by James A. Bacon
Albemarle High School opened the 2021-22 school year in a state of chaos after a year of COVID closings, and it never recovered, according to The Crozet Gazette.
To ease students back into the rigors of a regular school day, the school stopped imposing penalties on students for skipping or being late to class. With no mandatory attendance, kids took to drifting around the school. Bathrooms became lawless zones for drugs, sex, violence, and the filing of TikTok videos. Rules against the use of cell phones during class were not properly enforced. Brawls became routine. One teacher trying to break up a fight wound up with 14 stitches in his hand; a female teacher was knocked unconscious. Students addressed teachers with rudeness and profanity. And new, lax grading policies, mandated by the school division, resulted in many students doing no homework.
“Last year there were school shooting threats, violence, smoking, vaping, truancy, trespassing, and drug use, and the list continues,” student Kayden Wright told the Albemarle County School Board this past July. “Please don’t be complacent. How can you expect teachers or students to be successful in a learning environment if they are not safe?”
None of this will come as any surprise to readers of Bacon’s Rebellion. We have chronicled how adults lost control in many schools, leading to a collapse of order and educational outcomes. Virginia’s legacy media have totally ignored the meltdown in the classrooms. It comes as no surprise that the exposé of Albemarle High School comes from a community monthly, The Crozet Gazette, rather than Charlottesville’s daily newspaper, The Daily Progress. Kudos to The Gazette’s Lisa Martin for telling the story that literally no one (outside of Bacon’s Rebellion) has been willing to tell.
While the Albemarle school board focused on woke priorities such as transgender rights and fighting systemic racism, actual learning collapsed. Pass rates in Standards of Learning exams, which were disastrous during the 2020-21 year of remote learning, recovered somewhat for English but little for math. Predictably, minority students were the biggest losers from wokeness. Learning loss for Blacks and Hispanics was twice that as for Asians and Whites, according to Virginia Department of Education data.
Martin closes her article on a positive note, describing students and teachers as “cautiously optimistic” that the disciplinary environment will improve this year as administrators begin enforcing rules on cell-phone use and classroom attendance. But the grading policies haven’t changed, and the high school is still reeling from the resignation or retirement of 32 out of its 180 teachers last year, with the math and Spanish departments hardest hit.
Everyone knew that achieving “normalcy” would be difficult after the school’s 2,000 students had been studying from home the previous year. But the challenge was greater than expected. Writes The Gazette:
“We as teachers felt responsible for students’ [learning loss] during the pandemic year, and when they came back we were trying to triage their trauma at the same time we were dealing with our own trauma, and we didn’t know how to do it,” said Cathy Coffman, math department chair and 22-year AHS veteran. “I think, in hindsight, that when we came back from Covid we shouldn’t have made all those changes—grading changes, not penalizing for being late to class, and others. Kids needed the structure, and we didn’t give it to them. That was our fault.”
“When the kids returned, they didn’t know how to behave, or how to get along with each other, or how to sit still for even 20 minutes,” said Coffman. “The administration didn’t know how to handle so much chaos. So, when it was decided that, for instance, we were not going to worry about penalizing tardies, well, then kids didn’t go to class.” With no mandatory attendance, students took to drifting around the school.
Students were continually posting videos on social media. Unrestricted cell phone use meant that threats radiated through the student body in seconds. The administration issued several shelter-in-place lockdowns in as many weeks. “Some teachers [resigned] early in the school year because they couldn’t handle that kind of trauma after trauma,” said Coffman.
Teachers were assigned to patrol certain areas of the school to keep them clear. Dozens of students roamed the halls with impunity every day. Administrators felt compelled to temporarily close two of the bathrooms.
Even in the face of disruptions, administrators did not tighten disciplinary policies during the year, and staff had limited options for controlling behavior.
“It starts with having thousands of kids in an area where we don’t have any authority presence,” said Chad Townsend, a health and P.E. teacher. “The kids haven’t been held accountable for their actions.”
As disorders increased, civility eroded. Teachers told Martin that simple requests for students to return to class or turn down their music were met aggressively with rudeness and foul language.
“I think a lot of the [school environment] problems had to do with the pandemic, but not all of it by any means,” said Townsend. “When you write a disciplinary referral and there are minimal repercussions, and the kid is back in your class the very next day cursing you out, it’s incredibly frustrating.”
Students were less inclined to do the class work, and the Albemarle County School District was less inclined to make them pay a price. A March letter to the school board signed by nine math faculty members described the effects of changes in grading policies: not grading homework, giving minimum grades of 50 (on a 1 to 100 scale) even if students didn’t do the assignment, and letting students retake graded assignments and tests at will.
“Almost none of our students are doing homework now that they have no incentive,” stated the letter. “Because we cannot give a grade lower than 50%, a student can earn a “D” [passing] while only doing 20% of the graded material for a class.”
Said math teacher Bill Munkacsy at the school board hearing: “This year has been utter chaos. Students are not completing their work in a reasonable timeframe, and it is very difficult to maintain class momentum when so many students are behind. We’re now at the end of the year, the only enforceable deadline is upon us, and it’s extremely stressful for students and staff alike—we’re lost in a sea of no structure and no expectations. I implore you to consider the effects of taking away our ability to enforce reasonable expectations on our students through grading.”
According to The Gazette, school board members never responded to the letter or addressed the issues it raised.
School Principal Darah Bonham disputed the characterization of the students and teachers Martin quoted.
“It’s a misrepresentation to say that there were kids just roaming the halls and nobody knew about it,” he said. Further, claims of frequent fights are inaccurate, he said. “The notion … that the place was unruly with fights every week is not the case.”
Bonham said he and his staff “never allow” students to talk back to a staff member. “I can’t measure if kids were sassier or talked back more [last year] based on any data but I would say that students are more likely to follow rules and do what’s asked of them when they know the adult. And essentially half the school had no connection whatsoever with the teachers, and that’s a huge factor.”
The school had policies restricting cell phones, Bonham said, although he conceded, “it became much more of an issue than we would have anticipated.”
This year will be different, Bonham says. “It’s really about structure [Last year] we didn’t start the year saying, ‘This is our policy, this is what we’re doing.’ We were trying to get students acclimated to education again and giving them a lot of grace [in terms of rules and policy], and sometimes that’s not helpful, as we have learned. All those pieces in isolation made sense, but when you combine them together after a pandemic, trying to get back to normal social expectations, that created the need for more structure, and that’s where we had to make some changes going into this year.”
We’ll see.
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