Burley Middle School – C-VILLE Weekly

Bridging the gaps: New Burley principal has big plans

Kasaundra Blount felt stagnant. She had worked at Armstrong High School in her hometown of Richmond—first as a social studies teacher, then an assistant principal—for several years, and was ready for a new challenge.

So she accepted an assistant principal position at Albemarle High School. “There was a lot of conversation going on around makerspaces and project-based learning, and that really piqued my interest,” she says, as well as “up-and-coming work in cultural responsiveness.” Soon she became the school’s equity and diversity administrator. And now, five years later, she’s landed her biggest gig yet: Burley Middle School’s principal.

Despite the uncertainty of the upcoming school year, Blount has big aspirations for Burley, with a strong focus on culturally responsive teaching, which puts students’ cultural backgrounds and experiences at the center of every aspect of learning. Burley, with around 50 percent non-white students, is among the most diverse schools in the county.

“I want to make sure we are keeping our data in front of us at all times,” says Blount, who is a member of the division’s anti-racism steering committee. “We can easily get assessment data from students based on [their] performance, but there’s so many other data points that I want us to begin collecting and using, in order to inform where our gaps are in achievement and relationships—that’s going to provide that level of connectivity to allow cultural responsiveness to bridge those gaps.”

Blount also wants to give students more opportunities to delve into their interests and passions by creating after-school (or Saturday) exploratory academies in partnership with community organizations.

“I want [the academies] set up by interest, so students can jump in and start exploring what’s down the road,” she says. “While some of them may already know that they want to be pediatricians or teachers, they may not know that their love for social studies could lead them to archaeology. …By the time they get to high school, they’ll already have a path that they’re interested in.”

Blount, a graduate of Hampton University, entered the education field 21 years ago and has worked as a teacher and administrator in multiple schools around Virginia and North Carolina.

“All three schools where I served as an assistant principal were very different,” says Blount, who also holds a master’s degree in teaching secondary education from Hampton, a certification in administration and supervision from Virginia Commonwealth University, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in educational management at Hampton. “That in itself really, really [helped] cultivate my leadership [skills], and prepare me for this position now.”

As a Black woman, Blount says she feels honored to be principal at Burley, which was an all-Black high school for city and county students from 1951 to 1967.

“The legacy and the history behind Burley Middle School has enthralled me for so long,” she says. “Because of the efforts of those students who attended Burley High School, and other schools that were set up like that similarly throughout the South… I have [the opportunity] to be able to sit at the helm of Burley right now. That is tremendously humbling.”

“It’s such a revered legacy that I want to make sure it continues to be deeply cemented throughout this community,” she says, pointing to Burley varsity club and alumni as important community networks. “I am supportive of everything they want to do to ensure that the legacy of Burley is one that will live on—way beyond my years.”

Historic effort: Burley High on its way to landmark status

Last fall, after Burley Middle School unveiled a monument wall listing the names of students who attended the segregated school from 1951 to 1967, local activist Jimmy Hollins began circulating a petition to officially designate it a historic landmark.

Burley is one of three operating Virginia schools that had once been all-black, as it was when Hollins, 71, attended from 1960 to 1965. The Burley Varsity Club, a nonprofit co-founded by Hollins, collected over 500 signatures and sent a letter to the Albemarle County superintendent.

The Albemarle County School Board approved a resolution for the designation February 14. Next, the proposal goes to the Virginia Landmarks Register, which would officially grant historic status to the school. Then, an application would be submitted to the National Register of Historic Places to designate it a national landmark.

Burley’s unique story makes it a strong candidate for historic designation.

In the late 1940s, Charlottesville and Albemarle County decided to build Burley to show proponents of integration that public schools could truly be “separate but equal,” a common strategy in Southern localities at the time. The city and county provided Burley ample funding, hired top-shelf teachers, and distributed substantial resources to its athletic programs–all in the hopes of maintaining segregation.

At first, it seemed as though the plan may have worked. Burley was built to replace Jefferson and Esmont high schools and Albemarle Training School. “I think all the black kids wanted to go to Burley,” says Hollins, who played defensive tackle on the football team. “Charlottesville had police officers and firefighters who went to Burley, and UVA nursing school worked to get black nurses for UVA hospital from Burley.”

But the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1954 unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling, determined that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” because segregating black children on the basis of race “generates a feeling of inferiority…in a way unlikely to ever be undone,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. Regardless of quality, schools would have to integrate.

In the years between Brown and Hollins’ first year at Burley, Virginia Governor James Lindsay Almond Jr. shifted his efforts to actively resisting integration, temporarily closing Venable Elementary and Lane High schools in 1958 to avoid admitting black students. But his efforts were repeatedly quashed by mandatory desegregation orders from federal courts, and in 1959, the first black students enrolled at Lane and Venable.

Facing yearly declines in enrollment, Burley converted to a school for seventh graders from the overflowing Jack Jouett Junior High in 1967, then reopened as an integrated middle school in 1973.

Jeff Werner, historic designation and design planner with the city, decided to team up with Hollins after discovering they had a common interest: Since Burley Middle School is squarely within the Rose Hill neighborhood, designating the school could help the effort to preserve the entire historically black area, which has many homes dating from 1900 to 1930.

Werner inherited the project of designating Rose Hill a historic district from his predecessor, Mary Joy Scala.

Last summer, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources deemed Rose Hill eligible for historic status. This has granted special protections, since eligibility alone requires state agencies to take steps to mitigate potential damages when working in the district, even though its status has not yet changed.

Designating Burley a historic landmark “really changes the narrative,” Werner says. “Think about what that means to these individuals. That’s invaluable.”

Hollins concurs. “If I could go back to Burley I would do it all over again,” he says. “It was a family.” And one with a proud history, including the Burley Bears’ 1956 undefeated football season, which Hollins wants to make sure is not forgotten.