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Why are we not seeing strong improvement with grades in Prince Edward County Public Schools? When will Prince Edward schools be accredited? Prince Edward supervisors had a number of questions for Superintendent Dr. Barbara Johnson when she showed up to give her regular update at their Tuesday, Aug. 13 meeting. 

Johnson had told the board that while final grades and accreditation data hasn’t been released yet by the state, she was confident that the elementary school did well, she was confident that the high school made gains. However, “our middle school did not make gains, at least I don’t expect they made gains in anything but attendance,” she told the group. 

Supervisor Harrison Jones raised a question in response. He pointed to the fact she said attendance increased across the board, and chronic absenteeism was given as a reason previously why the schools struggled to get fully accredited. If attendance increased at the middle school, Jones asked, why didn’t test scores increase as well? 

“Because of instruction, general instruction,” Johnson said. “The instruction, it is my belief, and again, we are speculating, because I don’t have the test scores, but I’m pretty confident in my response. We need to make sure that everyone in all of our schools focuses on the standards, understands the standards and teaches the standards and that did not happen across the board.”
Why do you think that is, Jones asked. 

“I think that there are several different reasons,” Johnson said. “I think some people like to teach certain things and are accustomed to teaching them the way they’ve always taught them. I think some people don’t really understand the standards at the level they need to understand them. Virginia Standards is not something that is taught at the K-12 level to the extent that we need for implementation. So we have to go through that every year with seasoned and/or new teachers, it doesn’t matter.” 

Standards also change, Johnson said, with schools and teachers playing catchup. Last year, she pointed out, math and literacy standards changed.  

“So with standards changing, everyone does not keep up with their standards as well as they should,” Johnson said. “The question is, the children came, so what happened? What happened then is really the quality of instruction was not at the cognitive level it needed to be and it was not as direct as it needed to be. Direct instruction is really important.”

Prince Edward schools return to direct instruction

Johnson said one of the ways that’s being corrected is simply a return to direct instruction in Prince Edward schools. Education, she said, went through a phase where children were expected to do a lot of the work themselves, neglecting the actual direct instruction. And so the district is returning to direct instruction. Also, Johnson said, the school district this year has added in a period to get help. 

“We also have factored into the schedule at all levels a remediation and enrichment period, very specific, so that if you are not where you should be in your reading and mathematics, then we have a period, it’s not an extended period, it’s not a 90-minute block. But there is a period in the day where you can get assistance. And that’s on all levels for reading and mathematics. It’s also a period that can be used for enrichment, for those children who need additional supports just to move forward faster, because we can’t neglect that part of our population as well. Our population spans between those who are very gifted and those who are at a life skills level.”

Jones asked her if she could outline her administration’s plan to help Prince Edward reach the standards this year, the ones she had just said were not previously understood or taught in some cases at the level they needed to be. 

“Yes, that is through professional development and we have hired a consultant this year who works every week with our administration, because that’s part of it as well, the administrators need to understand exactly what they’re looking for when they go into classes,”Johnson said. “They need to give quality feedback to those folks. It’s not good enough, and I know we’ve all worked at jobs where someone has said ‘you’re doing a good job’. Well that’s great, but that doesn’t make you better at your job. So we are interested in making sure we give very specific feedback around what is working, very specific feedback around what is not working and we’re giving more frequent assessments. We have what is considered HQI, high quality instructional materials, that’s the new VDOE (Virginia Department of Education) term. What we do have (are) quality textbooks, quality instructional materials, we need to make sure everyone is using those quality instructional materials.”  

Johnson said she is also monitoring utilization reports. 

“How often are you giving assessments? Are they the right assessments, because we do have all these wonderful materials,” Johnson said. 

Not used to fidelity? 

So in your thinking, Jones said, are you saying the teaching materials and/or methods that were used last year were out of date? 

“No, the materials weren’t necessarily out of date, (they) weren’t necessarily used to fidelity,” Johnson said. “So there’s a difference. We’ve had high quality instructional materials, because we made sure that we purchased materials when standards changed. But as far as instruction, I don’t want to say out of date, I’m just simply saying people have different ways of teaching and they’re not always aligned with the standards.” 

Supervisor Dr. Odessa Pride raised a question based on that answer. If teaching methods were not always aligned with the standards, at what point last school year was this addressed? Did it happen right before Standards of Learning tests went out? Midway in the year? 

“When did you know that instruction wasn’t taking place in the means that it should have?” Dr. Pride asked. 

Johnson said the district had been working on instruction all year long. 

“Every year we work on instruction,” Johnson said. “We made changes. We made shifts mid-year with some of the academic teams, I’m speaking specifically about the middle school now. We made course adjustments if you will, probably mid-year with the hopes that we had the spring semester to really boost some differences. We changed how we met, the professional learning communities, grade level meetings, whatever one would want to call them. We changed how we conducted those. So we made mid-year corrections. They were simply not enough. At least my expectation is that they were not enough.”  

What’s the timeline for Prince Edward schools? 

Johnson was also asked by supervisors if she had a timeline when Prince Edward schools will all be accredited. She referenced discussing that the last time she came to give an update and said she would offer a different response now. 

“My response was then, that the elementary school I was not worried about, that the middle school would be next, it probably would take two years for the middle school (to be accredited) and that the high school I simply was not sure (about). I’m going to change that. The elementary school I’m still not worried about. The high school, really good possibility for (accreditation) this year, we’ve hit major key indicators. The middle school I have to just wait and see. I say wait and see because I need to understand where we’re going to be this year.”

She also pointed out that the state’s accreditation system will be shifting soon. Those standards have been established and we’ll go into more detail with them next week, when we sit down with some of the VDOE staff. But the key point state education officials say is changing is that Virginia will now split accountability and accreditation. That means accreditation, assessing schools’ overall quality and effectiveness, will be done separate from accountability, that is evaluating progress toward the state standards. Chronic absenteeism, for example, would no longer cause a school to be considered not accredited. 

Looking at other factors

Beyond grades and attendance, are there other factors you see where Prince Edward is improving, Jones asked. He asked Johnson what other factors she used when assessing the quality of a school and the district as a whole. 

“I’m looking at several things,” Johnson said. “I’m looking at our graduation rate. Our graduation rate has gone up, or the expectation is that it will go up. I’m looking at the amounts of money garnered in scholarship and supports.” 

Johnson added that she also typically looks at enrollment numbers, but “our enrollment numbers, because of what’s happening in the region, aren’t really a good assessment of that necessarily.” Another factor would be turnover, which has been an ongoing conversation for well over a decade in Prince Edward, she added. 

Making the jump in Prince Edward schools

She also looks at the literacy rate. Are children reading on grade level by the time they reach third grade?

And how are we doing in that metric, Jones asked. 

“I think we’re getting much better with that,” Johnson said. “I think our elementary school has done an exceptional job of sending strong students, stronger students to the middle school. Our biggest issue right now is figuring out what happens, aside from what happens just developmentally, because there are developmental things that happen. But aside from that, what is happening with instruction at that (middle school) level. It is that transition that is most critical and it is that transition that well over a decade, that’s where we lose children.”

Johnson said the elementary school has roughly 800 children, but that number drops to between 500 to 550 by the time they reach middle school. 

“And that has been historical. We have the data to prove that for decades, we lose our children in middle school,” Johnson said. “The question continues to be the why. Initially when I first came, I thought maybe it’s because parents are just afraid of middle school and so they do something different. But there’s a huge gap in our enrollment. And what you would think in a district that only has three schools that they would be able to maintain. We maintain from middle to high. We don’t maintain from elementary to middle.” 

Jones said he couldn’t imagine that 25% of Prince Edward’s students are dropping out as they enter 5th grade, so they’re finding different options. He asked if the district polled parents, giving an opportunity to say why they’re taking their child elsewhere?

“No, we do not,” Johnson said. “When someone leaves, they simply leave and sometimes we know because a parent or another school division has requested records. Sometimes that’s how we find out. Parents don’t typically come and tell us that they’re leaving. They just enroll their children somewhere else or they choose to homeschool, private school, move out of state or whatever the case may be. It varies.” 

The board members thanked her for her answers and wrapped up the discussion after that. 

When will data be released? 

Officials with the Virginia Department of Education say they expect to release accreditation scores and data within the next month. The rough estimate right now is for mid-September.