Departing Roanoke School Board chairman led division through trying times

Inside a Crystal Spring Elementary School classroom, David Carson found himself the arbiter of an important case: girls vs. boys.

Sitting at the head of the room, the girls lined up to his left and the boys to his right. They went before him two at a time answering math and geography questions he posed.

“Boom,” he said, pointing to the victor.

For the longtime Roanoke School Board chairman and soon-to-be judge on Virginia’s 23rd Judicial Circuit, presiding over the competition between the fourth-graders is where his future intersects with his present and past.

When he joined the school board in 2005, Carson set out to visit an elementary school every Friday morning to read to students and hold a short academic competition. It’s a tradition he’s continued.

After eight years, the last seven as chairman, Carson will end his time on the school board today. The General Assembly elected Carson in April to the judgeship and he is not legally permitted to remain on the board once he takes the bench in July.

Crystal Spring Elementary may well have been what sparked Carson’s service on the school board, a tenure many herald as a formative time for the school system that educates about 13,000 children.

The school is blocks from his south Roanoke home and where his children attended elementary school. He first considered applying for the school board as his daughter prepared to leave Crystal Spring for middle school.

“She was going off to the great big [James] Madison Middle,” he said, recalling when he and his wife went out for what was supposed to be dinner and a movie, but spent the whole night talking about what to do.

“Do we move,” he remembered contemplating. “We’ve never kind of quit anything.”

Carson, who at that time coached his children’s athletic teams, said he decided to get involved.

“I knew nothing about what I was getting into,” he said.

At the time the school system was limping along, struggling to recover both from scandals — the hiring of employees with criminal records, the discovery of procurement irregularities and the underreporting of school violence — and the abrupt retirement of Wayne Harris, the superintendent who had led the division for more than a decade.

Schools were not meeting federal accountability requirements and about half of the system’s schools had not received state accreditation.

Even with a new no-nonsense, hard-driving superintendent about to come on board, families were leaving the school system.

Carson’s first school board meeting was also the first for that superintendent, Marvin Thompson. He would leave two years later, embattled, after driving away many city schools teachers.

Just a year into being board chairman, Carson found himself tasked with one of the most critical jobs a board can have: selecting a superintendent.

Today, though, the school system shows progress.

During Carson’s tenure the school board revised attendance zones for the first time in decades, saved millions by closing underused or outdated schools, lengthened the school day to put the system on par with other divisions and installed Rita Bishop as superintendent.

‘Do the right thing’

Notable during Carson’s time, Roanoke public schools have slowed the flood of students dropping out. With gains during the past four years, Roanoke has moved its on-time graduation rate from 59.1 percent to 76.6 percent.

While the city still has one of the lowest graduation rates in Virginia, it has moved out of the bleak territory where little more than half of its students made it to graduation day.

Forest Park Academy is likely part of what started turning the tide. The program, created by Bishop in 2008, targets overage students who have repeated one or more grade levels or students who were unsuccessful in a traditional high school setting with the attention they need to earn a diploma.

Carson said he counts the school’s first graduation ceremony among his favorite moments.

School officials have said repeatedly if the state’s calculation of graduation rates took into account students who take more than four years to graduate, which includes many at Forest Park Academy, the system’s overall rate would be higher.

That’s never mattered as much to Carson.

“He cared more about people than numbers,” Bishop said.

In talks about Forest Park, Carson never asked how many students would count toward the system’s rate, she said.

Instead, Bishop remembered Carson said, “Do the right thing.”

That’s characteristic of his approach. Bishop said Carson has focused simply on what’s best for children.

In the weeks leading up to his election to the court she knew he was interested in the judgeship and they talked through the process.

“We were all pushing for him,” she said.

The two have a curious relationship. People agree their personalities are different . Yet they share a common passion for public education and an acute knowledge of how to get the school system where it needs to go.

Board Vice Chairman Todd Putney described them together as a dynamo.

He said Carson would learn what Bishop wanted to do and then figure out how to bring it to fruition.

Staying on point

Putney and others said Carson’s leadership style helped steer the school board through trying times, difficult decisions and even to innovations such as Forest Park Academy.

“He is great at getting others to join together and do what’s in the greater good,” said board member Mae Huff, who has worked alongside Carson for seven years.

She said he kept the board on task, clear of outside influence and always did what was best for all children, not simply his own.

Putney said Carson “masterfully led” the group, which brought about major changes in the school system and a different dynamic with city council.

He said in the past there appeared to be a subservient element when it came to the school board and its relationship to the city council, in part because school boards have no taxing authority in Virginia and, in Roanoke, its members are appointed by the council rather than elected by voters.

But with Carson leading the board, he said, they made some tough choices to close schools, empowering the board to ask the council for more money.

Putney said before those difficult choices, the discussions about money weren’t even on the table. But afterward the city council passed a temporary meals tax increase for schools and changed the schools’ funding formula.

Even in his final meeting with the council, Carson smoothly led school officials through a discussion about the system’s finances that could have easily slipped into less than harmonious territory.

The meeting came on the heels of a disagreement between the council and the school board over funding for Round Hill Elementary School’s renovation, where the school board asked for an increase in its capital budget, catching some council members off guard.

“It’s a marriage. Like any marriage there are disagreements,” Carson said during the recent meeting.

He was also quick to praise the council’s funding for the school system while also highlighting some of the challenges facing Roanoke schools, including what he described as inadequate state funding for schools.

“I’m profoundly concerned with public education in general in Virginia,” he said. “The cynic in me says there’s an agenda behind the starvation diet.”

Carson said there’s a political agenda that wants to squeeze public education and promote charter and private schools, but he feels strongly charter schools are not the answer.

When Carson takes the bench next month he’ll likely have to quiet such comments. Virginia judicial conduct codes prohibit judges from open political activity.

“That will be very difficult,” he admitted.

But he added he intends to continue being involved in the school system in any way that’s “legally permissible.”

He said he’s wrestled with how to stay involved. He’s always been a presence in local schools.

Along with the graduation of Forest Park, his Friday morning school visits are among his favorite moments. In the corner of his law office there are stacks of handwritten, brightly colored thank you notes from students he’s visited.

As difficult as his job has been at times, Carson said in a way being on the board has been easy because he’s asked only one question: “What’s best for kids?”

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