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Richmond Government 3 RICHMOND GOVERNMENT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND PRIVATE SPECTACLES Our lesson is, that there are two Richmonds. —Charles Dickens n Richmond’s oligopolistic media landscape, the Richmond Times- Dispatch set the agenda for other local news organizations, and what I was printed there became common knowledge among residents who kept up with the daily news. On June 19, 2017, K. Burnell Evans published a horrifying exposé on a city elementary school just one and a half miles from the state capitol. She reported that “teachers begin their days by wiping rodent droppings from students’ desks, said Ingrid DeRoo, the George Mason [Elementary School] site coordinator for Communities in Schools of Richmond. ‘Some teachers wear breathing masks all day in order to teach,’ DeRoo said of the air quality in what is widely acknowledged to be the district’s worst school building among dozens in need of major repairs.”1 Mason had opened ninety-five years earlier and was last renovated when Jimmy Carter was president.2 The story fomented a passionate response across the city: parents and teachers donned surgical masks in public meetings; politicians pledged to do better; a petition to fix the problem collected 14,000 signatures in a city of 230,000; and reporters wrote dozens of follow-up pieces in the city’s other news outlets.3 The Richmond School Board called a public meeting to hear citizens’ concerns.4 They responded with a litany of severe problems: “extreme hot and cold conditions, leaking bathrooms, falling tiles and infestations of bugs THE VIRGINIA WAY and rodents in their classrooms. A teacher said she regularly has to rescue children trapped in bathrooms, due to the failure of old doorknobs.”5 “My son has been sick 10 times in a row, and I can’t afford to miss work,” a parent of two children at Mason said. Fourth-grade teacher Hope Talley told the board: “Our parents want what’s best for their kids, just like any other parent. They speak [their fears] to us, we hear them, and we have to explain why their child had to do without heat today.”6 “From 2006 to 2017, I’ve cleaned up rat poop every morning before my kids come in,” she told a reporter. “Every. Day.”7 “I cannot stress to you enough that the building of George Mason is in a state of emergency,” DeRoo said. “It is unsafe, unsanitary and harmful to our students and staff.”8 Interim Superintendent Tommy Kranz noted that the “building leaks like a sieve.”9 He acknowledged to Evans that every couple of months, the smell of natural gas became so overwhelming that “the fire department and city officials respond.”10 On the other hand, he maintained the school was safe and stated that “if I wouldn’t send my grandchildren into a building, I’m sure not going to send anyone else’s child.”11 (Two years earlier, Kranz had sung a different tune, saying that the slightly better but still inferior Overby-Sheppard Elementary School “isn’t one we should have our children in.”12) He proposed options for Mason with costs ranging from $105,000 to $10 million; building a new school would cost “between $22 million and $35 million” and would take years to complete.13 The school board meeting adjourned without action, guaranteeing that the elementary would remain “a place where children will still confront the acrid smell of urine.”14 It was no surprise when the board voted two weeks later to fund the absolute lowest option presented, for $105,000.15 To some extent, the board’s hands were tied, as overall tax and budget levels were set by the mayor and city council.16 Chairwoman Dawn Page noted that they had “facilities plans for all schools dating back 20 years, but with no funding, the plans cannot be executed.”17 In the most recent example, after the board experienced a 100 percent turnover after the 2016 elections—not a single member was reelected, though two successfully ran for city council—the new members requested $207.4 million for “school buildings needs” and received less than 4 percent of their request from city council.18 Many residents felt that Richmond government had plenty of money to address these issues. “We’re not lacking in money, y’all, we’re lacking in moral commitment,” said former councilman Marty Jewell.19 Richmond protected its bond rating by assiduously maintaining a “self-imposed,” 80 RICHMOND GOVERNMENT arbitrary debt level. Even within this constriction, the city had “about $8.5 million in [bond] capacity through 2021, and about $321 million combined between 2022 and 2026.”20 Many Richmonders pointed out that city government had built the Washington Redskins a $10 million training camp and paid them a $500,000 annual subsidy based on lofty promises that never materialized, just as experts predicted.21 The Richmond Times-Dispatch published “a photograph of a decrepit boys’ bathroom at the city’s George Mason Elementary school, last renovated 37 years ago, showing two of four urinals in working order and only one operational sink.”22 The editorial board angrily wrote: Whatever publicity Richmond might be getting out of the [Redskins] deal can’t begin to stack up against the need to improve Richmond’s schools. Fixing them would do more for the city than any sports or entertainment offering possibly could. As any real estate agent will tell you, schools are the top concern for most people who are looking to relocate. They’re the main reason young families move out of Richmond to the counties, and a major reason families from the counties don’t move into the city. Nobody from outside the area is ever going to look at the city and say: “I’m going to move to Richmond. My kid will have to sweep rat droppings off his desk George Mason Elementary School bathroom, Richmond, 2018. From the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 81 THE VIRGINIA WAY at school and his teachers will have to wear surgical masks because the air is so bad, but at least I won’t have to drive far to watch [quarterback] Kirk Cousins run drills.”23 This was just the most egregious example: the city had somehow shelled out more than $20 million—about the price of a new school—to Stone Brewery to build a restaurant and small brewery in the city.24 Nor was it all the fault of city council and the mayor. Jason Kamras, who came in as a new superintendent in late 2017, would make $250,000 per year, and his top five staffers would make roughly $180,000 each, about $30,000– $50,000 more than each had made the previous year in top positions in Washington, D.C.’s public schools.25 For comparison, the Virginia secretary of education made about $160,000, and the U.S. secretary of education made around $200,000 per year.26 Richmond was only the twelfth-largest school district in Virginia.27 Doug Wilder, who made history as America’s first elected African American governor, had attended Mason when it was segregated. “Recently an advertisement appeared requesting volunteers to help paint George Mason Elementary School, so that it might be opened in September,” he lamented. “Imagine how that made parents and students feel about their status in the community—about their grasp of the American Dream.”28 Wilder and other commentators noted the remarkable disconnect between the impassioned public debate over the Parisian Confederate statues on Monument Avenue and the resistance to improving toxic city schools that were living monuments to white supremacy.29 While the recriminations continued, another school year started with little to distinguish it from the prior one. A group of about one hundred people, including teenagers from Henrico High School, volunteered to apply some fresh paint to the hallways before Mason opened its doors for the fall. On the day of volunteer action, “hot water would not turn on and the bathroom door would not lock on the bathroom at the school’s main entrance.” “The rest of these fixes are nothing but expensive Band-Aids for problems that we shouldn’t be continuing to have,” said teacher Hope Talley. “I hate the expression, ‘Lipstick on a pig,’ but that’s all I can think of,” said another teacher.30 Three weeks after the school reopened for the fall, water there tested high for lead, and the school had to begin “providing bottled water to students, faculty and staff.”31 82 RICHMOND GOVERNMENT SYSTEM FAILURE No Richmonder would claim that these problems were unique to George Mason Elementary. Something deeper was happening: Richmond was one of the wealthiest areas of the state, but its public school system had the worst high school graduation rate in Virginia.32 Evans’s original piece acknowledged the inertia of decades of inaction: “The issues that arise at every public meeting—from childhood trauma to challenges with special education—are so chronic and entrenched that they have become enshrined in a gallows humor–style bingo sheet passed around at Monday’s meeting. On the list are the school’s outdated facilities, which have been the subject of years of successive plans and little action.”33 Heartbreaking stories about the city’s dilapidated school buildings had become their own beat among reporters, commentators, broadcasters, and anyone else who cared to notice. The tales did not become less wrenching for their frequency; so widespread and indisputable were the facts and pain caused to innocent children that each story could fairly present a new and different problem.
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