An Action Program of the Richmond Education Association (REA) Adopted by the REA Rep Assembly on February 10, 2025
Introduction
During the 2022-2023 school year, members of the Richmond Education Association (REA) successfully negotiated Richmond Public Schools’ (RPS) first union contracts in nearly 50 years. With the implementation of those contracts taking effect for the 2023-2024 school year, and new bargaining units such as school-based office associates and central office staff working to negotiate their first contracts, we have no doubt that this collective working agreement heralds a new day for Richmond Public Schools. Education workers are asserting our collective power to win dignity, respect, and autonomy on the job.
At the same time, we have seen countless rank-and-file RPS workers, parents, students, and community members speak out, organize, and strive to defend and transform our public schools. These fights to protect public education in Virginia and to win dignity for all RPS workers are inseparable. It will take the entire city, from parents to REA members, to win the schools our students need and deserve. This program seeks to unify our community with a shared vision for our schools along with actionable demands and goals that can unite us to struggle for the schools Richmond students deserve.
It is our belief that there are numerous outstanding injustices and inequalities in RPS, which our movement must fight to change. It is in this spirit that we have written and adopted the following program, The Schools Richmond Students Deserve. It is our hope that it will serve as a framework for our movement’s work, helping to determine which issues should be the focus of our collective energies.
Richmond is a city of contradictions. On the one hand, the racist legacy of the plantation continues to cast its ominous and oppressive shadow over our city. Richmond residents continue to battle evictions, housing inequality, de facto school segregation, gentrification, low-wage employment, unemployment, police violence, mass incarceration, anti-immigrant legislation and policies, environmental racism, and the ongoing ramifications of an economic system that benefits the rich at the expense of working class communities.
On the other hand, there is the living potential for Richmond to lead the way with a “Third Reconstruction”. We draw inspiration from the legacies of empowering the multiracial and multinational working class first during the Reconstruction Era of 1865-1877, and second during the Civil Rights Movement, which many historians refer to as the Second Reconstruction Era. Building upon these historical achievements, we believe that a Third Reconstruction could propel the city of Richmond forward as a beacon of social progress, democracy, equality, and justice. While not wholly sufficient to transform our city, the cornerstone of this project must be the renewal of RPS. We also recognize that much like during the Civil Rights Movement, it will take a well-organized, disciplined, and strategic movement, made up of the multi-racial working class, to fight for and win the schools our students deserve here in Richmond.
A Note on the Organization of this Program
For teachers, the phrase “Maslow before Bloom” is probably familiar. For our readers who aren’t teachers, we want to offer our rationale for the sequencing of this program. Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist most known in educational circles for publishing “A Theory of Human Motivation” in 1943. In this article, Maslow theorized a “hierarchy of needs.” The needs for human development, according to Maslow, are ordered as levels on a pyramid. Starting with basic physiological needs such as clean air, food, water, and shelter at the base of the pyramid, followed by safety and health, love and belonging, self-esteem, and lastly, self-actualization at the top. The underlying concept of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid is the idea that in order to realize our full potential as humans, we must first have our most basic survival needs met, we must feel safe and healthy, feel loved and connected, and feel pride and confidence in ourselves–in that order.
It is also important to recognize that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was inspired by the worldview and traditions of the Indigenous Siksika or “Blackfoot” Nation who followed a traditional worldview that conceptualized self-actualization as a gift realized through the sacred acts of “education, prayer, rituals, ceremonies, individual experiences, and vision quests” (Ravilochan 2021). Since Maslow lived and learned from the Siksika people, he appropriated and modified this concept to fit into a Western capitalist worldview and way of life that perpetuates individualism, failing to recognize that the social relations of exploitation, oppression, and alienation are often the root cause preventing human self-realization on a broad scale. As a result, Maslow’s hierarchy omits a key concept that the Siksika people recognize – and which is encapsulated in the Indigenous Lakota saying Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, or “All our relations” – which is that the satisfaction of people’s individual needs are the responsibility of a community.
Benjamin Bloom was an American educational psychologist that is most well known in education circles for “Bloom’s Taxonomy,” which is a classification of ways of learning that indicate the level of complexity and specificity of a student’s understanding and mastery. By emphasizing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs over Bloom’s taxonomy in this program, we affirm that our students deserve a school experience that prioritizes their physical, mental, social, and emotional needs and well-being first, deemphasizes testing and incessant data collection, and empowers students to become the self-reliant and self-determined people our future so desperately needs.
I. Basic Needs at School
In order to truly address the most basic physiological needs of students and staff, we must articulate that RPS bears the impacts and perpetuation of institutionalized racism and poverty. Inequity is most harshly felt when it comes to accessing our most basic needs including decent food, water, housing, and rest.
Food & Water
The quality of the food RPS serves its students has long been a source of debate. During the 2021-22 school year, RPS came under scrutiny for the quality of the prepackaged, frozen food for students.
An RPS teacher explained:
My school assigned teachers to keep students in class during lunch time as a covid-related mitigation. Students were being given one main food option which were cold sandwiches almost daily. Sometimes the sandwiches were frozen and completely inedible. Students consistently complained to me how hungry they were. I got to the point where I started bringing my own meals, drinks, and fruits to share with my class during their lunch time. I was later reprimanded by an administrator for allowing students to use the microwave that I brought for students to heat up the meals that I would bring for them as well as the meals that they would bring from home. I was told to stop allowing students to use my microwave, and that I would have to remove it. During a staff meeting, several teachers requested that the school provide microwaves in the cafeteria for student use; although administration agreed that microwaves should be and would be provided for students, they were never installed.
Considering nearly 67% of RPS students were considered “economically disadvantaged” at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, and given the many neighborhoods without access to grocery stores and fresh food in the Richmond community where our students live, it is paramount that the food our students are served at school is nutritious and of the highest quality. Our food should also be inclusive of the cultural and religious backgrounds of our students, with kosher and halal options as one example. Further, our students deserve to be the ones leading the conversation on what they want to eat. To that end, our students deserve the following when it comes to what they eat and drink in school:
1. Student taste tests of vendors before any food vendor contract is chosen. It is equally important the caloric values of food we serve our students meets the basic caloric intake for children of that age. We should also aim to allow our School Nutrition Staff (SNS) to cook more, and reheat prepacked, processed and frozen food less.
2. Maintenance of water fountains is a must to allow students access to water. REA members have reported cockroach infestations of water fountains of some schools, or expired and unclean filters.
3. If some students, high school students in particular, are being allowed to obtain food from outside such as fast food, then this should be allowed for all high schools across the district. There is inequity present between the treatment of students who attend specialty schools such as Open High School and students who attend non-specialty schools such as Huguenot.
4. Stock vending machines with choices based on student input or allow students to run a snack counter at appropriate times such as before classes begin and during lunch time, available at a reduced rate.
5. Partnering with local organizations such as community gardens and BIPOC farmers to provide access to healthy locally grown food and culturally responsive teaching healthier food options and the history of food inequity.
6. All students should have two snacks in addition to breakfast and lunch. Teachers should not feel compelled to fund-raise, crowd-source. The amount of food is not adequate to the caloric needs of many of our students. For this reason, it is imperative that school food portions are sufficient to meet the developmental dietary needs of our students, meaning adolescents in high school need more food than our preschoolers. Additionally, students need adequate time to eat, a minimum of 30 minutes daily, which is covered in Section III of this program.
7. Access to vegetarian, Halal, Kosher, Gluten Free and Dairy free options to meet the diverse religious and dietary needs of our students.
8. Access to supplies such as hygiene products, soap and other basic necessities at school so that staff aren’t crowdfunding these nor begging for donations. These supplies should be readily accessible without bureaucracy when there is a student in need.
Housing
Although not specifically a component of our schools, there are many parallels between the current conditions of our schools and the quality and quantity of housing our students and their families have access to. Richmond is shamefully the eviction capital of Virginia and has the second highest eviction rate in the country. The impact of evictions on student wellbeing and development cannot be understated. Our school board and district administration have little if no control over Richmond’s housing policy. However, as a community and with the support and power of our union, the Richmond Education Association, we must fight for access to decent, quality, sustainable housing for our students as fervently as we fight for their education. Lack of quality affordable housing, coupled with evictions, creates instability in our community that leads to violence. A Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) study found that there is a direct correlation between commercial landlord negligence and increased violence in those neighborhoods.
We call on the Richmond City Council, Richmond Mayor and General Assembly to do everything in their power to stabilize housing in Richmond, including:
1. Fund down payment assistance for RPS and City employees to ensure that those who work in the city can afford to buy a home in the city, thus, and to encourage these newly recruited teachers to stay.
2. Fund legal representation for tenants in eviction hearings and housing disputes. 3. Ensure one to one replacement of public housing.
4. Create a citywide registration system of all rental units that landlords are required to register their properties with.
5. Implement the Residential Rental Inspection Program, which has been championed by the Richmond Chapter of Virginia Organizing, with enforcement mechanisms to hold landlords accountable, while investing and uplifting parts of our community that have historically been under-invested in.
6. Require all new economic development programs to intentionally include low-income and affordable housing that will adequately address the needs of our city.
7. Fully fund, build, staff, and include an itemized budget for a 24-hour permanent shelter for the unhoused, including families with children.
8. Enact rent stabilization legislation to keep local people in their homes.
II. Safe at School
A school building and the quality of our students’ time inside it are the first and most important indicator of our students’ safety at school. Our students deserve to be safe at school and that includes a physical building that is physically safe and healthy, as well as meaningful restorative justice practices that prioritize mental health and not the criminalization of our students.
Our students deserve clean, safe, spacious, comfortable high quality school facilities, but the conditions many of our students learn in are unacceptable. Currently, RPS suffers from both dilapidated aging facilities that are in need of replacement or renovation, as well as newer facilities that are not the best use of materials and funding. In order to make sure every student attends a school that is physically safe for them, we will discuss the issues with RPS school facilities, both old and new construction.
New Construction: River City Middle School
Opened for the first time at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, River City Middle School started the year off near capacity with over 1,500 students. This presented physical safety issues in the building relating to overcrowding and congested hallways. The overcrowding, coupled with student mental health needs following the Covid-19 Pandemic, led to many fights and other incidents of physical violence within the school building. To alleviate the overcrowding, the school board voted to rezone River City Middle School after just one year, leading to further instability for students and families. Make no mistake, River City needed to be rezoned. The consequences of poorly planned and managed new school construction such as River City is measurable. According to RPS’ own survey data, only 26% of teachers reported feeling safe at River City during the 2021-22 school year, compared to the district average of 56%.
Our students deserve schools that are planned in a manner that accurately projects student enrollment sustainability. One teacher explained the daily effects of poorly planned school design:
River City Middle School was based on a much smaller school. The design team added extra classrooms to fit all the students from Elkhart-Thompson, two schools that were merged together. They did not add extra bathrooms for teachers or students. Each grade-level wing included over 20 educators and a single bathroom. 500 students shared twelve bathroom stalls. The stairways weren’t designed to accommodate the larger student population and were a safety hazard during transitions or fire drills. Overcrowding and a lack of planning led to many teachers sharing classrooms and for minimal teacher work areas. Rather than save money by merging schools, the City of Richmond should have constructed two smaller schools. The original design that River City Middle School was based on would have better accommodated the populations from Elkhart and Thompson separately. Ultimately, teachers, students, and families need to be at the table during the planning and design process for our schools.
While River City was constructed by the City of Richmond, school construction going forward in Richmond will be under the control of the school board, due to the 2021 Schools Build Schools Resolution. In the transition to school board control of school construction, it is important we learn from past school construction to avoid such errors in future projects.
The City of Richmond awarded contracts under a method called construction manager at-risk, which allowed Richmond to expedite the award process in an effort to speed construction. The Virginia Contractor Procurement Alliance warned the city that the method would increase the cost and an audit confirmed their findings. The construction management company, AECOM, did not complete the schools in time. Unsurprisingly, AECOM also donated $10,000 total to Mayor Levar Stoney’s reelection campaign and failed One Richmond Casino project. River City Middle School did not have a certificate of occupancy when Mayor Levar Stoney turned the keys over to Superintendent Jason Kamras in summer 2020, meaning that the building was not officially finished, nor were Henry Marsh Elementary and Cardinal Elementary. Further, during the 2023-2024 school year, REA leadership received reports and photographs from members who work at River City showing water stained ceiling tiles inside the three year old building, as well as issues with excessive water temperatures in student bathrooms. All of this demonstrates the need for more oversight, transparency, maintenance, and school community buy-in when we construct new schools.
Revitalizing Existing RPS Buildings
Air quality, environmental contaminants, and fire safety issues within our school buildings are of concern in many RPS schools. Students and staff deserve clean air at school free from chemical pollutants like asbestos from deteriorating buildings and up to date fire safety protections. The lack of clean air can and has led to health problems for students and staff, especially those with preexisting health conditions. Not to mention, two RPS facilities, William Fox Elementary and a bus depot burned down in recent years, and yet RPS still began the 2023-2024 school year with many fire safety violations.
In light of the fire safety issues, excessive temperatures, and the presence of visible mold in several schools at the beginning of 2023-2024 school year, REA members, RPS staff, families and community members organized and rallied for safe schools. Our demand was for the School Board to adopt resolutions written by REA members that would establish safe operating standards as it relates to fire safety and air quality, as well as mechanisms for repairing issues and reporting issues to school communities. While the School Board ultimately did not adopt these resolutions, our collective actions led RPS to create procedures for reporting mold and fire safety issues and allow school administrators to request air quality testing, which 24 schools did complete and 22 were found to have visible mold. It also showed the presence of asbestos at several schools including Elizabeth Redd Elementary. The testing reveals what REA members and our community have been saying all along; our buildings have not been maintained and pose health risks to staff and students in them.
When it comes to safe and healthy school facilities Richmond students deserve so much better. We can start by establishing the following;
1. Educators, students, and families need to be at the table during the planning and design process during school construction that goes beyond tokenism. All too often, so-called advisory councils of teachers, parents and students are used as a way to justify decisions, without giving any real decision making power to teachers, parents and students. Before any designs are created, an initial assessment of school needs done by teachers, school staff, students and families should guide the design process.
2. RPS buildings need up to date entry systems. This includes keys to every classroom, card entry from the exterior of buildings and relevant keys for wings of the building where staff are required to work.
3. RPS should maintain a public record of facility repair requests and district responses. 4. The School Board should adopt board policies establishing safe workplace conditions that include specific criteria around maximum and minimum indoor temperature criteria and air quality standards and establish a process for relocating staff and students from rooms or buildings where conditions are deemed to be unsafe or unhealthy or when staff or students have medical conditions that are worsened by the conditions in their building. 5. Divestment from fossil fuels. RPS should continue to invest in solar energy, and apply to the EPA Clean School Bus program.
6. New school construction, as well as development projects that the City of Richmond approves should use project labor agreements, so that new construction and development benefits both students and community, but also the workers doing the building.
Restorative Justice
In July 2020, after a summer of protests across the U.S., including many in Richmond, Superintendent Kamras recommended that School Resource Officers (SROs) should be removed from our school buildings. This recommendation came after a student panel weighed in on the presence of SROs in their schools and how for Black and Latinx students, their presence left them feeling criminalized, not safe. Ultimately, time passed and the school board did not vote to remove SROs. Instead, further training on trauma-informed practices Care and Safety Associates (CSAs) was implemented, as well as administrative training on when to involve SROs in school incidents.
Richmond students deserve to be safe at school, and this includes safe from police brutality and safe from criminalization. We affirm that Richmond students deserve schools that don’t need police in order for students to feel and be safe. In order to create the conditions in which students are able nurture and grow the interpersonal and self-regulatory skills that lower the rate of violence amongst students, our students deserve better access to mental health support in school. Further, our students deserve to not feel that they are seen as criminals in school.
Inevitably, threats to student safety from within and outside of the school community are a real concern for many. Tragically, during the 2022-2023 school year, two shootings occurred in RPS; one on the grounds of George Wythe High School, now Richmond High School for the Arts, and another outside the Huguenot High School graduation, which resulted in the death of Huguenot High School graduate Shawn Jackson and his step-father, Renzo Smith. In response to these shootings as well as other instances of weapons found in RPS buildings, the School Board voted to add metal detectors to all RPS middle schools, in addition to the high schools, which already had them. Metal detectors and increased police presence in schools does not get to the root of the community violence that is plaguing our city.
Our students deserve schools that respond to their behavior as a symptom of unresolved stress and trauma. To that end, our students deserve real restorative justice practices in school and alternatives to suspension that resolve conflict. It is important that whatever restorative program that is developed be one that is implemented holistically throughout entire schools, changing the way adults, as well as children, relate and communicate with each other. RPS should look to the Unitive Justice framework being implemented in Hopewell, Virginia as a model. This is especially relevant when the most recent data on the RPS Administration’s own strategic plan shows that suspension rates have not changed from 2019-2020 until now. Our students also deserve the attention and support of staff members that have the time, training, and the space to do such.
In order to make sure every student in Richmond feels safe in their school, we must:
1. Provide adequate mental health support by meeting professional recommendations of ratios for school social workers, school psychologists, and school guidance counselors.
a. Currently the VDOE recommends one school social worker for every 1,000 students, yet the National Association of Social Workers recommends a ratio of 1:250 to 1:50 depending on the intensity of student needs.
b. For school psychologists, the National Association of School Psychologists recommends a ratio of 1:500, but the VDOE lists 1:1000.
c. And for guidance counselors, a similar trend emerges with the VDOE recommendation of 1:450 and the American School Counselors’ Association’s recommendation of 1:250, which is especially important given that school counselors are increasingly tasked with not counseling duties such as scheduling and clerical work.
2. Allow for our students to receive adequate counseling and mental health support as needed, school counselors should be able to spend at least 80% of their work day in direct counseling with students. Although this is enshrined in the Virginia Code, a clear and protected system should be made accessible to staff to report violations of this policy without fear of retribution.
3. Begin a justice-oriented culture shift in schools by developing restorative practices for all members of a school community to use that change the way all relate to one another, including adults. Train staff and administrators to relate and resolve conflict between one another in ways rooted in restorative justice. Hire a behavioral specialist in every school that is trained in the true restorative practices to address student conflicts. The behavior specialist would then plan and implement a long term restorative justice approach within the school, including planning staff training and facilitating restorative circles for student behavior issues.
4. Create a plan to phase out the presence of SROs in our schools, which will be increasingly more feasible as we invest more in student mental well-being conflict resolution, rather than criminalization and punitive measures.
5. Implement Group Violence Intervention (GVI) in the City of Richmond, as members of Richmonders Involved to Strengthen Our Communities (RISC) has been calling for for years.
6. End the searches of our students via wanding and metal detectors if that is the will of the staff, students and parents at a particular school; see the model for inclusive school leadership in Section V of this program.
7. Return to printing for families and educating them in the form of public meetings about the Student Code of Responsible Ethics (SCORE) as a district-wide disciplinary policy so that all RPS students receive equal treatment in disciplinary matters. In addition, SCORE should be accompanied with the Student-Parent-Caregiver Bill of Rights, which was created by the Richmond Chapter of Virginia Organizing and adopted by the School Board in 2022, but has not been widely circulated to families.
8. Implement yearly system-wide professional development around trauma-informed care and instruction, and adverse childhood experiences for all staff including: Nutrition workers, teachers, nurses, counselors, admin, CSA’s, SRO’s and all individuals who come into contact with our students. This training should be collaborative, engaging and lead by RPS staff, not private companies.
III. Belonging and Love at School
A feeling of belonging and love should be the experience of every student in every school in Richmond. Our students deserve to learn about things that interest them and to learn from educators that know and love them and their communities, including those that come from their communities. Unfortunately, those teachers and staff that love our students are leaving the district and the education profession at an alarming rate. In order to ensure that our students continue to have the committed, caring, and qualified teachers they deserve, we must retain our committed, caring, and qualified staff.
In Defense of Public Education
There are two opposing viewpoints as to how to move forward with public education. However, there is little up for debate in how we got to this point, especially in Richmond. Years of austerity measures at the state level following the 2008 recession, worsening wealth disparities that further isolate poor communities from resources that alleviate poverty, and the legacy of both Jim Crow and slavery that manifests itself in our institutions today, all compound to create the conditions in our community and school district. We only need to look at recent reporting on the effects of environmental racism via access tree cover in Richmond or the complicated history of our state funding formula, the local composite index, (LCI) to see the impact of such legacies and policies.
On top of the systemic inequity that is wrapped up in the LCI, localities like Richmond that have many state owned buildings lose out on the lost property tax revenue from those buildings. This has multiple ramifications for school funding. According to the state’s LCI funding formula, all the state owned property in downtown Richmond that is a part of the state government infrastructure, as well as all of the land and properties owned by VCU, are all accounted for as potential property tax revenue that Richmond should be able to collect and use for school funding. However, most state-owned property is exempt from property taxes. This leads to the state over estimating what the local government should be able to fund, and the state under funding its own portion of RPS’ budget. Currently, in nearby Durham, North Carolina, the city council is debating whether to force Duke University to pay their fair share back to Durham via a payment in lieu of taxes program, or PILOT.
When it comes to how we address these systemic conditions in our schools, that’s where there are differing views: reform an irreparable education system with privatization measures that give public funds to private companies, or defend public education by funding it like the cornerstone of democracy that we often consider it to be. We choose the latter. Richmond students deserve schools that are run, staffed and funded in order to alleviate the conditions of an inequitable society. We often say that schools are tasked with solving all of society’s problems. If that’s the case, it’s time we started running and funding them in a way that allows them to complete the work they are tasked with.
Privatization of public education comes in many forms and severities, but all forms seek to automate, deskill, outsource, and monetize the work of educating students. The reasons for privatization are complex, ranging from lack of faith in the ability to fix systemic issues, financial gain, or political pressure. However, all these factors continue to push educators out of the profession, shift public funding away from the community, and neglect to acknowledge and remedy root causes of inequity in our schools.
Addressing Our Teacher Retention Crisis
During the 2021-2022 school year 552 RPS teachers resigned during or after the school year, compared to 406 the year prior. Over the past several years, RPS teacher retention hasn’t changed much, with a 77% retention rate in 2018-2019, 76% for 2021-2022. The exodus of teachers and the shortage we face going forward is not unique to Richmond. Across the country, we see states lowering the requirements to become an educator. However, the way we as a city understand and respond to the ongoing crisis facing public education will be key to the restoration of our school system.
For too long, RPS staff have reported incidents of reprimand and retaliation for calling attention to policy violations and student and staff mistreatment, causing more staff to leave RPS. In 2022, Language Instruction Education Programs teachers (LIEP, formerly ESL) spoke out about retaliation and other abuses of power in their own department, which, in part, led to the formation of the EL and Latino Student Task Force. During the 2023-2024 school year, REA members continued to contact their union staff and leadership regarding toxic work environments stemming from retaliatory building principals. REA filed multiple grievances and complaints with RPS regarding these issues, and even formed an ad hoc committee of REA members to brainstorm strategies and solutions to change the culture in so many of our schools form one that is top-down and tyrannical to one that is collaborative, honest, and reflective.
At the same time, every year RPS loses caring and qualified school leaders and potential leaders who are looked over for principalships or other leadership positions and outsiders to RPS are hired instead. Why new talent is still needed, if a school community overwhelmingly supports a current staff member for a leadership position in that school site, those voices should take precedent over other high up administrators working out of Central Office. To date, principal directors, academic chiefs and the superintendent typically hire and fire school leaders.
Our students deserve teachers and staff that stay. If we are to retain our staff in the short term, we must start with the following:
1. Implement a fair transfer policy based on volunteers first and seniority when transfers are necessary due to student enrollment. Don’t use transfer as a retaliation tactic to transfer teachers that don’t want to be transferred and are performing well when their current position continues to be needed in their assigned work location. We simply have too many vacancies to do otherwise.
2. Guarantee lunch. All full-time staff need at least 30 consecutive minutes of uninterrupted, unencumbered lunch- time every day. Additionally, this should apply to students, too. All students deserve at least 30 minutes of lunch time as a social and mental break.
3. Increase planning time for elementary and preschool teachers. The first CBA for licensed personnel made gains to protect planning time for all teachers, but with the state minimum for elementary teachers still only 30 minutes per day, RPS must do more to increase elementary and preschool planning time. Elementary and preschool teachers are skills professionals just like secondary teachers, who teach multiple content areas each day and need just as much time to prepare instruction as secondary teachers.
4. Guarantee joint planning for LIEP and SPED teachers with their collaborative co-teachers for content areas. Additionally, RPS should create separate roles for LIEP and SPED case managers so that LIEP and SPED teachers’ primary focus is instruction and student learning.
5. Issue continuing contracts to all RPS support staff once they’ve completed a probationary period. This gives them protections if they’re unfairly terminated and makes RPS an enticing and competitive employer.
6. Audit complaints and grievances filed. This should include a school-by-school audit of the types of grievances filed, where they are filed, and whom they are filed against. The findings of this audit should be used to evaluate policies and the performance of administrative and supervisory personnel.
7. End excessive walkthrough observations where two or more administrators and specialists enter and observe one classroom together. Further, every teacher should also receive constructive and objective feedback from every observation within 48 hours of observation.
8. Complete an immediate audit with participant feedback of new and early career teacher support. This includes the New Teacher Program, mentorship programs, as well as coaching support and training. Too many of our new, and career switch teachers report receiving either inadequate support or no support at all.
9. Create components of the administrator and supervisor evaluation process to include staff feedback. REA members previously worked on a proposal to do this and would be happy to pick that process back up.
10. Allow for democratic and representative school panels of students, parents, teachers and staff to interview and hire school principals.
In the long term, we have much more work to do. We want our current staff to stay, but we also want to recruit the new and best talent and develop the type of work environment that allows teachers to master their craft and students to thrive. We can create this type of learning environment by:
1. Allowing educators maximum flexibility in their professional learning. This includes:
a. Expanding access to language classes to develop skills to be able to better communicate with multilingual families.
b. Credit for academic coursework related to their field in education.
c. RPS teacher led and created professional learning that teacher facilitators are justly paid for.
d. An end to corporate programming for professional development—after all, we have the skill and expertise to develop even stronger programs internally.
2. Establishing a task force that combines union appointed and RPS administration appointed teachers of color to oversee district-wide recruitment and retention efforts for teachers of color.
3. Passing a moratorium on future purchasing of corporate curricula for all subject areas. Instead, we should create a plan to embed frameworks from existing curricula and Virginia SOLs into our own internally developed curricula by RPS teachers and specialists. This also requires adequate pay for teachers that participate in writing and developing these curricula.
4. Deemphasizing detailed, formulaic, standardized lesson plans. Neighboring counties to Richmond do not require teachers to submit lesson plans to the degree Richmond does. By emphasizing the quality of instruction, rather than the detailedness and rigidity of lesson plans, teachers are encouraged to hone their craft and meet student needs.
5. Overhauling our New Teacher Program and Mentor Program. Currently, 40% of teachers leave in the first five years, according to Fund our Schools. This rate speaks to the inadequacy of our new teacher and mentorship programs. Further, collaborating teachers report discrepancies in the training and compensation they receive for serving in these roles.
6. Developing and implementing a system of peer coaching and evaluation. In doing so, highly trained teacher-coaches would serve as teacher- coaches and ultimately evaluators, using a robust, growth focused rubric that is helpful and nonpunitive to teachers.
7.Emphasizing quality over quantity in instructional time. RPS students are currently in school approximately 130 hours beyond the required VDOE minimum of 990 hours, and the extra time isn’t delivering academic benefits by way of test scores. Instead, RPS students deserve more unstructured break time, full thirty minute lunches, and a reasonably long academic day with the option for high quality after-school programming.
8.Ending hierarchical school management and bureaucracy. As is, RPS school management is very top-down. In order to rectify this, Central Office staff should be decentralized and work out of spaces available within our school buildings.
IV. Self Esteem and Accomplishment
In the City of Richmond, where a student lives often mirrors the conditions in their local school. De facto segregation based on class, race, and language means many RPS families live in neighborhoods and communities that are racially, linguistically, and economically similar, if not homogenous. And while autonomy and self-determination are important for our communities, each local school needs equitable access to resources to meet the diverse needs of each school’s students. In order to accomplish this, every school should be one that zoned residents want to send their students to, and all students need equitable access to specialty programs, as well as student-centered and directed future planning. In doing so, families with the means to send their students elsewhere instead invest in their local public school, and families for whom public school is their only option have access to high-quality programs for their students.
Equitable Education for All
Richmond students deserve good schools, no matter where they live in the city. There is ample data to show that standardized test scores really just correlate to economic conditions in the student’s community, not what they actually learned. In our schools, this means that schools with high concentrations of students living in poverty often have lower pass rates on standardized tests than schools with wealthier student populations. In turn, those high poverty schools face more state oversight, micromanaging, and the stripping of autonomy from school communities. Currently, for many students in Richmond, the prospect of applying and getting accepted to a specialty high school is seen as a way to escape a zoned middle or high school. This shouldn’t be the case. Every school should be a high-quality one, with unique programs and opportunities at each high school, essentially making them all specialty schools.
The demographic data for the students at two of Richmond’s most prestigious and highest performing specialty schools speaks volumes to the inequity between comprehensive high schools and specialty schools. In the fall of 2021, 62.3% of all RPS students were Black, 22.9% were Hispanic/Latinx and 10.7% were white. Yet at Open High School, 46.3% were white, 33.5% were Black and 14.4% were Hispanic/Latinx. At Richmond Community High School, representation of Black students was better, but still under representative of the district average at 58.4%, but only 9.5% of the students were Hispanic/Latinx. 26.5% of Community students were white. Given these disparities, the School Board voted in the fall of 2023 to change the specialty school admission process to be more equitable. We applaud this move as a step in the right direction, and while it should lead to more students that come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to be admitted to specialty high schools, it is imperative we continue to organize and advocate so that every RPS school is a place our students deserve to attend–where we would all be proud to send our children.
Richmond students at all levels deserve a multitude of opportunities available to them in their learning environment. In elementary, students should have access to exploratory and play-based programs that inculcate their love of learning while at the secondary level, they need agency to chart their own course and plan for their future. Richmond students deserve control over their education and input in the decisions that affect them. To ensure equity and access for all Richmond students we must:
1. Establish Future Centers in every middle school. While currently a component of our high schools, middle schoolers lack this support and it reflects in the rate of application from school to school. Since many guidance counselors are already inundated with other work outside of counseling, future planning specific counselors should be hired for each Future Center.
2. Create a detailed and measurable plan to establish an application based specialty school or program at every RPS high school. The aim here is to entice and encourage students from around the city to want to attend every RPS high school. For example, the newly renamed Richmond High School for the Arts is being rebuilt and will likely have extra seats. We should use this new construction to actually organize, fund, staff and administer a true “school of the arts” with robust programming that benefits zoned students as well as students from around Richmond that apply to attend the school of the arts.
3. Ensure AP and or IB courses are available and accessible at every high school, as well as a diverse elective choices, like foreign language and student newspapers, at all secondary schools. In elementary schools, students should have access to five different encore classes. This includes ensuring and prioritizing the hiring and retention of licensed teachers for those programs, and compensating and reimbursing teachers that pursue that licensure.
4. Guarantee time for structured and unstructured play in the elementary schedule to protect students’ developmental, social, and emotional needs and encourage their holistic growth. By asking our youngest students to learn for 5 hours a day with only one 30-minute recess break, we hinder their ability to focus and meaningfully engage with content throughout the day. Elementary schools should both create space for daily playtime for students outside of recess and develop curriculums that promote learning through play.
5. Develop and establish democratic Student Councils in every high school, and for all 8th graders. These councils should have a uniform structure across the division and have actual power such as being a part of an inclusive leadership team at a community school (see part V of this program).
V. Self-Actualization and Empowerment
Richmond students and their families deserve control over their education. To accomplish this, we must create ways for parents and caregivers to be empowered partners in their students’ education and for students to reach a sense of self-actualization via pathways and opportunities in their education. Self-actualization simply means a human-being’s, in our case our children’s, ability to reach their full potential. Additionally, our students deserve every opportunity to better understand themselves, their history, and their potential in the world.
Our students and their families deserve to have their needs met, and the formation of community schools can serve in that effort. Public schools can function as so much more than just a place of learning—they can be places of community, connection, health and healing. Such an environment is accomplished through the creation of true community schools.
In Spring 2024, Richmonders found out of a possible charter school coming to Richmond in the Battery Park neighborhood. We believe Richmonders are wise to be skeptical of such initiatives, and while the messaging of charter schools often sounds appealing, the solution we really need is to organize and fully fund true community schools, not charters.We believe that the planning, implementation and sustainability of community schools in RPS will be the cornerstone of establishing the schools Richmond students deserve. In order to accomplish this, there are key aspects and principles of community schools from models in other cities that must be centered.
Community Schools
The community school model has been implemented in other cities such as Chicago and New York City in order to establish public schools that serve as community centers. In community schools, the whole community is engaged and supported to support the whole child. Traditionally, community schools encompass these six pillars:
1. Curricula that are engaging, culturally relevant, and challenging;
2. An emphasis on high quality teaching, not high-stakes testing;
3. Wraparound supports and opportunities;
4. Positive discipline practices, such as restorative justice and social emotional learning supports;
5. Authentic parent and community engagement;
6. Inclusive school leadership.
While pillars 2 and 4 have been covered and outlined in earlier parts of this program, appropriate and engaging curricula, wraparound supports, parent and community engagement, and inclusivity in school leadership are key components of empowerment and self-actualization for both our students and their families.
Student Centered Curricula
Our students deserve schools that empower them to discover themselves and all they can be. This includes an honest teaching of our history that centers the struggles for justice as well as the joys and achievements of everyday people, not just those who had the most power. Our students also deserve diverse educational opportunities, particularly at the secondary level, that prepare them for success and stability after graduation.
We affirm our students deserve the following when it comes to control over their future:
1. A secular, scientific, rational, and democratic curricula relevant to the twenty-first century. This includes education on climate change and courses in People’s History that center the struggles, joys, and achievements of Black, Latinx, Asian, Native American, LGBTQ+, women, poor and all working-class people.
2. The opportunity for trade and job skills training and certification in partnerships with local unions. These partnerships should provide direct pathways to high paying union jobs with benefits upon graduation.
3. Training and job pathways for students (and family members) who want to pursue employment with RPS.
4. Access to high quality arts education in every school. This means fully staffed and well resourced fine arts departments in every middle and high school, and fully staffed and resourced Encore departments in elementary schools.
5. Meaningful community service; RPS students should have access to meaningful community service programs as a component of their education. These programs would foster community and provide tangible benefits to both participants and the community at large. These programs could provide services to those in need, after-school / summer programming for youth, or benefit the physical environment of the city, etc.
6. Highly skilled and certified teachers with ongoing peer training, accountability and coaching on instructional best practices, including for diverse learners such as students with disabilities and English Learners.
Wraparound Support and Opportunities
Through school-based councils, community members and parent members can identify outstanding needs of the community that affect our students. In doing so, student well-being and the fostering of the whole child is centered. Such programs depend on the needs of our students and their families, but in other localities with strong established community schools, partnerships with community groups and service providers make the community school a place where all needs are addressed. Examples of services provided include meals, healthcare, mental health support, and before and after care. It is worth noting that many of our RPS schools already provide some of these services, with mixed results and inconsistent utilization. What is specific to community schools, though, is that by involving parents, students and community members in the decision-making process through school-based councils, it is the community itself that is specifying their own needs, rather than the district administration dictating their needs for them.
Parents as Partners
The common expression, “it takes a village to raise a child,” is relevant to the role parents, families, and community play in our vision of community schools for RPS. Our families know their students better than anyone, and coupled with community knowledge and community history, there is much our students’ families and communities have to contribute to their education. This starts with knowing our families and empowering them. Schools’ relationships and outreach to parents shouldn’t be one-sided, or occasional. Our families should be consulted and included in all aspects of school planning, leadership and advocacy.
Inclusive School Leadership
In many RPS schools today, the decision making process is often very top down, with building administrators carrying out the decisions and policies of the district-wide administration. In true community schools, this dynamic is flipped. It is a school-based council of parents, students, teachers, staff, building administrators and community members that discusses needs, goals, planning and strategy of the school, and the district-wide leadership assists in allocating resources to meet these goals. While this will be a shift for how decisions are made in RPS, it isn’t far off from the calls for “school-based decision making” that many advocates and even school board members have called for. However, it will be imperative that these school-based councils are representative, democratic, and not tokenized.
In Richmond, a shift in our relationship with families from one that is advisory to one that is collaborative starts with the following:
1. Ensuring adequate language accessibility and bilingual staff are available in every school with bilingual children. This includes office staff, counselors, and interpretation services for staff. 2. Creating parent-family councils in schools where PTA/PTSO’s aren’t present, and further investing resources and funding to existing PTA’s.
3. Providing transportation for families that is well advertised for school events such as parent-teacher conferences, Back to School Night, festivals and other school events. 4. Educating parents, students and families about community schools, and beginning the process of collectively envisioning community schools that encompass the six pillars in all Title-I RPS schools.
Conclusion & Endorsements
As a community, Richmond needs a broad program of struggle to unite us as we take back our schools and rebuild them into what our students deserve.The Richmond Education Association aims for this program to serve as a foundation for organization and struggle for coalition of parents, families, students and community groups to fight for the schools our students deserve. As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand”. May this program serve as a fluid, and evolving basis of our demands.
The REA encourages all labor and community organizations who endorse this program to contact us to add your organization’s name to the Schools Richmond Students Deserve coalition.
A Note on Implementation:
The Schools Richmond Students Deserve Program is part of a larger struggle on multiple fronts. On the local level, there is the fight for more community control over schools and local policies, which are under the jurisdiction of the RPS administration, the Richmond School Board, Richmond Mayor and Richmond City Council. At the same time, many of the issues that affect the conditions in Richmond Public Schools are the result of state and national laws and policy. For example, RPS currently has a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, with the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) that puts limits on what changes RPS can make without VDOE approval.
Additionally, Richmond, like every other public school in Virginia, is required to partake in high stakes, standardized testing of its Standards of Learning or SOLs. It can not be understated the drastic effect that one-size-fits-all, high stakes, multiple choice tests have had on the education system and teaching today. Many of the issues with privatization in public schools have their origins in the implementation of Federal laws such as No Child Left Behind under the Bush administration, and Every Student Succeeds Act during the Obama Administration.
While the surface level goal of these laws was to ensure all students’ access to decent education, the result for many high poverty districts with diverse student populations is a hyper focus on test scores, which leads to the deskilling of the teaching profession and micromanaging of teacher autonomy through state and local education bureaucracy. In turn, we’ve seen the booming development of for-profit education companies such as Pearson and McGraw Hill among many, that lobby state and local governments to further siphon public funds to private companies such as for-profit charter schools, scripted corporate curricula, and outsourcing school programs and services.
To that end at the state level, we demand that the VDOE and/or General Assembly must:
1. Fully Fund the Standards of Quality.
2. Reform the Local Composite Index (LCI) funding formula to account for population swings and equal weighting of locality’s total population and school district student enrollment.
3. Amend Virginia Code 58.1-3403 to allow localities to levy Pay in Lieu of Taxation (PILOT) programs so that localities can mandate public universities pay their fair share back to be used for school maintenance, renovation, and construction for the public schools in the university’s locality.
4. Lower the staffing ratios for SPED, LIEP, counselors, social workers, and school psychologists to meet national professional recommendations (see “Safe at School”). For SPED and LIEP, these ratios should also reflect the nuance in the diverse needs of our students, such as a lower ratio for newcomer EL students than those with a higher proficiency level.
5. Deemphasize Standardized Testing and develop holistic, multi-modal means of assessing student learning and decouple standardized testing from graduation requirements.
6. End Right to Work laws, which have only suppressed wages for working people in Virginia and eroded the power of organized labor to fight for working-class issues.
7. End the Strike Ban in Virginia.
8. Repeal the Dillon Rule in Virginia so that local communities are free to solve their own problems how they see fit.
On the national level we call for:
1. Passage of the PRO-Act.
2. Repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.
3. Divest in military and defense spending, and invest in public education, healthcare, and climate resilience.