Poverty mires many in segregated schools; some seek solutions (2024)

Growing up in Fairfield Court, a housing project in Richmond’s East End, Samantha Thompson did not know her family was poor. The 12th of 13 children, Thompson had not seen much outside of the neighborhood until, during a short-lived period of mandated school busing, she attended an integrated school about 30 minutes from home.

In the 1980s at what was then Jefferson Huguenot Wythe High School, she met classmates who drove cars, knew how to play tennis and had parents who were doctors and lawyers. Thompson had always been a smart kid but had never thought that attending college was an option.

“It was at that time I realized that maybe this academics thing could do something for me,” Thompson said.

Now 55, Thompson is a senior business adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, where she has worked for 17 years. Thompson said attending an integrated school allowed her to see beyond her circ*mstances to the endless possibilities of what she could become.

That analysis found that schools remain separated by race and class decades after court-ordered school integration. In 2022-23, more than 30,000 students in the city of Richmond and Henrico and Chesterfield counties attended “intensely” segregated schools, where over 90% of the student body was students of color.

Looking at the demographics of Richmond schools now, like Fairfield Court Elementary School, which she attended as a child, Thompson said it’s unfortunate. The school’s enrollment is 97% economically disadvantaged, a rough gauge of poverty measured by the state; 89% Black; and less than 1% white.

“I think that these kids need to be exposed to different learning environments,” Thompson said. “I think having concentrated areas of poverty means that they’re gonna try to keep them there, and that’s not good.”

This second part of the series includes an analysis of seven Virginia school districts — in the cities of Richmond, Hampton and Petersburg and the counties of Henrico, Chesterfield, Hanover and Albemarle — to examine the impact of segregated schools on teachers’ experience, student participation in advanced classes and funding.

The analysis focused on 26 schools from those districts, 12 labeled as “high poverty” and seven labeled as “intensely” segregated, with less than 10% white students. Ten schools had “low” poverty levels, and all but two of those schools were majority-white.

“Research shows that integrated school environments help children to succeed after high school,” said Robert Kim, executive director of the New Jersey-based Education Law Center, which pushes for education equity.

“It increases their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. It increases their chances of finding a well-paying job after their education. It increases their competence and their leadership skills. So integrated school environments lead to many benefits.”

Virginia’s urban school districts

Virginia schools that did not fully meet the state’s standards last year — which some politicians have referred to as failing schools — are largely majority-Black schools in segregated, impoverished neighborhoods.

School systems that are overwhelmingly Black — like Petersburg’s, for example — typically have a lot of teachers who are still in college, teachers who are early in their careers and teachers who do not have full licensure.

Steve Staples, who served as Virginia’s state superintendent from 2014 to 2018, recalls learning of Petersburg’s low algebra scores and then finding that the school district had very few qualified algebra teachers. During his time at the Virginia Department of Education, Petersburg employed about 300 teachers. One year during his tenure, the school district opened with nearly 100 vacancies. One year, the sixth-graders in Petersburg went an entire year without ever having a licensed math teacher.

Petersburg has long been a predominantly Black city. Following school desegregation, many of its white residents relocated to areas like Chesterfield and Colonial Heights. The loss of manufacturing in the 1980s also left the city economically depressed. Today, the once majority-white Petersburg High School is 93% minority and 84% economically disadvantaged.

After Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ordered the end of government-sanctioned school segregation, Virginia officials looked for other ways to avoid integration.

White leadership in metro Richmond was divided — some tried to maintain white control and segregation by destroying Black housing, and some tried to maintain white control by annexing white residents from surrounding counties in order to dilute the Black vote, says the Rev. Ben Campbell, a pastor at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond and author of “Richmond’s Unhealed History.“

Campbell says state officials seized upon the independent city system as a way of maintaining racial segregation. The General Assembly and some of the white leadership in Richmond and Chesterfield in 1970 gave Richmond 47,000 mostly white residents from Chesterfield, and the legislature then shut down annexation.

“The fact that ending annexation meant that it was likely that Richmond would get a Black majority just gave extra energy to the state to make sure that Richmond was permanently unable to annex any more territory,” Campbell said. “It was all a fight about race and racial control and, ultimately, the penalty of winning was the laws of economic vitality and the resegregation of schools.”

The end of cities annexing land from counties led to cities like Richmond and Petersburg becoming more economically unviable, said Campbell, who was instrumental in forming the Richmond Slave Trail.

The state in 2019 identified 23 Virginia localities as having high fiscal stress — all of them were cities. Of the 20 localities deemed to have low fiscal stress, three were cities and 17 were counties. (In the in-between designations, 10 cities and 37 counties had above average fiscal stress, and three cities and 40 counties had below average fiscal stress.)

High-poverty urban districts

Virginia’s resistance to integrating Black and white students, and to consolidation of urban and suburban schools in the early 1970s, preserved a set of majority-Black, high-poverty urban school districts that face significant challenges.

Richmond’s school population is 59% Black and 12% white, although the city’s population is 44% Black and 42% white.

“Middle-class people of all colors are eager to live in cities, and they do live (in Richmond) now until their kids get to be school age,” said Anne Holton, a former state secretary of education and a current member of the State Board of Education.

Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras said that rezoning schools, which the city did in 2019, gets you only so far.

“Ultimately, I think we need to create a school system that is attractive to all families of all backgrounds, regardless of where they live, such that we could randomly assign kids in the city to any elementary, any middle, any high, and families would say, ‘OK, I’m good with that,’ ” Kamras said.

Richmond’s test scores and school buildings pale in comparison with those in the surrounding counties, jurisdictions that are whiter and wealthier.

About one-quarter of Richmond schools were built or renovated in the past 25 years, compared with nearly three-quarters of schools in Henrico and Chesterfield, according to a 2021 state study.

Across the nation, high-poverty schools almost always perform worse academically than middle-income schools — usually much worse. But some show it is possible for high-poverty schools to succeed.

Fairfield Court Elementary School just finished its first 200-day school year, which expanded instruction by 20 days. The percentage of the school’s children from kindergarten to second grade who passed the state’s literacy assessment grew 21 percentage points this year — from 61% to 82%.

“When we look at their early literacy scores, the improvement that they have made is life-changing,” Kamras said. “Research shows that family income is the best predictor of student outcome. But it is not set in stone. All it is, is one challenge, a really big challenge that we have to overcome.”

School accreditation

Students living in poverty typically face more barriers to learning than their more affluent peers. Low-income children often enter school with fewer social skills and foundational knowledge, come from homes with inconsistent caregivers, and lack support outside of school.

It generally takes an additional 40% to 200% in funding for those students to have educational outcomes comparable to students who do not come from poverty, according to studies of funding adequacy. Many school officials across the state have called for additional state resources for challenged schools, but that aid has not materialized.

The Virginia Board of Education in March voted to change the school accreditation model. It will soon publicly rank each Virginia school in a system with at least four performance categories. The new system could develop into a school rating score signified by a number of stars or different category labels for schools.

Kamras, the Richmond schools superintendent, said he fully supports accountability measures, but said the schools that will be labeled as underperforming need more resources.

“I don’t have a quibble so much with the direction it’s going, except for the following: It has to come with massive investment for places like Richmond, and that is exactly what the state is not doing right now,” Kamras said. “I’m all for a high bar. But you’ve got to provide the investment to help kids who ... (are) coming into kindergarten on a completely different level as higher-income kids.”

Virginia spends less on a per-student basis, on average, in schools that do not have full accreditation compared with schools that do, according to the most recent school finance data.

The Lee and Times-Dispatch analysis found that per-pupil spending for 17 of the 26 focus schools was below the state average of $14,533. Of those 17 schools, 10 had populations that were majority students of color.

More than half of the schools with high poverty levels and mostly students of color were below average in spending. Only five of the schools with below-average spending were 65% or more white.

The teacher vacancy rate for schools not fully accredited last year was 5.04% — more than double the rate in fully accredited schools.

Of the analyzed schools, five with the highest teacher vacancy rates — above 8% — all had mostly students of color. Three were considered high poverty and had student bodies made up of at least 80% students of color.

State Superintendent Lisa Coons declined to be interviewed for this story.

School choice

Some education officials and politicians believe the fix for school segregation is school choice. Research is mixed on the effects.

“ZIP codes really are the new redlining all over again,” said Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. “Unless you can buy a school district, you can’t really move about.

“It should be that parents can decide,” she said. “That’s why we need lab schools. That’s why we need charter schools.”

Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned on advancing school choice in Virginia, but the only significant school choice initiative to take off since his inauguration in January 2022 is his signature lab school program.

Before his inauguration, Youngkin announced a plan to launch up to 20 charter schools in his first year in office. The plan did not come to fruition in 2022 when the state Senate rejected administration-backed legislation to clear a path for more charter schools. With its restrictive charter school laws, Virginia is home to only seven, while neighboring North Carolina and Maryland each have upward of 100.

Earlier this year, Senate Democrats shut down a bill that would have encouraged Virginia’s school boards to give students a chance to attend any school in their district.

Lab schools are K-12 schools that partner with higher education institutions. The schools are free and open to the public, set their own curricula and budgets, and are associated with their corresponding institution of higher education. The administration expects 15 publicly funded lab schools to be up and running by the 2025-26 school year.

“That’s the knock on (Youngkin nationally) is he’s not trying enough (on school choice), which I disagree with,” said Andy Rotherham, a partner at the national education nonprofit Bellwether and a member of the state Board of Education.

“He can’t do it by fiat. I’m hoping these lab schools will demonstrate the sky doesn’t fall when we start giving people options.”

Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an associate professor and education researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the way school choice is designed matters.

“I wouldn’t disagree with the general idea that school choice ... can be a tool for desegregation, but it really matters how you design it,” Siegel-Hawley said. “A simple statement like that lacks teeth without commitment to providing transportation, an open admissions process, good information, etc. That, by and large, has not characterized the charter sector, and it certainly doesn’t characterize vouchers.

“At this point, we have a consensus in the research that these market-based forms of school choice exacerbate segregation.”

An example of success

Henrico’s Douglas S. Freeman High School is one of the most diverse in the region, with racial demographics that closely mirror the entire country.

Roughly 55% of students are white, 18% Hispanic, 15% Black and 7% are Asian, with the remaining races split between American Indian and multiracial students. The school outperforms the state average and the county’s average score in several key metrics.

Freeman students tested better than the averages for the rest of Henrico, and the state, in reading, writing, math and science. History was the only subject where it lagged, according to state data.

Freeman also outperformed the rest of the division with 62% of students receiving advanced diplomas, compared with 55% across the county, and 51% across the state. It also has significantly fewer “out-of-field” and “inexperienced” teachers compared with the rest of the county and the state average.

Freeman’s principal, John Marshall, said the school’s ethnic, linguistic, racial and socioeconomic diversity is one of its greatest strengths.

“If you’re in a history class and everyone has the same political affiliation and family background, that’s not going to be an interesting conversation,” Marshall said. “But if you have people from different backgrounds, they can raise their hand and talk about their experience.”

“That’s good for everyone. That’s good for the (disadvantaged student) ... and those from a higher socioeconomic status.”

Within schools

Despite the diversity of families, cultures and status, Freeman, and schools everywhere, still face problems with intraschool segregation, where poorer, typically students of color, do not participate in higher-level classes at the same rate as their more affluent peers.

Of the five schools analyzed with the lowest rates of enrollment in Advanced Placement classes, all had students of color in the majority. Three are considered “intensely” segregated, with students of color making up at least 90% of the student body.

“Students themselves choose to take a standard level course or an advanced level course. That leads to some intraschool segregation,” Marshall said. “We work hard to combat that, through exposure, selling the benefits of taking a rigorous course, reducing obstacles — if you have the aptitude and are willing to do the work, we’re going to support you.”

Students from poorer neighborhoods are more likely to come from single-parent households, with mothers or fathers who attained lower levels of education. Those parents might not have gone to college or finished high school.

“We have individual conversations with students. If there is a really strong student that isn’t signed up for an AP class, we ask, what’s going on?” Marshall said. “We look at all of the students to see if there’s potential talent we’re not tapping into.”

Henrico School Board Chair Alicia Atkins said the division is constantly looking into its policies for how to bring more children together.

“Internally, how we offer our academic programing, how we deliver curriculum plays a role,” Atkins said. “The more opportunities we have across Henrico for all to participate in, the better we can integrate, the better we can allow children to have cross-cultural experiences.”

Thompson, who grew up in Fairfield Court, said that exposure was key to allowing her to see beyond her circ*mstances to the possibilities of what she could become.

“I wish (kids in Fairfield Court) could go to (a school) in the West End and to just be integrated with some of those other kids in that neighborhood,” she said. “I don’t know why they feel like that’s something negative. But I do believe that you can’t be what you don’t see.”