As Petersburg’s once-booming manufacturing base hollowed out, crime and residents’ health . Along the way, places for kids to be kids disappeared, and many of them stopped coming to school.

Over the last year, about a quarter of students haven’t shown up for at least 10 days of class, even as Virginia overall that had spiked because of the pandemic. While chronic absenteeism is high, state tests show students’ academic performance . Most campuses weren’t accredited until a few . The whole school division and its 4,500 students has essentially been for decades. 

It’s a cycle that seemed unbreakable. Yet for almost four years, something quite extraordinary has been happening here. 

“Petersburg has the worst outcomes of anyone on everything,” said Aimee Guidera, Virginia’s  secretary of education during former Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s term. “That’s why we went in.” 

Guidera is referring to a 2022 encounter at a community meeting between Youngkin, a Republican, and Petersburg’s longtime Democratic mayor, Samuel Parham, which led to a yearslong relationship, . The partnership drew $447 million in state, federal and private sector investment to this city just south of Virginia’s capital, plus $2 billion in commitments to develop the area. It also helped fast track the city’s grant applications and approval for projects like , which will bring jobs and revenue, and supported small businesses , like the expansion of a Montessori-style childcare center.

In the schools, there is more before- and after-school childcare, more summer programs for kids and a new playground at the YMCA. There’s also more staff to help intervene when students and families are struggling, a new mentoring program for girls and more. 

Despite the intervention and attention, however, Petersburg schools are still floundering and remain under close watch by the state. But there is hope that as the city changes, its schools will keep changing too. 

Parent Lakeshia Tinsley, who leads the school division’s Parent Advisory Committee and can rattle off a list of concerns about the city schools, summed it up this way: “Petersburg has been on the move, slowly but surely.”

‘It’s all connected’

That’s quite different from how Tinsley felt when she first moved here, lured by Petersburg’s low cost of living. The schools were thought to be so bad, she recalled being told that she’d need to move again once her daughter grew to school-age. 

At the time, just one of the city’s four elementary schools offered childcare before and after hours — care that, for many parents, makes working full-time possible. 

In the early days of the partnership, Guidera said members of the community frequently complained about that lack of care, along with the dearth of summer camps and activities for kids in general. 

“You can’t just deal with crime without dealing with health, with poverty, with education,” Guidera said. “It’s all connected.”

In response, the commonwealth leveraged grants and federal dollars to expand care provided by the YMCA, before and after school at every city elementary school. 

For free. 

“Before, I was having to pay daycare at an actual daycare. That’s another bill that you have,” said Tinsley, who is now running for a seat on the Petersburg school board. “It’s more convenient to drop off at school,” she added, recalling that the bus taking children from the private childcare center to her daughter’s elementary school in the mornings sometimes ran late.

A related endeavor led to and giving kids a hand in designing it. 

Girls with Pearls

Those kinds of spaces to play and gather are essential for kids, said Wanda Stewart, who grew up in Petersburg during the boom times in the ’70s and ’80s.

“There were baseball games at the park, Little League games, city events in the parks for families,” she remembered. She attended college in North Carolina and later settled there with her husband. But phone calls home with nieces and nephews distressed her. 

The thriving city where Stewart grew up had gone.

Petersburg, a transportation hub that hugs the Appomattox River and a city , . The mall closed. So did the skating rink and movie theater. Even the bowling alley shut down. 

Family who remained wondered if it wouldn’t be better for Stewart, with her experience in dropout prevention, to use her talents supporting children back home in Petersburg. When a job running Petersburg’s opened up, she seized the opportunity to return.

And because of the Partnership for Petersburg, she had the chance to tell then-first lady Suzanne Youngkin about her organization, which works to keep kids in school, in part by taking stock of needs like food, clothing and mental health. Many Petersburg students’ parents or underemployed compared to those in other parts of Virginia and the country as a whole.

Stewart got Youngkin’s attention. The partnership three of Petersburg’s eight schools to hire its own CIS site coordinator. A dedicated staff member in school meant getting early warnings about students’ and families’ needs and handling them in real time.

Stewart also told Youngkin about “Girls with Pearls,” one facet of Communities in Schools she brought with her from North Carolina. Each participating student is paired with an adult mentor, who works with them on issues like leadership, self-care, etiquette and navigating conflict. The name comes from how the year ends: Selected girls at every Petersburg school are presented with a strand of pearls they’ve earned for their monthly sessions. 

Youngkin attended a sixth-grade center as a child in Texas and took a special interest in working with the Girls in Pearls at Blandford Academy, the Petersburg school for sixth graders. Sixth grade centers can : the year between the safe space of elementary school and the more daunting middle school years, when some students drop out. 

“I have a sweet spot for sixth-grade girls,” said Youngkin, who recruited members of her staff to mentor Blandford students.

Stewart said Communities in Schools staff and other school employees nominate girls they think would benefit from the monthly conversations and mentoring.

They are girls like Lakeshia Tinsley’s daughter, Serenity, and her classmate Zoey Williams, a fellow Blandford sixth grader who was Suzanne Youngkin’s mentee. At the group’s April gathering, Zoey and Youngkin chatted for a few minutes before getting into an ask-me-anything style conversation with a local OB/GYN who was there to explain menstruation. Many girls in Petersburg may be skipping school because they don’t have the menstrual supplies they need. The girls and their mentors filled 145 backpacks with pads and wipes — a two-month supply — so every Blandford girl would be outfitted with what they might need.

Before the Youngkins left the governor’s mansion in January, the girls got to visit. At the end of the school year, each received a strand of pearls as a parting gift. They were also given a journal and a binder filled with lessons to look back on. But “it’s not about gifts,” Youngkin said. “It’s about time.”

“I got to learn stuff I didn’t really know about,” Zoey said, citing sessions on anxiety and how to deal with emotions gone haywire. “I got to meet new people.”

‘Not … a finger snap’

Though the Partnership for Petersburg is over, and the Youngkins moved some 120 miles north, Youngkin said she plans to return when the next group of Girls with Pearls participants is selected in the fall. 

“It’s just sort of gotten to be what we do,” she said.

Like Tinsley, Stewart said she’s noticed positive differences in Petersburg, even if there’s a long way to go on the school system’s biggest concern, student performance in math and reading.

The school division offers a glimpse of the changes: Several schools are now accredited. The division has had , offering a sense of stability at the top, after running through several others in the last few years. Brown has for every student to be ready for college, the military or a career upon graduation.

But getting them to show up to school, every day, remains one of Brown’s top priorities. For example, absences are now tracked by a school division website , and Brown to the school that cuts down the most on absences every month. Still, chronic absenteeism remains above 20% at every Petersburg public school and is greater than 30% at a few. 

The school board and superintendent also adopted to guide how it will improve student achievement and hiring qualified teachers, among other goals. At the same time, , its first in 50 years. 

A Petersburg City Public Schools spokeswoman said neither the superintendent nor any of the division’s five board members would answer questions for this article.

Before- and after-school options grew because of the partnership. Girls with Pearls and the broader services afforded by Communities in Schools remain. But another effort directly tied to helping Petersburg students academically was short-lived.

Guidera helped hash out an agreement with the school division to bring in a surge of tutors, including students from nearby colleges, to work with students in person. Done right, it’s the kind of strategy can effectively address learning loss — “huge in Petersburg even before COVID,” she said — and something Virginia throughout the commonwealth. 

But the arrangement, started under a superintendent who has long since left, lasted just a single school year. Another tutoring program hasn’t gotten off the ground, though talks with the current schools chief are ongoing. 

Guidera also said the commonwealth’s oversight of schools in Petersburg, and elsewhere, was revamped so it is supportive, not punitive. “It’s not shaming and blaming. It’s very much focused on what works, and how do we use data … as a flashlight rather than as a hammer to identify what’s working, and learn from that.”

For Guidera, however, the truth is that Petersburg schools have not improved enough — “not as much as I want,” she said. But she recognizes it will take time: “It’s not going to be a finger snap.” 

Nevertheless, she thinks the intense investment of time and money was worthwhile.

“This is about partnership, community, relationships and building hope and using data.”