We have received an invitation to attend a press conference
by the Governor to announce Part 2 of his education legislative agenda, billed
as “ALL STUDENTS: Accountability + Innovation.”
We are not privy to this agenda, but we suspect that it may
include a few bills with which we may not be in agreement. One bill we anticipate would establish the
“Virginia Opportunity School District.”
(Leave aside the fact that we have “school divisions” - not “school
districts” - in Virginia.”) We suspect
that this concept will be borrowed from Louisiana’s “Recovery School District,”
which is described on the official website as “a special school district
administered by the Louisiana Department of Education.” We have a high confidence level in a bill
along these lines being announced since a budget sheet appearing on the
Department of Planning and Budget website describes $600,000 for funding in
2014 to support “the Virginia Opportunity School
District.” It will be interesting to see
how this concept can be drafted to conform to the Virginia Constitution’s
mandate that school boards supervise the schools in a school division. Perhaps the use of the word “district” is
intentional after all.
A second possible bill may be one that institutes a grading
system for public schools. Currently,
public schools receive designations under the Standards of Accreditation, e.g.
accredited, accredited with warning, etc.
Grading schools is a concept started in Florida, and most recently
adopted in Ohio, which assigns schools an A, B, C, D. F or I grade depending on
how the students in the school perform on the state assessment tests (SOLs in
Virginia) in elementary and middle schools and on state assessment tests and
other factors for high schools. If such
a bill is introduced, we anticipate that it will supplement, not supplant, the
accreditation designations we now have.
A third possible bill may be a virtual school bill that
would require a school board that does not offer a full-time virtual program (versus
courses) to transfer its state ADM and local funds to another school system
that enrolls one of its students in a full-time program. Perhaps such a concept is viewed by some as an
incentive for school boards to offer full-time programs. Of course, many school systems do not have
the wherewithal to develop such programs internally, so they will have to
contract with a private provider. Is
there any wonder that the private provider community has been a staunch
supporter of this concept! Of course,
the state has yet to develop standards for online schools. If this bill is introduced it will be the
proverbial cart before the horse.
