The Issues in Albemarle

The material below was compiled for my School Board campaign during 2003. 

Coalition for a Responsible School Board Questionnaire

The Coalition for a Responsible School Board is a non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the voters of Albemarle County during school board election years.  Candidates received a copy of the 2003 questionnaire in August and were asked to return a completed copy by September 5, 2003.  Six of the eight candidates submitted responses to the Coalition's questionnaire, and I am pleased to report that my answers are available below.  Two candidates who submitted responses answered very few of the questions.

For more information, contact:  Allen Freeman, Chair, Coalition for a Responsible School at (434) 823-4221.

Teacher Compensation

If we expect exceptional schools, then we should expect to have to pay for them.  I favor the raising of employee salaries above the mean of our competitive market.  We know Albemarle has a bubble of teachers reaching retirement age, as does the rest of the state.  We know Albemarle has a high turnover rate for new teachers.  Competitive compensation is what we will need to attract and retain the best teachers for our children.  The competitive market should be just that.  It should reflect the systems we are truly competing with for teachers and administrators and be made up of counties with a similar cost of living.  Our compensation should reflect our performance expectations and our accomplishments. 

I also believe competitive compensation requires regular teacher evaluations.  The public should be confident that our principals and administrators are conducting regular and effective evaluations as part of the building of an excellent school system.

Teacher stipends for professional development need to be restructured.  Today's professional development stipend of $100 will hardly pay for round trip mileage reimbursement to some teacher conferences.  The stipend has not been increased since 1987.  The school system could create larger pools of funds and allow teachers to apply for them.  Teachers could be allowed greater choices in course offerings that suit their professional development interests.  Today the County pays for all but $100 of a UVA course it deems acceptable for teachers.  If a teacher is interested in another provider or course topic, they can only receive $100 from the County. Our teachers would have enhanced opportunities for training and expanded knowledge to bring to our children if we increase the stipends and the flexibility of their use.

State Funding of Education

State funding of education is woefully inadequate.  Virginia is not even fully funding its inadequate Standards of Quality (SOQ) as required by the state Constitution which says the General Assembly must "ensure that an educational program of high quality is established and continually maintained."

Even when the state appears to be increasing support for the SOQs, it is a shell game.  The 2002 Virginia General Assembly increased SOQ funding, but at the same time reduced non-SOQ funding in areas like teaching materials for SOLs, teacher training for SOLs, and school construction funding.

I will work to educate the public and our legislators about the state's commitments to education.

Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) Report

By direction of the 2000 Virginia General Assembly, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) conducted a 16-month study on the state funding of the Virginia Standards of Quality (SOQ). Data for this study was collected from a variety of sources, including the Virginia Department of Education and all local school divisions in the state.

The report can be found online here:
http://jlarc.state.va.us/Summary/Rpt277/Edfund.HTM

Among the conclusions:

A summary of the JLARC REPORT prepared by former Albemarle County Schools Assistant Superintendent Frank Morgan can be found here: http://www.wheeleronboard.com/docs/jlarsummary.pdf

Here are some examples from Albemarle County that demonstrate the state's inadequate funding of the Standards of Quality:

Just a few examples of inadequate state standards, standards the JLARC report says the state fails to support to the tune of $1 billion in each budget. Consider the cumulative impact of this massive education debt.

Local Funding of Education

I will be an advocate for education to the Board of Supervisors.  The Supervisors approve the County budget, and 60% of County funds go to the schools.  The Board of Supervisors needs a school board that it can communicate with and that demonstrates strong leadership and wise decision-making.  The State's support for education is woefully inadequate.  Until such time as that situation changes, Albemarle's School Board and Board of Supervisors have to work together and take educational funding matters into their own hands.  Albemarle County residents also do not want to trade things that enhance our quality of living in Albemarle, like the acquisition of conservation easements, in exchange for education funding.  Likewise, our schools shouldn't have to trade compensation improvements for adequate classroom staffing.

Education and Local Planning

One of the School Board member's important jobs is to appoint representatives to the Board's three advisory committees.  I will carefully select those individuals and work closely with them to ensure they provide me the feedback I need to make decisions.  With regards to local planning, the School Board's Long Range Planning Committee (LRPC) has played a central role in analyzing facility needs and redistricting. 

The Long Range Planning Committee needs to be used more effectively by the School Board.  In November 2002, the School Board held its first ever joint meeting with the Committee.  Those meetings need to happen on a regular basis.  Both the School Board, system staff and the Committee need to work effectively with the County's Planning Department and Board of Supervisors to review accurate data on growth and development to ensure a well-informed capital improvement process.

The County's Comprehensive Plan needs to be maintained and revised to reflect the desires of the community for neighborhood schools.  Educational needs should be addressed early in the master planning process for each of our growth areas.

Redistricting

My first priority in reviewing any redistricting proposal will be to minimize change for as many families as possible and to redistrict the County as a whole as opposed to looking at the elementary, middle and high schools separately. Those goals are not mutually exclusive.  A comprehensive redistricting should allow for better long range planning and thus minimize the potential for multiple redistrictings for a family.  I support grandfathering with transportation provided by the County. 

Other redistricting priorities in no particular order:

1. Clear communication to families impacted and their school community. No new proposals should ever be added to a redistricting plan after a public hearing is held by the School Board or Redistricting Committee, unless subsequent full public hearings are granted (i.e., public comment at a School Board meeting does not count).
2. Explore alternatives to new building construction. When a new school is built, families more readily accept redistricting because they understand an EMPTY school needs to be filled and the cohorts of children are usually sizable (the children move with many of their friends). It is more difficult to find families willing to be redistricted into a school that is under capacity. However, in a county like Albemarle that is growing in areas where the infrastructure has not necessarily been built, residents have to understand that redistricting is a necessary tool. It is also fiscally responsible to explore alternatives the building of new schools. Alternatives might include redistricting to Albemarle schools that are under capacity; increasing the capacity of our existing schools; increased cooperation with the City of Charlottesville; and/or the development of magnet schools--all the time keeping my highest priority of minimizing change for as many families as possible.
3. Minimize or eliminate split feeder patterns in any new redistricting proposals. Any split deemed to be necessary should have a substantial cohort of children.
4. Annually assess our school capacity based on the use of the building. This annual review process was adopted by the School Board in 2002. Redistricting can only be done with clear numbers on capacity and enrollment projections.
5. Promote neighborhood elementary schools. This statement requires the acceptance of redistricting as a tool and support for new school construction in our growth areas. An effective long range planning process should make it clear when those facilities are needed.
6. Trailers or "learning cottages" are a stop-gap solution and not where we want our children to be learning.
7. I think if you pursue the priorities above, the transportation issues (time on bus) are mitigated (i.e. we use redistricting as a tool and we support neighborhood schools). However, time on the bus should always be assessed as a redistricting decision factor, as should the safety of certain roads or railroad crossings required in any school's bus route.

Class Size

I favor the lowering of the elementary school regular baseline class size.  This will ensure principals have extra resources which they can use to hire TAs, to address class size problems, and to allow those schools with small free and reduced lunch populations to have a more equitable staffing level prior to the application of differentiation to schools that need additional assistance.  I support differentiated funding, but only after the establishment of a reasonable baseline class size.  This doesn't mean we have to set a rigid class size ceiling and start building many new classrooms.  It does mean we will aggressively provide resources for teaching assistants, particularly to support early elementary literacy programs and for schools with larger classes.

I support the continuation of the Emergency Staffing allocation which helps principals address class size bubbles (something I proposed in 2000 as Class Size Emergency Relief and which the School Board has approved every year since). Emergency staffing should be  applied only to regular classroom needs.  I will ensure all our students have a learning environment conducive to success. 

For more information on differentiated funding and baseline class sizes see:
http://www.wheeleronboard.com/docs/differentiation.htm

The U.S. Department of Education goal is to have average class sizes of 18 children in grades K-3.  As you can see in the table below, Albemarle is close, but has some room for improvement.

Division Mean Size by Elementary Grade Level
2002-03 Class Size Report

When looking at the frequency of certain class sizes in all elementary grades, Albemarle has only 38.6% of its classrooms with 18 or fewer students and 53.1% of its classrooms with 19 or fewer students.

"Small classes are especially important in the early grades so that all children learn to read well, which will increase their ability to succeed in advanced subjects and later grades. Teachers in small classes can provide students with more individualized attention, spend more time on instruction, cover more material effectively, and provide students and parents with more detailed feedback on each child's progress."

http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/ClassSize/Guidance/A.html

Standards of Learning (SOL)

If we focus on recruiting, retaining and training our best teachers and we make sound curriculum decisions (then we won't have to worry about state standards as we will always exceed them).  I think the SOL have certainly given the public one tool for accountability.  I am concerned, however, that our improving scores are the result of some teachers increasingly teaching to the test.  Are we teaching the material our children need to be successful?  Are children learning general problem solving skills? Is high-stakes testing going to mean 10-20% of our seniors can't graduate each year?  I am open-minded about the SOL, and they are certainly are not going away any time soon.  In fact, the federal government's No Child Left Behind legislation is going require we add high-stakes testing in grades 4, 6 and 8 in math and reading such that we will have these types of tests every year from grades 3-12.  I do think many of our best teachers are finding creative ways to balance great instructional approaches and curriculums with the demands of the SOL.  Yet, we have lost other teachers (many to private schools) who simply didn't want to deal with them.  Many classroom experiences have been forced out by the needs for SOL preparations.  Further, the state and federal governments cannot keep forcing mandates on the localities that they are not themselves willing to fund and support.

Religion