Our Recent Work: Defeating HB127
As we entered the 2022 Session of the Virginia General Assembly, we learned of HB127, a bill sponsored by Delegate Glenn Davis from Virginia Beach and at the top of Governor Youngkin’s legislative agenda. Under the original language of HB127, the bill sought to tie the hands of local school boards for academic Governor’s Schools and restrict their admissions process to “traditional academic success factors” such as standardized testing. It sought to prohibit “proxy discrimination” — an overly broad term that would have outlawed some admissions practices already being used by some school divisions that feed into Maggie Walker. The bill further sought to eliminate the collection of admissions data to keep the inequity of admissions in the dark. It quickly became apparent that we needed to defeat this bill. It went too far in undermining all tools for affirmative action—so far that we figured even Senator Chap Petersen from Fairfax County (who led the effort to defeat SB2305 last year) would object given his quote from the prior year that “I understand as well as anybody that we need to get different populations into our governor’s schools, and I think there are ways to do it.”
We teamed up with TJAAG and the Hamkae Center to compile talking points on the reasons why our state legislators should kill HB127. As expected, the bill quickly passed out of the Republican-controlled House of Delegates but picked up passionate objections by Democratic delegates such as Delegate Maldonado and Delegate VanValkenburg. This prompted the tacking on of an amendment by Delegate Davis calling for “rigorous” middle school curriculum — which sounds nice but amounted to a hollow, unfunded mandate.
Through commentary in the media, testimony, public comment, and many meetings with key leaders of the Democratic party and their aides, current MLWGS parents, alumni, and other equity-minded stakeholders worked hard to persuade numerous state senators to vote against HB127. When the bill died in the Public Education subcommittee, Senators Hashmi, Locke, and Lucas credited our alumni voices with helping to show the harm HB127 would impose on Black and Brown students aspiring to these schools!
Unfortunately, at the last minute, Senator Petersen swapped in a substitute bill without the opportunity for public comment. While the amendment did eliminate the most problematic language of HB127, it kept the unfunded mandate and unnecessarily repeated what has long been the law of the land: that race shall not be used as a basis for unlawful discrimination of students in admissions. Many Democratic Senators pointed out the pure politics behind this move and maintained their stance against the bill.
At the end of the day, HB127 did not prevail! Efforts to unravel the progress of governor’s schools who have adopted more equitable admissions processes with race-neutral methods failed, and we’re proud of the part we played to advocate for its defeat.