Virginia Beach gifted school will start new year as planned
Suit challenging selection process to move forward
A Virginia Beach judge said Old Donation School second graders will start the new school year as planned, while a lawsuit regarding the selection process for the gifted school moves forward.
Nearly 20 Virginia Beach parents asked the judge to order the Virginia Beach school system to redo the selection process for the gifted school, alleging that an unapproved lottery system was used and arbitrarily denied their “top students” enrollment.
Judge James Clayton Lewis told the parents in the courtroom Monday afternoon Virginia law was “very unfriendly” to those seeking such an injunction and the standards for him to order that were not met.
The matter is set to come back before a judge on Aug. 31.
The School Board’s counsel filed its opposition to the parents’ complaint Monday afternoon. The division argued redoing the selection process two weeks before school starts would cause the division to have to also redo much of its planning regarding transportation, staffing and class sizes while the students who had already been selected to attend Old Donation were forced to return to their neighborhood schools.
Lewis also raised concerns about the start of school and asked the parents’ attorney, Patricie Drake, if he was expected to tell the school system, “Second grade is canceled until further order?”
Drake previously told The Virginian-Pilot she believed the division could go through the selection process prior to the start of school. Monday, she added that division leadership had created the hardship for themselves by delaying the “simple remedy.”
She said the reason the motion had not been filed until several months after the parents were notified their children had been waitlisted was because they had been led to believe the division was working on solutions with them. The motion was filed July 31.
She said Lewis’ decision was “disappointing.”
According to a joint statement from the parents, division leadership promised solutions but failed to provide them “despite the acknowledged errors and flaws in this year’s admission process.”
The statement reads, “Our grievance stems from the fact that the division violated regulations, misled us, deprived both us and our children of the suitable educational environment that had been identified to cater to their very distinct gifted requirement needs, and eroded our faith in the school system.”
According to past presentations to the School Board, there was an increase in the number of students identified as gifted this year. There were also changes to the ranking system used by the selection committees. Under this new process of ranking students, more than 200 were identified as “top students” to fill the 130 second grade seats at Old Donation, so a random selection process was used.
The parents, as well as some School Board members and members of the community advisory committee for gifted education, said the ranking system needed more differentiation to prevent a situation in which a lottery would be needed to fill all available seats at Old Donation.
Deborah Collins, who
represented the School Board, said the parents’ were not able to prove that their students would not succeed in the gifted cluster programs at their neighborhood schools. All the students who were identified as “top students” had received the same ranking, and therefore eligible to attend Old Donation.
The school system’s response to the parents’ complaint also questioned whether readministering the selection process for just second grade — when the same one was used for all grades Old Donation serves, which is second through eighth grades — would be equitable. All the parents involved in the lawsuit have rising second graders.
Moving forward, the parents would need to prove that division leadership misrepresented the selection process and show that “irreparable harm” was being done to the students by not receiving full-time gifted instruction at Old Donation.