Henrico School Board weighs future of under-performing Achievable Dream Academy

When Henrico County Public Schools officials entered into an agreement with An Achievable Dream Academy in 2017, they hoped that it would help level the playing field for students at Highland Springs Elementary School, which serves one of the most impoverished sections of the county.

ADA, based in Newport News, partners with school districts to operate schools primarily in underserved communities and provide additional resources and opportunities for their students. At Highland Springs, the program operates on a year-round schedule. It began by serving kindergartners through second-graders, has expanded by one grade level each year and now serves K-5 students.

But three years after partnering with the organization, Henrico School Board members aren’t quite sure what to think.

They sat in shock during Thursday’s work session as they listened to striking academic data from the school’s principal, Shawnya Tolliver, and Director of Elementary Education Scott Thorpe.

The most numbing: last year, the percentage of students in grades 1-5 at the school who were reading at or above their individual grade levels ranged from just 3% (among fifth-graders) to 19% (among first- and third-graders).

Tolliver and Thorpe were before the board seeking approval to expand the program into a middle school setting at an existing but unnamed county site so that rising sixth-graders could continue in the program next fall, at an estimated overall cost of about $4 million. But board members weren’t interested in considering that possibility after seeing the data.

“I am deeply troubled,” Varina District board member Alicia Atkins said, her voice trembling at times. “There’s a huge dynamic of dysfunction when we see numbers like this. These numbers tell a much, much bigger story. Principal Tolliver, I know that your heart is in the right place. I know we have staff that’s working hard. Clearly something’s not working, and we’ve got to fix it.

“Our children deserve better. We need help. This is a crisis when only 3% of a fifth-grade class is reading as a fifth-grader. . . It brings me to tears, cause the words are escaping me.”

Atkins suggested that the bigger story was what was happening with the vast majority of other students who weren’t reading on grade level.

Thorpe told her that the data was upsetting to administrators, too.

“These trends are gravely concerning to us, and they serve as a call to action, continued action and more aggressive action,” he said. “This represents lost opportunities that we can’t get back. This represents trends and outcomes that are unacceptable and that must be reversed. This does not represent the love and the work of the leadership and the team and the faculty at Highland Springs Elementary School and the Achievable Dream Academy. Their heart and their soul is in it to win it for kids.”

Thorpe suggested that coaching in place at the school would need to be strengthened, as would lesson-planning. He also suggested more intentional opportunities for vocabulary development among students.

“This begins and ends with literacy,” he said.

'How in the hell do we get them to read?'
Atkins said the idea of finding more money to continue the program at the middle-school level wasn’t on her radar.

“My immediate next steps isn’t how do we get these kids to sixth grade, site identification – my next steps are how in the hell do we get them to read?” she said.

Brookland District board member Kristi Kinsella concurred.

“I can’t even contemplate expanding a program, because I want to take some of that money and put it toward the remediation to catch those children,” she said. “As a mother of children who struggled to read, reading is everything.”

Superintendent Amy Cashwell told board members that the low reading proficiency levels were what officials were “laser-focused on right now.”

Kinsella and Marcie Shea of Tuckahoe suggested that the board might need to consider cutting ties with Achievable Dream and bringing the school back under the full control of Henrico Schools.

“I so deeply believe in HCPS and our team and what we can offer students,” Shea said. “I believe that we know our students and we know our community needs much more than an external entity can.”

Overall, the school system invests about $1.7 million into the program annually, of which about $720,000 covers licensing, uniforms and field trips, according to Thorpe. The rest covers salaries. However, budget data from the school system attributed spending of between $3.1 million and $3.7 million annually to the program during Fiscal Year 2018-19 and FY20-21.

Three Chopt board member Micky Ogburn, who was part of the board that voted to approve the program, admitted she was disappointed by the results.

“I thought at this point four years in we would be having better results for the children,” she said. “I know that the community has that expectation. We do, all of us. If there’s something we’re not doing that is contributing to this, I think we need to drill down and find what is the missing piece.

Just throwing money at this is not going to solve the problem.”

Ogburn suggested a comparison between the program's results at Highland Springs and those of other ADA programs elsewhere, as well as an academic comparison with nearby Fair Oaks Elementary School, where students in the Highland Springs Elementary zone who opt not to participate in Achievable Dream are sent instead.

She also pointed to data that showed a 95% attendance rate so far this year – in virtual mode – compared to data from the previous three schools years that showed between 15%-19% of all students missed at least 10% of classes during the year.

“Right there is a place to start,” Ogburn said. “There has got to be a reason why the kids are showing up virtual but they’re not in person. Because kids can’t learn if they’re not in school.”

'They are growing, we just have a lot further to get our babies'
Responding to a question from School Board Chairman Roscoe Cooper, III, of the Fairfield District, Tolliver noted that most of the school’s students have personal trauma of some type that can hamper their academic progress.

“That’s the hard part in looking at numbers like this. It doesn’t show you how far these children have come. . . They are growing, we just have a lot further to get our babies," she said. "I’m seeing kids problem-solve very differently. I’m seeing children able to manage their emotions and the trauma that they’d have in a different way. I’m hearing the positive self-talk. I know my students are growing."

Cooper said that while academic outcomes were disappointing, they might not necessarily tell the whole story.

“It’s so easy to get lost in translation if we just totally reduce something to a number,” Cooper said. “If you go to bed at night and you don’t have to see somebody get beat, or you go to bed at night and don’t have to worry about eating, it’s a different story than somebody who goes to bed crying every night.”

“It’s so much more.”

To wit, Tolliver and Thorpe said, the school offers 31 in-school clubs that seek to engage students in ways they wouldn’t have been engaged otherwise, and (pre-COVID) it took them on regular field trips to broaden their horizons in similar ways (24 during the 2019-20 school year). It also focuses on positive reinforcement for students and has partnerships with community mentors, public safety officials and local businesses.

And, they said, not all academic data from the school was discouraging.

Data reflecting student proficiency in math showed that the percentage who achieved proficiency according to a semester benchmark increase slightly among third-and fourth-graders last year (63% and 57%), when compared to the previous year’s third- and fourth-graders (54% and 34%), Thorpe said.

And last year, higher percentages of first- and second-graders demonstrated growth in their reading skills (78% of first-graders and 61% of second-graders), he said.

Tolliver cited a 35% decrease in suspensions from September 2018 through February 2019 when compared with the same timeframe during the 2019-20 school year.

“This focus on social and emotional well-being – by being reminded daily of how important they are and how they have the power to be the best they can be – is paying off [for students],” Tolliver said.

Third-graders at the school last year passed the state’s reading and math Standards of Learning exams at higher rates than third-graders the previous year, though most other SOL metrics were down.

Reading proficiency of individual grade levels of students also had declined steeply as those students moved from one grade level to the next through the program, according to the data.

The proficiency levels of those who were kindergartners during the program’s first year in 2017-18 declined from 49% that year to 27% as first-graders and just 9% as third-graders, for example.

Those who were first-graders during the program’s first year saw their proficiency levels decline from 39% to 32% to 19% during the same three-year timeframe, while the levels of those who were second-graders in 2017-18 dropped from 52% that year to 40% the next year and 18% last year.

Cashwell told board members that she and staffers would return with more information prior to the budget process for the coming fiscal year.

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Atkins will host a public meeting Nov. 19 at the New Bridge Auditorium, 5915 Nine Mile Road, from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. to provide details about the program and solicit input from citizens. The meeting also is available online at https://tinyurl.com/hsprings-community-meeting.

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