TUESDAY, JUNE 7 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE B5
BY LAURA VOZZELLAbristol, va. — For the first time
in about a half century, this rural
community on the Tennessee bor-
der has scrounged up what it
needs to build a new elementary
school to replace three moldy,
leaking campuses that are well
past their expiration dates.
That achievement alone might
have lured any governor some 324
miles from the capital to plunge a
shiny gold shovel into Southwest
Virginia dirt. But it’s how local
officials financed the project —
with a public-private partnership
— that made Gov. Glenn Youngkin
(R) especially eager to celebrate
the groundbreaking Monday
morning, when he hinted that
he’ll tinker with the state budget
to push for “lab schools” and cut
the gas tax.
“When we bring together the
private sector and the public sec-
tor, great things happen,” the for-
mer private equity executive told
a gathering of local dignitaries,
state legislators and schoolchil-
dren, who took home keepsake
vials of soil. “If we look to govern-
ment to come up with every solu-
tion, friends, we’re not going to
get where we want to go. And
when we bring the private sector
and the public sector together to
innovate and create, amazing
things can happen.”
Youngkin used that appearance
and a second stop in the region
Monday afternoon to highlight
his interest in public-private part-
nerships in K-12 education, specif-
ically through the establishment
of lab schools, which would pair
colleges and possibly private busi-
nesses with public K-12 schools.
He hinted that he could ad-
vance that goal by amending the
state budget bill making its way to
his desk — which includes $100
million for lab schools, even
though related lab-school legisla-
tion seems destined to die in a
conference committee.
As an aside in Bristol, Youngkin
also indicated that he plans to
find a way to cut the gas tax
despite the General Assembly’s
unwillingness to go along with
that effort in the budget.
“We have a chance to get out of
neutral,” Youngkin said, referring
to efforts to improve education.
“I’m telling you, the common-
wealth of Virginia has shifted into
high gear and this car can drive.
Unfortunately, we’ve got to pay
$4.75 for gas. We’re doing every-
thing we can about that, too. Let
me tell you, I’m not done on the
gas tax, folks. I’m not done.”
Youngkin had urged the Gener-
al Assembly to halt a scheduled
increase in the state’s gas tax and
to grant a five-month gas-tax holi-
day, suspending it fully for three
months and partially for an addi-
tional two. Neither plan was in-
cluded in the budget bill passed
last week by the General Assem-
bly.
House Appropriations Com-
mittee Chairman Barry D. Knight(R-Virginia Beach) has urged the
governor not to tinker with the
budget, which emerged after
months of negotiations with his
counterpart in the Democratic-
controlled Senate, Sen. Janet D.
Howell (D-Fairfax), chairwoman
of her chamber’s Finance and
Appropriations Committee.
Knight declined to comment.
A political newcomer, Young-
kin ran for governor last year by
leaning into K-12 culture wars
over how schools approach racial
history and racial sensitivity. He
also promised to promote
“choice” in education, through
charter schools or lab schools,
which he touts as sources of inno-
vation.
Democrats call both a potential
threat to public schools and have
been especially wary of any plan
to allow the private sector into
public classrooms.
Lab schools are allowed under
existing state law passed so long
ago that some current legislators
are graduates of them. But they
can be operated only by public,
four-year colleges or universities
with teacher training programs.
Perhaps because of those restric-
tions, the state currently has
none.
Legislation introduced in the
General Assembly this year
sought to loosen some of those
requirements, allowing private or
public colleges to participate, re-
gardless of whether they have
teacher-training programs.
Youngkin is making his re-
newed push as prospects for lab
schools in the state seem oddly
mixed. The two lab school bills
appear destined to die in a confer-ence committee, with negotiators
unable since March to overcome
their differences. Yet the two-year
budget bill the General Assembly
passed last week included $100
million to establish the schools —
a provision that a handful of
budget negotiators slipped into
the plan to the chagrin of some
Democrats.
Youngkin hinted Monday that
with some tweaks to the budget
language, he could make it easier
for lab schools to sprout across the
commonwealth.
“To have the funds in the House
Bill 30 really matters and that
means we can go to work,” he said.
“And so I’m very excited about
that. I do think that there are a few
things that we need to fix with
regards to the scope of what we
can do.”
That was good news to Keith
Perrigan, Bristol Public Schools
superintendent. “We didn’t wake
up and say, ‘Let’s go build a lab
school,’ but if there’s $100 million,
I think we’re in,” he told the
governor during his afternoon
visit with area K-12 and higher
education leaders at Southwest
Virginia Higher Education Cen-ter, a conference center and re-
mote learning site for a number of
colleges in Abingdon.
Sen. Todd E. Pillion (R-Wash-
ington), who sponsored the Sen-
ate bill and attended the ground-
breaking in Bristol, told the crowd
that the $100 million for the
schools presents “an exciting op-
portunity for new approaches.”
Del. Glenn R. Davis Jr. (R-Vir-
ginia Beach), who did not attend
but sponsored the House bill, said
the budget language might be
enough to kick off the effort.
“Arguably we don’t need the legis-
lation,” Davis said. But he allowed
that relying on budget language is
not the most durable approach,
since the language will expire at
the end of the two-year budget
cycle.
State Sen. Jennifer L. McClellan
(D-Richmond), one of the negotia-
tors on the lab school bills, thinks
the $100 million set aside for
them would be better spent for
school staff, such as social work-
ers, nurses and custodians.
“My priority would have been
supporting the schools that al-
ready exist rather than creating
new ones,” she said.VIRGINIA
Youngkin talks budget amendments at school groundbreaking event
LAURA VOZZELLA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Ali Jo McKinney, 9, a rising f ifth-grader, high-fives Virginia Gov.
Glenn Youngkin (R) on Monday in Abingdon, Va.Governor hints at cuts
to gas tax, e xpanding
funds for ‘lab schools’“We didn’t wake up andsay, ‘Let’s go build a labschool,’ but if there’s$100 million, I thinkwe’re in.”
Keith Perrigan, superintendent of
Bristol Public SchoolsBY MEAGAN FLYNNAri Pearlstein was in elemen-
tary school the year a gunman
killed 20 children and six educa-
tors at Sandy Hook Elementary in
- Now here he was, a high
school senior, sitting before a U.S.
senator weeks after another
deadly school shooting, with a
question that had been gnawing
at him for years: “Is there any-
thing we can do to change this?”
“What do you think we can do
— we as students, and you as
Democratic lawmakers — to, like,
break through?” Pearlstein asked
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) during a
roundtable discussion the sena-
tor held Monday at Wakefield
High School in Arlington. “Be-
cause right now, for the last how-
ever many years, it feels like it’s an
endless cycle of this happens,
we’re all outraged, we protest ...
and nothing happens.”
Kaine sat at a table in front of a
whiteboard surrounded by nearly
two dozen Wakefield students,
each wearing an orange ribbon
marking National Gun Violence
Awareness Month. He had been
here before, four years ago, to talk
about gun violence and school
safety in the aftermath of the
Parkland, Fla., school shooting in
2018 which a gunman killed 17
people. And Kaine acknowl-
edged, less than a month since a
gunman killed 19 schoolchildren
and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex.,
that “it was sad to come back” to
have the same conversation.
But, Kaine told Pearlstein and
the class, “I do want to preach a
message of don’t give up, because
the changes made right after
Parkland, they were modest, but
they wouldn’t have happened if
students didn’t protest,” Kaine
said, referring to changes in fed-
eral law that allowed federal
health authorities to research
gun violence after a decades-long
ban. “I would argue it’s only when
students have been involved that
we have any prospect of moving
forward on this.”
Kaine’s message of hope con-
trasted with the sense of despair
that many students expressed,
after years of tragedies and failed
congressional action. They grew
up with lockdown drills and, as
they got older, participated in
school walkouts to protest the
inaction. Just days away from
graduating high school, they
watched with skepticism as Con-
gress prepared to consider gun
laws once again.
“What makes you feel like this
time will be any different?” one
student asked Kaine.
“What kind of sacrifices would
you have to make to gain Republi-
can votes?” asked another.
“We are going to be faced with
exactly that question,” Kaine said,
acknowledging that proposals he
favors, such as a ban on assault-
style weapons or high-capacity
magazines, are unlikely to garner
Republican support.
For more than an hour, Kaine
took questions, sought advice and
explained in detail the hurdles
facing numerous gun-control
provisions, the legislative history
of the filibuster, and the language
and limitations of the Second
Amendment, among other
things. The issue is personal to
Kaine, who was governor when a
gunman killed 32 people at Vir-
ginia Tech in 2007.
Echoing a floor speech he gave
the day after the Uvalde shooting,
Kaine said he experiences a kind
of PTSD after each mass shoot-
ing, bringing him back to “the
worst days of my life.” And headmitted he shared some of the
students’ skepticism about
whether Congress will act.
“How do you hold on to hope
that something could happen
when it’s been 15 years and Con-
gress has done nothing about it?”
he said. “How do you hold on to
hope and not just give up or
despair and say it’s never going to
happen? Here’s what I do: I think
about Virginia.”
Virginia, home of the National
Rifle Association headquarters
and once a bright-red state, man-
aged in 2020 to pass a gun-con-trol package, which included lim-
iting handgun purchases to one a
month and a red-flag law allow-
ing authorities to seize weapons
from people found to pose an
imminent danger to themselves
or others. Kaine and Sen. Mark R.
Warner (D-Va.) have introduced a
bill seeking to make Virginia’s
laws go national.
But for now that is unlikely to
gain traction in Congress, where a
small group of senators led by
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), is ne-
gotiating modest proposals, suchas incentivizing states to develop
red-flag laws vs. creating a federal
law.
“I have no guarantee we’ll be
successful this time, but I do
think I have a guarantee that we
won’t stop — we will eventually
succeed,” Kaine said. “My prayer
is we’ll succeed now.”
At one point, Kaine asked the
students to raise their hands if
they had ever been affected by
gun violence.
A few did. One was Markel
Alston, an 18-year-old senior who
was crowned prom king lastweek.
He said he wanted Kaine and
federal lawmakers to keep in
mind as they considered gun -
violence-prevention laws the dis-
proportionate impact that gun
violence has on minority commu-
nities. Alston, who is Black, said
his grandmother was fatally shot,
a personal experience that
shaped his view on the issue from
a young age.
“While it is important to pre-
vent it at schools, it really does
heavily affect the Black communi-
ty. They should keep that in mind
as well while they’re fighting for
children,” Alston said in an inter-
view. “For minority communities,
the schools are a safe place for us,
so it’s important that we do feel
safe here.”
Lately, he said, the onslaught of
mass shootings has started to feel
“more numbing,” leaving him
feeling hopeless. One classmate,
18-year-old Anabelle Lombard,
said she and her classmates had
learned to “adjust” to the lock-
downs, and the anxiety that a
mass school shooting could hap-
pen anywhere, “which is not
something we should have ad-
justed to as a student body.”
As a habit, Lombard said, when
she enters a room — any room,
anywhere — she identifies the
exit. She thinks about how she
would escape. After the active-
shooter drills, “we talk as a class,”
she said, “because the drill —
there are better options. We’re not
going to stay in this room. We
would climb out this window and
do these other things. We’re al-
ways talking about alternative
methods of escaping.”
She said she took part in a
walkout protesting gun violence
four years ago, in 2018, when she
was a freshman. Would another
make a difference? “It just feels
like we’re repeating history,” she
said. “We’re living the same year
over and over.”VIRGINIA
Students grill Kaine: A fter shootings ‘nothing happens’
MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) visits Wakefield High School in Arlington in the aftermath of the Uvalde, Tex.,
mass shooting to hear students’ concerns about gun violence and school safety.Senator takes questions
and explains h urdles
facing g un-control laws“I have no guarantee we’ll be successful this time, but I do think I have aguarantee that we won’t stop. ... My prayer is we’ll succeed now.”
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