Interview: School Board candidate Glen Sturtevant

Glen Sturtevant, along with Trent Park, is vying for the 1st District School Board seat being vacated by Kimberly Bridges. Sturtevant, an attorney with Hunton & Williams, is a former Vice-Chair of the Richmond Public Schools Education Foundation, and has an undergraduate degree from Catholic University and a law degree from George Mason University. He […]

October 28, 2012; 11:52 AM • by West of the Boulevard News

Glen Sturtevant, along with Trent Park, is vying for the 1st District School Board seat being vacated by Kimberly Bridges.

Sturtevant, an attorney with Hunton & Williams, is a former Vice-Chair of the Richmond Public Schools Education Foundation, and has an undergraduate degree from Catholic University and a law degree from George Mason University. He has been endorsed by the Richmond Crusade for Voters, the Richmond Education Association, and the Richmond Association of Realtors. He has 2 pre-school aged children.

I sat down with Mr.Sturtevant for an interview back in August, and instead of a Q&A session, it became a 30-minute discussion prompted by a question about accountability and reform. Here are some of Mr.Sturtevant’s own words:

“Number one, first and foremost, Richmond Public Schools has to hire and retain only the very best teachers and principals. That, I think more than anything else, is going to not only improve kids’ academic performance, but also give them the tools and the skills and the opportunities to lift themselves up to be successful in life.”

“One of the things that I want to do is give parents more of a seat at the table, more of a voice in the education of their kids at the school board level, and at their school. And this ties in with the accountability thing. I would like to see developing something where parents have a say on a teachers yearly review, this gives parents a voice, that helps to identify the very best high-performing teachers and to identify those who are being promoted to the detriment of the kids.”

“You can’t expect to hire and retain the very best if we furlough the teachers for five days next year, if we keep the salaries stagnant for six years in a row. If you’re coming out of college or grad school and you want to go to somewhere, even if you have a heart for teaching in the city of Richmond, at the end of the day you got to pay the student loans so people are going to go to Henrico, Hanover, Chesterfield.”

“I’d like to find all of the cost savings and efficiencies that we can that have nothing to do with the classroom. RPS is not in the business of transportation, it’s not in the business of cafeteria service, and not in the business of janitorial service. If we can find ways to save money there and allocate that money into the classrooms and pay teachers better, things that will improve authentic learning experiences, we need to be doing that.”

“There has got to be fiscal accountability, fiscal responsibility. We’ve got to right the fiscal ship. When we do that, we can go to city Council with a straight face, and say look, “we’ve made cuts here, we’ve made savings here, need to hire more teachers, we need to increase the teacher pay.”

“1st District centric things, we lose a lot of those Munford kids at sixth grade. That’s a perception problem and also a reality problem. A lot of those parents don’t feel their kids can go to Hill and get the same sort of rigorous education that they got from Mrs. Peasley in the fifth grade or Mr. Bennett or Mr. Lombardi. And so consequently people in my area, friends and neighbors, either move out to the county or spend $20,000 a year on a private school. It seems wrong for people to think those are the only viable options.”

“My view is, look, we need to listen to what the parents want. If the parents want IB, we need to support IB. If you take IB off the table, if you take the charter school off of the table, you are consequently saying to those parents “sorry, we don’t have anything for you”, and they’re going to say, “we are not sending our kid here any more”.”

“So Columbia University and one of the middle schools in New York City have created this Columbia secondary school for science, technology, engineering. It’s a neighborhood middle school, but it’s got Columbia’s name on the door, they are involved in the curriculum, they got graduate students and professors going in there and teaching classes. They got some money on the table. People are knocking down doors to get their kids in. What I would like to specifically do at Hill is bring in VCU […] And create a similar sort of VCU partnered secondary school, that is still a neighborhood school-if you live in the district, your kid can go there.”

“[In four years] I would like to see that we have something in place where we were identifying, supporting, and promoting the very best teachers and principals RPS has, and holding them up as examples, and rewarding them accordingly.”

“I would like to see a school system that is a good steward of the public money, that is squeezing the nickel out of every dollar. And that we are rightly allocating that money into the classrooms, and that we have eliminated, to the extent humanly possible, waste, fraud, and inefficiencies wherever they exist.”

“And that Albert Hill is, in four years, both in perception and reality what Mary Munford is today to people in the 1st District, which is just as good as any private school academically and which provides a lot of other important life skills and opportunities that you can only get in a public school.”