.AlecMacGillis reports from Richmond, Virginia, where teachers, parents, and school-board members are divided over a plan to switch to a year-round school calendar. Published in partnership with ProPublica.
“If this doesn’t alarm everyone in the city of Richmond, I don’t know what will,” Young, the male board member, said. “If this data doesn’t say that a business-as-usual calendar is inadequate, then I don’t know what would.” Several of his colleagues also expressed dismay.
Kamras had spent a summer during college working as a tutor in a housing development in Sacramento, his home town. He came away from the experience with two insights: that he really liked working with kids, and, he said, that “the third and fourth graders I was working with were every bit as capable as any other kids I’d been with, but had clearly not had the same opportunities that I’d had—and that just struck me as wrong.
Before the pandemic, Kamras had been skeptical about a year-round calendar, but he was alarmed by the effects of virtual learning. “Three decades of gains were wiped out,” he said. “You’ll hear this now from elected leaders and others: ‘Stop talking about the pandemic, you can’t blame everything on the pandemic.’ I am most certainly not, but to ignore the impact of the pandemic and the fact that it’s going to have repercussions for years would be tantamount to sticking our heads in the ground.
Kamras was taken aback when several board members declared that the survey should have another option, too: the status quo. Gibson said that changing the calendar would spur teachers to quit, and that it was unfair to students. “We’re basically merging school into a full-time job,” she said. “It’s not right that Black and brown students in our district are chained to their desks essentially further into the school year while their counterparts in the counties get to play and have a summer.
Young was the only board member to vote against the traditional calendar. “This board, when it punted on an alternative to the status quo, said that we would adopt it for the next school year,” he said. “That, I presume, did not mean anything when it was said.” Roza detected a more depressing factor contributing to the urgency gap: people have simply grown inured to talk of underachieving schools. “The system has always had some kids failing, and now we have more,” she said. “There’s maybe a numbness to it.”
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