Tag: walker upper elementary school

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In brief: Refugees welcome, Albemarle bans guns

Refugees welcome

Over the weekend, activists gathered in downtown Charlottesville to draw attention to the crisis in Afghanistan, where extremist Taliban forces recently seized control of the government following U.S. withdrawal of troops after two decades of war. 

The activists called for the United States and the Charlottesville area specifically to accept as many Afghan refugees as possible. The International Rescue Committee says that internal displacement in Afghanistan has risen 53 percent in the last two weeks. Local refugee support nonprofit International Neighbors reports that two families of Afghan refugees have already been housed in Charlottesville, and that more than 150 people have donated to the resettlement efforts. 

Playground groundbreaking

On Tuesday, Walker Upper Elementary School unveiled a crowdfunded playground, the culmination of a multi-year effort spearheaded by Christa Bennett, a local mom, advocate, and chief operating officer at the Strive for College nonprofit. 

In 2018, the school held design thinking sessions with students on how to improve their school. The students decided a playground would enhance their learning experience at Walker, but only had a $6,000 grant to pay for the playground. Bennett, who has a background in grant writing, stepped in, and was able to secure $26,000 from Charlottesville City Schools, $15,000 from the City of Charlottesville, and additional time and resources from local businesses. 

Walker has the second highest number of students of color in the district as well as a higher-than-average number of economically disadvantaged students. “Walker students not having a playground when they wanted one was a big problem,” Bennett says. “I think it was an equity issue.” 

Bennett emphasized that the community rallied around the cause and support the Walker students. “I thought that it was really important to make sure that our students have all the resources they need in our public schools,” Bennett says. “I want to tell the kids that the community did this for you, because we love you and we believe in you.”

In brief

JMU paper sues JMU

The Breeze, JMU’s student newspaper, is suing the school, alleging that the university administration failed to release data about the spread of COVID on campus last year. “This data is crucial to the public’s right to understand what COVID-19 looks like in this community,” said editor Jake Conley in a story in The Breeze. “We are fully willing to seek a redress through the courts in the name of transparency and accountability.” A JMU spokesperson downplayed the suit, saying the school “engaged in several conversations” and “attempted to work with [The Breeze] in good faith” throughout the last year. 

Mailing it in

Senator Mark Warner appeared at a Charlottesville post office on Monday afternoon to address the consistent mail delivery delays that some city residents have complained about in recent weeks. The area’s post offices are understaffed, Warner reports, but he says he’ll be back in three months to make sure things have turned around. 

Albemarle bans guns 

At their meeting last week, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to enact an ordinance that bans guns on county property. Pro-gun activists rallied against the ordinance last month, but many residents, including the county commonwealth’s attorney, spoke in favor of it. Charlottesville passed an identical ordinance last year. 

Quake anniversary 

Monday, August 23, marked the 10-year anniversary of the 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook central Virginia on a sunny Tuesday morning in 2011. The rare East Coast quake didn’t result in any serious injuries, but Louisa County High School, near the epicenter of the quake, sustained serious damage, and the school district held a commemorative ceremony on the anniversary this week. 

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Kids who cook: An after-school club teaches kitchen skills and more

Becky Calvert leads cooking club members at Walker Upper Elementary School as they prep ingredients for orzo with roasted root vegetables, fresh herbs, and fresh squeezed lemon and olive oil dressing. Photo: Eze Amos

On one of the last days of classes before the holiday break, the bell rings at Walker Upper Elementary School, and kids stream for the exits. But Becky Calvert is just getting settled into her “classroom,” a sprawling institutional kitchen with a lot of buffed stainless steel surfaces. “I try to do some of the prep for the kids every week,” says Calvert. The blade of a chef’s knife rings as she swishes it across a honing rod. She cleaves a turnip in two, then a carrot, and then a sweet potato…. “Roasted root vegetables are the main ingredient tonight!” she says, her voice rising over the noise of the convection-oven fan.

Celebrated chef Ian Redshaw, a guest instructor at the cooking class, keeps a watchful eye on the kids as they slice and dice vegetables. Photo: Eze Amos

For an hour on most Wednesdays, from 3:30-4:30pm, Calvert convenes the cooking club at Walker, guiding about a dozen 10- and 11-year-olds through a recipe. Former Charlottesville City Schools dietitian Alicia Cost launched the program in 2003, and it has been running ever since. A real estate agent by day, Calvert began assisting with the club in 2014 and took over as director two years ago. It’s funded by the schools, but Calvert has worked to secure donations and volunteer help to keep the club thriving.

Some food industry folks, friends of Calvert’s, help out. In fact, one has just bounded in and peeled off his jacket. “Hello, Miss Becky,” he says. It’s Ian Redshaw, the star chef formerly of Prime 109 and Lampo. He looks like a rocker ready to take the stage, with black Converse high-tops, skinny jeans, a flannel shirt, and spiky hair.

Redshaw washes his hands, dons an apron, and brandishes a knife. “What can I do for you?” he asks Calvert.

“I want those quartered,” Calvert says, pointing her blade at a mesh bag of brussels sprouts.

“Okay,” Redshaw says, “I am quartering brussels sprouts!”

Now the kids start trickling in and the volume increases, as their voices and laughter join the din of the oven fan.

“Hey, guys!” Calvert says, greeting Alex, Nakiya, Avarie, Maya, Amelia, Si-Si, Alanah, Zeniah, and Gabby. “Has everyone washed their hands?!”

“Yessss!” says the chorus of young cooks, positioning themselves in front of their chopping mats.

“Today we’re going to do orzo with roasted vegetables and olive oil and lemon juice—and you’re going to love it!” Calvert says.

“Oh, goody,” says Gabby, 11, a tall girl with a brown ponytail.

Calvert had warned that the class would be “fast and furious,” and she did not lie. Within 60 minutes—from first slice to plating—the group will have created a big, delicious batch of root vegetables and orzo with fresh herbs, plus the dressing Calvert mentioned. The coup de grâce are thin, delicate, cheese crisps, which Redshaw makes with the kids, using finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. “They taste great,” Redshaw says, “like Cheetos!”

It’s a marked contrast to what’s usually available at the cafeteria, where city schools are reimbursed only $3.43 from the federal government for each lunch they provide. With labor and other overhead costs, the net amount available to provide one school lunch is between $1.50 and $1.75, says Carlton Jones, nutrition administrator for Charlottesville City Schools.

At cooking club, students work with fresh, organic produce and they are learning a lot—new knife skills, the meaning of “chiffonade,” how to juice a lemon, and a special move called the “cat’s claw,” which the chef teaches the kids to reduce the risk of cutting a fingertip while dicing.

“I would say our schools try to do everything we can to expose all of our kids to healthy food choices,” says Krissy Vick, the city schools community relations liaison. She lauds Calvert’s cooking club, while also citing several other programs, including one that sustains vegetable gardens tended by students on school grounds.

After Calvert mixes the vegetables and orzo in a big stainless-steel bowl and adds the dressing, the students line up with plates to be served. Calvert spoons out the meal, and Redshaw doles out the cheese crisps. The young cooks head into the cafeteria to eat. With the oven turned off, the kitchen is quiet now, and the sound of the kids’ chatter filters in.

Calvert dries dishes and straightens up the kitchen. Redshaw gives her a quick hug and bids her adieu.

This was the penultimate  class for this group of students (next up: chocolate chip cookies), and Calvert admits in a low voice that she feels a bit sad, knowing that soon she won’t be seeing them every week. “They really are sweet, and so capable,” she says.

She tells the story of one former student whose mother held down three jobs to keep the family afloat. Because of this, she had little time to cook, so the student often prepared dinner. “That’s why I do this,” Calvert says. “It’s a lot of fun, and I love the kids, but the best part is knowing that they leave here with a new skill.”

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Pushing for play: The local mom behind an effort to bring a playground to Walker Elementary

Christa Bennett and her daughter Emma.

By Alexis Gravely

Christa Bennett is no stranger to community advocacy. 

After earning a master’s degree from King’s College London in international relations with a focus on human rights, she directed an organization focused on ending the genocide in Sudan. She’s worked on community development projects in Rwanda and lobbied the British Parliament. Since moving to the area in 2012, Bennett has spearheaded two campaigns pushing for policy changes in Charlottesville City Schools: to stop weighing students in gym class, and to end the practice of punishing children by taking away their recess. 

Ultimately, both campaigns were a success. Parents can now opt out their students and students can opt themselves out of being weighed at school, and the city schools’ updated wellness policy states that the division “will not reduce or eliminate time for recess as a punishment.”

Now, the Charlottesville mom (her daughters, ages 6 and 11, attend city schools) is leading a new charge—to build a playground at Walker Upper Elementary School.

“This is really about human rights on a smaller scale,” Bennett says. “The access to places where we can move our bodies and do so freely and safely is really important. There are 700 students at the school and one basketball court isn’t enough.”

Bennett says that after researching child development, she’s learned how important opportunities for free play are for children, to support their brain development. Her husband is a neuroscientist, and they’ve discussed how what children are doing in their younger years impacts the rest of their lives.

“Our brains can change some as we get older, but not as much as it will change when you’re 10, 11, or 12—the ages of the children who go to Walker,” Bennett says.

While students have access to a soccer field and basketball court, Bennett says the lack of playground equipment excludes kids who are shyer or aren’t interested in playing team sports. Her own daughter often does homework during recess time because she doesn’t have anything else to do.

Bennett wanted to find a solution. She decided to use her experience in grant writing and fundraising to help raise $90,000 to build a playground by next year. When she learned that no one from the city schools had applied for the UVA Health System’s Community Health Grant, she started working on an application. Bennett wrote two additional grant applications for the project, and is expecting to hear the results this month. 

If all goes well, her next step is to take her proposal to the school board and City Council.

The initiative, called “A Playground at Walker,” already has the support of Walker Principal Adam Hastings and Kim Powell, the district’s assistant superintendent for finance and operations, if funding can be secured. Walker has not had a play structure since it was converted to an upper elementary school, the district says, though interest in adding a playground has grown in recent years. In the long term, the division is planning to convert Walker to a citywide public preschool, and have fifth graders stay at their neighborhood elementary schools while sixth graders attend Buford Middle School. 

The playground project has been a year in the making, and Bennett’s been working constantly behind the scenes to make her vision a reality. From collaborating with the Walker PTO to meeting with the Charlottesville Parks and Recreation department to developing initial designs with local architects, she has been involved in all facets of the process.

“It’s like this part-time job that I have,” Bennett laughs. But she’s okay with that. “This is something I can do, so I’m willing to give my time.”

The daughter of a pastor, Bennett says she is motivated by the moral commitment to justice that her faith instilled in her, and she defines justice as “everyone having what they need.” The Walker project is just another way to make that happen.

“We need to show up for people,” Bennett says. “Justice is a community event.”

Bennett is working with the PTO to distribute surveys to parents and students, and she’s planning to hold community work days when construction begins. She says the group may also start a GoFundMe campaign for people who want to donate money.

Some local citizens have criticized the initiative, noting that it shouldn’t be Bennett’s responsibility to crowdsource funding for a playground at a public school. Bennett agrees that it should be done by the City Council and the school board, but she also believes the kids at Walker deserve to have a playground—and her efforts can make that happen a lot sooner.

“My intention for this project is for it to be a both/and situation—where I’m raising questions about why this hasn’t happened so far and getting a playground built in 2020,” Bennett says.

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Curriculum crusade: Spanish as elective perturbs parents

Exterior photo of Walker Upper Elementary School
If city school reconfiguration moves forward, Walker Upper Elementary would be converted to a preschool, with the building also housing a health clinic and counseling services. PC: Staff photo

Come this fall, Walker Upper Elementary, which serves the city’s fifth and sixth graders, will drop its Spanish language requirement for a focus on math and science instruction.

During a January school board meeting, Principal Adam Hastings said the change, which the school board approved in February, was prompted by “a need for students to receive focused math and science instruction.” But when reached for comment, Hastings focused on the fact that the school is also adding a second elective, and said “having kids find joy and love learning” helps make them successful.

Still, the move to make Spanish an elective has recently raised alarm among parents, some of whom showed up at an April 11 school board meeting to express their discontent.

“I wish I wouldn’t have thoughts of taking my kid out of Walker, but I do have them,” says Minou Beling, whose 11-year-old is a fifth grader there.

Many of the area’s private schools have foreign-language requirements through middle school, including the Waldorf School, St. Anne’s-Belfield, Village School, and the Field School.

“So the rich will continue to get this,” says Tony Lin, whose son is a sixth grader at Walker. “The wealthy will put their kids there. …They’re going to have a leg up on everybody else.”

School officials say some misinformation has been circulating among parents about the upcoming changes, and that they will be adding a second elective to next school year’s course load to give students more options. All students will be required to take a fine arts elective, and they will choose from a second fine arts class, Spanish, or STEM as the additional elective. STEM content is also already wrapped into the core curriculum.

Beling says she doesn’t want her son to have to choose between those offerings.

“Making my son decide between STEM or Spanish is putting him on a track,” she says. While she wants her children to have specialized education in STEM, she also thinks they’ll be most successful if they start learning a language in elementary school and continue until graduation.

Currently, city schools provide mandatory Spanish language instruction starting in first grade.

Amy Ogden, a French professor at UVA with a sixth grader at Walker, has been encouraging parents to write letters to the school board, Hastings, and Superintendent Rosa Atkins, in opposition to the changes.

“It might seem that we shouldn’t worry if Spanish becomes an elective—offering more choices and looking for new ways to engage students sounds like a good thing,” she wrote to parents. “The core of the problem is that making Spanish optional rather than required shows that the community does not consider foreign-language learning as important as physical education, English, math, science, social studies, or fine arts, all of which are required.”

And making Spanish and STEM mutually exclusive choices could further undermine the language program, she says, because STEM has become so popular across the country, and parents will likely steer their kids toward it instead of Spanish.

“Reduced enrollments means reduced resources, and rather than strengthening the program, the change really risks killing it,” says Ogden.

Lin says he’s in favor of reevaluating the curricula, but he doesn’t think it will solve the achievement gap, which was spotlighted last fall when The New York Times and ProPublica published a story on Charlottesville City Schools’ racial inequities. And as someone from Argentina, he says the school sends a good message by requiring that students learn Spanish.

“To know that all my classmates have to learn the language of my parents and my family, it does something for the immigrant students,” says Lin, who works as a research scholar at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. “It creates a different kind of culture for the school.”

The more practical reason to require students to learn the language, he says, is because the United States is the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world—second only to Mexico.

School Board Chair Jennifer McKeever says students who opt to take Spanish instead of STEM will still receive the project-based learning that STEM promotes in their core science classes.

“Dr. Hastings is trying to meet the needs of all of our children,” she says, and encourages parents to talk to the principal before pulling their kids out of Walker.

Matthew Gillikin, whose elementary schooler goes to Jackson-Via, has been following the debate at Walker, and says, “It just seems so reactionary.”

Because so many folks have been reeling over information that later changed, he says, “If parents are going to try to advocate, they need to have their facts straight. Ask questions first and then make demands second.”

Corrected April 18 at 9am. We incorrectly reported that parents were incorrect in thinking their students would be required to choose between a Spanish and fine arts elective. Amy Ogden says a March 11 email from the school’s principal said students would only be able to choose one elective—a decision that was later changed to allow for two.

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Open dialogue: Group helps special education community

Rachel Rasnake, a special education teacher at Walker Upper Elementary School, says concerns voiced by her students’ parents have helped her remodel some of her practices. Rammelkamp Foto

The parent of an eighth-grader who receives special education at Buford Middle School says her daughter doesn’t appear like she’s disabled.

Lisa Torres’ daughter is moderately to severely dyslexic and has some difficulty with speech articulation, but she’s enrolled in advanced classes and also in the band.

“I’m a parent who’s at a different end of the spectrum,” she says, adding that when people think of a disabled student, they often think of a child in a wheelchair or with autism. “My daughter’s is more silent,” she says, but “a disability is a disability.”

Torres is a member of the Charlottesville Special Education Advisory Committee, which aims to give people involved in special education a voice, along with dealing with unmet needs and developing plans for improving the performance of disabled students.

Torres describes her daughter as “a child who wants to be looked at as normal and a teenager,” who is “struggling with acceptance of the fact that she needs these accommodations and, yet, doesn’t want to have to raise her hand and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I didn’t get that.’”

The committee gives Torres a platform to make her concerns known. For example, she believes it would be helpful if students could stay with the same case manager, instead of being introduced to a new one each year, like her daughter has.

SEACs have been mandated for every school district in Virginia since January 2012, according to Emily Dreyfus, chair of the local SEAC for most of the past decade, and a member from 1998 to 2013. She says 571 disabled students are currently enrolled in Charlottesville public schools.

Daphne Ingene, co-chair of the Charlottesville SEAC, says students in special education receive little attention from the general public and their needs can go unnoticed and unaddressed.

Parents, guardians and family members of students with disabilities, people with disabilities, related community service providers and other community members make up the 25-person committee, which formally meets four times each school year and informally every second Thursday of the month. Though members must apply to be on the committee and are appointed by the Charlottesville City School Board, all meetings are open to the public.

Ingene, along with co-chair Tina Dumheller, hosted a teacher/administrator and parent dialogue dinner November 16, after one of the major concerns brought up to the committee was that these two groups lacked sufficient communication.

“I feel like a lot of our parents are overwhelmed and not active participants,” says Rachel Rasnake, a fifth-grade special education teacher at Walker Upper Elementary and a SEAC member. “I didn’t realize that our parents were intimidated…and that was something that I could address immediately by making sure my [students’] parents knew that my door was open and that they were as much a part of the team as everyone else.”

Rasnake is currently working toward improving communication with Charlottesville parents by making sure everyone in Walker’s community is informed of school events and that they’re accessible to everybody—“not just physically, but making sure everybody feels included.”

“As a parent,” adds Dreyfus, “it was always very gratifying when my [disabled] son’s teachers heard our ideas and ran with them.” When she wanted her son to gain employment skills, special educators at Charlottesville High School started a program that helped more than 15 students with disabilities gain hands-on experience in community organizations.