In 2010, Tiyanna Stewart was the only Black student from Chesterfield County Public Schools selected to attend the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, a common tale for many Black students entering the school.
Data obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch through open records requests shows that Chesterfield sent one Black student a year to Maggie Walker in 10 of the last 22 school years. Henrico County, which more years than not sent zero Black students to the school during the first decade of the 2000s, has sent more than two Black students there only once in the last eight years. And in Richmond, where the public school system is composed primarily of Black students, the 34 white students selected for Maggie Walker this year outnumber all the Black and Hispanic students sent from Richmond in the past five years combined.
Stewart didn’t feel the weight of her experience until The Richmond Free Press interviewed her as a student, to ask about being Black at the school and following in the legacy of Maggie Walker, a Black civil rights trailblazer for whom the building was also named when it housed an all-Black high school under segregation.
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“After that moment I was like, 'OK, this is deeper than I realize,'” Stewart, a 2014 graduate, said of an experience that could be fraught and lonely.
Stewart saw attending the school as an opportunity and went on to success there, even after initially being wait-listed for admission, a development that compounded her experience as a Black gifted child often deceived into believing she wasn't as smart as she is.
In interviews spanning decades of experiences shared by current and former students, the Richmond Times-Dispatch found that the school has allowed students of color to feel isolated and unsupported.
Twenty-two years of admissions data provided to The Times-Dispatch by the governor’s school shows the acceptance rate for Black student applications during that time was about 5%, nearly four times lower than the percentage of white students accepted. The highest single-year acceptance rate for Black student applications was 10.3% in 2000, when 184 Black students applied, and 19 across 10 districts were selected to attend. And before admitting 17 this year, the school hadn't accepted more than seven Hispanic students in any year during the past two decades.
This three-part series, produced as part of reporter Kenya Hunter’s participation in an Education Writers Association mentorship program, examines the lack of diversity at the Maggie L. Walker Governor's School and others across the state.
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Stewart recalled having traumatizing experiences and enduring countless microaggressions, which are incidents of discrimination against marginalized people that often are subtle or indirect, at the elite public magnet school, including insinuations that she wasn’t as smart as the white students. She remembers the systems of care to overcome the climate, like a club called Peer Mentors and "the Black table," where the few Black students would sit at lunch, trade stories of microaggressions from the day and uplift one another.
In Stewart's sophomore year, she said, a teacher singled her out while going over a journal by an explorer in U.S. History that described Black women in Africa as "lascivious" and "promiscuous." Already uncomfortable as one of the few Black students in the class, her stomach dropped when she heard the teacher say her name.
He said: "See, class, but Tiyanna isn't like that, is she?"
"Your face gets hot," she said, remembering the experience. "You don't even want to look around to see if anybody's looking at you."
She was stunned, embarrassed, and ended up dropping the class.
Now a 25-year-old consultant for nonprofits, Stewart's path to elite education was nearly disrupted before it even began. Stewart recalled that when her mother realized that she was doing advanced work as a second-grader in Fluvanna County, her mother brought samples to her daughter's teacher to ask that she be tested for gifted programming. The teacher, a white woman, at first disagreed and critiqued Stewart's math work.
“I made two mistakes and she used it as proof that I shouldn't be tested. That I wasn't ready, that I wasn't as smart as my mom thought I was - that was what she was trying to say,” Stewart recalled. “So my mom was shocked. You know, she seemed like she was trying to find a reason for me not to be tested, not to be considered.”
If not for a Black woman being in the room, her mother wouldn't have known where to get her tested for gifted services, she recalled.
Black and Latino students are often barred from advanced coursework, partly because teacher bias affects who is viewed as “gifted,” The Education Trust found in a 2020 study. Those decisions affect who, at an early age, is put on the most common path to ultimately end up in programs like Maggie Walker's.
In the past five years, Maggie Walker has admitted seven times more white students than Black students.
This year was the first year in the last two decades that the majority of students selected weren’t white, which appears to be driven by choices at the school district level.
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As school districts feeding into Maggie Walker weigh changes to how gifted children are identified and which students are selected to attend the school - one of 19 governor's schools across the state - public scrutiny has increased on the utility of standardized admissions tests.
Maggie Walker is not in charge of the selection process, just the application. The school creates a composite score for the students based on application materials. That information is returned to the districts, and from there, they use it to make their own selections. Each district decides how many slots it wishes to purchase annually.
At Maggie Walker, the school administers a two-part admissions test - an aptitude test and a 10th-grade achievement test. The planning committee at Maggie Walker, composed of the central Virginia feeder districts' gifted and talented coordinators, says the test is more of a barrier than an indicator of who will do well at the school.
The administration has proposed removing the achievement test, keeping the aptitude test, and adding an essay that describes why a student would want to attend Maggie Walker.
Maggie Walker’s regional school board waived the admissions test for the Class of 2025, a decision driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. The school welcomed 25 Black students for the 196-student cohort, more than any class in the past two decades, the data shows.
The increase in Black students was driven almost entirely by Chesterfield, which sent a dozen Black freshmen this year after sending three in 2020.
The waiver of the admissions test didn’t do much for diversity in Henrico and Richmond.
White students account for about 20% of Richmond Public Schools' enrollment, according to state data, but made up 90% of the system's Maggie Walker selections in 2020, a figure that mirrors the rate from 20 years ago.
Richmond selected five Hispanic and three Black students this year. It sent 34 white students this year - more than the 32 Hispanic or Black students it has sent in the past five years combined. Richmond hasn't selected fewer than 32 white students in any of the past five years.
It’s not for a lack of Black applications. During the last five years, white students who applied were accepted into the school at a rate nearly six times higher than Black students.
Henrico Public Schools has sent nine Black students to Maggie Walker in the last five years, including two this year, data provided by the school system shows. In the same time frame, the system sent 107 Asian students to the governor’s school and 78 white students, which accounted for about 85% percent of Henrico students sent to Maggie Walker.
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Dominant Turner, one of two Black students from Henrico to be selected to attend the school in 2017, sees more work to do but said things are headed in the right direction.
While he says he’s never had an overtly racist experience at the school, he has felt the effects of microaggressions and misconceptions of Black people who are identified as gifted.
“A lot of people think that it's just a diversity push, and that you're actually not as gifted as them,” Turner said. He describes his experience at Maggie Walker as one that started with a culture shock - he was used to his eastern Henrico school, Fairfield Middle, where Black students were in the majority.
“I was more comfortable there, and there were just more people to relate to. It was more like a family environment,” he said of Fairfield. “With Maggie Walker, it was just completely different. It wasn’t a lot of Black people there. I couldn’t really relate to a lot of people.”
Turner was identified as gifted when he was in kindergarten. His parents pushed for the county to test him. His mother, Christina Turner, recalls being met with some resistance.
The difficult track to get Dominant identified as gifted is not uncommon for families in Henrico's eastern portion, parents say, where Black students are most concentrated. The county’s recent audit of gifted programming, led by John Hopkins University professor Jonathan Plucker, notes a perceived notion of western Henrico parents having more access to rigorous curriculum than those in the eastern part. The perceptions led Turner to join the school district’s gifted education advisory panel to help amplify the voices of parents in eastern Henrico.
“The white and Asian students have access to things that the other students don't,” Christina Turner said. She recalled a program in Henrico called Early Bird Math, in which the district selected a limited number of students to be tracked into advanced math. “None of the parents in my district knew anything about this, and it was one of the things they use to identify students as gifted. … So it’s things like that, it’s just a lack of information.”
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Plucker has a solution for Henrico that could be instructive for other localities: improved communication and front-loading.
Front-loading for students from historically disadvantaged groups means raising the rigor of curriculum in earlier grades so students are prepared for gifted learning in the future. In the audit he performed for Henrico’s gifted education program, Plucker found that front-loading should be a major priority for the district.
“Most of your advanced learning programs tend to be very upper-middle class and upper class and white and Asian American,” Plucker said. He also noted that many localities across the country are just getting enough credible research to begin to figure out how to push diversity and remove barriers for students of color.
Now, the gifted education team has proposed adding 14 seats to the county's governor’s school cohort, one for each middle school.
"We still seem like we fared similarly to what we have in the last couple years, so it was a little bit discouraging," said Jenna Conlee, a gifted and talented specialist for the Henrico school district. But she is encouraged, she said, by Chesterfield Public Schools, which led the way in diversity at Maggie Walker by revamping how it selects students.
Chesterfield has the most seats of any of the 14 districts, and it sent a notably higher number of Black students to the governor’s school this year. A dozen of Maggie Walker's 25 Black freshman come from Chesterfield. In 2020, Chesterfield sent three Black students.
The change came by way of a new two-phase admissions process that allows for school-based selection as opposed to countywide picks, which was unanimously approved by the Chesterfield School Board last year on the advice of staff members who ran simulations to determine how the school system could boost diversity.
Other localities that hoped the waiver of Maggie Walker’s two-part admissions test would boost diversity might learn something from what they found. George Fohl, who oversees gifted and talented education for Chesterfield schools, said the selection process for Maggie Walker had been the same since the school opened in the 1990s.
“There has been an awful lot of talk and discussion over the decades, but no real change to address the actual issues,” Fohl said. “And it's a complex thing. It's not just participating divisions, it's a collaborative effort.”
Chesterfield still has a division-level ranking, Fohl said. But before it hands out slots to the top students, the district reserves slots for the top applicants at every middle school in Chesterfield, depending on the size of the school.
“People have different life experiences, educational experiences, backgrounds and so forth,” he said.
The pipeline challenges that are forming a barrier to diversity at Maggie Walker won't be solved by any one thing, said Plucker, who worries about Maggie Walker focusing solely on admissions tests.
“If you keep focusing on the test as the problem, there is no way that you don't end up pitting these groups against each other,” Plucker said. “And so that's just another reason why I think that's a really big mistake.”
Among the parts of the application process at Maggie Walker are an essay and teacher recommendations, which some experts argue are even more subjective than a standardized test and could lead to more bias in application processes.
School officials at Maggie Walker argue that it doesn’t make sense to administer the achievement test. Students will learn the material at Maggie Walker once they get to the 10th grade, they say.
As the school works to remove barriers to admissions for students of color, Dominant Turner and Tiyanna Stewart both say the administration has work to do to support students once they get there.
Turner, who has played baseball at the school, says one of the local umpires attended Maggie Walker when it was a Black school, and would stress the importance of “carrying the torch.”
“There's this one umpire that I see when I play baseball. … He always points out my Maggie Walker stuff [and says] I carry the torch because he went there,” Turner said. “... It’s just important to me being Black, and knowing that there aren’t that many Black students there anymore.”
Stewart said she hopes the conversation about who gets to attend Maggie Walker will continue, especially because of who Maggie Walker was to Richmond. And she hopes the governor’s school’s efforts to address it are sincere.
“What does it really mean to have this name when what's going on inside of the building is in contradiction to what they stand for, and what they fought for and what they want?” she said.
Coming tomorrow: Part three - Officials pledge progress after ‘racist’ showdown over bill; another never got a hearing
READ PART ONE OF THE SERIES
In a partnership with the Education Writer's Association, the Richmond Times-Dispatch examined the lack of diversity at the Maggie L. Walker Governor's School and others across the state in a three-part series.
READ PART THREE OF THE SERIES