By Kim Robins on December 16, 2020
Gazette-Journal reporter Kim Robins, right, has been named to the 2020 Virginia School Boards Association Media Honor Roll. She received the award Dec. 8 during a meeting of the Gloucester School Board from Robin M. Rice, chairperson, at left. Robins joined the Gazette-Journal staff in 1986 and has been named to the honor roll in previous years for her long-standing coverage of Gloucester County Public Schools.
The Gloucester County School Board named Gazette-Journal reporter Kim Robins to the Virginia School Boards Association’s 2020 Media Honor Roll. The board also named WXGM radio to the Media Honor Roll.
The Media Honor Roll certificate presented to Robins at the board’s Dec. 8 meeting said the board “recognizes your fair and balanced reporting on school division and education topics. Your work has aided this community in focusing on the goal of providing the best public schools we can for the students who attend them.”
WOODSTOCK â Three Shenandoah County teachers made public comments to the School Board on Thursday asking the division to move schools to all-virtual learning for the time being.
Shenandoah County Education Association President Jeff Rudy along with Peter Muhlenberg Middle School teachers Nicholas Zimmerman and Cara Stombock spoke for three minutes each about how they believe schools should switch to all-virtual with the Christmas holiday coming up. Many of our teachers and students plan to visit family over the holidays, Zimmerman said. We should be 100 percent virtual next week, so that families can quarantine. Not only that, are we thinking proactively about what will happen after the break? Are we planning for a virtual start so that the school can resume as normal as possible without a COVID-19 nightmare spread? I am concerned and know that when we are proactive we can spend far less time being reactive.
Michael Pope reports.
Funding for Virginia schools is based on how many students are in each division. That creates a problem for schools across Virginia, which lost about 45,000 students after the pandemic hit.
J.T. Kessler with the Virginia School Boards Association says the latest enrollment data is not a good metric for calculating how much money schools need. We believe that once the pandemic is over, we will see the vast majority, if not all those children, come back to the public schools, Kessler says. And it would be very hurtful to our public school divisions if they are penalized because of a pandemic and choices that parents and guardians have made to not send their students back to the public school at this time.