Seven people applied for a vacant seat on the Manassas School Board relinquished last month by former Chairman Sanford Williams.
Williams said he wanted to spend more time with his family in California, leaving the government school division with the task of appointing someone to serve the remaining 14 months of William's term.
Only three of those who submitted their resume and showed their willingness to serve their community were called in for interviews -- Jill Spall, Sandra Day, and Marlysha Liddel. The interviews will occur in front of the public during special 7 p.m. School Board meeting on Thursday, October 21 at city hall.
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Student-athletes in Manassas may soon be forced to get a coronavirus vaccination.
The city School Board is set to vote on a mandate for athletes at its meeting on Tuesday, October 26, 2021. Longtime School Board member Tim Dimeria, who is running to be elected the city's next commissioner of the revenue on November 2, pushed to force vaccines on teenagers.
"We need to get ahead of this thing, more so than we already have," said Dimeria. "We haven't waited to see what other [school divisions] are going to do."
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Manassas is searching for a new chairman for its city school board.
First elected to the School Board in 2014, Sanford Williams announced he'll be stepping down to spend more time with family in California.
The city government school division seeks to fill the empty seat by November 14. The appointed chairman will serve through the end of the year.
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After serving on the Manassas City School Board since July 2010, Chairman Sanford S. Williams will resign when his term ends December 31.
Williams made his announcement during board comment time at the city school board's regular meeting. Williams thanked the Manassas community for allowing him to serve and stated that his decision comes from wanting to spend more time with family.
In retirement, he'll spend more time with his daughters who live in California.
"I'd like to thank the community for allowing me to serve. It's a pleasure and an honor to serve. It's not easy, but it's a pleasure to serve, so thank you for that," said Williams.
Williams's departure from the board comes soon after Scott Albrecht, who stepped down a year earlier after serving on the school board for 20 years.
As chairman, Williams oversaw the implementation of new anti-racism and diversity, equity, and inclusion policy which calls for hiring more teachers based on race, to not just narrow, but to eliminate the achievement gap between high and low achieving students and to create a new curriculum that incorporates "the contributions of diverse cultural groups."
According to school officials, the school division would spend three years working to achieve these goals.
While white students make up less than 20 percent of the student body in Manassas City, they do outperform other historically underrepresented groups such as Hispanics, African-Americans, Native Americans, and others on state assessments.
Members of the public were also critical of the board's new policies, such as the only metric used to study performance was by race and left out other metrics like zip codes or class.
While Williams plans to stay until the end of his term, he announced he wouldn't be present for the next school board meeting, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, October 11.
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Removing all water fountains from school buildings is just one of Manassas City Public Schools' measures to fight the coronavirus.
Over the past year, the school division has installed everything from plexiglass, portable UV lights, to "blasters" in large spaces to stop the spread of everything from the common cold to the coronavirus," said Andy Hawkins, the city school division chief of financial services.
"I want to you and our community to know; the safest place for your children will be our schools," Hawkins told the city School Board at its August 10 meeting. "There will not be another building they come in contact with that are cleaner than ours. We have spared no expense."
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As students return to the classroom in numbers not seen since the pandemic began, public school divisions across the region are experiencing a shortage of teachers.
In Manassas, the public school system is short nearly 30 teachers in schools across the city. At Metz Middle School, they're hiring teachers for math, science, English, social studies, and special education.
In elementary schools, they're looking for teachers to fill 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-grade classrooms. There are open positions in the business department at the city's high school, alongside all of the other familiar positions the school division is short, including math and science.
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Students headed back to class in Manassas on the first day of school today will be greeted by a new 10-point grading scale and have more chances to retake tests.
On Tuesday, the city's School Board voted unanimously, with two members absent, to institute the new scale. It also ushered in a new policy that allows students the opportunity to redo assignments in hopes of higher grades.
Under the new policy:
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A new round of policy updates is expected at Tuesday's Manassas School Board meeting.
Among them is the addition of a new political protest day, where which students may have one excused absence a year if they attend a "civic event."Â A school principal must determine what types of activities or civic events qualify for an excused absence, states school division spokeswoman Almeta Radford.
The policy comes as a new state law that took effect July 1, allowing students one excused absence to attend a protest. The practice began in Fairfax County Public Schools, and bills championed by Senator Jennifer McLellan (D-Richmond) and Delegate Sam Rasoul (D-Roanoke) led to Virginia becoming the first state in the union to pass such a law.
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Manassas teachers were told to confront race and racism head-on during the city school division's annual convocation.
On Tuesday, August 3, the virtual event welcomed teachers back to the classroom before students are scheduled to return Thursday, August 12. Tyrone Howard, a professor of education and associate dean for equity and inclusion at UCLA, was the keynote speaker.
PLN obtained screenshots of Howard's presentation, which states, "teachers can't just be non-racist. They must be anti-racist." The slides also encouraged city educators to specifically teach about the activist group Black Lives Matter, whose members led violent and deadly protests in cities across the U.S. following the death of George Floyd, a man who died at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.
