EDITORIAL: Will Spotsylvania Learn and Forget Nothing?

The road ahead is long. It’s going to take everyone.

by Martin Davis and Shaun Kenney
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF and COLUMNIST

The bombshell exploded in November 2021.

Just after the election that put Kirk Twigg, April Gillespie, Rahbi Abuismail, and Lisa Phelps in charge of the Spotsylvania County School Board, Twigg and Abuismail openly talked of burning and banning books.

The incendiary remarks set the stage for a controversial two-year period decried as the destruction of public education in one quarter, the salvation of moral education by another quarter, and a feeling of despair by half the population.

In November 2023, Spotsylvania said enough to the chaos.

Lost teachers, massive turnover in Central Office, battles over school libraries, and a school board leadership which simply refused to interact with constituents, the media, and one another were a bridge too far in Republican-leaning Spotsylvania.

The new Board majority will be seated in January. Nicole Cole (whose seat wasn’t up for re-election this year) and Lorita Daniels (who regained her seat) will be joined by newly elected Megan Jackson, Carol Medawar, and Belen Rodas.

This new majority will be closely watched by parents, political operatives, and the FXBG Advance. What lessons have they learned? What mistakes will they make? And will this Board bring a return to “normalcy”?

A Long Road Ahead in Spotsylvania

No doubt the Board will make difficult decisions early on that are going to upset members of the community. The superintendent will almost surely be removed. No matter how it happens, or when, a small but vocal segment of the community will not be happy.

Other employees put in place by Taylor look to already be jumping ship. The chief of staff, Jon Russell, appears to already have stepped aside (on his Facebook page he describes himself as “Former Chief of Staff at Spotsylvania County Public Schools.”) And Tara Mergener, the Christian Broadcast News alumna who served as communications director, no longer appears on the county’s personnel page. Has she left as well?

There will certainly be more personnel changes, and how these are handled will matter greatly, but there are more-important tasks before this new Board that will have a greater impact on education and the future of the county’s public school system.

The most important lesson this new Board must absorb, and quickly, is that there is no going back to “normal,” if “normal” ever really existed.

In many ways, this Board has a blank slate to work from. The system itself is in tatters. It has lacked effective leadership for more than a year. It has lost a significant amount of classroom talent. And test scores (a poor measure of what is happening in any school system, but a political reality nonetheless) are down.

Addressing these challenges will consume the Board’s work for the first year. And they have one chance to get it right.

Step One: Regain Community Trust by Listening to the Entire Community, Not Just the Loud Ones

This community does not trust this School Board at this moment in time.

Yes — the outgoing School Board provided plenty of evidence that it behaved badly and that it was not up to the job before it.

But the behavior of those on the losing end wasn’t a model of leading from the minority. Notable are the numerous lawsuits filed that had little chance of success and demonstrated to those who had their team in place that the losing side did not have their interests at heart.

The outgoing Board has already signaled that it and its followers won’t go silently into the good night. (See Lisa Phelps’ board comments at the last meeting.) This will only complicate the difficulty of regaining public trust.

So how to do that?

Step Two: Find Broad and Effective Solutions from Leadership Willing to Bear It Out

The next superintendent is going to have to be someone with political savvy, deep understanding of public education and the challenges before it, and the ability to unite a sharply divided community.

If that sounds like a tall order, it is. And this Board is not likely to find such an individual among those who’ve spent their entire careers in education.

This Board needs to look beyond education resumes and credentials to find people with real-world executive leadership experience in addition to education experience.

This would be a bold move that will anger the purists left and right but should play well with the voters who spoke clearly in November that they’re done with ideological battles.

Where to find that person? The Board could look to hiring someone from the Broad Center at the Yale School of Management. Endowed by the late Eli Broad, who spent billions of his own money to transform Los Angeles’ ailing school system, it is one of the more-innovative programs available for bringing great leaders from across disciplines into public education leadership positions.

They should also consider consulting with the Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning school reform organization. Though ideologically standing apart from the incoming school board members, it nonetheless has a national reputation for smart thinking and writing about leadership issues in education.

Finally, consider consulting Frederick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute. Hess is conservative-leaning, but he’s also one of the most-respected education thinkers working in America today.

In addition to this, bring in leaders from across the community to weigh in on who to hire. This group should span the political and religious spectrum and reflect the community’s racial and gender diversity.

Spotsylvania County Public Schools are not trusted right now. Public education writ large is not trusted right now. Worse still, there are plenty of vultures out there willing to feast upon the carcass with failed solutions such as charter schools — even getting rid of teachers altogether in favor of remote learning.

Recapturing the public trust begins with a truly transparent search for a transformative superintendent ready to restore the public weal.

Step Three: Administrators, Support Your Teachers (and Remove Every Obstacle to Teaching)

Any new superintendent will be faced with an immediate choice: opt for stability first which will preserve a system which is failing (and failed) at the ballot box, or opt to do something radically different which restores trust in public education?

It is rumored that as many as 500 teachers have left Spotsylvania over the last two years. Certainly the profession has become more difficult, with SOLs becoming so broad and useless, one begins to feel as if teachers are training students to play Trivial Pursuit rather than become successful and productive members of society.

The brain drain is twofold. Yes, there is a teacher shortage, but there’s been a teacher shortage for the better part of the past decade. Yet there is a brain drain among students themselves. It is often remarked that one gets what one subsidizes — public education writ large spends far too much attention on bullies, abusers, and the students and parents who simply do not give a damn about their education. Imagine those resources aimed at a culture which rewards and encourages achievement rather than subsidizing mediocrity?

Yes, the county’s reputation has been sullied. Yet Spotsylvania has long struggled with its reputation. Lacking the urban amenities of Fredericksburg, it has historically trailed Stafford in educational achievement. Yet Virginia also ranks as one of the best state for teachers.

So what are the solutions that a locality can introduce in order to improve local public education? Much of how Virginia runs public education is centered in Richmond, including tenure reform and serious increases in salaries. Fully half of Virginia’s mandates to localities center on public education — some funded, mostly partially or unfunded. Without Richmond, most localities are doomed to fraying the edges of reform — that is, unless they demand an overwhelming local investment through increased property taxes.

Yet it isn’t all doom and gloom. Culture commands, and the best way to improve culture is to focus on three things:

1. Teachers have the right to teach. This means going back to the old ways of allowing teachers the maximum latitude to give their students the gift of learning. Little Johnny gets a C-? Parents can blame Little Johnny — and administrators should get in the habit of defending teachers to the hilt. Teachers should not spend a single fraction of their time defending the idea that reward follows achievement and not effort.

2. Students have the right to learn. If there is one thing we have done to teachers and students, it is surrendering to the soft bigoty of lowered expectations. If Little Johnny is disruptive, Little Johnny can go to an alternative school and learn there. Rather than spending millions of dollars attending to the needs of bullies and abusers, imagine a school system which spent that same amount of investment and energy encouraging excellence? You get what you subsidize.

3. Parents have the right to choose. Over 8% of Virginia families homeschool; 11% opt to send their children to private or parochial schools. Should public education and their hires continue to reflect narrow and partisan interests in the name of non-partisanship, parents will continue to vote with their feet. At what point does the clamor for school choice reach a tipping point among voters? Public education is vital for a strong democracy, and we are failing not just our neighbors but ourselves if we continue to strive for mediocrity — and most certainly our students.

In the end, much of what our local school districts face are created by apparatchiks in Washington and Richmond. The fight for education reform should be taken there in haste.

Yet with the tools at hand, local parents and teachers and certainly administrators have the latitude and the ability to make an impact. Treating teachers as professionals again would be a start; removing bad actors from the classroom and showing a zero-tolerance policy to those who interfere with a student’s right to learn is an awfully close second.

Perhaps some low hanging Day One fruit? Announce a war on illiteracy — the very problem which continues to rear its ugly head in the book burning debates.

Students who show an aptitude and love for reading should be rewarded. Personal bookshelves at home should be rewarded. Reading in one’s down time should be rewarded. Not with gold stars or the traditional bribe of a personal pan pizza, but with grades and clubs and recess and latitude. Forget honor roll; give me bookmarks and privileges.

Set that tone and watch what happens.

Focusing like a laser on supporting teachers in the classroom and treating them as the professionals they are is needed — now. Removing students who refuse to learn is not just an ethical need but a moral imperative. Showing parents that public education is a public good will take time and trust, but the olive branch is in the hands of local school board members to extend.

Rebuild trust.
Find an excellent leader.
And drop the ideology.

If we really believe in students, we will honor them by putting the best minds possible before them — political orientation be damned.

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-Martin Davis, Editor