Putting Student Safety First: A Call for Administrative Accountability

I am deeply proud of our teachers and staff for crafting a loving and fruitful educational environment for our students during a historic time in public education with unprecedented challenges. In spite of these incredible efforts, our district is at a crossroads. Simply put, we face a crisis of governance which has put our students and staff at risk.

In 2017, shortly before my inauguration, the Board made a controversial decision to replace the incumbent administration with new leadership at the very start of their tenure. This new leadership hailed from DC Public Schools, a district that reports directly to the mayor with no democratically-elected school board, allowing for highly centralized control and less accountability to democratic bodies.

In Richmond, although we do have a democratically-elected board, we have replicated the DC model by praising a governance culture that reliably votes yes to every school administration and mayoral initiative absent data and regardless of benefit to students. From my perspective, given the failures we have seen, this model has failed. A lack of accountability in district administration has systematized failures that pose a real and daily threat to the well being of our students and workforce. When I speak of systematized failures, I am describing a pattern of escalating emergencies that appear reckless in a district already struggling under the compounded social pressures of institutionalized racism and decades of defunding. Some of the most notable instances in this pattern include:

• Mass layoffs of attendance officers in 2019 followed by 3 years of escalating student absenteeism presenting a very real threat to the success and wellness of the children of our city.
• In 2021 the Board learned from the consistent advocacy of parents across the district that our food was inedible and failed to meet nutritional guidelines put forward by the National School Lunch Program. Investigation revealed that administration had been notified as early as 2019 of food non-compliance, but that failure to address the issue over the following two years put federal funding at risk.
• In February of this year Fox Elementary suffered a devastating fire, revealing that the school’s fire alarm system was not properly maintained and that the administration knew this to be the case. Months later a bus facility burned down and the board learned that it never had an alarm system. The response I received from the Superintendent was that it was not the district’s responsibility to maintain one.

Attendance, food services, and fire safety are basic needs of any district. These failures reflect a pattern of neglect that exists along countless other stand out instances of substantial oversight: failure to pay essential staff like bus drivers, issues with transcripts that continue to impact student aid and college acceptance, lack of toilet paper in our bathrooms, uncertainty about large scale purchases like Chromebooks, the expense of millions of dollars on untested literacy programs that have yet to show any substantiation of student success, failure to address a myriad of concerns — including ratios and transportation — raised by preschool teachers, and blood left pooling in school hallways for days.

We are failing in matters of basic safety. We are also failing to meet our basic academic commitments to our students. I have often served as a dissenting vote on policy and curriculum that I do not support, and I have worked to hold administration accountable to policy and the best interests of our students on a range of issues, from safety and curriculum to teacher retention and labor issues. That is not sufficient. I have asked repeatedly for the district’s existing safety protocols. We have still not been provided with them. I have asked repeatedly that the administration follow school board policy and provide contracts ahead of votes, and I have continued to be ignored.

Neither I, nor my colleagues can govern competently if we cannot access protocols, policy, or contracts. We cannot vote on information we do not have and say, in good faith, that we have the best interest of our children at heart. Without the cooperation of district administration, our city has democratic governance in name only.

When we extended Superintendent Kamras’s contract at the start of 2021, I supported a two year extension and voted against a four year one. I believe there was a shared understanding of the need for stability in leadership to shepherd us through the height of the pandemic. If the rest of my colleagues had agreed to that two year extension, we would be reviewing this contract now. Given today’s circumstances, I don’t believe that its continuation would have been a sure bet.

Our experiment in governance without accountability has been a fraught one. This has been the highest paid superintendent and cabinet in Richmond’s history, yet leadership turnover persists. Many members of the team came from big cities with higher costs of living yet received unprecedented raises to work here in Richmond. They have governed with tremendous independence from Board oversight on multiple fronts. I do not believe this experiment has succeeded.

We live in a district where discipline for students is extraordinarily severe, where teachers are routinely disciplined for minor infractions — yet we have seen no accountability for our leadership. Far too often, governance models imported from the private sector mean just this: harsh oversight for the bottom without any accountability at the top. I believe a lack of accountability has put our students, our workers, and our infrastructure at risk.

We cannot normalize neglect, we deserve better. The Board must act.

As a Board, we have two tools at our disposal. We are not permitted day-to-day oversight, and as part-time officials, we can’t run the schools. What we can do is to create and enforce policy along with and hire, manage, and fire the district Superintendent. Given the gravity of these failures, our Board cannot defer taking action to hold administration accountable to policy and to the outcomes of governing choices. Far too often students and families are swept the the side as ambitious individuals use public office to advance their personal careers at the public’s expense. Richmond cannot be their stepping stone — not in the mayor’s office, not on City Council, not on the School Board, and certainly not in the schools’ administration.

Richmond’s future is bright. Living in this community is one of the greatest honors of my life. Our students are immensely talented, the teachers in our district are invaluable, and our community is savvy. Richmonders have always been real, and they don’t need to be told it. The people of this city have the power to build that bright future, but it is not a guarantee. We must fight for it together.