Virginia Students Will Suffer from Democrats’ Gerrymandering Power Grab
Democrats, led by their teachers’ union overlords, push to take away more learning time for students.
In an unprecedented power grab, Virginia Democrats fast-tracked a constitutional amendment to redistrict Virginia’s congressional maps to seize four House seats from Republicans—ignoring legal procedural requirements. Since schools are used as voting precincts, districts around the state are forced to close for the special election. The resulting lost learning time must be made up under state law, but the teachers’ union is already protesting, showing once more that students’ education ranks low on their list of priorities.
If lost learning time isn’t made up, districts could lose state funding. That doesn’t seem to bother the union.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the teachers’ union wants to keep kids out of school after they forced long, harmful school closures during COVID. Students are still struggling from that lost learning time, but the union doesn’t care.
Robin Gardner, a leader of the Virginia Beach Education Association (VBEA) teachers’ union, started a petition decrying the superintendent and school board’s decision to add 10 minutes to the school day for six weeks to make up the lost time as required by law. The VBEA claimed it would be too disruptive to staff and family schedules. Yet, in previous years when Democrats controlled the school board, there was no outrage or petition when the school board added 24 minutes in 2015 and 15 minutes in 2018 to the school day.
Some rightly argue that 10 minutes to the end of the school day doesn’t do much to help students. The alternative could have been to place an additional day at the end of the school year, though families with vacation plans wouldn’t be happy about that change. Taking away a teacher’s workday could also be an option, but the teachers’ union would certainly protest that decision, too. Going to school on Saturday was another option—but who would support that?
Nevertheless, the lost instruction time must be made up, as required by state law.
The Democrat-appointed Virginia State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jenna Conway, issued a memo to all public schools on the topic. She told districts they could not use virtual learning days for lost in-person instruction based on a state law—also adopted by Democrats. The law also requires a minimum of 180 teaching days or districts could face a loss of funding.
I served on the Virginia Beach School Board when the current calendar was adopted in 2024. I voted against the calendar structure because students needed more than just the minimum required 180 teaching days, but the Democrats disagreed. In past years, the Democrat-controlled school board kept reducing the number of days in the calendar. Yet now they’re upset that their approved 180-day calendar isn’t sufficient to meet the legal requirements and they’re blaming the now Republican controlled school board.
State law allows school boards to determine their calendar based on total number of days or hours, either a minimum of 180 days or 990 teaching hours. The teachers’ union petition asks the school board to change their entire methodology—at the end of the school year—from using a minimum number of hours rather than days. Yet in the approved calendar, using the minimum hours metric would still require make up time.
Students attending specialty high school centers in the district only have 990 hours of instructional time built into their schedule. Therefore, if the school board listened to the teachers’ union, the district would be at risk of losing state funding for not meeting the minimum number of required teaching hours.
Virginia Democrats and the teachers’ union created this mess with their own power plays, yet they expect students to bear the cost. School closures for partisan redistricting should not come at the expense of instructional time. Virginia students have already suffered enough under Democrat rule. They deserve leaders who put learning first, not political gamesmanship.
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