"The curriculum coordinators are out. The gym teachers and guidance counselors are in.

In the simplest terms, that’s the story of the revised 2005-2006 budget that Charlottesville Schools Superintendent Scottie Griffin presented to the School Board on Tuesday, February 15, three weeks before it’s due to City Council. While she continues to emphasize that curriculum across the division’s nine schools needs to be aligned, Griffin seems to have bent to some demands of outspoken parents and educators. She has turned those coordination duties over to existing teachers within the division who will be paid stipends for the extra work. In so doing, she has freed up about $293,000 in her revised $58 million budget and salvaged the jobs of the two guidance counselors and three P.E. teachers she previously wanted to eliminate.

But if Griffin’s budget could be said somehow to represent a step forward, there were plenty of steps backward on Tuesday night, too, leaving the impression overall that Griffin and the Board may be doing too little too late.

Griffin’s first budget, presented on January 19, spurred much public outcry as it signaled the kind of Central Office consolidation that, many argue, doesn’t necessarily translate to better test scores. Griffin and the School Board have repeatedly stressed that her first task is to raise the achievement of Charlottesville’s underperforming students, most of whom are poor and African-American. The Commonwealth mandates that 70 percent of students pass certain standardized tests, known as the SOLs, and four of the city’s schools have narrowly missed the benchmarks. Griffin, who was hired in July, has not publicly clarified how widespread spending—rather than expenditures targeted solely on the kids who need it most—would close the achievement gap. She didn’t offer much of an explanation last Tuesday night, either. Indeed, Melissa Schraeder, a first-year instructional assistant at Greenbrier Elementary, who made a point of praising Griffin for the impression she made on Schraeder on the first day of school, implored the Superintendent and Board for an explanation.

“In the last four School Board meetings, the achievement gap has not been addressed,” she said. “If someone would show me how the budget closes the achievement gap, I would appreciate it.”

Surprisingly, Griffin’s new budget also includes cuts in preschool spending that total about $119,000 and which, on the surface, seem to contradict her stated goal. Early childhood education is widely regarded as crucial to improving the performance of poor children in school.

Still, Griffin must have considered some of the other criticisms of her first budget. She restored a dean of students position and an assistant principal position, for example, at the city’s upper elementary and middle schools. She also incorporated better raises for everyone in the division, including classified staff that had gotten next to nothing in her first budget (in contrast to the first budget, Griffin also wrote herself a raise of $4,356 this time, to bring her salary to $153,540).

Griffin and the School Board have been criticized on many fronts during the past several months, most notably their mismanagement of public discourse. Parents, teachers and principals have complained about being cut out of the communication loop. And the last three School Board meetings have featured the kind of invective name-calling that would get most students a one-way ticket to the principal’s office. The situation had gotten so bad that by early last week Mayor David Brown went public with his criticisms, telling
C-Ville that School Board Chair Dede Smith should be replaced in that role.

Yet on Tuesday night, the second verse was just like the first. M. Rick Turner, the new head of the local NAACP, took twice the time allotted to speakers (Smith routinely allows Turner to exceed the five-minute time limit) to repeat his allegations that racism underlies the criticisms of Griffin. “All of Dr. Griffin’s recommendations to upgrade the schools have been denied by the majority of the School Board…because of a program of white control that is tantamount to the Ku Klux Klan,” Turner said.

If Smith felt especially motivated to make a clear step forward on a day when she’d been rebuked for letting communication problems spin out of control, she didn’t show it. She said nothing in response to Turner. Griffin, as is her habit, also remained silent after Turner’s remarks. Instead, it took straight-shooting Board member Peggy Van Yahres to voice outrage at Turner’s characterizations. “To call our staff racist makes me sick,” she said. “I think the Board needs to apologize and the Superintendent needs to apologize for the utter chaos in our system.

“We all know we have systematic problems,” she continued. “We are never going to get [to a solution] with this kind of leadership from the Board and the Superintendent.”

Vice-Chair Julie Gronlund later suggested that the School Board would not conduct an election for a new Chair to replace Smith, despite Mayor Brown’s unequivocal recommendation. “We are all responsible for what is going on,” she says. “To blame one member is unfair.”

It’s probably safe to assume, in that case, that the next budget work session, on Thursday, February 24, will feature a similar forward-backward dynamic. The issue then is whether the steps forward will be decisive enough to answer the lingering questions, What is going on in the school division, and, Why can’t people talk about it in civil tones? The School Board will hear one hour of public comment starting at 5 pm on that night in the Charlottesville High School Media Center." (Cathy Harding, C-Ville Weekly, February 22, 2005)