Schools everywhere are struggling after COVID, some more than others and each with their own struggles. Rural school districts have completely different needs than suburban or city districts. Bill Outlaw, school board member in Nottoway county, VA, shares about the needs and successes of his local district today on The State of Education.
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Schools everywhere are struggling after COVID, some more than others and each with their own struggles. Rural school districts have completely different needs than suburban or city districts. Bill Outlaw, school board member in Nottoway county, VA, shares about the needs and successes of his local district today on The State of Education.
GET CONNECTED WITH NWEF
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nwef.org/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NWEF_org
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nwef_org/
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdHayyOqPftVoiGEqxYdsg
To hear more from NWEF, subscribe to our other podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1898310
– WHAT IS THE NOAH WEBSTER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION? –
Noah Webster Educational Foundation collaborates with individuals and organizations to tell the story of America’s education and culture; discover foundational principles that improve it; and advance practice and policy to change it.
Website: https://www.nwef.org
Reach out: info@nwef.org
[00:00-41:18]
ADAMS: My guest today is Mr. Bill Outlaw. He is from Virginia and is a board member of the Nottoway county public schools. Bill, welcome to The State of Education podcast.
OUTLAW: Melvin, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me in your program.
ADAMS: Well I’m delighted that you can join us. We want to learn things from you, we want to share things with our audience that can help other people. Because at the end of the day, we’re all working together to make better-equipped schools and better students. So thank you again.
So we’re excited to hear your story in providing experience and leadership to your county schools but why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit more about your background and what caused you to step forward and serve your community by providing leadership to your schools?
OUTLAW: I’m a retired U.S. Army aviator, of 41 years (I was a slow learner). We moved to Nottoway county a little over 20 years ago. My wife and I became involved, early on, in a variety of different community activities that would help youth.
I have four children. They have been educated in private schools, public schools, and homeschools. I’m also the chairman of the Nottoway County Republican Committee and have been in that capacity for about 6 ½ years now.
I decided to run for the school board because I had attended school board meetings, read articles in the paper, had discussions with other people, and had a number of issues that were mostly personnel-related.
And I had the opportunity to run in 2019, so I did. I was elected and I pretty quickly learned that my due diligence was not all that it should have been. And right on top of taking office in December 2020, COVID hit.
So we’ve had our challenges here in Nottoway, we’ve had some changes and I am excited about what we might accomplish going forward.
ADAMS: That’s awesome! Well, one of the reasons I wanted to speak with you is because on this show we talk to a lot of different people. And often, school board members that we talk to are from states in large counties or cities and serve huge populations, and sometimes have billion-dollar budgets.
Others, like yourself, serve a rural community in some ways. And some would say it’s “resource-limited.” And I think probably as we go across the whole country, there are many more districts like your own than there are of the great, big metropolitan or big consolidated school districts.
And so I think it’s important for us to hear from all of these points. Because it’s talking to the American public and we need to be able to connect with and identify more closely with more individuals.
So as we talk a little bit today, I’d like to explore a few things with you that may be insightful and reflective, and helpful to communities who are listening today. Why don’t we start by you telling us more about your county schools? The schools themselves, your budget, and your greatest operational challenges.
OUTLAW: Nottoway county has a population of about 18,500 our school division is currently forecast to have a little over 1750 students. So it’s very small. Our budget this year is about $45,000,000 and we have 5 schools.
We have two primary schools, an intermediate school, a middle school, and a high school.
ADAMS: So your intermediate school: is it based on grade levels or are there other issues?
OUTLAW: They are based on grade levels and we are one of less than 10% of the school divisions in Virginia that have an intermediate school.
ADAMS: Alright, so you’ve been at it now for a couple of years. You talked about COVID and the challenges that it has, do you want to talk about that a little bit more? And about how you navigated that as a community?
And do you want to talk to us a little bit more about budgets (that’s an area I really want to focus on and I know you focus on it because it’s so important to the community)? But just talk about the general challenges of operating with your situation.
OUTLAW: Okay. With COVID, it hit the spring after this current board took office. And like everybody in the country, we didn’t know what we were facing. We had no idea what the government at the federal and state level were going to impose on us.
And it was, simply put, a nightmare for pretty much two years. Things would change on a weekly, if not more frequent, basis. Wear masks, don’t wear masks, do this, don’t do that. So it was hard to make any long-range plans.
And as I’m sure you’re well aware, we are now beginning to see the effects of some of these decisions on our children. There was a recent article in the Epoch Times on the crisis in education. And boy, oh boy, are we seeing it.
ADAMS: So talk to us a little more about that. You’re talking about learning loss and emotional health and other things of that nature. Is that correct? And how are you seeing that in your area?
OUTLAW: That’s exactly right. Well, baking up just a little bit—and this is across the country—we are seeing shortages with teachers, substitute teachers, bus drivers, everybody. And this is not uncommon.
We currently, and I guess we’re fortunate for being as small as we are. Our current hiring needs are 36 teachers. Which is small. We have a large school division, not too far from here, and they have a deficit of 500. And how in the world they’re going to deal with that… my heart goes out to them.
The learning loss is… I don’t know how we’re going to be able to qualify that going forward. I mean, for some it will be a lot depending on the student themselves, their families, and how they interact with their kids.
And so it’s a multifaceted problem in dealing with the needs of some of these students, the younger students in particular. I read a story of one little child who was almost 3 years old, and he couldn’t speak—he couldn't talk. What we’re finding out is a problem that we can trace back to all of the government restrictions because of COVID.
And he was taken to a speech therapist and the mother handed him over and the kids just screamed for about three hours. He’d never been with anyone but his mom. And you can advance that a little bit and… some of these kids today haven’t interacted with other children their age, which is vital, particularly in the earlier ages. They haven’t done that and they don’t know how.
And that creates problems in the classroom. There will be 4 or 5 kids at a time screaming at a teacher and she’s trying to teach. And that’s not a learning environment.
ADAMS: Thank you for sharing that. And that is a sad reality that we’re in but it is true. Some things you know… Monday morning quarter-backing. We can see lots of things that could have been done differently.
The reality is I think we’ve got to give some graft to everyone because people are trying to work their way through these challenges, trying in a responsible way, hopefully making decisions based on safety and stuff.
Sometimes it seems like decisions were made not so much around interest and care for the students as it was for employees. And maybe union people. Which, I get it: everybody needs protection, and everybody needs to be represented. But at the end of the day, the ones that are most impacted are our kids and that’s where we are seeing the backlash now.
And I think it’s going to require an awful lot of diligence to help recover the things that we’ve lost. And some things may never be recovered. But let’s dig in just a little further. Let’s talk more about your budget.
So let’s start with where does your money come from? We’re trying to help people understand where most systems work. And so money typically comes from the feds, from the state, and from your local county. Do you know what the breakdown is for you in Nottoway?
OUTLAW: I don’t have the percentages. A relatively small amount comes from the feds, however, since COVID there have been a number of grants available and we have a very capable person on our staff that has pursued those diligently.
They’ve helped a lot. Of course, they come with a lot of strings attached. Then from the state, we get a lot of our funding there. And the local government… and our local board of supervisors have been very good.
I think they realize some of the problems that we’re facing and they have been very good about stepping up to the plate, going above and beyond what the local match is required by the state. And we’re probably more fortunate than many school divisions in that regard.
ADAMS: Do you know how much of the county budget the education system gets?
OUTLAW: I don’t know the percentage but we’re the largest recipient of Nottoway county’s taxpayers' dollars.
ADAMS: Yes. I could have practically guaranteed that to be true because that’s pretty much a universal truth our education systems far and away exceed other budget items in the county budget and the city budget, almost always.
Sometimes it’s well up into the 70 percentile of a county’s budget going to schools. Of course, that varies from location to location. But what that tells us is that first of all, the significance of our educational systems and offerings—it’s probably the number 1 employer in your county, and it impacts multiple people.
So you know that’s a major factor. The other factor of course is that it’s really an investment for education. Because it’s not just something we have to fund. It is an investment in the future.
And so that’s why the feds usually put in somewhere between 6-8% of the resources and those monies, like you said, always come with lots of strings attached. And I’d be interested in a statement from you if you want, the amount of funding you get.
How much does it actually cost you to fulfill all strings attached and does it really money that is well-used and beneficial to your system? I ask that question to a lot of people and I get different answers. What are your thoughts?
OUTLAW: First off, Richmond, Virginia does not know Nottoway county. They don’t know our needs and if Richmond Virginia doesn’t know our needs, certainly the federal government does not know our needs.
So, personally, I don’t think the government at the state or federal level has any business in education. And I would much rather have the tax rate lowered on both those entities, and have the money used at the local level as we see fit. Because we, I think even though we are small and rural, know best what our population is and what our needs are.
ADAMS: Well, that’s a great answer and you’re not alone in thinking that. That’s so true. Alright, so just kind of a quick follow-up on this without beating it to death. Do you know how money is allocated in your budget? So like how much of it is really allocated by state or federal mandates? How much of it goes into particular departments?
And I don’t need a list of all of them, but where does the majority of money go to? Are you seeing trends? And I know you haven’t been there a long time, but are there trends and increases in spending?
For example, many schools are saying, “Okay, we’re stagnant with our teachers and our support staff but the expense is just going out the roof in administration. Because of all the mandates and the systems that are being generated, they’re just loading the schools with more administrative help which is actually channeling all the money instead of getting it down to the students. What are your thoughts on that? Are you experiencing that at all
OUTLAW: The lion's share of our budget goes to instruction. We have, I think, on the administrative side, we are pretty lean. We had needs… one example is of assistant principals.
The state requires that for a school to be authorized an assistant principal and receive the funding associated with that, they’ve got to have 400 students. Well in my way of thinking, that’s a pretty arbitrary figure.
And whether you’ve got 200 or 400, the principal has tremendous demands placed on their time. And up until two weeks ago, we only had one assistant principal out of 5 schools (and that was in the high school.)
We’ve just hired one for middle school. And we’re working on assistant principals for all of our schools. And that need is amplified tremendously because of the impacts there.
And the principals need to be spending, at least in our views, time in the classroom seeing what’s going on and determining what, if any, help teachers need. We’ve got some great teachers! But they are having to do things they’ve never had to do and put up with things they’ve never had to put up with in the past.
And our principles need to know that. And they can’t do that if they’re sitting behind a desk somewhere. Let me give one example from middle school. Those kids are going through a lot of developmental changes in the of times: puberty.
And I can’t imagine, it’s been a long time since I was there. But add to those difficulties some of the things we’re seeing from COVID now (and this is across the country, not just in Nottoway). We have more fights, we have more discipline problems in a variety of different areas.
And principles need to be on the scene to deal with those more than they’ve been able to do because of their other responsibilities. And this is a complicated problem, I think. And I’m sure it will vary from division to division. But I think there are a lot of common denominators across public education in the country.
ADAMS: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You started talking a little bit about school performance issues. Let’s dig in there just a little bit. You’ve talked about the need for principals and assistant principals who can really be there on the ground observing what’s going on in the classroom, supporting the teachers, understanding what’s going on in the student population, working up plans and strategies in order to help them not only catch up on learning gaps but deal with other issues that are going on: behavioral issues, like you mentioned.
Let me ask you this (and I know this is something that’s been going on for a while but it seems like it has really escalated recently) different mandates, different things that are being passed down as part of the “learning curriculum” in our classrooms.
Some would say contrasting learning with indoctrination and ideology. Are you seeing these kinds of things? Are these kinds of mandates happening in your schools? Are there efforts or is it driven by mandates from above? If you’re seeing it, is it primarily through activist teachers? What’s your experience as a board member and observer of your system?
OUTLAW: Well that’s an excellent question. And I think this whole issue, again COVID sticks its head in and of course the changed administration in 2020, but I often ask the question, “How is it that we have plenty of time to indoctrinate our children but we don’t have the time to educate them?”
And we see CRT, transgender issues, LGBTQ… all of these things that we seem to have time for and are promoted from the state and federal level and other activists. But our kids are suffering in reading and math and just about every subject.
Nationally you can look at the statistics and how we compare to other countries, some other countries which are barely above third-world status and they outperform our kids academically. How can that be?
ADAMS: Let me as you point-blank on this. Because your response is that this kind of stuff is going on in your school which is in a small, rural community. And a lot of times, parents and other leaders in the community think of their schools as these pristine places that are safe. [They think], “When I went to school there it was awesome.” even like 10, 15, 20 years ago.
But what I’m increasingly hearing is from folks across the country is that these are not just isolated things you hear about in the news, like Loudoun County and Fairfax, Los Angeles, and Chicago. But in all reality, this stuff has deeply penetrated down to every structure of the broader system. Are you seeing that in your county?
OUTLAW: Not out in the open, that I’m aware of. And does it go on? I would like to say, “No.” But I can’t say that. I’m hoping that now, and it’s one of my major goals, to try to ensure that we have the business of educating our kids as our number one priority and not some of these social agendas that are harming education.
We have had one teacher that was, a couple of years ago, talked to by the principal and told that kind of behavior was not something we want here. I’m sure you’re well aware of some of the books that have been in school libraries.
I’ve known the head librarian in the public schools here for years. I’ve spoken with her and she guarantees me that none of the titles are on our school library shelves. So that’s a good thing!
ADAMS: Yeah.
OUTLAW: And the thing too, I think everybody needs to realize until… when did the CRT issue blow up? About a year and a half ago. The people that are promoting CRT and these other agendas are not stupid. So they become more subtle in their approaches. Which makes it that much more difficult to figure out problems like this. And I certainly don’t have any magic answer for that.
ADAMS: Yeah. Well, but diligence is important at every level. And the board is the one that hires and fires and has a really controlling stake in the future of your school. So obviously as you work together as a team, I know that you’re always working to bring improvements.
Let me ask you this. You implied that you felt like you had some really good teachers that, by and large, your administration is doing a great job. And outside of the consequences primarily from restrictions placed from COVID, and historically pre-COVID, were students in your community thriving?
Because that is ultimately what everybody wants to see. They want to see students thriving. Because when students are learning they become sharp, intelligent, motivated members of communities as they start to grow up.
Basically, when we have great schools in our communities it enables the local community to flourish, and it helps students want to stay in their communities because jobs tend to come when students are well-equipped and thriving, and capable.
So where are you in that? I know you came in, hit COVID, and all this stuff. And I know you’re a long-term professional. Where do you see all this? And you said you were really excited about some things you thought were coming up. Do you want to talk into that realm for a little while?
OUTLAW: Yes. And this is a nationwide problem: absentee fathers. Single-parent households. And I see that as one of the biggest challenges that we have in Nottoway county.
We have parents that are not much past being children themselves. And have not had role models to equip them for the job. And this has been going on for a few generations now. So I think one of our biggest problems is parental involvement.
And we’ve got some parents that are just phenomenal. And I’ll tell you, you don’t want to get in their way. They do some really tremendous things for the school and all students. So we’re blessed there but we’ve got the other problem and that’s a tough one.
ADAMS: So, Bill, you were just talking about parental engagement and how some of the parents are fantastic and others may be a little delinquent. But let me ask you this question.
Sometimes when parents don’t feel like they have options and it’s just a dead-end street for them. And maybe sometimes it’s because they’re just sued to having everything done for them, so they’re not going to do anything because they expect you or somebody else to do it for them (and I don't say that in a demeaning way but it’s a behavioral thing that can be learned).
Let me ask you this about your community. Do you have school choice options? What are your thoughts on school choice options? You stated that you yourself had homeschooled and had your kids in private and public schools.
So what are your thoughts on that and do you think that kind of concept (of educational freedom) exists in your community? Should it exist in your community? And what values do you think it could bring?
OUTLAW: I am 100% plus pro-choice in schools. My youngest daughter has a five-year-old, a two-year-old, and soon another. And she has just chosen, recently, to homeschool her five-year-old. And I’m thrilled about that. My opinion is if you want your child to have a truly good education, the only option you have is homeschooling.
Now, with that being said, that certainly is not an option for a lot of people. We have a very good private school in Nottoway county. My youngest child, my son, went there except for four years when he was homeschooled, and my youngest daughter went there.
And they do a really good job. And they did an exceptional job through COVID. But, again, that’s not an option for a lot of people. So we owe it to the children in our community to give them the absolute best public education that we can. That’s a work in progress.
ADAMS: Yeah. So, I agree. Your role is really to lead public education. And to some extent, your interest is for all students in all forms of the education process there. So we talk and have talked for years about school choice.
In more recent years there's been more focus on what’s called education freedom. That’s really with education savings accounts. And basically, legislation like West Virginia and Arizona most recently created a universal program for that.
Where every student, regardless of where they’re educated, every student in the state has a certain amount of money—it’s state money—that is put into an account and the parent of that child can use that money to help educate that child regardless of their choice in educational options.
In other words, the focus is that the money follows the child, not the institution. For a long time, the whole focus was on the institution and it became public school versus private school versus homeschool. And the focus was never really on what was best for the student.
It was really about who are we going to fund and who are we not going to fund when it comes to organizations. And so the new trend is that we should break that down and let all organizations and institutions compete through their abilities and through their competency for the enrollment of those children and let the parents decide where that money gets spent.
And that would help improve the quality of education in our communities. What are your thoughts on that and is that something that, I know as school board members you always have opportunities (particularly a period of time every year) where you can address the state legislature with ideas? Is that an idea that you think would be valuable to your community and to communities across the commonwealth?
OUTLAW: Absolutely! I totally agree with what you just said. Public schools, for too long, have had a monopoly. And I don’t know of a single case where monopolies provided the consumer with the best options.
What’s the incentive? A guy making a widget in somebody else comes up with a better way to make a widget, and that’s where the people are going to go. Parents have not had that option in educating their children. We’re seeing that now.
And it kind of gets back to what I said. In the absolute perfect world, the government would be out of education except possibly at the local level. All that money would be right here so the problem would be taken care of.
ADAMS: Yeah. One person put it this way: “Why is it that the government seems to not trust parents with the ability to make good decisions for their children and so they are going to force us to pay them to educate and if we decide we’re not going to, they’re going to take our property.”
That puts things in a real perspective, both at federal and state levels. And I think you make a strong point that if we didn’t have those elements digging into our pocket without our consent then all of a sudden there would be a whole lot more money left at the local level for communities to do what they felt were best. Whether it was educating their kids, building bridges, or any other kind of thing.
OUTLAW: Well, what got Glen Youngkin elected governor of Virginia last year? Parents are the ones. And that’s in the code of Virginia. It’s the parents’ responsibility. And I hate to say this (and you alluded to it) but parents have kinda gotten away from taking responsibility for their children.
And they would rather give that child up for however many hours a day to be educated and they think their job is done. That’s far from the case.
ADAMS: Yeah. So let me wrap it up with another question for you here. Our target audience is parents, grandparents, educators, and legislators. Is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners that you believe may be solutions-based when it comes to engagement with our children and their education?
OUTLAW: Absolutely. I think one of the biggest problems we have with parents and grandparents is apathy. And they’ve got to get past that. They’ve got to get involved, they need to know. And that was one of the beauties of COVID.
Parents were seeing, because the kids were online at home, what was going on. So there’s been an awakening there. It can’t stop where we are now. We’ve got a lot of improvements to make.
ADAMS: Well, Bill, I really appreciate you spending time with us today. Thank you for your insight, I wish you well. And your service there in our own county. And I trust that you’ll be able to work with the team of people who are trying to help your children get back on track in their education. And I trust that you have wonderful success.
OUTLAW: Thank you so much; I really appreciate this opportunity. Thank you.
ADAMS: You’re most welcome.