Students, supporters fight to save MathScience Innovation Center funding

With some members dressed in matching bright blue apparel, and one even donning a cheese-shaped hat, the Deep Run High School Blue Cheese robotics team must have been a strange sight for members of the Henrico County School Board.

The team members and their mentors had entered the room just in time for the school board’s Feb. 14 public comment session. The whole team couldn’t make it to the event – it was a school night and Valentine’s Day, but perhaps more pressingly, it was right in the middle of the team’s “build season.”

The team had just four more days to build a robot, but it had chosen to spend the evening with the School Board, in the name of a cause important to its members.

“One of our team’s core values is to advocate for STEM education, and today we are advocating for the MathScience Innovation Center,” began Deep Run senior Piyush Jessani.

The team had come out to speak against the Henrico School Board’s proposal to eliminate funding for the MathScience Innovation Center, a K-12 learning center in Henrico that provides hands-on STEM-related programs to students.

Founded in 1966, the center has been supported by six member school districts: Hanover, Henrico, Petersburg, Colonial Heights, King William and Richmond, though Dinwiddie, Goochland, Prince George and Hopewell districts also have taken advantage of less comprehensive “institutional” partnerships.

The program serves approximately 130,000 students each year, according to its executive director Hollee Freeman.

The MSiC offers learning opportunities to students at its facilities, as well as sending staff to schools for in-person lessons and using the internet for virtual lessons and conferencing. It also includes professional development courses for educators.

Schools that pay for consortium membership, like Richmond and Henrico have in the past, can access these resources free of charge, though non-members can purchase resources like lessons at the center on a fee basis. In addition, students from member schools are eligible for Saturday and summer programming and only obligated to pay a small fee for materials.

The Henrico County School Board’s proposal for the 2019-2020 school year includes cutting its funding to the MSiC completely, resulting in $1.1 million in funds it plans to use for textbooks and techbooks and reducing the laptop fee from $50 per student to $25. With these savings, the board aims to completely eliminate the laptop fee by 2022.

'Hands-on learning' key to STEM education
But some Henrico residents, including the Deep Run Blue Cheese team, don't support this tradeoff.

“When you take educational opportunities like the MathScience Innovation Center away, you put Henrico County students at a competitive disadvantage in the job markets of today and tomorrow," team member Alec Ritchie, a freshman, told the School Board during its public comment session. “I really learned with my friends how to interact with computers and mess with them and make things work on my own accord without having to look at a standardized project.

Bridget Westhoven, who spends as many as 40 hours per week volunteering as one of the team’s adult mentors, explained that the news of Henrico’s withdrawal from the MSiC was difficult for the students on the team – nearly all of whom have taken classes at the center.

“I feel like through my experience, the hands-on learning is the best way to teach STEM,” Westhoven said.

Senior Piyush Jessani echoed those sentiments during the public comment session.

“Classes at MiSC do just that and are even more relevant today than they were in years past,” he said.

Sophomore Leo Bukalski echoed Ritchie’s positive experience at the center, describing how robotics classes he took at MSiC in elementary school impacted him.

“I loved them because they were hands-on, and I actually got to build robots, which is an opportunity I’d never had before,” he said.

As Freeman pointed out, the original purpose of the center was to provide an answer to programming gaps that superintendents noticed in the curriculum of their schools.

According to Freeman, those gaps still exist.

That’s one of the reasons why Henrico’s proposed withdrawal (and the additional divestments of Richmond, Chesterfield and Hanover districts) is particularly frustrating to Freeman.

“I don’t know," she said. "I went to Henrico schools also, for elementary school…so I know the hard work that people are doing there. I also know that students need services that are in addition to what they’re receiving in schools currently.

“I feel like there are opportunities that aren’t being thought through. I wish we were working together to work through these issues because I think the students could benefit.”

School system's evolving needs and priorities
Henrico Schools officials have explained the decision as one that will allow each student in the system to save as much as $350 on laptop fees during the course of seven years. Officials also plan to enhance STEM offerings in school as a way to offset the change.

“Today, Henrico County is a much different place than it was when the Math Science Innovation Center was founded,” reads a flyer that the school system produced to explain the decision. “We're bigger, more diverse, and we have needs and priorities that have evolved.”

Nearly two dozen supporters of the MSiC addressed the Henrico Board of Supervisors during its budget hearing April 9, making similar impassioned arguments for the center's importance as others had to the School Board earlier. But though the Board of Supervisors allocates money to the School Board, it legally cannot control how the School Board spends that money, Board of Supervisors Chairman Tyrone Nelson said.

But students in the Blue Cheese club remain determined to do whatever they can to make a difference. Henrico resident and Maggie Walker Governor's School sophomore Perisa Ashar started a petition on Change.org, asking for signatures to help save the MathScience Innovation Center from being defunded by Henrico County.

As of April 2, Ashar’s petition had reached 1,752 signatures, just shy of its 2,000-signature goal.

“Initially, I wanted to start the petition because I personally felt as if a lot of people were still unaware of Henrico's sudden decision to withdraw funding from the MSiC,” Ashar explained. “I guess to the influx of people that were initially surprised by this action as well, they kept sharing it as they probably realized the importance/value of the MSiC and its wonderful STEM opportunities that it offers to students to Henrico.”

Ashar has participated in various MSiC programs and camps since she began elementary school, learning about topics from coding to lasers, criminal forensics to nanotechnology and robots to microscopy.

She has particularly fond memories of the “Expedition to Mars” program, where students were divided into groups of biologists, doctors and engineers, and able to use “fancy equipment” to program robots and analyze soil samples.

“I thoroughly remembered this amazing experience, because I was so surprised as to how ‘real’ this whole mission felt,” Ashar explained.
The fond memories Ashar and her peers have of the center were jolted by the announcement that Henrico would cease funding the center.

Keeping the lights on
For Freeman, the center provides unique experiences for students in participating school districts, where hands-on experiences and teaching corps still need to be strengthened.

“It provides support for all of their students, which is outside of what they provide in schools,” Freeman explained.

Freeman also stressed the importance of the MiSC as a place where students from different backgrounds and school districts can go to learn and cooperate with each other.

“The center is a place where kids come from different neighborhoods, different races,” Freeman said, citing the example of students from Petersburg working alongside students from Hanover. “Those kids may not have ever had the opportunity were it not for the space."

For Freeman, the other frustrating part about Henrico’s divestment is the timing.

“When a school district divests, you still have to keep the lights on,” Freeman said. “The center relies on economies of scale…everyone pools their money and everyone benefits from the results of that.”

But with fewer schools putting funding into the center, the MSiC won’t be able to hire as many staff or produce as many programs, Freeman said.

“The issue here is that we have such a short amount of time to generate revenue in other ways,” she added.

As far as the center’s future direction, Freeman said that the center was considering public and private partnerships, including working on how to “better engage the business community.”

Freeman also said that the center aimed to become a stronger, more stable organization that wouldn’t be as affected by the ebbs and flows of school funding.

'We did our best'
It wasn’t just students like Ashar and the Blue Cheese team who took a stand.

In a poignant moment at the February School Board meeting, former teacher and current MSiC staff member Elizabeth Layne also stepped up to the microphone during the public comment session to share her thoughts.

“When I started my teaching career, I would not have been successful if it were not for the center,” Layne began. “The professional development that I received from them…got me through my first few years as a teacher."

Though Layne, who had taught at Henrico schools, had been given a mentor, her mentor was on their way out, leaving her with few people to turn to.

“I had no one there at my school to help me,” Layne said.

After pausing to collect herself while describing the amazement she has seen on the faces of students at the center, Layne continued.

“I don’t think that you understand everything that you would be taking away from the students and the families in the county, and the teachers,” Layne said.

“I just really hope you reconsider,” she added. “I’ll stop now, before I get emotional.”

If the budget process continues without disruption, the Fiscal Year 2019-20 budget will become effective July 1.

“Who knows what ultimately will happen,” Westhoven said, “but we did our best.”