City launches school PR campaign

I missed this from last Sunday, but the RTD has an interesting article on a new effort to improve the city schools’ public image. Details include glossy door hangers and bus ads. A couple interesting quotes: … the school system has lost half its enrollment. Academic performance bottomed out about a decade ago when state assessment […]

May 4, 2009; 10:15 PM • by North Richmond News

I missed this from last Sunday, but the RTD has an interesting article on a new effort to improve the city schools’ public image. Details include glossy door hangers and bus ads. A couple interesting quotes:

… the school system has lost half its enrollment. Academic performance bottomed out about a decade ago when state assessment tests showed that statewide, only Petersburg was doing a worse job educating its children. And despite improvement in the classroom, public confidence has continued to erode to the point where a third of the school-age children in Richmond aren’t in public schools.

While her school [Henderson] is scheduled to grow by 170 or so students next year with the closing of Chandler Middle School, the open house attracted a different crowd.

Most of those in attendance had children at Holton Elementary, where parents have been vocal in past years about seeking opportunities out of the zone.

“It just takes one parent, one family” to change that, Turner said. “Hopefully, the word will spread.”

And my personal favorite:

[Linwood Holton] said those schools, one of which bears his name, worked well for his children in the early 1970s and for his grandchildren — the children of his daughter, Anne Holton, and Gov. Timothy M. Kaine — in the past decade or so.

“We are living testimony to the results that can be achieved from this school system,” he said. “There’s a whole lot more success here than people realize. You couldn’t ask for better preparation than our kids and grandkids have had.”

May 4, 2009 10:15 PM 0