By ZINIE CHEN SAMPSON
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
RICHMOND--Artina Brown said her daughter's chronic health problems have forced her to miss weeks of school each year and remain at home with no lessons or contact with any of her teachers.
Her daughter, now a freshman at Petersburg High School, never got the word processor and software she needed to keep up with schoolwork while she was homebound because the school system couldn't afford it. In middle school, she and other special-needs students "sat in the back of the class doing puzzles and drawing pictures" while other students were taught by a regular teacher, Brown said.
The Petersburg woman was one of hundreds of parents, guidance counselors, advocates and others who testified at hearings across Virginia this month or sent comments to the Department of Education about the state's Standards of Quality, minimum educational objectives mandated by the state constitution. Such measures include school staffing, accreditation and testing and graduation requirements and are up for revision every two years.
The Board of Education will review the comments before proposing changes to the standards, which drive about 85 percent of the state's funding for public K-12 education, Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle said. The General Assembly then will act on the board's recommendations in its upcoming session.
Brown, who says her child lacks basic educational skills, urged the state to raise the minimum educational standards "to ensure that all children with special needs get a high-quality education and that school staff get much needed support to do a better job on behalf of these children."
In addition to enhanced services for students with disabilities, speakers have asked for school specialists to help students get up to speed on math and for more services for students who are non-native English speakers, a growing population in Virginia.
Guidance counselors have asked the state to require schools to hire testing coordinators to alleviate the burden of administering standardized tests, which takes time away from advising students.
In Petersburg, parents say their children's needs are dire, as two city schools persistently have failed to make progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law, which seeks to have all children, regardless of race, poverty or disability, proficient in reading and math by 2014 and requires schools to show annual progress in test scores. Also, four schools failed to gain state accreditation, based on their inability to pass Standards or Learning exams.
Now, parents and advocates hope the General Assembly, through the Standards of Quality, will set the bar higher for local school divisions, including increasing teacher pay, lowering teacher-to-student ratios and adjusting for inequities in resources among school divisions by giving more funding to poor schools to support programs that target at-risk students.
"Why not organize our Standards of Quality, which drive funding, around the reality that it takes more resources to educate poor children in schools of concentrated poverty?" said Joe Szakos, executive director of the Virginia Organizing Project, a social-justice group based in Charlottesville, in his prepared remarks to the Board of Education.
Education department spokesman Pyle said that funding is just one of many elements of a successful school.
"If there were a magic bullet as simple as that, we would have found it," he said of Petersburg.