The parent at the podium wanted city leaders to understand one thing: It would be difficult and expensive to fix all of Norfolk’s school buildings, but any other option was unthinkable.
“It is so clear that all our hope and confidence in the future is inextricably bound up in the education of our children today,” Karen Jones Squires told the City Council. “We cannot continue to be satisfied with the abysmal state of so many of our school buildings.”
That was 2009.
One of the recommendations from the school facilities committee that Jones Squires chaired back then was to replace Sherwood Forest Elementary and turn it into a K-8 school. Neither happened, even though the renovation was on the district’s capital improvement plan at the time and labeled a top priority.
It’s not clear why the big plans for Sherwood Forest never materialized. With every passing year, conditions at the school have deteriorated — the last audit of the district’s buildings in 2017 said less than 30% of the school was in “good” condition — until this month when teachers shared with The Virginian-Pilot their worries that the district was downplaying reports of rats, roaches and mold. The district says outside tests show the building is safe.
The last decade of deferred maintenance at Sherwood Forest isn’t an anomaly, either, in Norfolk, Hampton Roads or across Virginia.
Spending on schools, and buildings in particular, fell sharply statewide during the recession and has never recovered. The conditions at Sherwood Forest highlight the long-term costs — in real dollars and in the impact to children and staff — of kicking the can down the road.
But Norfolk, even before the recession, had a reputation for doing that. It still spends a tiny fraction of what Chesapeake and Virginia Beach do on school maintenance, even when accounting for size. Its per-pupil spending on facilities this year is the lowest in the seven cities.
Jones Squires, who lives in Atlanta now, said news of the latest problems at Sherwood nearly brought her to tears.
“We said then, and it is still true: Actions, not words, demonstrate one’s priorities, and priorities reveal one’s values,” she wrote in an email. “Norfolk and the Commonwealth have shown little commitment to the welfare of children, particularly children of color. Sherwood Forest is the ugly proof of that.”
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Sherwood Forest opened in 1957, in a neighborhood about halfway between downtown and the airport. From the beginning, the building’s been under heavy use.
It was enrolled beyond the building’s capacity by about 200 students for those first few years, with the youngest students attending school in shifts.
A school for white students when it opened, Sherwood Forest later was paired with an all-black elementary during the three decades when Norfolk bussed for racial integration. During those years, a young Kenny Alexander attended, bussed from Berkley for first, second and third grade. He’d go on to become the city’s first black mayor.
Now, the school’s pre-K-through-5 population looks a lot like the district as a whole. Last year, 58% of students were black, 15% were white and 14% were Hispanic, slightly fewer white students than the district as a whole and slightly more Hispanic students. About 55% of students at the school are considered to be economically disadvantaged, less than the district as a whole (61%).
Over the past few decades, the school has gotten some upgrades and additions. A 10-room annex was added, and around the turn of the century it got electrical upgrades and a new auditorium ceiling and floor that replaced old asbestos tiles. From 1996 to 2009, a total of $413,432 was spent on Sherwood Forest, according to a superintendent’s report at the time.
But parents who attended the school say it looks a lot like it did when they were children.
A 2016 report said asbestos tiles elsewhere in the building were scheduled to be removed last year, but the work wasn’t listed on a report of completed capital projects presented to the board. The district hasn’t explained why and hasn’t responded to a request to detail any work done in the past five years at the school.
A decade ago, the goal of overhauling Sherwood was agreed on by consultants, the citizen committee and the then-superintendent, Stephen Jones, who said in 2009 it should happen within five years.
Jones called the district’s approach in those years “aggressive.” The citizen committee had taken tours of many schools and was shocked by what one member described as “deplorable” conditions. The old Larchmont Elementary had water damage throughout. At Lindenwood Elementary, there was one toilet for the 73 adults in the building. Dreamkeepers Academy at J.J. Roberts Elementary, which has since been closed, had no sinks in children’s bathrooms.
Charla Smith-Worley, who served on the original committee and a similar one set up more recently, remembers touring Sherwood Forest in July 2008. The windows were leaky and the air conditioner wasn’t working that day.
Despite the building problems, the school was doing well. It had some of the highest test scores in the city. Teachers were doing their best to make the school welcoming, covering up water stains with banners and colorful posters, Jones Squires recalled.
“The place was held together solely by the obstinate courage of the teachers and staff,” she said. “It just infuriated me that the administration and City Council counted on that so they could continue ignoring the decay.”
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Why did needed fixes there — and across the city — never happen?
School Board Vice Chairman Carlos Clanton, who was on the original committee and then started working for the district in 2009, said he thinks the answer is simple: The recommendations had the unfortunate timing of coming right as the country entered its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The district began receiving less money from the state at that time — a recent report from the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis found that Norfolk is receiving 12% less now than it was before the recession — which pushed more of the district’s day-to-day costs on the city. When the district had to make cuts, teachers and instruction were prioritized, Clanton said.
“We had to make some hard decisions, and the most important thing is the classroom,” he said.
That’s what happened statewide, too.
Facing recession-era cuts, districts slashed facility budgets sharply to preserve classroom spending. Between 2005 and 2014, instructional spending in the state fell by 1%, while construction, renovation and debt spending dipped 29%, a 2015 Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission study found. With every cut, another can was kicked down the road.
Virginia localities have historically shouldered the cost of school facilities without much state help. Between 1994 and 2013, the state covered 5% of the costs, a 2018 report by the National Council on School Facilities found.
The state has contributed even less since the recession. It stopped putting money into a school construction grant fund and a low-interest loan program. This year was the first in a decade that the General Assembly put money into the loan program — a total of $30 million, down from the $80 million Gov. Ralph Northam proposed.
A Southwest Virginia state senator’s more ambitious proposal, to issue $4 billion in bonds to pay for school construction, was rejected. Bill Stanley, the Republican senator from Franklin County, led a legislative committee last year that looked at facilities across the state. After touring schools in Norfolk and Portsmouth, he and other legislators told school leaders the conditions here mirror what districts are dealing with all across the state.
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The absence of state funding, which is often an equalizer elsewhere, has led to stark inequities between the state’s haves and have-nots, as more affluent communities can afford to pay more.
Norfolk budgeted $3 million for school projects this year. In contrast, Chesapeake, with only a few more schools, is spending 25 times that — $74.5 million. Virginia Beach, with roughly double the number of schools, is spending 19 times as much ($57.5 million).
The citizen’s committee noticed the same disparities a decade ago. Back then, Chesapeake was spending 14 times as much as Norfolk and Virginia Beach was spending 11 times as much. During the 2008-09 school year, Norfolk budgeted $5.6 million.
“The disparity in our respective household incomes may be significant, but not significant enough to warrant this dramatic difference in funding levels, especially considering the fact that Norfolk’s infrastructure is much older and thus in greater need of repair,” the committee’s 2008 report stated.
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A Booker T. Washington alumnus, engineer John Sommerville, made the same point to the School Board this week. He’s been working with the district’s facilities staff to address concerns at Booker T., including mold and moisture. When he saw the district’s $3 million budget, he was “floored” it was so small.
“These kids, they’re our future,” Sommerville told the board. “We really have to rethink how we spend our money. This is not going away.”
Acting Superintendent Sharon Byrdsong acknowledged the $3 million isn’t enough.
If Norfolk were spending what the industry recommends for annual capital upgrades, it’d take $16 million. Last year, the School Board asked City Council for that and got a little less than half. This year, under a previous superintendent, the district asked for and received $3 million, although School Board Chairwoman Noelle Gabriel’s letter to the council said their true need was $16 million. Byrdsong said she’s not sure yet what she’ll propose in the 2020-21 budget.
“The administration, the School Board, we just need to make it a priority,” she said. “Every year we’re at the same place having the same discussions about what we need for schools. And here we are again. We’re not where we need to be, clearly.”
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Districts end up paying for capital repairs and maintenance one way or another. Deferring maintenance almost always creates more expensive problems down the line, said Jerry Roseman, an environmental scientist for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers Health and Welfare Fund.
In his job, Roseman has access to inspect Phildelphia’s school buildings — which are, on average, about 20 years older than Norfolk’s — and serves on a recently formed coalition that’s lobbied for $100 million to fix toxic conditions in schools. A longtime teacher’s diagnosis of mesothelioma sparked the campaign.
When Roseman gets called, it’s because something’s gone badly wrong. He said he sees the effect of delayed maintenance constantly. Just recently, there was a school that flooded: There’s $150,000 in damage for what could have been prevented by a $100 fix, he said. That kind of stuff happens a lot.
“Pretty soon you have this real bomb waiting to go off,” Roseman said.
Sherwood Forest parents and teachers have blasted the district for its lack of transparency on the school’s issues, a failing acknowledged by Gabriel and administrators. Parents criticized the district earlier this year, too, for taking down a video filmed by student journalists about the conditions at 109-year-old Maury High.
Roseman said that’s common. There’s often a reluctance among district officials to fully acknowledge the extent of problems by the time the situation becomes severe, he said. Officials are often embarrassed, and since they don’t have the money to fix all the problems right away, they tend to downplay their seriousness.
Mary Filardo, who lobbies for school facilities funding as the 21st Century School Fund’s executive director, said districts are in a tough situation. They have a responsibility to provide safe schools, she said, but they’re working with buildings that are often well beyond their expected life. She echoed Roseman’s point that districts too often aren’t transparent about those challenges and downplay them because they don’t have the money to fix them.
Facilities aren’t “sexy,” Roseman said, but they’re important and research shows it has an effect on how well students do in school. Problems can affect morale, like Sherwood Forest teachers say has happened.
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Norfolk’s School Board heard an update on the situation at Sherwood Forest this week but until then, the board hadn’t talked about facilities much in the past year.
In June 2018, the district’s consultants recommended closing or consolidating a quarter of the city’s elementary schools. Aside from discussion around the closure of Poplar Halls Elementary and the merger of Fairlawn Elementary and what was Lake Taylor Middle, this school board hasn’t talked about that proposal since four new members took office in July of last year.
Gabriel said those conversations have taken a back burner for a reason. It’s great to talk about buildings and what the district wants, she said, but where’s the money going to come from? With a third of the city’s schools lacking full accreditation, she said she doesn’t want to “waste precious time” discussing buildings instead of talking about what to do in the classroom that could improve academic outcomes for students.
“It’s not just a simple question of what is the next school we’re going to build?” she said.
Asked if she thought the condition of the district’s facilities was a factor in its struggle to get all schools accredited, Gabriel said no. She said she’d have put the performance of Larchmont Elementary up against any school in the state even before the building was replaced. Sherwood Forest is accredited, too.
“It’s really what’s inside the building,” she said. “Now, it doesn’t help when you have ceiling tiles falling on your head and issues with no hot water and whatnot. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t make you feel any better. But really, what matters in the building are the teachers, are the parents and the will that every child can learn and will learn.”
Ultimately, the district’s most recent facilities study, from 2017, should drive the board’s decisions, she said. Maury High badly needs replacement, she said, and Larrymore Elementary was the worst-rated school during the audit.
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She said the board also needs to decide where to put a long-planned comprehensive career and technical school. It’s expected to go at either Booker T. Washington or Lake Taylor high schools. But the board didn’t discuss that either for a year, taking it up only over the past few months when funding has seemed more in reach. The City Council voted this month to earmark money for work at Maury and Booker T. Washington high schools from the sale of land to the Pamunkey tribe for a casino.
Clanton said the board’s facilities committee is working on a proposal to bring the CTE issue to the forefront. But there’s only so much the district can do, he said.
“We can only put it on a budget,” Clanton said. “At the end of the day it’s got to be a true partnership between City Council and the board to get this done.”
It’s not clear where those conversations will go.
These days, Norfolk’s leadership points to a crushing debt burden from previous major projects — including the construction of five schools —as the reason it isn’t taking on any significant new projects.
Many of those projects were opposed by school facilities advocates on the citizens committee, who questioned back in 2009 why the city was spending millions on parking garages, a cruise terminal and light rail instead of schools. Jones Squires, Smith-Worley and another member of that committee, Kathy O’Hara, said they felt like their concerns fell on deaf ears. It was hard to even get the City Council to hear the recommendations, they said.
The money for the five new schools, paid for through a public-private partnership, represented just a “drop in the bucket” of what was needed, Jones Squires said.
Paul Fraim, the city’s mayor from 1994 to 2016, didn’t return a call for comment.
Alexander, the current mayor, pushed back recently, saying the issues at hand with Sherwood Forest reflect problems with day-to-day maintenance, which would be dealt with from the district’s operational budget, when the City Council’s only direct involvement with school facilities is construction and capital maintenance on the buildings. He also noted the council had raised funding for the district’s operations over the last several years.
“Let’s not get it twisted — let’s not mix apples and oranges here,” Alexander said. “What we heard is a maintenance and sanitation issue.”
Jones Squires said what she told council members in 2009 still applies.
“They have a lot of making up to do for years of neglect, and that will be expensive, but continuing in this way has a much higher cost,” she said. “Excellent schools lead to excellent workers lead to better jobs and communities. Public education is the foundation of a great city, but city and state leaders don’t seem to understand that.”
Staff writer Ryan Murphy contributed to this report.
Sara Gregory, 757-222-5150, sara.gregory@pilotonline.com.
