Championing Special Ed, trailer reduction, Deutsch seeks reelection to School Board

PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Willie Deutsch will seek re-election to the Prince William County School Board as its Coles District member. Though School Board races are non-partisan, the incumbent is the first Republican to announce their candidacy for the seat.

All the seats for the school board are up for reelection on November 5, 2019. Deutsch was elected to the school board in 2015, his first time elected to public office.

“Back in 2015, we had a lot of concerns with accountability of the school administration, concerns that the parents weren’t being heard after a number of high-profile decisions.” Deutsch.

The past three years was a busy term for the school board.

“Over the last term, it’s been a very high profile school board, shall we say,” Deutsch said.

The early days were mired in controversy. Deutsch, along with the rest of the elected body approved a compromise vote in March 2016 to name Kyle Wilson Elementary School after the fallen firefighter, the only in Prince William County to die in the line of duty.

The second part of the deal was to rename Godwin Middle School, named for a Virginia Democratic Governor that once embraced segregation but reversed his position by the time he moved into the governor’s mansion, and later founded the Virginia Community College System, to Dr. George Hampton Middle.

The move sparked an outcry from teachers and staff at Godwin community. Hampton supporters, who were hoping to have a new elementary school named for him, accepted the compromise.

Under the leadership of former Chairman Ryan Sawyers who abruptly stepped down earlier this year, the school board continued debating larger social and political issues like gender equality and bathroom usage. Voters last month replaced the unpopular Sawyers with Dr. Babur Lateef.

Special education audit 

Through all of it, Deutsch says he’s been focused on the issues that affect students.

“We have done a lot to address class size overcrowding. We’ve added thousands of additional school seats at every level. We’ve worked very hard to push through an important bipartisan plan with the [Prince William County] Board of Supervisors to add an additional 500 high school seats to one of our latest high schools that we’re currently building and we’ve taken aggressive steps on that front,” he said.

He also pushed for an external audit of the special education department after parents pushed for a review of the system.

An audit found a persistent achievement gap in students with disabilities, despite Prince William County Schools being one of the best school divisions in Virginia according to 2016-17 overall Reading and Mathematics assessment pass rates.  

“External audits are useful to shine some sunlight on places where maybe things are being hidden…” Deutsch said. “We’ve gotten a number of important recommendations and now we are working to make sure that those are actually carried out and that special education is more responsive to parents and students and that students get the services they need.”

Prince William County Schools contracted with Public Consulting Group to produce the audit, which was an in-depth analysis of the Division’s special education services, staffing, organizational structure, and processes. They reviewed data, held focus groups, conducted interviews, and visited schools.

The audit came with 24 recommendations, some of which included hiring a Special Education fiscal officer, assistants to implement technology in the classroom, ensuring that non-verbal students always have access to communication devices, improving the special-education website, and creating “a monitoring system and follow up mechanism when staff are not completing progress reporting as legally required.

Deutsch says he’s an advocate for the taxpayers over school administrators. Prince William County is one of two localities in the state that blindly hands over more than half of its budget to its public school division with zero restrictions on how the money is spent.

“…with about 57% of our property taxes going to the school division, so it’s critical that that money is used effectively,” he said. “We’ve got over 90,000 students now [and that] education that those students receive is critical to the future of this county and so we’ve got to make sure that we have the best school division possible,” Deutsch said.

Removing trailers 

Two of Deutsch’s main issues he hopes to tackle if he is re-elected are a reduction of the 207 trailers or portable classrooms used at schools across the county. And continuing growth of the special education department.

“There’s talk of plans to fully eliminate trailers. We may be able to get very close to that. It’s a matter of building on the work we’ve done over the last four years with adding additional seats across the county, adding some more over the coming term, and making sure that happens.” Deutsch said.

A joint committee of School Board and Board of Supervisors members are formulating plan that could cost as much as $143 million more than what is currently budgeted to fully remove all of the trailers.

“I am fully supportive of removing some of the trailers, not all,” said Occoquan District Supervisor Ruth Anderson, who serves on the joint committee.

There’s also the possibility of a leadership change at the school division’s headquarters in the next few years. Superintendent Dr. Steven Walts’ contract expires two years after the new School Board takes office in January 2020.

“I also believe that the next school board is going to choose the new superintendent of the school division. And I think that’s a critical issue that’s going to define how we move forward. Both who we pick and what that contract looks like is going to be very important.” Deutsch added.

Deutsch has been a Northern Virginia resident since 2007 and currently works in digital communications for a public relations firm called CRC Public Relations.