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VEA leaders and staff kept their eyes on the ball over the summer.

Shenanigans in the making of school policy doesn’t take a summer break, and neither does the vigilance of your Union. Here are just a few examples of how VEA leadership and staff spoke out over the last few months, when the attention of many wasn’t as focused on public education as it normally is:

• As the school year wound down, Arlington Education Association President June Prakash said this, in a letter to the editor of the Gazette Leader, co-written with Delegate Alfonso Lopez: “At a time when many students are requiring increased levels of educational, social, and/or emotional support as they recover from the effects of the pandemic, we are doing them a disservice by not doing more to recruit and retain effective educators…even though they may not want to, we are giving educators no other choice but to seek better compensation and a lower cost of living: A path that will lead them away from Arlington…this is not a recipe for success.”
• When the Youngkin administration announced in late July that a year after making funding available for “lab schools,” the first grant was awarded to Virginia Commonwealth University and CodeRVA, a regional high school focused on computer science, VEA President James J. Fedderman had this to say to statewide media: “All students in Virginia deserve to be funded and supported like those at CodeRVA, but that is not the reality…Showering one school with huge amounts of state and local funding might look nice and distract some of the public, but parents of kids in other public schools want and deserve adequate funding for their students, too. Let’s work to fund all our public schools like we fund our lone lab school.”
• Also in July, Governor Youngkin announced that the state would no longer disseminate grants created to help provisionally licensed teachers of color get their full teaching license, VEA’s Director of Human & Civil Rights, Taisha Steele, said this to media outlets: “While half of the students in Virginia are students of color, more than 8 in 10 of our teachers are white. We know that all students benefit from diverse teachers, and these benefits are particularly pronounced for our students of color.”
• In August, the Spotsylvania School Board became the first in the state to approve the state’s newly-written “model” policies for the treatment of transgender students. At about the same time, Fairfax County, the state’s largest school division, said it was sticking with its previous policies. Fedderman shared this with Virginia Public Radio and other media about the Spotsylvania decision: “These policies, which value political partisanship over kindness and decency, open the door for the bullying and harassment of students who already face too many barriers at school. To score some political points with his base, the governor and the Spotsylvania board are willing to implement policies that are simply cruel. All young people in our public schools deserve to feel safe and to exercise their right to live authentically.”
• As state budget negotiations dragged on through the summer, leaving school divisions to deal with the resulting uncertainty, VEA policy analyst Chad Stewart told The Washington Post and Virginia Public Radio, referring to hiring decisions and school upgrades, “When you’re assuming that your budget might be millions of dollars larger over the two years, you spend differently… School divisions were expecting to have more funding and they actually are going to likely end up with less.”