The mistake, said Fredericksburg City Schools Chief Academic Officer Brendan Albon, was relatively easy to explain in scholastic terms.
“It was very much one of those cases, where, if you think about a teacher giving a test where the student gave the right answer on the wrong line,” Albon told the city school board during Monday’s meeting.
The result of the mix-up — a data-entry error into the Student Record Collection system utilized by the Virginia Department of Education — was a reported 0% in technical skills in Perkins statistics discussed at the board’s May meeting.
The seemingly-woeful performance alarmed school board members, who devoted a good portion of that meeting to diagnosing possible causes and identifying solutions.
“It’s obviously super concerning,” Ward 1 rep. Andy Wolfenbarger said then.
But the correct figure, Albon said Monday, is 96%, or 92 of 96 students who successfully completed two sequential CTE courses and achieved 80% of program competencies.
“It’s much nicer and a fairer representation of the work being done in our schools,” he said.
Albon assured the school board that while the data cannot be resubmitted at this point, the error won’t affect city schools’ Perkins funding or its VDOE Student Support and Framework standing.
“It’s an ahistorical blip that doesn’t hurt us, but we’ve learned from it,” he said.
After the May meeting, Albon said, staff conducted a multi-step analysis to prevent future issues.
“I think it’s going to help us find more dust bunnies in the corners and that all of our data is accurate,” Albon said.
Tuition changes discussed
Currently, if a family living outside Fredericksburg wants their student(s) to attend city schools, they can pay tuition.
This past year, 10 FCPS students who live outside the school district had that tuition — currently set at $6,300 — waived, with eight cases due to financial hardship. Each of those waivers were approved by Superintendent Marci Catlett on a case-by-case basis.
On Monday, the school board discussed potential sweeping changes both to the cost of — and process for waiving — tuition.
Deputy Superintendent Matt Eberhardt presented a draft policy that laid out three specific criteria for granting waivers. Those include a sudden change of custody based on certain circumstances, a student moving prior to or during their 12th grade year and families whose children start school no more than three months prior to a planned move into the city.
The new tuition, which wouldn’t go into effect until the 2027-28 school year if approved, would be $11,028.
Malvina Rollins-Kay (Ward 4) questioned why the superintendent, who is her sister, should be limited in granting waivers.
“I can’t imagine me as a board member telling a superintendent that they can’t give a waiver for some reason,” Rollins-Kay said.
She also argued that affordable tuition could aid James Monroe High School’s athletic programs.
“If I could not afford to live in Fredericksburg and my son plays like Larry Bird, I would want my child to go to the Fredericksburg city school system,” Kay said. “I would sell chicken dinners and everything else to try to afford his tuition. In a situation like that, I think we benefit because we get that extra support, and they benefit because they get a stellar education in addition to being a star athlete.”
Wolfenbarger countered that athletics were also a concern of his, albeit in the opposite direction.
“My son was on the football team, and he drove a lot of kids all over the place that don’t live in the city,” he said. “They go to school here. I don’t know what the circumstances are. But I do think we could get ourselves into a lot of trouble.”
Ultimately, the board tabled the discussion with the understanding that any changes wouldn’t go into effect for the upcoming school year. Likewise, current tuition students could be grandfathered into the existing rate or receive an additional year grace period.
“A good policy protects the superintendent and the school board,” school board chair Katie Pomeroy said. “If we don’t have a policy, if we don’t have criteria, if we don’t have a rubric, we are setting ourselves up for a lawsuit.”
