Revisions are Democracy in Action; Let the School Board Do its Job.
Budgetary revisions are a necessary part of democratic dialogue, but the Superintendent’s resistance to process is part of a broader pattern.
Tomorrow (Monday, February 28th) the School Board is scheduled to host a budgetary session to review changes made in response to public comment. District policy requires revisions to be posted by administration before close of business the Friday preceding a meeting. As I type, it’s 6:11pm on Sunday evening. No revision has been posted.
This delay comes after a month of outcry from the office of the Mayor demanding the Board pass a budget as soon as possible. In public statements, Mayor Stoney has threatened to freeze district funding allocations to punish the Board for the delay. Such a move would be devastating to an already-underfunded district that has seen new school construction delayed since 2017 (also at the hands of the Mayor) and a devastating elementary school devastating elementary school fire fire that has left families and educators scrambling without sufficient supplies or a working building.
Amid threats, the Mayor has implied the Board is negligent, delaying a budget adoption beyond reasonable deadlines. The drama is manufactured. The Board is not only compliant with historical budget adoption timelines; the delay is the direct response to community outcries for substantial changes to the budget as proposed by the Superintendent. A glance through the past 10 years of Board Budget adoption documents show new budgets adopted for the district across a month-long window, from February 1st (2016’s operational budget) to as late as March 3rd (2015). Budget adoptions routinely happen in late February (2019 & 2020), as is expected this year. Why, then, the threats from City Hall? Why the missing budgetary documents in RPS’s Board Docs system? What is emerging fits a pattern of partnership between the Superintendent and the Mayor that is proving devastating to the district and undermining of democratic process. It has to stop.
Democracy in Action: the 2022 Budget and the Fight to Save the Virtual Academy
Optically, the Mayor has relied on a manufactured deadline to create the appearance of gridlock, but in fact the 2022 budget process has been one of the most successful on record, including robust demands for revisions on behalf of the Board in response to public advocacy. The first draft of the Superintendent’s budget came bundled with a proposal to all-but-eliminate the Richmond Virtual Academy, the district’s last vestige of fully-online instruction serving primarily students with health needs that preclude a return to in-person learning in the ongoing context of the pandemic. Response from educators and parents alike was swift and unified: the virtual academy is an essential service. Outcries on social media on social media led to a mass mobilization to the Board for its February 7th public hearing on the proposed budget.
Testimony was heartbreaking. One father spoke of his son’s need for access to virtual learning as part of the district’s ADA mandate to educate his son, “he suffers from chronic lung disease. Simple colds put him in intensive care. We’ve already spent 111 days on a vent. We’ve already had two bouts of lung damage from pneumonia. Any exposure to COVID-19 would be devastating for our family.”
The Board responded quickly, requesting a budget revision that accounted for the academy’s needs and staffing. The Superintendent refused, issuing unilateral notice to the Academy’s staff one week later that they should seek transfer employment elsewhere in the district. While personnel does sit within the Superintendent’s purvey, elimination of a program does not, making the decision without Board approval inappropriate.
At the Board’s budgetary work session on February 16th, Board members pushed back on the budget presentation from district administration, noting that it did not contain some of the requested revisions, which went beyond preserving the academy and into reductions in executive administrative positions. That same session included data requested by Board members on central office cabinet positions earning over $80k / year. The data was jarring. Of the district’s highest-paid positions, over half are new positions created by the administration since Kamras’s arrival in 2017 — totaling 86 new administrative funding lines with salaries starting at $81k and climbing as high as $180k. One week later, Chris Suarez of the Times Dispatch broke a story that painted a very different portrait of RPS gridlock than the one coming from the Mayor’s office:
The requested removal of two cabinet positions escalates tension between the school division’s administration and several board members who allege that the central office is bloated with officials who have failed to cooperate with their policy decisions and requests for information.
In the article, Board members indicated a pre-existing pattern of non-cooperation from district administration.
SlowBros: Jason Kamras and the Stoney Stonewall
The emerging picture is of a highly competent School Board, taking responsibility to enact priorities of Richmond, facing an oppositional political alliance between a Mayor struggling to maintain commitments to corporate donors and a political appointee with a long record of Mayor collaboration and no prior experience serving under an elected Board. Kamras and Stoney are a natural pair, brought up by a political team experiencing unforseen fallout and ensuing chaos.
Levar Stoney’s political foundation in Virginia grew from a tight alliance between the corporate wing of the Democratic party and the state’s heaviest political players — namely Dominion Energy under the guidance of Tom Farrell. A protege and former appointee of Terry McAuliffe, Stoney was groomed to govern a city that no longer exists, in a state that has moved on. Stoney’s signature political project, a proposed publicly-funded and privately-owned redevelopment of Richmond’s downtown under the guise of Farrell was resoundingly defeated by public advocacy and a wary City Council. The unexpected death of Farrell in 2021, Stoney’s subsequent failure to move forward his highly-touted casino deal, and the definitive loss of McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race have left the ambitious young mayor scrambling. A series of public scandals involving Stoney’s insistence on awarding costly city contracts to campaign donors included the revelation that Stoney was building schools by directing public dollars back to donors, cutting corners and schools in the process.
Kamras was hired to be part of the Mayor’s public education takeover, a project with roots in the original version of his Education Compact. A high-profile political figure under the Rhee administration in DC, Kamras came from a context where teacher turnover was praised, unions were busted, and democratic governance was replaced by a Mayoral / Superintendent partnership that functioned as de-facto corporate rule. In Richmond Kamras’s early attempts to bring top-down teacher evaluations were defeated, but he still showed an early willingness to flout Board authority, attending press conferences with the mayor and cultivating a rapid following by redirecting school social media to his personal pages, engaging regularly with national media, and governing more as an outspoken political figure than any Superintendent in Richmond history.
The death of Farrell — who chaired the Superintendent’s search committee and served as a key political ally early in his tenure — followed by the political defeat of Stoney has left the Superintendent in a comparably precarious political situation, especially as his administration accrues scandals of their own. District-wide protest over costly and unpopular school curriculum awarded to companies with conflicts of interest in the Kamras administration has weakened teacher investment in the administration’s leadership. The revelation that the administration has concealed legal noncompliance in school meals procurement from the school board for nearly 3 years appears to have cost the administration significant support among Board members, who are experiencing a pattern of high-risk administrative negligence. That pattern of negligence is emerging again around the fire at Fox Elementary, where botched protocols and failed administrative due diligence led to a devastating loss in a wealthy district of the city. While the superintendent retains some vocal supporters among local political figures, his base among a majority of city workers is eroding, and his entrenched unwillingness to preserve the Richmond Virtual Academy signals a new public turn in the Superintendent’s political playbook. His political appeals to educators are receding, as is his willingness to engage with a democratically-elected Board.
And there lies the gridlock: as Stoney pushes to make good with donors in the construction industry on schools, and as Kamras doubles down on a corporate governance model imported from DC, the rights of the Board to govern have clearly been called into question. Kamras and Stoney are politically savvy actors, and they know a very simple truth: slowing down the work of a public body is an incredibly quick way to discredit and disable that body, particularly in the eyes of the public. In a context where Stoney openly endorsed opponents to our current Board, and Kamras’s team did support work for those opponents’ campaigns at the polls, this should concern all of us. When the politically powerful can’t win democratically, they will seek to win by other means. Those means, increasingly, are taking on the tactics of Virginia’s most regressive forces.
What happens when Democrats adopt the tactics of the Republicans?
This question is being called explicitly at a tenuous political moment for the Democratic Party. Youngkin’s statewide campaign on public education has directly targeted School Boards, explicitly eroding their governing power through executive orders and proposed legislative changes that would consolidate power up — to the regional and state level. Youngkin’s campaign is perfectly timed in a moment where chaos within the Democratic party is trickling down, leaving localities to clean up the aftermath of the McAuliffe campaign and a failed statewide strategy of corporate collusion and insider politics. While Richmond is an ongoing target for the erosion of School Board authority, the dysfunction of Stoney’s political program has disproportionately impacted the city’s politically independent Board, which provides an easy target for other Democrats as they vy for power within the state’s reorganizing party structure. These tactics — stonewalling, withholding funds, demand for recalls — all imperil students and communities more than anyone, and they are exhaustingly familiar to progressive Democrats who have found the party more willing to viciously attack what it sees as internal threats before attacking the real threats statewide: namely the program of white supremacy and privatization of the Republican Party.
In a moment where our Governor has declared explicit war on teaching racial justice in schools, our Mayor has set his own sights on working Black mothers serving on his local School Board. To put it succinctly: Stoney and Youngkin have chosen the same target; this should terrify all of us. There is no exaggeration to saying that democracy very much lies in the balance here. Nationally the fight for an elected School Board has become the defining cry for racial justice in urban public school districts. That fight matters in Virginia more than ever.
