Near West End

Style Weekly’s cover story this week is carefully timed to come out just a few weeks before the long awaited and stressful process of the open enrollment lottery for Richmond City Schools on March 31st.
In the article, Richmond Council of PTAs President, Tichi Pinkney-Eppes, takes issue with the open enrollment policy, saying that it is rooted in segregationist policy.
Below, School Board member (and Munford parent) Kim Bridges, explanation of why Pinkney-Eppes may have approached the issue in a way that caused controversy:

Bridges says she takes no personal issue with the sort of advocacy in which Pinkney-Eppes has engaged — to a point. Bridges took umbrage when Pinkney-Eppes lashed out in Style Weekly in February that the city’s much-heralded “open enrollment” — which allows parents to send their children to schools outside their designated school zones — was rooted in segregationist policy. Bridges started working the phones, calling fellow PTA chapter presidents to express concern about their leader.

Pinkney-Eppes says she believes “wholeheartedly” that Bridges has acted against her because she called for change during the January selection of the School Board chairman and opposed the school system’s open-enrollment policy.

“We can’t get [school PTAs] to the table because [Bridges] caused the division on an issue that doesn’t even necessarily impact them,” Pinkney-Eppes says.

Bridges says her calls to local PTA chapter presidents were aimed at reconciling concerned parents at Mary Munford Elementary and other, more active PTAs that benefit from the open-enrollment process with Pinkney-Eppes and her core leadership group.

“The concerns that I have heard from the PTA in my district is just wanting to be part of the process — not about the content of what’s being said — just being part of the process,” Bridges says. “I tried to put those folks in touch with Council of PTA members — with Tichi and other board members.”

Bridges says she was concerned that Pinkney-Eppes chose a newspaper as her first outlet for voicing her concerns about open enrollment. She says she wishes Pinkney-Eppes have waited for the School Board to conclude its re-examination of the program.

That re-examination began when School Board member Keith West, a critic of a system that he says intentionally makes some schools better than others, asked last year that open enrollment be eliminated.

Bridges says Pinkney-Eppes’ public statements were the first she heard of the PTA board’s apparent concern.

“I guess everyone has a right to feel the way they want to about the process,” Bridges says. “But my big suggestion was just to be part of the process.”

By speaking out, Pinkney-Eppes believes she’s angered the constituencies of the school system’s most prominent PTAs that represent schools where parents don’t want the boat rocked. As a result, she says she’s a marked woman politically, a leader with a fast-approaching expiration date. In June, she fully expects forces within the citywide PTA to vote her out.

But more than that, she’s rocked the boat at the School Board, which, Pinkney-Eppes says, is sowing seeds of distrust with the PTA boards at Munford and William Fox elementary schools.

She says the School Board and superintendent “are purporting that it’s us against them amongst us to cause that division,” she says, stressing that PTA advocacy — parent advocacy — is the right of parents.

“If you follow the model that PTA has designed,” she says, “Mary Munford parents could get more. Parents over at Blackwell could get more. By a lot of parents not turning up at the table, you’re dismissed that way. Ultimately, it is your child being victimized by this.”

Rather than taking away from West End schools, she says, any advocacy for less-affluent schools would serve to raise the entire district.

The article continues with Pinkney-Eppes criticizing Richmond’s “zero-tolerance” discipline policies, after her own son was suspended for insubordination.

Suspensions were frequent for “insubordination,” a charge Pinkney-Eppes says amounted to teachers being intimidated by her son’s size and occasional obstinacy and refusal to sit at his desk.

Personally, I think if he is in high school and he won’t sit down when a teacher asks him too, then he should be asked to leave the classroom. Teachers in Richmond have a hard enough time teaching the kids who want to be there and who do listen. I’m not sure why Pinkney-Eppes thinks standing up for her son for this behavor is noble. If my son was insubordinate to a teacher, especially at the high school level, and was suspended, I can’t say that I’d parade it around as a flawed policy. How can you take away what little power the teachers have? The article continues with her saying that keeping her son home alone for 3 days (while she can’t supervise him) is not a fair punishment. Perhaps she’s right. He should be forced into an in-school suspension, not one at home where he can do as he pleases. I wouldn’t call that a “trigger-happy suspension rate”, as Style does. I’d call that fair.

What’s not fair is comparing Henrico and Chesterfield statistics when the school systems populations are so different. Also, what’s not fair is quoting statistic for absences over 6 days in each of the school systems and somehow connecting that to a suspension rate. Plenty of kids don’t come to school in the city for many other reasons, including health issues, custody issues, parent’s substance abuse or incarceration issues and survival (rather than school) being the number one priority.

The article tackles many other issues — it’s worth a read in its entirety.

Harry Kollatz, over at The Blue Raccoon, has some interesting ponderings about the state of politics in Richmond. Of particular interest is the saga of how much the Richmond City School Board knew of the planned eviction from City Hall and when they knew it. Did they in fact participate in the planning of their own eviction and then plead ignorance? Or is Wilder just orchestrating another dirty trick? Only time will tell.
Don’t we have something better to be spending our resources on?

The January 2, 2008 issue of Style carries the article headlined, “Did schools help plan attempted move?”
Chris Dovi writes, “Schools administration officials, who have maintained their ignorance about why the move was carried out so suddenly — under the cover of night and with the aid of Richmond Police — were far more involved in the planning of that move than previously disclosed, according to internal documents obtained by Style Weekly.

City documents and interoffice communications obtained through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests indicate that schools officials not only knew about the planned move, but also were initially involved in negotiating the lease for the 3600 W. Broad St. building where Wilder tried to move them. They also helped develop the timeline to move schools offices out of City Hall by Sept. 30.”

I refer you to the article linked above; suffice to say, the school administration doesn’t come across as more sinned against than sinning but more confused and willful than smart. And the Governor-Mayor is, well, his intransigent self. The immovable object and the irresistible force paradox comes to mind…

By Saturday, January 5, matters had proceeded further, as described by the Times-Dispatch’s Michael Martz, as “members of a special committee of Richmond City Council are demanding a full accounting of a botched attempt to evict the school administration from City Hall.”

Richmond Community High School in the Near West End and Open High School in Oregon Hill have been recognized by U.S. News and World Report for being among America’s best schools.

Richmond Community and Open high schools received silver and bronze medals, respectively, in the ranking conducted by School Evaluation Services, a K-12 data research and analysis business operated by Standard & Poor’s.

More than 18,500 schools located in 40 states were analyzed according to how well students performed on state tests, how well each school’s disadvantaged students performed and whether the school was successful in providing college-level coursework.

Richmond Community was one of only 505 schools, or 3 percent, to be awarded a gold or silver medal. Open was one of 1,086 schools, or 6 percent, to earn bronze.

[Via]

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