Month: August 2011

UVA President Teresa Sullivan

“This is the strongest academic class that we have admitted, as measured by their standardized test scores and their class rank,” Sullivan said.

In spite of the fact that the University’s state funding has dropped to around 10 percent of its academic operating budget and is less than one-third of what is provided at nearby flagship UNC-Chapel Hill, UVA is still ranked among the top public universities in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, The Princeton Review, and others.

Sullivan said the school’s adherence to its founder’s vision, which emphasizes the role of student/faculty engagement, is still one of its main attractions.

“I think the academical village is one of the huge attractions for people to the University of Virginia and I take it as, literally, one of the gems that we have to preserve, but I also take it figuratively as a sign of a model of education that Jefferson believed to be best in which faculty and students worked in close proximity to each other,” Sullivan said.

Other reasons for the University’s continued prominence are its $5 billion endowment and its consistent ability to raise money from private donors. The College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, UVA’s largest school,  received $41.7 million from alumni, parents, and friends in 2010-11** and the University has raised over $2.4 billion thus far in its most recent capital campaign.

When she took over as president, Sullivan prioritized hiring a new leadership team, a job she finished this past week by naming Duke chemist John Simon as executive vice president for academic affairs and provost. Simon joins brand new Chief Operating Officer Michael Strine, who came from Johns Hopkins University during the summer.

During an interview in July, Sullivan talked about the challenges facing her team. First among them is the state’s insistence that the University grow its enrollment to accommodate more students from northern Virginia and to produce more graduates in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.

Sullivan sees the initiative as an unfunded mandate, but the threat of a cap on out-of-state students has driven the University to meet the demand.

“The state will not be able to increase its enrollment of science and engineering students without more science and engineering faculty, and the bottleneck for us is the ability to equip laboratories that those faculty need to conduct their teaching and research,” Sullivan said.

Faculty at UVA has gone three years without raises, and Sullivan said faculty recruitment and retention will be another fundamental challenge in coming years if the school intends to maintain its status as one of the elite public universities in the nation. 

Meredith Woo*, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, anticipates the need for 63 new professors in her area to meet the enrollment growth targets through 2018-19. 

Sullivan, Simon and Strine all addressed the need to control costs and create efficiencies during their press conference last week, using language that sounded more corporate than Jeffersonian.

“We are constantly looking for opportunities to control costs, increase savings, and improve efficiency. Our areas of focus so far have included streamlining processes, consolidating units and positions, automating functions, creating shared services and resources, conserving energy, and studying best practices in other industries and our higher education peers. This year we will come through the University once again to look for additional savings opportunities,” Sullivan said.

As a new first year class arrived on Grounds, Simon urged it to help redefine the way learning happens in the information age.

“I think technology has democratized knowledge, and in universities today the opportunity that exists is almost redefining or rethinking the student/faculty relationship and how we work together to create knowledge. How you learn,” he said.

 *An earlier version of this story included an incorrect spelling [Wu] of Meredith Woo’s name.

**An earlier version of this story said the University raised $41.7 million in new commitments in 2010-11; that number properly refers to commitments to the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

When I entered elementary school in Tampa, Florida, I flunked my first gifted enrollment test, and had to take it again. Nerves? Socioeconomic status? It wasn’t the most embarrassing moment of my scholastic career; that was likely the day I fell down a hill during cross country practice. But I was invested in my education before I knew what sort of shape it would take, and I remember feeling that my first test didn’t bode well for the future.

Now, I know that every element of my personal experience contributed to how I learned. I needed to be invested in my classes, which means they needed to engage me (page 16). If they didn’t, then I could tune them out like bad music. Fortunately, I thought calculus was pretty cool.

When I moved to Virginia, I left a city where Hispanics were roughly 20 percent of the population for a county where they represented less than 5 percent. I had good language classes, but fewer opportunities to use the skills I’d learned. Now, Albemarle County’s Cale Elementary is one-quarter Latino (page 18), and the county is increasingly bilingual, which gives me a great chance to brush up on my vocabulary.

At UVA (see below), I found traditions I liked and a few I could do without (the small crowd that shouted “not gay” during the football games, for instance). After graduation, I had to get to know Charlottesville as a resident, rather than a student—an act that felt like an education, but took place outside of a classroom, which I hadn’t been without for 17 years.

Fail or pass, no test is as complex as any single student. Last week, thousands of city and county students returned to school, while UVA students reinhabited their dorms, apartments, classrooms and favorite Corner bars. And for the rest of us, life got a little faster.

Beginning with a 5am meetup, and the first patient on the move roughly two hours later, Martha Jefferson Hospital started the transition to its nearly $300 million new home on Pantops Mountain. Construction of the 176-bed hospital began in June 2008 and concluded roughly three years later. Hazel Jones (pictured), 90, was the last patient to move into the new facility. According to reports, all patients were relocated before noon to the hospital, which is larger than its predecessor by half.

 The line that formed outside the Southwood Community Center stretched out of sight. Moms, dads, students, teachers and administrators gathered on August 16 to get a piece of the fun at the second annual Back-to-School Festival, an event designed to help Southwood families celebrate and prepare for the start of the school year. This year, the event’s attendance ballooned to an estimated 350 people. 

Much of Albemarle County’s rapidly growing Latino population is based in Southwood Mobile Home Park, which houses more than 270 Albemarle County Public School students. According to census numbers, Albemarle’s Latino population increased more than 200 percent to 5,417 in 2010, up from just over 2,000 in 2000. Statewide, Latinos now account for 8 percent of the population. 

Bernard Hairston, executive director of Community Engagement and Strategic Planning for county schools, says the event’s purpose is to connect “with families who may not be so inclined to visit our schools.” According to data from Hairston’s office, the number of Latino students in 26 county schools has nearly doubled over the past five years, from 575 in 2005 to 1,070 in the recently ended academic year. 

Gloria Rockhold, Community Engagement Manager with county schools and a native Spanish speaker, works as a liaison between Latino families and the school system. In 2009, however, a tight budget endangered Rockhold’s position as the sole connection to the Latino community. The School Board has since made her job full-time, a decision Hairston says was guided by the enrollment projections of Latino students. “We have seen a tremendous growth year to year,” he says. 

Cale Elementary has the highest number of Latino students in the county, with 148 for the 2010-2011 academic year, or 26.8 percent of its total student population. Rockhold says the school had to increase its classes, “because all of a sudden, its enrollment is much more than it had projected,” she says. The largest jump in Latino student population was recorded at Woodbrook Elementary with 20.8 percent this past year, up from 6.7 percent in 2005. 

County school officials say that, due to new federal race and ethnicity reporting standards, the number of Latino students may be a bit skewed. New regulations allow students to select their ethnicity as Latino and their race as white, potentially increasing the number of reported Latinos. 

Hairston says that the resources the county puts into the engagement of Latino families will pay off in the long run. “The greater the parental involvement, the greater the student achievement,” he says. 

Those resources extend into the community, as well. Rockhold works with local agencies that serve Southwood, such as Habitat for Humanity and Children Youth and Family Services. 

“I manage my programs with community partners,” she says. “If I did not have community partners and volunteers to help me, I think it would be difficult for me to do all the things that I do.” But Rockhold says there is never a time when the community has not come through for her. 

“I feel like the community really backs me up,” she says.—Chiara Canzi 

With more than 270 county students living in Southwood, the Back-to-School Festival there gave neighborhood families the chance to meet schools’ administrators and teachers. Many Southwood students attend Cale Elementary, the school with the highest number of Latinos enrolled. 

Cale Elementary has the highest number of Latino students in the county with 148 for the 2010-2011 academic year, or 26.8 percent of its total student population.

Do students that meet federal poverty guidelines have less access to advanced studies? The nonprofit news website ProPublica recently released what it calls the “Civil Rights Data Set,” gathered from 2009-2010 school year reports. The data includes numbers on gifted enrollment, free and reduced lunches, and race for every school district with more than 3,000 students. ProPublica offered the data as “The Opportunity Gap,” a free tool for evaluating access to advanced courses of study across racial and economic lines. In Virginia, 32 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, but just 13 percent of students are enrolled in a gifted program. [See C-VILLE’s map: Opportunity and Access in Charlottesville/Albemarle Elementary Schools]

Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica’s Director of Computer Assisted Reporting, writes that her team found the strongest correlation between gifted access and free and reduced lunch numbers, “a variable often used in education research to estimate poverty at schools.” She tells C-VILLE that ProPublica received no corrections for Virginia data.

Charlottesville’s six elementary schools feed into Charlottesville High School, where their stats are mixed then averaged. Forty-five percent of Charlottesville High School’s roughly 1,200 students qualify for free or reduced lunch—a number well above the Virginia average. Those same students have access to a veritable buffet of 26 Advanced Placement classes, and enroll more frequently than their peers across the state. 

Looking at the elementary schools, however, the numbers tell a different story. 

In Charlottesville City Schools, Clark, Jackson Via and Johnson elementaries have the highest percentage of students on free and reduced lunch, between 71 percent and 85 percent. The same three schools have the lowest enrollment in gifted programs, between 6 percent and 9 percent. Clark Elementary has both the highest rate of free and reduced lunch and the lowest gifted enrollment percentages; its district also includes the Sixth Street and Crescent Hall housing projects and Friendship Court, one of the city’s largest recipients of Section 8 housing assistance vouchers.

In Albemarle County, where the area median income is nearly twice that of Charlottesville, a mix of school sizes and locations yields more varied results. However, at schools where 40 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch (Scottsville, Greer, Yancey, Red Hill and Woodbrook), gifted enrollment totals 8 percent or below.

The upside? Area schools are adapting to meet varied student needs. Since Charlottesville City Schools started its Quest Gifted and Talented program, Director Beverly Catlin says resources have been devoted equally across schools and among students of all backgrounds. Every elementary school has a half-time talent development teacher for kindergarten and first grade students, and a full-time gifted education specialist at every school for grades two through four. 

“That’s a pretty unusual thing to have, if you look at schools across the Commonwealth,” says Catlin. En route to high school, both Walker Upper Elementary and Buford Middle have three gifted education specialists. Catlin also says that gifted instructors do not have their own classrooms.

“Our program is a lot of collaboration with classroom teachers, from kindergarten up,” says Catlin. “We do a lot of planning with teachers, a lot of co-teaching. We want everyone to be an expert at teaching every student in our school division.”

Billy Haun, Albemarle’s Assistant Superintendent for Student Learning, says the smaller size of county elementaries like Red Hill and Scottsville make for more drastic percentages. He also notes that Albemarle’s gifted resource teachers must spend at least half their time working with every classroom.

“They’re going to be teaching all students, not just the students that are identified,” says Haun. He adds that Albemarle sends additional staff to those schools that show greater numbers of students on free and reduced lunch, and that the school board is “ready to move beyond simple Standards of Learning (SOL).

“We’re developing more project-based learning assessments, rather than simple SOL tests,” says Haun.