NORFOLK, Va. — Several of Victoria Manning’s fellow Virginia Beach School Board members and the superintendent criticized a post she made on social media that decried the cost and necessity of educating children who didn’t grow up speaking English.
Manning said she wrote on Facebook after a presentation during Tuesday’s board meeting about the school division’s growing English as a Second Language program.
“(Virginia Beach) schools has 300 additional ESL students in the past year. Most are from South America,” she wrote. “Our ESL budget has increased over $1 million in two years. Continuing to educate South Americans is not sustainable.”
In an interview Friday, Manning said she was advocating “for sustainability for all students” and she agrees the division should teach all students. She also said her main concern is having to hire additional ESL teachers and enroll more students, coupled with trying fill existing teacher vacancies and teaching kids who attend Virginia Beach schools.
“We are having trouble educating all of our current students, much less taking on more,” she said.
According to Virginia Beach schools, 2,084 students — 3% of the student population — qualify for ESL services, up from 1,774 last fall and 1,419 in fall 2020. Spanish is the most common first language among the division’s ESL students, followed by Tagalog, Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese.
Nicole DeVries, the district’s director of K-12 and gifted programs, told Manning during the meeting students have immigrated from multiple countries, but mainly Central American countries.
Federal funding for ESL students increased from $183,462 in 2020 to $210,667 for 2021. The division could not confirm how many funds it has received from the state before this story published.
Antipas Harris, who served on a diversity task force for the school division in 2015, said Manning’s focus on funding is an attempt to negate the issue.
“This is not about money. This is about cultural intolerance, and bigotry,” he said.
Board Chairwoman Carolyn Rye and Vice Chair Kimberly Melnyk along with Superintendent Aaron Spence criticized Manning’s post, saying the division supports educating all students regardless of their cultural background.
“Individual board members do not have authority to act nor speak on behalf of the board,” Rye and Melnyk said in a joint statement. “Our community should rest assured we will continue to teach and embrace every child who walks through our doors.”
Spence said in a statement that the district stands “on the fundamental belief that every child who comes to us deserves to feel they belong and feel loved.”
“Teaching and caring for our students, whoever they are, is the most sustainable part of who we are. No matter what else happens, we will continue to keep that as our core mission and we will celebrate the diversity that makes our community so vibrant and wonderful,” he said.
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