WCPS Administrators Update School Board on Increased Staff Needs

Some Warren County Public Schools (WCPS) administrators and staff are facing increased responsibilities outside their contracted duties that are impacting their regular jobs, they told the Warren County School Board during its Wednesday, March 20 work session.

Warren County Public Schools Superintendent Christopher Ballenger (above) urged the School Board during its March 20 work session to consider charging fees for FOIA requests, which are overwhelming staff.

For example, higher numbers of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are interfering with the regular duties of WCPS Assistant Superintendent of Administration George “Buck” Smith and WCPS Interim Director of Technology Doug Stefnoski.

One original FOIA that he had to work on was almost a million pages, said Smith, who often has to spend time outside his contracted hours — on weekends and after hours — to finish FOIA requests.

When FOIA requests are broad, it can sometimes take Stefnoski three to five days to pull all the information needed for a request.

“If you were to take the $16 per quarter hour and multiply that, that’s like $512 a day for just what I’m doing because we’ve got to jump through a couple different systems to get it just down to even PDFs that [Mr. Smith] can go through,” Stefnoski told the board. “So it’s time consuming, very time consuming. And not particularly fun to be perfectly honest.”

Filling FOIA requests isn’t part of their job descriptions, nor specifically, anyone else’s in WCPS. Still, someone has to do them because state law permits citizens of Virginia, businesses trading within the Commonwealth, and media representatives with circulation within Virginia to have access to public records and meetings of public bodies, with some specific exemptions and exceptions.

Smith pointed out that all public records are presumed to be open and may only be withheld if there’s a specific statutory exemption that applies. “There are lots of exemptions that you have for FOIAs,” he said. “The last I looked, there’s probably almost 100 or so.”

Currently, WCPS Superintendent Christopher Ballenger said that WCPS does not charge for FOIA requests, even though the school division could and should.

“We have not charged at all. I think that the board should strongly consider that we go ahead and charge for some of these FOIAs that are coming in,” Ballenger said. “Just recently, there were three of us in an office for a day, doing nothing but [redacting documents] with black markers” to ensure they met legal requirements before fulfilling the FOIA request.

“I appreciate having this conversation this evening,” said Board Chair Pence. “I don’t know that everyone on the board realizes — although I think we have a good idea now — how much time you’re spending as an assistant superintendent working on FOIA requests. And money aside, you’re not getting to do the job of assistant superintendent when you’re doing that.

“So I think, we’re not going to solve it right this minute, but long term we also really have to be thinking about how we will address these FOIA requests moving forward,” she added. “There really is going to need to be a job for that because [Stefnoski’s] got all his stuff to be done; I mean everybody has stuff that they should be doing for our students and not spending 15 or 25 hours on this in addition to their jobs.”

Pence (above) said she’s not in favor of adding some cost to it, largely because the cost isn’t really going to solve the issue. “Because they’re still going to be spending their time doing it,” she said.

Lo asked why WCPS is not currently following existing policy on charging for FOIA requests. Smith answered that it’s basically been “a historical practice rather than any other reason.” He also suggested that if the division hired a communications director, then that position could handle FOIA requests.

Andrew Selman, a local government and school board lawyer with Sands Anderson who provides legal services to WCPS, clarified for the board members that the Freedom of Information Act prohibits charging parents who want to review their students’ education records.

“The school division may not charge the fee for parents to look at their own children’s records and emails,” Selman said. “Whatever constitutes the student’s scholastic records, and that’s fairly broad under FOIA, so there can be no charge for those.”

Editor’s note: The 11-page Virginia FOIA document Smith presented during the work session portion of the School Board’s meeting is available online at https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/warren/Board.nsf/files/D3D53F0E43F4/$file/Freedom%20of%20Information%20Act.pdf.

More work session items

According to other WCPS administrators and staff who presented during the work session, there are more examples of areas needing additional employee coverage, including special education, nurses, bus drivers to transport homeless students and students with disabilities, and K-8 reading and math specialists, among others.

For instance, Angie Barbe, the special needs route coordinator in the WCPS Transportation Department, told the board that it’s been difficult to keep up with staffing the buses that transport students who have IEPs and other requirements for special transportation.

The bus drivers on these routes are handling “our most needy students with the most demanding needs,” Barbe said, and they’re only getting paid $12 an hour.

“We’re having a really hard time keeping drivers that are willing to do the long hours,” she said. “And it’s really hard to keep them to transport our most difficult students at that pay rate. Just to build on that… they carry a lot of additional responsibility and they go above and beyond.”

The minimum wage in Virginia is currently $12 an hour. Virginia’s state minimum wage is set to gradually increase each year. In 2025, it will increase to $13.50 an hour and on January 1, 2026 will reach $15 per hour for workers whose employment is covered by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and to public employees. A higher minimum wage may also be required by the FLSA for some workers.

Another need was cited by Randa Vernazza, WCPS Director of Pupil Services and Principal of Non-Traditional Education, who said she could use another teacher.

“Currently, being the principal and the director has been challenging,” Vernazza said. “Next year what I’d like to do is devote more time to the Director of Pupil Services role. I’d like to work more on developing discipline matrices that are consistent among all schools and that we’re meeting with fidelity.

“And I feel like if we can make discipline and behavior more manageable, that’s going to align with better instruction in the classroom, increased test scores — I mean it’s just going to be this domino effect,” she said.

While devoting some more time to the Director of Pupil Services role, and possibly still overseeing non-traditional because the position is still part of that behavior portion, Vernazza said perhaps someone else could do the day-to-day leadership in the building itself.

Other needs were discussed during a presentation on federal accountability by WCPS Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Heather Bragg, who noted that four of the division’s schools recently were federally identified for support and improvement based on data from the 2022-2023 and 2021-2022 school years.

The Warren County schools federally identified for support and improvement along with the student populations in need are: Skyline Middle School – Students with disabilities; E. Wilson Morrison Elementary School – Students with disabilities and white students; Leslie Fox Keyser Elementary School – White students; and Warren County Middle School – Students with disabilities and multi-race students.

Bragg said that Skyline Middle School has been identified consistently as needing support and improvement, and it seems to continue to be with students with disabilities.

“I do think that the turnover rate to some degree with our students with disabilities and our special education teachers at Skyline Middle School has impacted that consistency there,” said Bragg. “Skyline Middle has our highest turnover rate and our most inexperienced teachers staffing that building and that does make a difference.”

Bragg said WCPS is also struggling to get substitute teachers in these classrooms. “I do think that the discipline behaviors do have some impact on it, but also, you know, there’s not that established mentoring staff there either,” she said.

“Teaching is a hard job,” added Bragg. “When you have that hard job, you are facing those discipline problems in your classroom and you don’t have a very big toolbox for how to manage classroom behaviors.”

Watch the Warren County School Board Meeting of March 20, 2024, on these exclusive Royal Examiner videos. The meeting was about 4 hours and was divided by agenda points. Video by Mark Williams, Royal Examiner.

Warren County School Board – March 20, 2024 – Part 1 – FY2025 Budget Presentation and Public Hearing

Warren County School Board – March 20, 2024 – Part 2 – Food Service Update, FOIA Update

Warren County School Board – March 20, 2024 – Part 3 – Leave Policies

Warren County School Board – March 20, 2024 – Part 4 – Action Agenda