School Board votes to close Chandler
The Richmond School Board has voted to close Chandler MS at the end of the school year:
Chandler Middle School will close at the end of the year, as the result of the Richmond School Board’s unanimous vote tonight. For the past seven years, Chandler, a 300-student school on East Brookland Park Boulevard in North Richmond, has failed to meet state and federal academic achievement standards.
I would assume that since the city recently spent a good amount of money renovating it, that the building will be used for something else? A new middle school option? Community HIgh, whose building needs to be renovated? Richmond Schools offices?
I hope the building isn’t going to be sold cheap to some “faith based institution” like every other nice building is sold to in North Side…(see R.O.C., Brookland Park theater etc.
I live in one of the neighborhoods that feeds into Chandler, and I must say that the baggage the children enter the school carrying is more than any educational system should have to deal with. I volunteer at one of the middle school’s feeder elementary schools (which is accredited, by the way) and am shocked at how ill-prepared so many of the children are to learn due to factors at home and their economic plight. While little, kids are easy to teach, but as they grow, outside factors can make it darn near impossible to reach them if teachers don’t have parental and community support. I’m not making excuses for the problems at Chandler, but closing the school and moving kids who are behind to other schools where they’ll just carry their problems doesn’t seem to be the best answer here. I would have rather seen the RPS Board develop programs and bring in folks who are equipped to turn around such circumstances. Instead, the board sat on the issues for seven years, pointed fingers and closed the school. Not bright – I’d give them a failing grade at this one, actually.