Enrichment program planned at 2 Henrico schools, free meals expanding at 5 others

Henrico County Public Schools will test an afterschool enrichment program run by the Henrico Education Foundation in two schools and will expand a free meal program to five more schools in the fall.

The Henrico County Public School Board heard details of the programs and funding additions during a May 23 work session and later voted to approve the expansion of the free meal program.

During the work session, the School Board also heard details about additional grant funding that it will receive to assist with its preschool programs.

Enrichment program set for Greenwood, Shady Grove
The Henrico Education Foundation will implement a pilot of the Learning and Discovery after-school extended day enrichment program at Greenwood and Shady Grove elementary schools to increase student opportunities, especially in the science, technology, engineering and math fields, said Executive Director of Henrico Education Foundation Mike Taylor.

HEF selected Shady Grove and Greenwood because both have been providing extended day enrichment but want to do more, and because both principals have innovative approaches and have received innovative classroom grants from HEF, Taylor wrote in an email.

The pilot will offer “varying opportunities outside the typical classroom, such as academic supports, environmental stewardship, world language instruction, book clubs” and more, Taylor told the board.

“The whole point about this is making it fun,” he said. “It is learning. It’s going to support and reinforce some things during the school day, but it’s going to be fun, and it’s not going to feel like the classroom, and that’s the goal.”

Students will be able to receive help with homework from certified teachers during the program, Taylor said.

The program will give students a chance to learn world languages with consistent practice, Taylor said, which can be tough to achieve during the school day because of the varying schedule in elementary schools.

Environmental stewardship could include water testing and quality, Taylor said. HEF has helped with environmental stewardship programs before. It funded a Greenwood project through which students raised trout in their classroom and then worked with wildlife resources to release them.

The program will offer robotics using the FIRST Lego League program designed for elementary and middle school students, Taylor said. He emphasized that the program will give students opportunities to deep-dive into subjects that interest them and potentially will include girls’ clubs for STEM subjects. The Learning and Discovery program would incorporate elements that the HEF uses in its grant for girls in STEM, Taylor said. That grant allows more than 100 elementary school girls to work with high school robotics teams and speak to women with careers in STEM.

The program will begin enrollment on July 1 and will start Sept. 3. It will run from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on schooldays and will be self-funded by participants who pay $75 per week. HEF is working to fund scholarships that will be in place in the fall for students who wish to attend the program, Taylor said. Registration will be available online and manually, and HEF will offer a total of about 60 to 75 spots.

Free meal program expands
The board also discussed a proposal from the School Nutrition Services to add five schools — Fairfield Middle School, Harvie Elementary School, Johnson Elementary School, Longdale Elementary School, and Rolfe Middle School — to the community eligibility program, which allows all children to have breakfast and lunch meals regardless of their ability to pay. The program served more than 140,000 meals to students without funds in their accounts from September 2018 to April 2019.

Children who cannot pay are not identified in any way, said Director of Nutrition Services Peggy Gordon. They receive the same meals as every other student, and cashiers are trained to let students go if they cannot pay, Gordon said. These steps comply with the Virginia law that prohibits lunch shaming — identifying and stigmatizing children who cannot pay for lunch.

The system becomes self-supporting, Gordon said. When the program expands, students who previously qualified only for reduced-price lunches become eligible for free ones, and nutrition services is reimbursed $3.31 by the USDA and federal programs for each free lunch served and $1.79 for each breakfast.

Nutrition Services also plans to contribute to the fund balance for nutrition service operating costs. To comply with Virginia law recommending funding on-hand to operate for three months, Gordon said, the county needs $6.6 million, but the fund is currently holds $7.1 million – a $500,000 operating surplus, as school board chairman John Montgomery Jr. pointed out.

Grant funding to increase
Also Thursday, the school board learned that funding for the 2019-2020 school year will increase for preschool programs. Director of Foundational Learning and Family Engagement Cristina N. Alsop told the board that Henrico’s Virginia Preschool Initiative grant will increase about $900,000 (to almost $2.8 million), while its Head Start and COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) grant awards increased about $24,000 (to about $1.4 million), she said. The grant runs from Feb. 1, 2019 through Jan. 31, 2020.

The VPI grant will support 760 preschool students, she said, up from 514 currently, while the others “provide quality pre-school experiences for early success in concepts and skills prior to entering kindergarten” and support parents, she said. Additional students are supported by federal funding through the VPI+ and Title 1 grants, she said.

The grants use different formulas to determine funding per student, but Henrico Schools’ Foundational Learning and Family Engagement department pools the funding, Alsop explained.

“We put that funding together to actually be able to support the 53 classes that we have, which are made up of 932 students,” Alsop said. “The way it works is Head Start has one formula that is used for how much money they’re able to give us, and then VPI has a different formula because that is a state grant.”

The school board next will meet June 20.