Henrico supervisors, School Board discuss future of Achievable Dream Academy

Discussion of the Achievable Dream Academy at Highland Springs Elementary School, and the program’s planned expansion to the middle school level this fall, prompted a few pointed remarks during a joint meeting of the Henrico Board of Supervisors and School Board Tuesday night.

Henrico Schools contracted with An Achievable Dream, based in Newport News, in 2017 to operate its program at the school beginning with kindergarten, first and second-grade students that fall and expanding by one grade level each year since. The organization partners with school districts to operate its program primarily in underserved or challenged communities and provides additional resources and opportunities for their students.

At Highland Springs, school takes place year round, students wear uniforms, and (during non-COVID times) have frequent visits from community leaders and mentors, and take a number of field trips. The concept is designed to expand students’ learning beyond the classroom and to provide life skills and motivation for students, many of whom face daily challenges in their home lives.

Henrico Schools will have spent nearly $15 million on the program during its first five years by the end of this school year, and officials are proposing to spend another $6.2 million on it in the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. That money would include the first year of an expansion of the program to the middle-school level to serve rising sixth-graders.

But students have slipped backwards in some key academic areas – notably when it comes to reading on grade level, something only between 3% and 19% of them were doing at the end of last school year, school system officials indicated in November.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Varina District Supervisor Tyrone Nelson (whose district includes the school and whose advocacy for the program helped lead to its adoption) took issue publicly with the fact that school officials hadn’t corrected those trends sooner, implying that perhaps too much criticism had been directed at An Achievable Dream.

“My hope and my concern as we go forward is that we too accept the responsibility of the perceived non-success,” Nelson said. “Looking at the stats – none of this stuff just flew from out of nowhere. We should have been watching this. This didn’t just get like it is overnight.

“Clearly we’re putting this much money in, there’s a certain level of accountability that we’ll be holding [An Achievable Dream] to, but we also need to be doing our part.”

Nelson also criticized the school board and school system officials for not publicly naming possible locations for the middle school program – funding for which would be included in the budget supervisors will approve in about two months.

“I am now in a joint school board meeting having to ask ‘Can you please tell me what locations you are considering?’” Nelson said. “We’ve not operated like this. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve never had to have information that I’ve had to go to somebody and ask.

“Now it just seems like there’s some kind of secret.”

Varina District School Board representative Alicia Atkins responded that it wouldn’t have been appropriate to consider locations until it was clear that the program was going to continue.

Atkins had publicly blasted the program’s low academic achievement levels at that November school board meeting, wondering aloud at the time how officials could consider expanding the program to middle school before addressing the elementary school achievement issues. Several other school board members echoed her assessment then.

Tuesday night, Atkins told Nelson that school system officials had to consider whether the program would continue at all before thinking about where middle school students might be located if it were to expand to that level.

“I think what’s significant in this conversation is understanding, first and foremost, making sure that the partnership was going to continue,” Atkins said. “I think that’s a really key point, that both entities understand what improvements need to be made on both sides and then validate that those improvements can be made.”

Atkins indicated that her questions about the program and its ability to address the concerns of the school board had been met and that some updates to the memorandum of understanding between Henrico Schools and An Achievable Dream would be forthcoming, something that Superintendent Amy Cashwell later confirmed.

Atkins said she was “delighted” that new academic measurements would be implemented to ensure that students are learning and achieving at the levels school officials expect, though no one at Tuesday’s meeting provided those specific metrics.

“Measurements have been shared and discussed, and I think that that’s going to help us,” Atkins said.

Cashwell told Nelson that two possible options for housing the middle school program are the Central Gardens facility and the current Highland Springs High School building, which will be vacated when a new edition of the school opens in the fall.

But a challenge, she said, is that there will only be about 60 to 70 sixth-graders in the program, so officials are hesitant to place them in a building by themselves this fall and could instead consider locating them at another middle school for a year. Her implication was that the program then could move to its own location the following year, when it would be serving sixth- and seventh-graders.

Cashwell also told supervisors that school system leaders have been tracking the achievement levels of Achievable Dream students throughout the program’s history at Highland Springs.

“I own that issue, my staff owns that issue,” she said. “We have the data, we’ve been reviewing the data. The academic success of the students in that school is something I own and take full responsibility for, as does my team.”