What Have We Become?

“You turn to the student body of Maggie Walker, and you’re demoralized,” said sophomore Avery Redmond, when asked about her experience at the governor’s school. “You’re just looking at a sea of white people, knowing that you’ll have to deal with sheer ignorance. After a while, you get tired of explaining the Black experience.” 

In terms of its student body, Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School could not be more different than the school it was founded as. Although it was at one point one of only two all-Black high schools in Richmond, only seven percent of the governor’s school’s student body today is African-American, something deeply ironic for a school whose namesake was one of Richmond’s most influential Black women. 

Lower population rates of Black and Latino students in magnet schools have been an issue throughout the state. Despite Black students accounting for 22% of public school enrollment statewide, schools like Maggie Walker have some of the lowest enrollment percentages for Black students. According to data from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Black students account for less than 10% of enrollment at 12 of the state’s 19 governor’s schools; for eight of these schools, it is less than 5%. 

Kenya Hunter, the reporter of the series in the Times-Dispatch, acknowledges that this reality is especially heartbreaking at a school like Maggie Walker Governor’s School, which has a deep connection to Black history. Throughout her research on the institution, Hunter noted, “The Governor’s school has the most unique stories in the country regarding the beginning, middle, and end of these [diversity] issues throughout national history. I can’t think of a single gifted school that has such a strong connection to its older history.” 

Director Dr. Robert Lowerre knew the backlash the school would receive after revealing the data in the Times-Dispatch series. When asked if he was surprised by the series, however, he simply stated, “No. I gave those statistics. I shared all that data that she [Kenya Hunter] ran, and so we knew it. We’ve seen it.” 

The shocking data reported on in the article series which Lowerre was referring to entails the following: in ten of the last 22 years, Chesterfield county, one of Maggie Walker’s contributing school districts, has sent only one Black student for each school year. Henrico county, which has faced immense criticism in the past two years for its disproportionate demographics, has only once sent more than two Black students in the past eight years. 

85% of Henrico students sent to MLWGS this year identified as Asian American or white, with 107 Asian students and 78 white students. Richmond Public Schools (RPS), which is primarily composed of minority groups, has sent 32 Black and Hispanic students in the past five years combined, while 34 white students from the Richmond school system were selected to attend Maggie Walker just this year. 

In fact, Hunter reported that Richmond has not selected fewer than 32 white students at all in the past five years. While white students only make up 20% of RPS enrollment, they made up 90% of Maggie Walker selections in 2020. “This figure mirrors the rate from 20 years ago,” wrote Hunter. This year, Richmond selected five Hispanic students and three Black students. 

Maggie Walker has admitted seven times more white students than Black students in the past five years. Even when Black students apply, there seems to be a trend of Black students being accepted at a lower rate than white students; for the past five years, white students have been accepted at a rate of almost six times higher than Black students. The Antiracist Alumni Group of MLWGS, which consists of MLWGS alumni who seek to fight these diversity issues and have gathered demographic data, found that if the school were representative of the region, the incoming 2019 class would be 41.9% White, 35.5% Black, 15.0% Latinx, 4.2% Asian/Pacific Islander, 0.4% American Indian/Alaskan Native, and 4.4% Multiethnic/Unspecified. In the 2019 freshman class, however, just 4.8% of students were Black and 3.2% Latinx. Meanwhile, 67.0% were White and 19% were Asian/Pacific Islander.”

Dr. Lowerre, although not shocked, is certainly not proud of the statistics. “There is something wrong, and we need to fix it. We want every one of our kids to feel that this is home,” he acknowledged. In response to the Richmond-Times Dispatch series, which did shock the student body and staff alike, Assistant Director Dr. Lisa Williams stated, “We must take it in; there was data there—qualitative and quantitative. You can’t negate data.” 

Dr. Lowerre is hopeful, however, and cites numerous actions by both administration and the regional school board to push for greater diversity and equity in the school. “The Class of 2025 [current freshmen] are the most diverse class we’ve gotten so far,” he noted, attributing this development to Chesterfield County changing their selection system in 2020, as well as a change in Maggie Walker’s admissions test. For many existing students, though, a sense of discomfort remains.

“The underrepresentation doesn’t necessarily make me feel excluded,” junior Phoebe Johnson said. “But it would be much easier to go up to people that you could relate to so you don’t feel like you have to act a certain way.” 

Sophomore Jaliyah Hairston shares similar sentiments, saying, “The people that attend Maggie Walker are really comfortable with expressing themselves, which is very cool…but they still lack diversity. I barely have any African American students in my grade, which is quite awful because I feel as if I have no one to relate to.” For Hairston, who applied prior to the admissions change, Maggie Walker’s long standing issues with diversity require further administrative work with the admissions test. “Maggie Walker needs to work on being more open to whom they let in. I know the school doesn’t choose who comes, but they may need to change that and make it happen. I’ve had a great time at Maggie Walker, but sometimes I don’t feel like there is someone I can talk to.”

For her part, Johnson says that she hasn’t faced any blatant racism at school or in her personal life. “My parents have tried to put me in a position where I wouldn’t have to face a lot of those things personally,” she mentioned. However, she does note that many of the schools she attended haven’t been entirely representative, a fact that can take its toll. Before coming to Maggie Walker in 2019, she attended a Montessori school in Richmond. “It wasn’t a bad experience,” she said, “but it did prepare me to come to Maggie Walker in that it had even less representation for people of color.”

Redmond had a similar experience in middle school, but states that the many issues the governor’s school faces with diversity stems from deeper issues. “From my experience, I don’t think that Black people know that they have the opportunity and option to go here,” she said. “This isn’t just a Maggie Walker problem. I was ‘lucky’ enough to have the opportunity to be here because I went to a predominantly white school, and so they advertised it to me, but some people just aren’t there to hear about it.” 

Redmond’s concern illustrates an issue that has been raised to Maggie Walker’s administration regarding their admissions outreach—many alumni and students have argued that the outreach done to middle schools that are part of Richmond Public Schools is insufficient, substantially contributing to the school's underrepresentation of African American and Latino students.

Micky Ogburn, a representative for Henrico County on MLWGS’s Regional School Board, similarly stated in a June 2020 school board meeting that some students of color in Henrico assumed MLWGS was inaccessible to them: “To have some of our minority students tell us they didn’t initially think they could do it... we can work on telling all students they can and should apply; it’s not an unreachable goal for them. This stigma is something each division can work on for anyone who can academically qualify.”

Johnson went on to mention the systemic racism that is present in school zones that feed into Maggie Walker. Even beyond admission to the school, once students of color get to Maggie Walker, “it’s just not a level playing field, which isn’t recognized as much as it should be,” she said. Some students do not have the same academic foundation as others coming into the school, yet are expected to adapt just as quickly as their peers. “It’s like we’re all expected to be on even ground, but that isn’t always the case.” Programs at Maggie Walker such as Peer Mentors aim to support students in their transition to the governor’s school, but administrators do cite a need for the program to be expanded to reach a wider breadth of students. 

Mariam Jafari-Nassali, a junior, shared strikingly similar situations and even went on to describe the long-term effects these experiences have had on the broader school culture. “The student body is not as close, and the student-teacher relationships are more distant,” they said, explaining that these disparities in diversity cause “cliques to be formed.”

Johnson, Redmond, Hairston, and Jafari-Nassali’s experiences echo many others for students of color at the governor’s school—an experience mostly marked not by outright acts of racism, but by an environment that is not always welcoming. “One of the hardest parts of being Black at MLWGS was the palpable indifference from faculty towards your academic well-being,” wrote a student anonymously on the Instagram account @POCatMLWGS, or People of Color at Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, a page that was created in 2020 to allow students and alumni of color to share their experiences with diversity and inclusion. “This sort of thing is impossible to measure, yet most Black students possibly relate. It is different from the overtly hostile environments that some teachers create with their snide remarks and microaggressions. On the surface, it looks like nothing, but for those of us impacted by it, it causes you to disengage and feel no connection to the work, the subject, or school in general.” 

Jafari-Nassali learned about the Instagram account in April of 2020. While they could not necessarily fully relate to the experiences, they felt that they could sympathize with some of the sentiments in the shared posts. Jafari-Nassali felt that many of the submissions, however, were disturbing, and that the account should have been better addressed by the MLWGS administration. “It finally allowed different perspectives to be revealed, but at this point, administration should hold teachers accountable; you hear these situations but don’t see many consequences happening. The student body is obligated to know.”

Jafari-Nassali has a personal connection to the legacy of historical underrepresentation at this very institution, as their grandfather, Emmett Jafari, attended Maggie Walker High School in the Class of 1972. “Even though my grandfather had these experiences, I didn’t expect the same issues to come up,” they said about the widely shared experiences of discrimination towards Black students present in the school, even 50 years later. “It’s a little absurd and unfair to portray the school as having so much diversity, and then ignoring certain voices or not living up to those standards.” 

For their part, Maggie Walker’s administration and the Regional School Board acknowledge many of the school’s shortcomings, and have worked in the past year to address issues of underrepresentation and inclusion through efforts like making changes to the admissions test and implementing professional development for faculty and staff seeking to address cultural competence. In 2020, Chesterfield County also notably changed its admissions process for the governor’s school, switching to a middle school-based selections process, which led to the county sending 12 Black students to Maggie Walker, more than it had sent in the past four years combined. 

This year’s freshman class is the most diverse that the governor’s school has had in 20 years. “We have as many African American students in our freshman class as we have in our sophomore, junior, and senior classes combined, so we’ve had a year with tremendous growth, mainly based on Chesterfield’s change,” noted Assistant Director Max Smith, who played a significant role in the school’s undertaking of its commitment to diversity. Johnson noticed this change positively, saying, “There’s definitely a lot more people of color in the freshman class, and I think that it’s cool because they’ll have each other. It’s kind of too late for us [referring to the diversity of other classes], but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s not just giving spots to random people because of their race, it’s just making sure the people who really deserve it have a place and a chance.” 

Similarly, when asked if diversifying the student body would help prevent microaggressions and disparities between students, Redmond stated, “I think that having a more diverse student body would fix a lot of Maggie Walker’s problems. It’s something that I think could help to improve future students’ day-to-day interactions with each other.”

Jafari-Nassali also emphasizes another crucial flaw at the school: a consistent lack of direct communication about efforts for greater diversity to the student body. “I had no idea half the things administration was doing until I talked to Kenya [Hunter], a completely different outside source,” they said about information they learned from participating in a three-part series on race at the governor’s school by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Beyond the diversity of the student body and communication by administration, students of color at Maggie Walker have emphasized a greater need for cultural competence among other students and teachers, as well as further diversification of class curricula. “The only time we really learn about people of color is when talking about slavery, the Civil War, or segregation, as if that’s our only history,” Johnson said. In particular, she feels that the thousands of years of white history taught in Maggie Walker’s history classes—compared to the minimal amount of material taught from the perspective of figures of color—is unfair. “We’re reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in my English class right now,” she mentioned. “The first time that we’ve studied slavery not from a white person’s perspective.” 

Furthermore, Jafari-Nassali believes it is the school’s responsibility to teach students about the history of Maggie Walker, both the governor’s school and the namesake. “It’s more important to lift up the school’s history consistently, not just whenever the school dictates for it to be known.” Hairston shared a similar feeling, stating, “Maggie L. Walker’s legacy is something that is long lasting and shall be for years to come. I do believe we should incorporate more of her into teaching at Maggie Walker because she has had many impacts on the world we know today. I think she could be incorporated into our history classes, business classes, and even possibly have a class based on her.” 

Many alumni of MLWGS, particularly from the Anti-Racist Alumni Committee and Black Alumni Network, have echoed similar sentiments. They feel as though it is the responsibility of the school to give a holistic education which describes how the school was rebranded, particularly considering the fact that we use the same mascot and name to this day. 

Hearing things from different perspectives as well as learning more about the positive parts of history involving people of color are important things that Johnson believes should be included in MLWGS curriculum. That being said, she also emphasized the importance of learning and accepting the historical truths. “Understanding what happened and having compassion for it—not being in denial—is the only way to move forward,” she says.

As clear as it is that there are issues with inclusion and diversity at Maggie Walker, there’s no easy solution. The counties that feed into the governor’s school and the school board can find solutions to diversify those who are admitted, but the problems that lie within the school can only be solved by the students and faculty. “I think the school has been trying harder to be anti-racist,” Johnson said. “But there’s still a lot of work to do.”