ELECTION 2023: All 5 Fairfield District school board candidates discuss hot-button issues at Henrico Democrats' forum

All five candidates for the Henrico School Board’s Fairfield District seat spoke at an Oct. 6 forum for Democratic school board candidates on issues including teacher shortages, book banning, and socioeconomic inequities.

Varina District school board member and vice-chair Alicia Atkins and Three Chopt District school board candidate Madison Irving also spoke at the event, which was hosted by the Henrico Democrats at the Eastern Henrico Recreation Center.

While all school board candidates are required to run as independents, candidates still may campaign alongside political parties and receive party support and partisan funding.

Atkins, Irving and all five Fairfield candidates – Keith Hicks, Tommie Jefferson, Crystal Varner Parker, Terrell Pollard, and Ryan Young – said they opposed the Virginia Department of Education’s 2023 model policies regarding transgender students. All candidates also said they would support or at least consider a school board proposal that would allow Henrico Schools employees to participate in collective bargaining.

Tom Shields, an associate dean and professor at the University of Richmond who previously ran as a Democratic candidate for the House of Delegates in the 2000s, moderated the event.

“You’re running for one of the most important offices I think in the country these days,” Shields said to the candidates. “There is a good amount of power collected in school boards in Virginia.”

Discussion focuses on East vs. West comparison

Many candidates highlighted the disparities between the schools in the Fairfield District and those in the West End, stating that the school board needs to address the “East versus West” achievement gap and the gap in school resources.

“It’s hard having my kids in the car and we’re driving into the West End and they’re like, ‘Daddy, how come my school doesn’t look like this?’” said Jefferson, a driving school teacher and Army veteran. “We need to make sure that funding is distributed equally.”

Young, a consultant and youth basketball coach, referenced the “2023-2024 Best U.S. High Schools” list by U.S. News & World Report that ranked five of Henrico’s public schools in the top 40% of the nation; all five schools are in the West End.

“We all watched the news reports out there that listed our five top schools. They were all in the West End. Whereas the bottom four were in the East End,” Young said. “Yes, it’s one Henrico and we all want to thrive together, but we do need to pour more resources into our East End schools.”

However, Parker, a Presbyterian minister and former financial educator, said the problem is not that the division is spending more in the West End than in Eastern Henrico schools, but that certain parent-teacher associations are able to raise more money from their community to provide extra funding.

“When we look at the East versus West, I know in the Fairfield District we are spending more per student than we are in our West End schools,” Parker said. “But the problem is we have an overreliance on our PTA to fill in the gaps where our state and our federal funding are not providing.”

Pollard, the director of the Henrico Too Smart 2 Start Coalition and the Fairfield District representative on Henrico’s Board of Zoning appeals, said that teachers in the Fairfield and Varina districts – which have higher numbers of teacher vacancies – should be paid more.

“In the last couple years, I’ve met with every school board member and I’ve challenged them on things where inequities are,” Pollard said.

Henrico recently offered a $3,000 annual bonus during the next three years for eligible teachers at nine “opportunity schools” – schools with high numbers of vacancies and provisionally licensed teachers – which are all in the Fairfield and Varina districts.

Jefferson also emphasized the need for better hiring practices and communication at HCPS.

“We need to fix our hiring practices,” he said. “If you apply for a job in Henrico County and don’t get it, you will never hear from us again.”

Hicks, a long-term substitute and student intervention liaison, said that HCPS needs to stop relying on board substitutes – who have a bachelor’s degree but not a teacher license – to fill vacancies. HCPS has hired more than 100 board substitutes since the beginning of August to cover teacher vacancies.

“We can’t continue to have a lot of board substitutes teaching our kids in content areas they’re not qualified in,” Hicks said. “You can’t have an art graduate teaching a math class. If they are holding that seat, we need to train them and provide them with professional development so that they can be successful.”

Henrico Schools prefers but does not require a board substitute to teach a class on content they have majored in or have a certification in, according to HCPS official spokesperson Eileen Cox.

Additional school services sought

Candidates also emphasized the need for more school services – such as reading specialists, after school programs, and tutors – to combat learning loss, particularly in math and reading, seen in Henrico after the COVID pandemic.

“When we talk about academic loss, it’s real. My daughter did kindergarten on a computer,” Young said. “So we need reading specialists in our schools – every single school at every single level. Reading is still fundamental. It’s fundamental to everything that happens in education.”

Said Hicks: “I’m the only person [here] who has taught in a classroom as a sub in the Fairfield District. One of the things I do every day is work with kids who have reading loss and math loss. They’re two to three years behind.”

Parker, however, said that Henrico Schools should focus less on comparing students to pre-pandemic standards.

“We can’t look at data in a vacuum. We like to say that our students are behind, but whom are they behind?” Parker said. “We have to acknowledge that they went through something traumatic.”

Candidates also condemned recent efforts across the state at banning books from school libraries.

“We got to be careful about what we set precedents for, because banning books is just the first step,” Young said. “Five years down the road or 10 years down the road, they will use these same policies to make a bigger agenda happen.”

Atkins, who sits on the board’s instructional review committee, emphasized that Henrico County has yet to ban a single book despite the several requests made to the committee.

“The majority of books that come in are on Black people, about interracial relationships, or LGBTQIA,” Atkins said. “We have not banned one.”

Pollard, however, emphasized that the school board also needs to foster more communication and establish more trust between parents and board members.

“I think we need better relationships with parents. We have to reestablish some trust,” Pollard said. “And I understand that some of the folks that want to ban books, they have an agenda. But I just want to make sure that we are going to open lines of communication.”

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Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.