Calls to fire Richmond's superintendent collide with pandemic recovery challenges
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A local Black political group wants the Richmond Public Schools superintendent fired.
Why it matters: The latest push to oust Jason Kamras is renewing a conversation on who is at fault when a historically underfunded and segregated school system struggles to recover from a pandemic that devastated the city's most vulnerable.
Details: The Richmond Crusade for Voters, which was founded to oppose Massive Resistance in the 1950s, says Kamras has failed to achieve the 2023 goals he set when hired in 2018.
- Some goals, like increasing graduation rates and receiving 100% full accreditation, have faltered.
- But other targets — like teacher retention, chronic absenteeism and proficiency rates in science and history — improved in the past year, per RPS presentations at a Tuesday School Board meeting.
State of play: The pandemic aggressively set back learning nationwide, but a January report from Harvard and Stanford universities found that higher-poverty districts lost the most — widening an existing gap.
- In Virginia, the gap in reading scores between high- and low-income districts grew by more than half a grade from 2019 to 2023.
- It was partly the heightened COVID risk that also led RPS to go remote for longer than any other district in the state, leaving students to lose two years of math skills and 1.5 of reading, per a ProPublica investigation.
- In August 2020, for example, Black and Latino residents in Richmond accounted for 80% of cases. Black Richmonders were 61% of deaths.
Between the lines: RPS is predominantly Black and Hispanic, and 68% of students are deemed "economically disadvantaged," per state numbers.
What they're saying: "Assigning blame without recognizing the complexities of our challenges is not a constructive approach," Richmond School Board Chair Stephanie Rizzi told the Times-Dispatch.
- Richmond City Council's education committee, which includes Chair Stephanie Lynch and Vice Chair Cynthia Newbille, agreed, saying, "The issues that ail Richmond Public Schools do not lay on any one person's feet."
Worth noting: It's up to the School Board to decide whether to remove Kamras, but most members — including those heavily critical of him and the six RCV endorsed in 2020 — don't support releasing the superintendent from his contract, reports the Times-Dispatch.
- His four-year contract, which expires next year and was obtained by the Times-Dispatch in 2021, shows Kamras as the highest-paid superintendent in RPS history with a $250,000 yearly salary.