Leaders at Old Dominion University have offered to act as the fiscal agent and public partner for five approved lab school projects — including three in Southwest Virginia — that could otherwise lose millions in state money needed to open and operate those schools.
ODU’s plan was discussed Thursday during a work session of the Virginia Board of Education, which will vote Friday on the fiscal agent and partnership applications between each of the schools and ODU, a public, four-year university in Norfolk.
The affected colleges with approved lab schools are two private four-year colleges, Emory & Henry College in Washington County and Roanoke College in Salem, and three community colleges: Germanna in Locust Grove, Mountain Gateway in Clifton Forge and Paul D. Camp in Franklin.
Officials with the colleges learned in mid-May that the state’s newly approved budget, signed May 13, changed the eligibility definition for receiving public funds to operate a lab school. The modified language states that a college partnership lab school must be established by a baccalaureate-granting public institution of higher learning, which excludes these five already approved lab schools.
The budget goes on to say that applicants not eligible for funding can partner with a public four-year college to get the money, but the partnership must be approved by June 30, which gave them just six weeks.
It also requires the affected lab schools to resubmit contracts to meet the requirements for a fiscal agent and partner, and stipulates that the lab schools must be financially sustainable by the end of their initial approved period.
The budget also reduced the lab school fund from $100 million to $75 million.
“ODU, who has put forth four of their own incredibly forward-thinking lab school proposals, has shown great leadership and care for our students and families and has proven to be a leader on innovation in the commonwealth,” said Board of Education President Grace Turner Creasey.
“Not only has ODU collaborated with these additional five impact lab schools to expand high quality educational opportunities for their students, but ODU has also brought forth an expanded definition of what it means to be a fiscal agent and partner, going above and beyond in multiple ways.”
She added that ODU will launch a lab school support network that far exceeds the set requirements.
Several other board members thanked ODU officials for stepping up to take on the role, as did representatives of the five affected schools who appeared remotely at the meeting. Several said their schools already have relationships with Old Dominion, and they look forward to learning from ODU and the other schools involved.
“We are excited and eager to collaborate with ODU as our fiscal agent and partner to implement our innovative health care-focused lab school,” said Lou Fincher, Emory & Henry’s senior vice president and dean of its School of Health Sciences. “The fact that ODU is serving as the fiscal agent for their own lab schools as well as now five additional lab schools allows for such synergy and collaboration across all of these lab schools.”
E&H received approval for its lab school in late April and is set to receive $3.85 million from the state over four years.
Fincher, who will serve as E&H’s interim president beginning in August, said ODU is a great fit for this role and pointed to its strong academic programs in health care and its recent merger with Eastern Virginia Medical School.
If the applications are approved Friday, ODU will have a network of nine lab schools. There is nothing in the new budget language that caps how many lab schools a fiscal agent may oversee, Creasey said.
So far, the board has approved 14 lab school applications. Lab schools are meant to be an “innovative, high-quality education experience,” according to the Education Department. They are partnerships among higher education, employers, school divisions and communities.
According to information about the ODU partnership included with the board’s agenda, ODU’s Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity would coach lab school leaders, provide subject matter expertise, provide a forum for data sharing, give research support, and provide professional development and network-wide design thinking opportunities.
The lab school network institutions would commit to share quarterly data on progress toward goals, challenges and opportunities; participate in joint research projects with other members of the network; share best practices; participate in lab school events; and send representatives to an annual lab school summit.
If approved, the lab school network would be overseen by an advisory council coordinated by ODU that would have one representative from each lab school and virtual and in-person meetings.
Board member Anne Holton said after the discussion that she wanted to clarify that the General Assembly’s position on the eligibility language in the budget regarding lab schools “would be not that they changed eligibility requirements in the budget, but rather that they provided a pathway for the community colleges and private institutions that previously did not have access to the funding pathway to have access to the funding.”
She added, however, that she knew there were some differences of opinion.
The June 30 deadline “speaks for itself,” replied board Vice President Bill Hansen.
Lab schools have been permitted in Virginia for a decade, but questions about eligibility have persisted. Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been a proponent of lab schools as a school choice option, but Democrats have worried they would mean less money for public schools.
State law stipulates that any higher education institution can apply to start a lab school, but tens of millions of dollars in state funding that was earmarked for the projects in 2022 was restricted to public four-year schools.
Despite that restriction, the Department of Education had been operating under the broader law and had accepted — and approved — applications from private colleges and community colleges.
