Lillie Jessie: No aviation classes for Stonewall Jackson High School

Lillie Jessie, the Occoquan District School representative on the Prince William County School Board, is fighting to keep an aviation mechanics program solely at Woodbridge Senior High School, in her district.

Last year, the county school division announced plans to add the after-school, extracurricular classes to Stonewall Jackson High School on the other end of the county, outside Manassas.

The idea was to expand the career and technical educational opportunities offered to students on both sides of Prince William County. There’s a lack of aviation mechanics in the industry, and the jobs pay more than $50,000 to start.

The Aviation Institute of Maintenance, of Manassas, is teaching the classes at no charge to the students, as part of a public-private partnership. For tuition cost alone, that’s $43,000-per student tuition value, said Dr. Babur Lafeef, Prince William County’s School Board Chairman At-large.

In a memo, Jessie said that Woodbridge Senior High School lost many of its specialty programs when county’s Center for Fine and Performing Arts moved from Woodbridge to Colgan High School when it opened in 2016.

Jessie also accused Lateef and fellow School Board member Gill Trenum in segregating Stonewall Jackson High School during recent vote to change boundaries, moving some students that would have gone there to a new 13th high school being built next to Jiffy Lube Live.

“Dr. Lateef and Mr. Trenum made a commitment to the Stonewall Jackson community. It should not be made on the back of a school in my district,” Jessie penned in her memo.

That commitment was a three-part resolution that is meant to:

• Work to restore funding the county used to give to economically disadvantaged students prior to the 2009 recession.
• Start renovations on the county’s oldest high schools — Stonewall Jackson, Woodbridge, and Osbourn Park, as outlined in the school division’s infrastructure task force report to the School Board.
• Add a new dual enrollment program at Stonewall Jackson, which doesn’t offer its students the opportunity to take classes for college credit like other high schools in the county.

Those resolutions were agreed upon in a deal between Lateef and Trenum prior to a School Board vote, not the boundary change. The move means more affluent white students will attend the new high school, leaving Stonewall Jackson less ethnically diverse, students charged at the time of the vote.

In a reply memo, Lateef notes that it was the governor who pushed for these classes to be taught.

Here’s a more in-depth look at the county’s career and technical education plan.