Teachers in more than half of Roanoke's public schools face classrooms in which two of three children live in poverty. In some schools, it's nine out of 10.

In the past 15 years, the number of poor students in the school system has swelled from just over a third to nearly two-thirds of all students, a Roanoke Times analysis has found.

While the city population is slightly more than a quarter black, nearly half the school population is. That's up from 39 percent in 1990. This year, for the first time, black students outnumber white students. The number of Hispanic students has increased tenfold in the past 15 years.

Impoverished or minority children, who suffer from well-documented achievement gaps compared with their peers, now constitute the majority of the city's student population.

The system is the seventh worst-performing division among Virginia's 132 divisions in terms of state accreditation, and the worst among large systems, according to state Department of Education statistics. And a major reason is the system's failure to close achievement gaps.

Twelve of Roanoke's 29 schools have failed to achieve state accreditation. While some of Roanoke's poorest schools are accredited, in all 12 of those that are not, nearly two-thirds of students or more are poor.

"The demographics have changed, but it's as if no one wants to acknowledge it," said Anita Price, a guidance counselor at Round Hill Montessori Primary School. "This is not Mayberry anymore."

The school system is facing a current of increasing numbers of students in groups who historically have struggled academically, and at a time when school divisions face intensifying accountability to state and federal government.

Starting after this school year, schools can be denied state accreditation and face sanctions that could include replacing administrators and faculty if 70 percent of students in each school don't pass state Standards of Learning tests. One city school, Westside Elementary, could be denied accreditation after this year. Eight more could face the same fate after next year.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires not only that all students meet SOL pass rates, but subgroups including blacks, Hispanics and the disadvantaged must each pass in their own right.

SOL pass rates for blacks, Hispanics and the poor in Roanoke lag 10 percent to 15 percent behind their white peers in all subjects.

"Obviously, something has to change," said Superintendent Marvin Thompson.

School leaders say they make no excuses.

"We want people to understand the dynamics of where we are," said August Bullock, associate superintendent for instruction, "but we will never say these students cannot learn."

'Very urban'

Nearly every school in the city system is seeing the changes, enrollment data provided by the school administration show.

The percentage of poor students, as indicated by eligibility for free and reduced-price lunch programs, increased in 27 of 29 schools in the city from 1990 to 2005. At Fairview Elementary, 75 percent of students are on free and reduced-price lunch, compared with 47 percent in 1990. Westside Elementary saw a similar change.

Twenty-two schools saw an increase in the number of black students in the same period, while all but two schools saw a decrease in the number of white students. Fallon Park Elementary, for example, nearly doubled its number of black students, while the number of white students was cut in half.

"The big picture of this data is that we are very urban," said school board member David Trinkle, who is also an independent city council candidate in the May 2 election. "Why we're behind the curve here ... is because we haven't acknowledged it."

Former Republican mayoral candidate Alice Hincker calls that a "culture of denial."

Roanoke's student demographics are a challenge, the frequent school board critic said, but "they are similar to those faced by other urban school systems around the country that are seeing their children succeed. ... In Roanoke we spent the last five years trying to convince the world that the problems 'perceived by a few' were being exaggerated."

"These issues didn't just pop up overnight," said School Board Chairwoman Kathy Stockburger.

Former Superintendent Wayne Harris talked often about overcoming achievement gaps, but Stockburger thinks the school system, like many around the country, never treated accountability measures like the SOLs and the federal No Child Left Behind Act with the seriousness they warranted. The achievement gap is one of a number of reasons the system finds itself in the position it's in, she said.

Over the past few years, controversies over school system hiring and purchasing, as well as the discovery that the division had been underreporting school disciplinary data, were huge distractions, said Stockburger, a three-year board member who is not seeking a second term.

Harris left office in July 2004, triggering the appointment of an interim superintendent and a search for a full-time replacement, she noted.

School board members confess they weren't fully aware of the school system's problems until Thompson took over as superintendent in May 2005.

"We were just awakened," said board member Jason Bingham. "We've been failing these kids."

Thompson has been careful not to cast blame on Harris, but he's been plain that the system is in trouble.

"None of you knew the condition of this division when I arrived, needless to say, nor did I," he wrote to school board members in a December e-mail.

"In my time here it has become apparent to me that the obstacles facing us moving forward are the entrenched practices which have led to mediocrity and failure," he wrote, failure "to know the requirements of the law and the best practices which have been employed by school divisions across the country to address our issues."

In an interview, Thompson called the system "program-driven" in the past. Whenever a problem emerged, a program was developed to address it, but with no clear sense of what the program was supposed to achieve, he said.

Stockburger said during Harris' tenure the board and administration made decisions with good intentions, but lacked the information and data to allow them to be proactive.

"The lens had been pretty cloudy before about the information the board had been receiving from the superintendent," and the board didn't know what data to ask for, Stockburger said. "It wasn't the culture of this district to be as data-driven as Marvin Thompson would have us be," she said.

Trinkle said the school system was focused on positive developments "to the point where sometimes you just didn't know about the negatives."

Stockburger said the personal agendas and emotional attachment to programs, and not real analysis of them, often drove decisions.

"The data may tell us things that we didn't see," Stockburger said, "or don't want to see."

Data-driven

Thompson, a student of the corporate philosophy of total quality management, believes the key is closely tracking the performance of students throughout the year and analyzing frequently which students need help in which subject areas.

This data-driven approach doesn't call for focusing on groups like the poor or minorities, but Thompson himself watches the data for those groups.

If all of Roanoke's schools are to pass the SOLs, he said, it will depend upon the poor and minorities making gains in performance. That's where the greatest opportunity for improvement is.

Stockburger called these achievement gaps "a huge concern in Roanoke" and "one of the greatest threats to our community's, and our nation's, future success."

Race and poverty are societal and community issues, Stockburger and other school board members say, yet educators are among the few who confront those issues every day.

"The school system cannot single-handedly rid Roanoke city of poverty or the effects of poverty," said board member David Carson.

Ideally, the community would do its part and all children would arrive at school equally prepared, board members say. "Parents or caregivers have an equal responsibility to start their kids' education at home," Carson said.

"The community must partner with the school system on these huge foundational issues," said Stockburger. "I don't think the community's doing that very well."

Yet the school system does not have time to wait.

The achievement gaps "are there and they are real and we have to deal with them," Stockburger said. "We need to keep the notion in front of us that every child can learn, every child can achieve to their highest ability."

Staff writer Ray Reed contributed to this report.