Students learn in an ecosystem of relationships. Familiar adults are key.
Across the country, the only successful public education movements have been multi-racial movements that bring students, parents, and educators together. Our movement must center the interests of RPS students; a core way we do that is by supporting the democratic participation of students, parents, and educators in identifying solutions and fighting for the necessary funding to implement those solutions.
We need students to feel that the adults in their life are advocating for them. We need parents to feel that educators understand the value in their participation, in everything from volunteering in the classroom to speaking up at School Board meetings. We need educators to see parents fighting for them to be fairly compensated. In other words, we need the opposite of a culture of fear and isolation.
That means acknowledging the difficult challenges RPS is facing, but not accepting that things cannot improve. We need to have hard conversations about accountability and course correction. Teacher retention is a district-wide problem, and there are some schools where it is particularly bad. RPS students, Holton Elementary students included, deserve better than us throwing up our hands and assimilating to low expectations.
Over the course of five years, Holton Elementary has lost over 50 educators. Who bears the damage? Our students…kids in RPS, many who already endure disproportionate trauma and lack of stability based on rampant poverty and injustice. These kids will not find the secure, stable, and familiar relationships that they need at Holton while the turnover rate stays high.
“…prolonged separations from familiar caregivers and repeated ‘detaching’ and ‘re-attaching’ to people who matter are emotionally distressing and can lead to enduring problems.” — Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, Young Children Develop in an Environment of Relationships.
“Insecure attachments can make children feel badly about themselves and feel they are unimportant. They may feel a lack of control over their environment and may struggle to develop positive relationships with others.” — University of Nebraska, Building Positive Relationship With Children
There is conclusive evidence that indicates RPS students are immensely harmed by low retention rates because young people’s healthy cognitive development relies on stable relationships with familiar adults they can trust.
Teachers across the division have shared that currently, RPS students express surprise when teachers share that they’ll be returning the following year. This is not normal.
RPS students, unlike those from more well-resourced areas, often don’t get to show their teacher from last year how they went on to memorize their multiplication tables, or how their behavior improved. This undermines their sense of their own growth — their own value. Their ability to form trusting relationships with adults is stunted.
Richmond For All is an organization founded by educators and members of educational communities across the city, and the majority of educators who have reached out have expressed appreciation for our bringing this to light. A much smaller group has expressed fear of retaliation and/or asked us to take the post down. Richmond For All is committed to defending any student, parent, or educator who experiences retaliation, and we have a track record of successfully doing so. We are strongest when we stand together as a coalition of students, parents, and teachers.
The First Amendment rights of parents to speak on the damage done to their children by low retention rates, as well as the rights of educators to speak up about their experiences, must be honored. Images of former Holton educators have been posted by Richmond For All and public education advocates in order to call attention to the high turnover and push for exit interviews of all educators who left. The exit interviews will allow us to come to an accurate diagnosis.
These are public school yearbook photos. By definition, they exist in the public sphere. As the ACLU affirms on its website, taking and posting photos is a protected right-to-free-speech activity. It is our hope that accurate data about the reasons educators have left can be obtained through exit interviews and used to inform policy priorities in service of students, parents, and teachers going forward.
The visual that shows how many teachers have left in such a short period of time is stunning and effective. It is precisely this image that is forcing the School District to have a desperately -needed conversation about retention and leadership at Holton, and it is our hope that this leads to similar movements at every school impacted by low retention rates and low teacher satisfaction data.
In 2018, educators and parents organized and were successful in pressuring the Kamras Administration to include teacher retention as a metric in the Dreams4RPS strategic plan. Now — again — educators and parents are organizing to ensure we have the conversation that we need to be having. This organizing has already resulted in a significant win. The Kamras Administration, at last week’s Community Meeting, committed to offering exit interviews to all former Holton teachers. It is students who will be served by this win. Our teachers’ working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. The fight to improve these conditions uplifts us all.
