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In order to improve reading scores and overall grades, officials with Prince Edward County Public Schools want to roll out three new programs, basically a literacy plan. To do that, first they needed approval from county supervisors, as the money came in the form of grant funding from the state. Despite raising some concerns about how the money might be better spent by the district, supervisors unanimously approved the transfer during their Tuesday, Oct. 8 meeting. 

The money is from an ALL IN Virginia grant, given out to each district by the state in order to fund projects to help students recover from the pandemic and improve grades. In this case, the school district had $905,976.56 left over from the grant they received last year. 

The plan is split into three parts. First, district officials want to focus on tutoring in grades 3 through 8. Spread out over a three year period, this will take up roughly 70% of the funding. They want to hire a lead teacher tutor at a salary of $27,634, to coordinate tutoring services for the district. Then Prince Edward Public Schools plans to hire 20 tutors, from either Longwood University or the Farmville community as a whole, at a cost of $20 per hour. These people would handle both tutoring during the day and after school. District officials also want to hire current or retired teachers for tutoring and pay them $30 per hour, along with 10 high school students interested in education. The students would simply earn credit as part of a work-based learning experience. Over the next three years, this will add up to $685,084.74. 

A need for literacy plan

The second part of the project involves paying teachers to work after hours and during the summer to develop a district-wide literacy plan. That showed up as a problem in this year’s Standards of Learning pass rates. At the elementary level, only 63% of students passed their reading test. Only 56% did at Prince Edward Middle and 75% at Prince Edward High. These teachers would be paid $30 per hour and work with a literacy consultant. That all adds up to $195,720.01 over a three year period, taking roughly 20% of the grant funds. 

And then there’s the third part of this project, which involves fighting chronic absenteeism. It’s a problem that already cost the district once this fall. If the chronic absences weren’t a problem, Prince Edward High would have been accredited with no conditions. As it stands, 25% of students at the high school, 16.2% at the middle school and 20.11% at the elementary are chronically absent. The plan is to hire current employees to call parents of chronically absent students after school and offer any community resources to try and help get the student to class on time. 

‘A lot of extra money’ 

Prince Edward Supervisor David Emert felt that’s a lot of extra money to be spent on tutoring and phone calls. 

“(It) would be better to hire some new teachers (with this money),” Emert said. He pointed out that if they used the money to hire teachers starting at a $45,000 salary, that’s 20 new teaching positions. At $50,000 salary, that money would be enough for 18 new positions. And at $60,000, that would be 15. 

“That adds up,” Emert said. “If you cut it back to five extra teachers, that’s four years at $65,000 per year, guaranteed. That’s a whole lot of money. I’m not saying they don’t need it, but (more than) $900,000 to be split up for tutoring is a lot of money.”