If you follow the railroad tracks about an hour southwest of Richmond, beyond rolling green fields dotted with yellow buds of spring, down wide and winding country roads, past faded barns, some overgrown with climbing weeds and others slumping towards earth, you'll find the Nottoway County School Board Office.
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The central office oversees the school district's 2,200 students, more than 30 percent of whom live in poverty. For a community with such an astounding concentration of poor children, it's done a good job preparing students academically ā especially considering one in four adults here don't have a high school diploma, and only 12 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher.
In fact, the wood-paneled walls outside Superintendent Daniel Grounard's office are decorated with awards from the Virginia Board of Education and others touting its ability to overcome those challenging circumstances.
Such accolades, however, have been hard to come by for Nottoway since the Great Recession, the economic collapse from which it's barely recovered despite the resurgence in many parts of the state and across the country as a whole.
The district has been hemorrhaging teachers it hasn't been able to replace, in part because of poor health benefits. Nearly all those who have stayed haven't seen a pay raise in the last six years, even if their contracts stipulated one. It can only afford to employ one math and one reading coach, as well as one school nurse, all of whom float among the district's seven schools throughout the week.
[For more of this story, written by Lauren Camera and Lindsey Cook, go to http://www.usnews.com/news/art...-meant-for-poor-kids]
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