doing whatever it takes to support our kids’ post-pandemic recovery, leaders on the School Board and in the Richmond Education Association choose to sit idly by & maintain the status quo.” Twitter took the Mayor to task with several dozen responses all questioning what the Mayor himself has done for RPS and challenging his timing and accuracy in throwing the Richmond Education Association (REA) under the bus. In those tweets in response to the Mayor something important occurred. Not only was there support for the REA, a union that represents some 1,200 RPS employees and is also the first union in Virginia to win back collective bargaining rights in nearly 50 years, but the Twitterverse connected that an attack on our union is an attack on the workers of RPS themselves. The collective response from the community actualized a belief VCORE members and rank and file workers have held, which is that we are the union, meaning: the union is not a separate entity from the workers themselves.
A complex legacy
The tweet attacking the union also elicited further speculation about Mayor Stoney’s post-Richmond mayoral plans: many responses hypothesized that the tweet was an attempt to appeal to more conservative voters ahead of a run for governor in 2025. So what has Mayor Stoney done for RPS during his tenure as mayor? For starters, the meals tax hike that Mayor Stoney championed early in his tenure, which the City Council passed in 2018, made possible the construction of three new and much needed schools: Cardinal Elementary, River City Middle School, and Henry L. Marsh Elementary. It’s worth noting that at the time of the meals tax increase passing, then City Council President Chris Hilbert signed a statement indicating that the Richmond City Council could repeal the tax increase if it were discovered the funds were misappropriated. Initially, those three new schools were supposed to be five. Since then, audits revealed that understaffing and outdated software have lead to the City losing $1.5 million each year in uncollected tax revenue from the meals tax, and the three schools that were constructed did not meet completion deadlines, failed to meet goals of 40% of construction being subcontracted to Black and other minority-owned businesses, and cost approximately $16 million more than the state average of school construction during the same time period after the Mayor declined to use a sealed bidding process for construction proposals. Around this same time, at the start of his second term, Mayor Stoney disbanded his Mayor’s Teacher Advisory Council just four days before a scheduled meeting, surprising and dismaying RPS teachers that were part of the council. As of this writing, the Mayor’s Teacher Advisory Council has not reconvened.
School funding for Richmond Public Schools has also increased considerably under Mayor Stoney’s tenure. In the 2023-2024 Annual Fiscal Plan for the City, the Mayor states, “The FY 2024 local contribution to RPS, $221,460,106, is $69,921,277 more than the FY 2017 funding level and represents a 46.1 percent increase in RPS funding during my tenure as Mayor. To put it another way, the local contribution has increased almost 50% in just seven years.” All of this is true, but data, when not contextualized, is often convenient and used to promote a narrative. As many on Twitter were quick to point out, the Mayor and City Council missed fully funding Superintendent Jason Kamras’s and the Richmond School Board’s proposed budget for FY24 by $7 million, despite a surplus in revenue amounting to $35 million in 2022, of which $18 million was given to property owners as a real estate tax refund. For FY24, the City of Richmond allocated 23.3% of all general fund expenditures to Richmond Public Schools. Compared to neighboring counties, Richmond underperforms when it comes to prioritizing school funding with Henrico county allocating 56.2% of their general fund to education, and Chesterfield County allocated 39.3% to schools. Now, one might see these figures and think; well, aren’t the counties much wealthier in terms of available tax revenue and have lower percentages of residents living in poverty? Both are true. Richmond’s poverty rate is nearly 20%, and both the counties are approximately 7% according to the most recent US Census. Further, histories of anti-Black redlining and other exclusionary housing practices across the Commonwealth have led to decreased property value, which in turn led to less property tax revenue for schools in those localities. On top of that, the local composite index, which is the formula Virginia uses to calculate a locality's ability to pay for school funding based on available property value and student population, fails to reflect student need. That means the formula ignores the barriers and realities that students from low-income households face in their communities, such as inadequate and unstable housing, transportation access issues, lack of technology access, lack of healthcare, food insecurity, and environmental hazards. As the education workers that care for and teach our students daily, we recognize the connection between our students’ struggles in school and the factors and conditions outside the school building that accompany them to school.
So what if we compared Richmond’s budget to other Virginia cities with demographics comparable to Richmond? Norfolk, Virginia is very similar in population to Richmond, has a poverty rate of 17.4%, and for FY24 allocated 37.6% of general funds to their schools. Petersburg, Virginia which has a population of approximately 33,000 residents, about a sixth of Richmond’s population, has a poverty rate of 21.3%, and spends a mere 14.7% of their FY24 budget on schools. Richmond, Petersburg, and Norfolk are also majority Black cities, or near majority, with Black/African American residents making up 45.2%, 76.5%, and 40.7% respectively. The metro Richmond counties of Henrico and Chesterfield have a majority of white residents. What’s even further telling is the way race and class not only correlate to schools being less of a budget priority than they are in wealthier districts, but also the correlation to police budgets and per resident funding on police. Of the five Virginia localities mentioned, Richmond spends the most per resident on police, by a lot. At about $490 per resident for the FY24 budget, Richmond spends considerably more to police their residents than Henrico, Chesterfield, Petersburg, and Norfolk. The second highest goes to Norfolk, which will spend approximately $355 per resident for FY24 and the least goes to Chesterfield at approximately $233 per resident
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A budget is a reflection of our priorities. And it appears for the Mayor the priority is to police the residents of Richmond, rather than put our children first. The Mayor’s history with the Richmond Police Department (RPD) is also telling. On June 1, 2020, when Richmond and the rest of the country were in the midst of the largest protest movement in U.S. history after the police murder of George Floyd, Richmond Police illegally teargassed peaceful protesters well before curfew. The next day Mayor Stoney and the police chief met an angry crowd outside of City Hall. Initially, police and the Mayor stood by the use of teargas, then later admitted error. A few weeks later, Stoney was caught on camera saying he saw nothing criminal about an RPD officer driving his vehicle into a crowd of protesters. Years passed, and the protesters’ calls for divesting from police and investing in communities were redirected into removing the Lost Cause Confederate monuments from Monument Avenue, which Mayor Stoney got to reclaim in a New York Times essay, and a civilian review board of police misconduct that is Mayor and City Council appointed and without subpoena power.
Fast forward to July 2022. RPD was forced to redact tweets and release video evidence as part of a $1.6 million settlement with protesters stemming from the June 1, 2020 teargassing response by police. What happened next is either an incredible coincidence or timing that is clearly too good to be true. On July 6, 2022, which was the same day it was announced that RPD would be forced to release body camera footage and other evidence related to the lawsuit and June 2020 protest, Mayor Stoney and then Richmond Police Chief Gerald Smith held a press conference to announce and answer questions about an alleged mass shooting plot of the Dogwood Dell Amphitheater on July 4, 2022. Almost immediately, questions and inconsistencies about the mass shooting plot arose. And that skepticism many of us shared about the Mayor and police chief’s claiming to have stopped a mass shooting proved accurate; the men arrested for the alleged plot were only charged with weapons violations related to their immigration status. When the judge asked the commonwealth’s attorney in court if there was evidence of a mass shooting plot on Dogwood Dell on July 4, 2022, the prosecution answered with a simple, “No”. Later that fall, Police Chief Gerald Smith resigned abruptly with many questions about the alleged mass shooting plot lingering. Yet Mayor Stoney walked away from the alleged mass shooting controversy relatively unscathed, going on to finally see City Council approve the Diamond District project after the referendum failure of the One Casino initiative and the Navy Hill redevelopment deal.
“Learning Loss,” or “Education Debt”
If we return to the Mayor’s tweet again, it must be contextualized in the ongoing underfunding and mismanagement of school districts like RPS and the conditions of poverty and systemic racism that allow the underfunding to occur. It’s also a red herring in that it suggests that the solution to decades of underfunding RPS, alongside the many inequities related to systemic racism that affect daily life for our students such as housing, violence, and food access, could all be undone if RPS just switched over to year round school or extended the school day. Now, one might think, wasn’t Stoney talking about the learning loss from the time-off during the Covid-19 pandemic? What does systemic racism and RPS funding issues have to do with it? The answer is everything. Students around the country experienced interruptions to their schooling (learning loss) during the pandemic. However, the effects of the pandemic from job loss, exposure, hospitalization rates, and death disproportionately affected and continues to affect Black and Brown people. Solutions like extended calendars and or longer school days could have a positive impact for our students, if and only if that extra time is used meaningfully; if teachers, staff, students, and parents buy into the extended time, and if schools are staffed and resourced adequately to begin with. REA’s national affiliate union, the National Education Association, points out that the results of an extended day, in particular, are mixed. Locally, Chesterfield county came close to ending a year round pilot in two elementary schools, but opted to give it one more year, with WRIC reporting, “While students in the year-round program did display small improvements in reading compared to their peers, math scores remained relatively unchanged, and the report highlighted anemic participation in intersessions.” It’s also worth noting that despite one School Board member’s comments in the Propublica story, the REA never publicly took a position on a year-round calendar nor a 200-day calendar. Ultimately, once the School Board requested a traditional calendar option be added to the surveys for staff and families, the RPS community overwhelmingly supported a traditional school year calendar, and that is what the RPS administration recommended in January 2022 for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years. There’s a lesson here that perhaps the Mayor and others are missing; solutions to the inequitable conditions that plague our schools must come from the families of RPS, our students, and the staff that teach and love them everyday. We know our schools best, we know what we need, and we are more supportive of changes that are made with us, not for us. It is also worth noting that both the RPS administration and the School Board could have had the opportunity to make decisions and changes with RPS workers directly via collective bargaining negotiations, but the School Board chose to limit the scope of bargaining for the first contract in the resolution passed in December 2021. Although the CB resolution allowed RPS to choose two topics of their own, RPS selected the same topics as the union. Rather than seize the opportunity to use collective bargaining to improve worker conditions, stop the teacher retention exodus, and fold in more basic humanitarian supports for our students and staff, RPS chose to maintain the status quo by leaning into a narrow iteration of bargaining
A Plan for RPS that’s Actually Bold
The Mayor in his tweets accused the REA of not being “bold,” so what would a bold plan for our schools actually look like? A bold plan to change academic, social-emotional, and psychological outcomes for our students would start at the root of our students’ struggles: housing insecurity, homelessness, de-resourced schools, and a philosophy that prioritizes the needs of standardized test peddlers and canned curriculum publishers over meeting our students where they are. A bold vision would implement a Housing First program and would build the homeless shelter that was promised. It is near impossible for students who experience housing insecurity and homelessness to be able to focus on their academic work. And of course there’s the elephant in the room - our schools are not fully staffed. Our schools are not fully staffed because compensation is not adequate to compete with the market; physical conditions like mold and pests are driving teachers and their colleagues out; and the climate and culture of some schools, coupled with a deprioritization of teachers’ lived experience, is deeply demoralizing. Changing the length of the school year will do nothing to help RPS students who walk into classrooms to find no licensed teacher in sight. RPS education workers would like to work collaboratively, authentically, with the Mayor, City Council, and the School Board, but most importantly, our community, to fix all of these issues. Richmond students deserve quality education. If the Mayor is serious about changing RPS for the better, he must start at the root of the problem. These issues and their recommendations, as mentioned on our previous blog post, would be a good starting point:
Funding and staffing a behavior specialist in every RPS school that is trained in best practices for restorative justice and coordinates the training of staff and implementation of a school-wide, holistic restorative justice program. Additionally, RPS should staff school social workers, school psychologists, and school counselors at the ratio prescribed by their respective professional associations. That means a school social worker for every 50-250 students depending on student need, a psychologist for every 500 students, and a counselor for every 250 students.
Implementing Group Violence Intervention (GVI) programming throughout Richmond, which is a research-based program, grounded in community, that finds the small percentage of people in our community that are responsible for the majority of gun violence and provides them with the support they need to leave a life of violence. Richmonders Involved to Strengthen our Communities, or RISC, has been championing this approach for years, only to have the Mayor continue to ignore this evidenced-based approach. GVI programming can also ally closely with local hospitals and healthcare systems, such as through Bridging the Gap and similar evidence-based programs which increase connections between survivors of community violence and community resources by supporting injured patients while they are in the hospital. Youth-specific programs must be fully funded and expanded to reach more RPS students and their families.
Addressing the root causes of poverty that lead to our community members feeling dehumanized and alienated. In particular, safe, quality, and affordable housing continues to be inaccessible to many families in Richmond. To address the housing crisis, Richmond and the Virginia General Assembly should do the following:
Fund legal representation for tenants in eviction hearings.
Ensure one-to-one replacement of public housing.
Create a citywide registration system of all rental units that landlords are required to register their properties with.
Implement a strong, tenant-centered Rental Inspection Program. Richmond City Council has passed the start of such a program, but it needs adequate funding and accountability mechanisms if it is to truly help tenants secure safe and decent homes.
Require all new economic development programs to intentionally include low-income and affordable housing that will adequately address the needs of our city.
Fully fund, build, staff, and include an itemized budget for a 24-hour permanent shelter for the unhoused.
4. Creating honest, twenty-first century curricula that is culturally-relevant and student-centered in all RPS schools. This includes education on climate change and courses in People’s History that center the struggles of Black, Latinx, Asian-Pacific Islander, Native American, LGBTQ+, disabled, women, poor, and all working-class people. This requires allowing students to chart their own course for their future with internships, paid jobs and job skills training, divestment from standardized testing, and restoring autonomy to teachers in their classrooms.
5. Creating connectedness in our schools with the food justice and food sovereignty movements by partnering with local organizations such as community gardens and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) farmers to provide representation and culturally-responsive teaching when teaching the student population about healthier food options and the history of food inequity.
6. Building a system of community-centered healthcare that actively works to challenge and correct decades of medical racism and unequal access to healthcare. Every person and family deserves proactive, easily-accessible healthcare delivered by providers that are competent, trustworthy, committed to anti-racist medical practice, and deeply-rooted members of the Richmond community. RPS can take the lead in part of this effort by building opportunities for RPS students to envision themselves as part of a system of care, including by promoting shadowing, bringing in guest speakers, and building pipelines for students to establish themselves as nurses, doctors, and allied health providers. RPS must also increase resources and referral pathways for students and their families to access healthcare, including mental healthcare, in a timely, affordable, and just manner.
7. Calling on the RPS School Board, Richmond City Council and the Mayor of Richmond to create a true needs-based budget for our school system. As it stands, RPS has never been fully funded to meet the needs of our students. We urge all community members to join with teachers and community leaders in demanding a needs-based budget from RPS, the City of Richmond, and Richmond City Council.