Katharine Reilly paints a picture Norman Rockwell would love. Parents walking their kids to the neighborhood elementary school every morning, a school that’s both economically and racially diverse not to satisfy some socio-engineered ideal but because that’s what the area it serves looks like. Tighter-knit communities where more people know each other and get involved in local issues. People not fleeing to the suburbs when their children reach a certain age and property values rising as a result.

“Positive. Positive. Positive,” she says, ticking off the list.

All this from an elementary school.

Reilly is a soon-to-be mother who lives in Woodland Heights, one of the neighborhoods just south of the James River that would be served by a proposed charter school, the Patrick Henry School of Art and Science. She also has a Ph.D. in education from UCLA and helped successfully write the charter for a school in Orange County, California.

Reilly and others have worked for months on a proposal that would use the Patrick Henry Elementary School building at the intersection of Forest Hill and Semmes Avenues. That building currently houses the students of A.V. Norrell Elementary, who were moved there for the 2006-2007 school year after the flooding in Battery Park. But it will be empty when they leave. Patrick Henry Elementary was shut down after the 2005-2006 school year.

The group will make its pitch to the school board some time this summer with the hope of starting classes in the fall of 2008. Contained in the board’s majority vote will be answers to questions larger than the viability of a single school, questions about the character of the city and its neighborhoods, the kind of citizens it hopes to attract and the opportunities it wants to offer its students. The nine-member board may not recognize the significance of the moment, but it won’t just be voting on whether to approve a charter school. They’ll be answering the question of what kind of city Richmond can and will be. And we’ll all have to live with the result.

“I’ve got a 20-month-old now and I don’t like that it’s totally up in the air where she might go to school,” says Gina Wojtysiak, a Woodland Heights resident and member of the local initiative. “I want a good school option that I know I can send her to when it comes time.”

Forest Hill resident and initiative member Richard Day puts it more bluntly: “I have a four- and a five-year-old and they’ll probably stay at private school unless this succeeds.”

Talk to people at Crossroads Coffee across the street from Patrick Henry Elementary or at the dog park at Forest Hill Presbyterian and you quickly find out the decision Day and his wife had to make is a common one. Too often it ends with a family deciding they can’t afford private school but don’t trust the local public school. So they move away.

“We’ve known probably a dozen families, just ourselves personally, that have already fled to Chesterfield County,” Day explains. “They buy a house in Woodland Heights, for example, they might renovate it, they get real involved in the community and then boom they have a kid and by the time the kid is four years old they’re gone.

“We’ve also run in to several low-income families, both black and white, that are homeschooling because they refuse to send their kids to public schools.”
Linda Chance is a Westover Hills resident and a real estate agent in the area. She sees another positive impact a viable elementary school would have on the area.

“I think it would help enormously with property values,” she says. “I don’t know if I could give you a percentage in increase…but I could compare it to how well the Mary Munford and Fox areas do in holding property values. Because people know that they can buy a home and they have an option K through 5. So they can stay there quite a while.”

Mary Munford Elementary in the near West End and Fox Elementary in the Fan are brought up often in the conversation about quality elementary schools in Richmond. They’re the gold standard, but they’re also regular public schools overseen by the city school board and located in relatively affluent areas. The proposed school would be different.

As a charter school, it would be outside the purview and control of the school board. A board of directors—made up of parents, teachers and community leaders—would set the curriculum and operate the school. All it would receive from the city is the Patrick Henry Elementary building and a negotiated percentage of the per-pupil funding any other city elementary school receives (It’s common for charter schools to receive 85 percent of what standard public schools get).

According to Reilly the proposed charter will include three features that will set it apart from any other public elementary school in the city—and the state, for that matter.

The first is a focus on the arts and sciences, taking advantage of the school’s location near the Forest Hill and James River Parks. The second is mandatory, contracted parental involvement. The third is the use of a “modified” or year-round calendar, with a rotation of nine weeks on and three weeks off. The advantage of that calendar, Reilly argues, is that it “allows you to target the kids that are falling behind or at risk during the school year and not have to wait until the summer.”

Wojtysiak and others see the school as community glue and a bulwark against suburban flight, the kind of initiative that has as good a chance as any riverfront condo project or mixed-use development of keeping people living happily in the city.

“Historically, creating the mega schools and allowing people to send their children to a different neighborhood to go to school…it slowed the unity of each individual community,” she says. “Rather than people staying in their community and working on what’s in their community and making that better. It’s so much easier just to say, ‘Oh well,’ and just go to another community and not worry about it.”

A quirk of geography adds another intriguing component to the proposal. Forest Hill and Semmes Avenue act as an almost literal dividing line between predominantly black and white areas of South Richmond. South toward Midlothian Turnpike and Hull Street are largely black neighborhoods. North of the corridor from the Lee Bridge to the western edge of Westover Hills is mostly white.

Because the school aims to serve the community, the proposal would draw students first within a one-mile and then a two-mile radius. As envisioned, the school would be truly representative of the racial and economic demographic that surrounds it.

With Patrick Henry Elementary closed, Reilly says, the opening of a new charter school would come at the perfect time to serve the region’s kindergarten through fifth-graders.

“The largest argument you ever hear against a charter school is students who are currently enrolled in other schools [would go to the charter school and thus] pull from the talent [pool]. The number one rebuttal is that students in this area don’t have a community school and if they did they’d be going here.”
But as fifth district school board representative Betsy Carr will tell you, they did have a community school: Patrick Henry.

“Patrick Henry was a community school and it wasn’t supported. People left that neighborhood to go to Fox and Mary Munford,” she says. “I think it was 100 people in that area that were sending their children to Mary Munford or Fox. If those people had worked together and put their children in Patrick Henry, you’d have another Munford or Fox in Patrick Henry right now.”

That argument doesn’t persuade parents like Day, Reilly and Wojtysiak. None of them, like many others spearheading the charter-school effort, had school-aged children at the time. They say they want the chance to create a Fox or Mary Munford situation in their neighborhood, but because Patrick Henry is closed they have no choice but to go the charter-school route.

At heart, any charter school proposal is making this statement to a school board: We think we can do this better than you.

Carr says that doesn’t bother her. Both she and school board president George Braxton say they aren’t against charter schools and that each proposal is judged on its merits. But Carr admits that charter schools don’t always sit well with public school traditionalists.

“I come from a background of public education,” she says. “People get concerned that it’s taking away money from public education, that it would get funds that would ordinarily go to educate [kids in Richmond public schools].”

District seven representative Keith West was the only school board member to vote in favor of a failed charter-school application that came before the board earlier this year. His explanation for his colleagues’ reluctance is succinct: “It’s a threat. Once you lose students, you lose funding. Funding drives everything.”

That’s the perception but is it reality, especially in the case of the proposed Patrick Henry School? Would it pull students from other elementary schools or would it pull students back from schools like Fox and Mary Munford?

“At the end of the day there’s not much to [the perception],” says Don Soifer, executive vice president of the Lexington Institute, an education think tank based in Arlington. “It doesn’t hold water.”

A school district may lose the funding that goes with each student, Soifer explains, but it also no longer has to allot resources to educate that student.

Says West, a father of two young boys, “Why not give another option to people who feel that the school system isn’t meeting the needs of their child?”

Carr says the board would be open to a charter school if “it provided a learning opportunity that was not available otherwise. It has to be different.”
West agrees, but thinks some board members are too wedded to the status quo to keep an open mind about a charter proposal. He can think of three, he said, though he wouldn’t name them, that he thinks would vote against any charter proposal no matter how good it was. “Some school board members are very tied in to the education system that they want to protect at any cost.”

Carr sites the adage, “The neighborhood makes the school, and the school makes the neighborhood.”

In one part of Richmond, a group of neighborhoods is coming together this summer to hold up its end of that bargain. Will the city do its part?

I am really amazed when reading this article, because I woke up this morning thinking about the benefits of a charter school in Richmond, specifically in the lower income and impoverished areas.  I really would like to help on this endeavor becasue I think it is a wonderful idea.  Considering all the schools that are being closed, what are they going to do with those unused buildings?  I am a former RPS high school teacher and I was ashamed of the efforts that the students put forth, the parents, and the school board, for commendable school morale.  My students did not have enough books, I did not have teacher edition books, and supplies for my classroom were completely out of the question.  We really need to get back to the real fundamentals of learning, not learning just to pass a test.