Charlottesville and Albemarle County school superintendents’ failure to show for an NAACP forum has left some ruffled feathers.
M. Rick Turner, president of the Albemarle-Charlottesville branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, says Albemarle Superintendent Pamela Moran and Charlottesville Superintendent Rosa S. Atkins skipped Monday’s forum after Turner told a TV news reporter that he’d like to know what progress has been made to lower the high dropout rate among black students.
“When they found out I wanted to ask those sorts of questions, they said they weren’t coming,” Turner said. “If you’re a superintendent, you have to be able to answer those kinds of questions.”
Phone calls to Moran and Atkins were not returned late Tuesday afternoon. However, Albemarle schools communications coordinator Maury Brown wrote in a statement: “I believe there was some miscommunication about this meeting. It is our understanding that the conversation with the two superintendents had been postponed.”
“There was a miscommunication,” Charlottesville schools spokeswoman Cass Cannon concurred.
Brown and Cannon each declined to elaborate.
Moran and Atkins were expected to speak Monday to provide an “environmental scan and education projections for Albemarle County and Charlottesville city schools,” according to publicity materials for the event.
Atkins told the local NAACP vice president that she didn’t want to “get involved in issues of race,” Turner said, adding that Moran did not notify him that she wasn’t coming.
About 25 people showed up at the Monday forum at Burley Middle School, Turner said, only to find that the superintendents were no-shows.
“There were a lot of disappointed people last night,” Turner said.
Turner said The Daily Progress, radio station WINA and local TV stations had announced the forum with the superintendents.
Turner said that he never changed the agenda of the event. The superintendents, he said, were free to talk about whatever they wanted. But Turner said he thinks it was entirely appropriate for them to field questions regarding educational issues, such as the disproportionate dropout rates between black students and their white classmates.
Brown said school officials are “perfectly willing to discuss the achievement of African-American students, and all students, with any member of the community.”
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