Dr. Sherica Jones-Lewis

BUSH: [00:04] Good morning, this is Denise Bush, and I have Dr. Sherica Jones-Lewis here today. Welcome for coming here. I’m looking forward to introducing you to everybody, and this interview is going to be really good. So it looks like you gave us the contact information—is everything correct here?

JONES-LEWIS: Yes.

BUSH: Your phone number is 5-4-0-6-6-1-3-4-0-7?

JONES-LEWIS: Yes.

BUSH: And your email is sjlewis@k12abermarle.org.

JONES-LEWIS: Mh-hm

BUSH: [00:45] And you’re a farmer? 

JONES-LEWIS: I’m a former resident of the—

BUSH: Oh, “former.” (laughs)

JONES-LEWIS: Couldn’t read this. 

BUSH: [00:52] I was going to be excited. I thought maybe you were starting the community garden. So, did you bring any artifacts or anything with you today?

JONES-LEWIS: I did not.

BUSH: [01:03] Okay, you did not. I just wanted to make sure that (unclear). So you know we are doing this interview because we want to know as much as possible about the history of this area, the education. And that’s one reason why I’m excited about talking to you. So, it looks like you have something to drink—is there anything else? Something to eat? 

JONES-LEWIS: I’m good.

BUSH: You’re all ready to go.

JONES-LEWIS: I’m ready to roll. 

BUSH: [01:33] Okay, so the first thing you need to do is sign a consent form for me. 

(assorted mic and pen noises) 

JONES-LEWIS: The pen over here is not working.

BUSH: It’s not working. 

(assorted mic and pen noises)

JONES-LEWIS: One more try. 

BUSH: A pen that works. 

(assorted mic and pen noises) 

BUSH: [02:20] So, I have some informal questions, but would you just like to start off with telling us a little bit about yourself and your history here?

JONES-LEWIS: Sure. So I grew up in Orange, Virginia—so not very dissimilar from Albemarle in a lot of different ways. I ended up, after graduating from high school, going—and I got my Bachelor’s and my Master’s at Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, and even Fredericksburg was a little too city for me. (laughs) So I was really looking forward to moving somewhere with my husband that had a little bit slower pace. So I got an early contract with Albemarle County, and that allowed me to have a lot of interviews and a lot of choice in where I worked. So I went to a lot of interviews, and when I came and interviewed at Yancey, it immediately just felt right. It just felt like home. Everyone was kind.

BUSH: [03:30] Could you tell me what year that was?

JONES-LEWIS: That was 2005, May of 2005. And I actually started working here as a substitute before I even finished my grad program, because they needed a six-week sub at the end of the year. So I subbed in kindergarten for six weeks, and it was awesome. And one of the really great experiences that came out of that is that I then got to teach those kids when they were in fourth grade and they were in fifth grade. So to see their progress, in a real way—

BUSH: Relationship-driven.

JONES-LEWIS: It was wonderful. It was wonderful. So I worked here for six years. And during that six years, my job kind of morphed. In my first year, I taught fourth grade. It was the first year of fourth-grade SOLs. And I had twenty-six students in my class—and I was a little overwhelmed. You know, I’m brand-new, I have twenty-six kids: no one really knows what I’m supposed to be doing. And that was the experience for a lot of the fourth-grade teachers, because the SOLs were new. So there was a lot of pressure. 

But, on top of that, there was what felt like a lot of outside pressures. A lot of media coverage about the school and people in the community—articles, things like that. And I consider myself who thrives when there are perceived challenges. So, even though I didn’t perceive my job as a challenge, I knew that other people did. So one of the things I started doing very early is I would clip the newspaper articles and I kept them. And that really served as my motivation, because I knew how smart the kids in my class were, and I knew that they were very, very capable. And so we just really pushed.

So that year, the kids did well—and not just in terms of SOL pass rates, though they did. I had an 86% pass rate in reading, which at the time was very good, especially compared to the other fourth-grade classes across the county. But as I continued to teach, what I taught was mostly math. In my last few years, I taught third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade math. And that was the best because, especially in the area of math, there are often deficits so it’s really difficult to teach, for example, fifth-grade math when they haven’t learned what they needed to in third-grade math. But I wasn’t facing that deficit because my kids knew what they were supposed to, because I had taught them. 

BUSH: [06:28] From the beginning.

JONES-LEWIS: From the beginning. So they were just rocking and rolling, and doing really, really well. And again, in terms of pass rates, we were at 96 or 100% for the last three years I was here across math.

BUSH: Congratulations.

JONES-LEWIS: Thank you. But also the ACAM is another test that really tests mathematical thinking skills and number sense and computation, and they were doing really well on that. So not just test-taking, but also mathematical thinking. 

And I just loved my job. I really, really loved being here, and I loved all of my kids. I stayed after school almost every day, to help students during Club Yancey. When the Club Yancey coordinator was pregnant and had to be out, I subbed for her for three months, so I worked every day after school. 

BUSH: [07:31] This was the beginning of your career, really, here.

JONES-LEWIS: Yes.

BUSH: It’s a beautiful start.

JONES-LEWIS: And I had kids over at my house—and it just was community. Club Yancey was helpful in a lot of different ways, too, because you could see the parents every day. So it wasn’t the broken home-school partnership: it was very, very tight-knit. Parents were able to see me; I was able to see them; we were able to talk to the kids together on a real-time basis. So you didn’t have kids getting behind on homework and things like that. And it really allowed us to build partnerships.

But, then, my husband’s uncle died and we moved to Madison—and I just could not make the drive. I say that and I’m driving to Walton now, but at the time I had littler kids, smaller kids, and so at the time I started working at Burley Middle School. And then I got my doctorate and really wanted to come back to the southern end of the county, and got a job as an assistant principal at Walton Middle School.

BUSH: Great, great. Wow, you have contributed a lot to this area.

JONES-LEWIS: I love it here.

BUSH: [08:49] And I’m sure they really appreciate it, your teaching here. Especially since I had a granddaughter who was impacted by your teaching. That makes it really special. So, I’m just going to look here, if any of these questions are relevant to you, since you did not exactly grow up here. But you said in the county you grew up in that it was similar—you felt like it was a similar experience. So I think you could go ahead and address that. But did you feel like there was any experience in growing up of segregation, when you were in school?

JONES-LEWIS: When I was in school? Absolutely. And Orange is, like I said, very similar to Charlottesville, Albemarle, where there’s a tendency for there to be pockets of people who are more open freethinkers, and then pockets of people who are a little more rigidly tied to things that have happened in the past. There is a great sense of pride on both ends—but that pride does not impact all people equally. You hear a lot about African-American students and them feeling isolated in higher-level classes and things. That was my experience in high school, and in middle school. In fact, and this is just a little short thing, (laughs) when I went to sixth grade at Prospect Heights Middle School, we had three teams. We had the gold team, which I was on, and the silver team and the red team. So immediately you were like, “Oh, well all the smart kids are on the gold team”—and they were. (laughs) It was super-clear, right? So my cousin, who I had been in classes with from kindergarten to fifth grade, was now on the red team—and she took a very different path than I took. And I was on the gold team, and I had wonderful teachers. I took Latin in sixth grade. It was an amazing experience—but very different for her.

That had a large impact on how I taught. And so, with my students here, it was very, very important to me that people were given opportunities. I feel like when we put kids into categories like that, especially so early, it really shuts doors for them. And so I really wanted for my students to be able to have as many opportunities as possible. So, for example, when I taught my last year, every single one of my fifth graders learned all of the fifth- and all of the sixth-grade math content. And they knew it. They were able to go to middle school and really have a choice of math classes—and math tends to be the gatekeeper for lots of different courses. So I think that, in terms of segregation, we tend to segregate people more in schools than even they are segregated outside of school.

BUSH: [12:30] That’s interesting. So are you talking intellectually, or color of skin? 

JONES-LEWIS: I think that initially it is intellectual, but many times it ends up being segregated by skin color because of perceived abilities. When I went to Burley Middle School, after I left Yancey, I started the process and I actually became the first culturally-responsive teacher that was certified in the county to really dig into: “How do we, despite who we are and our feelings and our biases—because we all have them—treat each student with respect and treat each student like they deserve the best?” Right? Because we all have those things that creep into the backs of our minds, and when it’s egregious—

BUSH: I’m going to just put this on pause.

JONES-LEWIS: No problem.

BUSH: Somebody wants to speak to us.

END OF TAPE [13:25]