"Four open seats, the Charlottesville School Board election promises to be intriguing for city parents.

In May, it looked as if there wouldn’t be enough candidates to fill the seats. But a late surge of candidate declarations before the June 12 deadline ignited a competitive and energetic campaign.

This will mark only the second time that Charlottesville’s voters will have a say in the makeup of the School Board. The first election took place in May 2006, when Ned Michie, Leah Puryear and Juandiego Wade were elected to four-year terms.

Before 2006, the School Board was appointed by the City Council.

Current School Board members Peggy Van Yahres, Julie Gronlund and Charles Kollmansperger are not seeking new terms. Kollmansperger was appointed over the summer as an interim replacement for Louis Bograd, who moved to Kentucky.

School Board Chairman Alvin Edwards is the only incumbent among the seven candidates. He was appointed to the board in 2005.

Edwards, the pastor at Mount Zion First African Baptist Church, has a long history of public service in Charlottesville. He served on the City Council from 1988 to 1996 and was mayor from 1990 to 1992.

Edwards said an important issue that the School Board will face in the near future is technology infrastructure. “We need to assist our teachers in communicating their lesson plans to their students,” he said.

The school division’s biggest accomplishments of the past two years were making Adequate Yearly Progress and having all schools fully accredited, he said. AYP is a national benchmark system created by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

Colette Blount, a seventh-grade math teacher at Sutherland Middle School, said she got into teaching 13 years ago to help eliminate disparities in the nation’s education system.

The key to student achievement, she stressed, is high expectations.

“I expect that all my children are going to Harvard and that’s how I teach them,” she said.

Blount, the mother of a junior at Charlottesville High School, wants to implement foreign language instruction at the elementary-school level and bolster the college prep program at the high-school level.

Grant Brownrigg, a business cartoonist with an extensive business background, said that budget issues are what interest him most.

“Ideas are going to remain ideas unless we get the money to make them into a reality,” Brownrigg said. “We need to manage our money well, use intelligent cost cutting and create a culture of continuous improvement.”

Brownrigg, the father of three students in the city school system, said that he hopes to strengthen the relationship between the school system and the local business community. He added that he would seek to ensure that Charlottesville’s students learn the skills necessary to thrive in the workplace.

Llezelle Dugger, an assistant public defender in Charlottesville and the mother of two young daughters who will enter the city system in the next few years, is passionate about closing the achievement gap and decreasing the dropout rate at CHS.

She realized the significance of the problem after noting the number of her clients who had dropped out of city schools. She said that the current projected dropout rate is around 4.8 percent and that the black dropout rate is almost double that.

“I want a school system where all of our children can succeed,” she said.

Dugger would seek to increase collaboration between the school system and the community in providing support for at-risk students.

Kathleen Galvin, an architect and mother of two city students, said she would focus on four areas - teaching, administration, community and knowledge.

Galvin is concerned that the division’s administration is putting too much emphasis on the Standards of Learning and AYP.

“We need to think outside of that box and look at what kind of curriculum our students should be mastering,” she said.

“I think making AYP may be giving us a little bit of a false sense of security.”

Sean McCord, an information technology specialist at the University of Virginia, grew up in California before moving to Charlottesville in 1991. He has three children who are students in the city school system.

“As a board, we need to develop solutions to closing the achievement gap and design creative approaches toward funding schools,” McCord said.

Two specific ideas McCord has in mind are the creation of a student-run judicial review board at CHS and the launching of a capital campaign by the school division.

Lynette Meynig, a dancer, artist and entrepreneur, wants to revamp the education system. She said too many students are falling behind because the education system is not engaging them.

“Kids are falling through the cracks because they are not enjoying school,” she said. “We need to create a new system that caters to the students and not old fogies. Students succeed when they enjoy learning.”

Meynig, the mother of two city students, wants the system to run an open-market business education program. Groups of students would come up with business plans and learn skills needed in the 21st-century workplace. Meynig hopes that community businesses would get involved and provide mentoring for the students.

The election is Nov. 6." (Barney Breen-Portnoy, The Daily Progress, October 14, 2007)