by Martin Davis
Editor-in-Chief, FXBGAdvance
Fat Boy’s restaurant in St. Paul, Virginia, is well-known — at least in Wise County — for the two BBQ items that sit atop its menu hanging behind the counter. The Heart Attack, and the Stroke.
This 1930’s-era diner, marked by low-rent flooring, plain tables, and chairs that are best described as sturdy but hardly comfortable, proved a more-than-suitable place to sit down and reflect on a day seeing first-hand what makes one of the poorest places in Virginia one of its most academically successful, at least when the measuring stick is Standards of Learning scores.
For the second year in a row, Wise County schools have had the third-best overall SOL pass rate in the state of Virginia. It hasn’t ranked lower than eighth since 2013.
An impressive feat considering it spends less per student than Fredericksburg city, Spotsylvania County, or Stafford County public schools; is riddled with a meth epidemic that has led to a startlingly high incarceration rate of 721 per 100,000 people (Virginia’s rate is notoriously high at 679 per 100,000 people); and nearly 20% of its citizens live in poverty (more than 25% of children grow up in poverty).
In the Richmond halls of the Virginia Department of Education, and among education policy wonks, the reason for the county’s success is captured in a simple acronym — CIP, which stands for “Comprehensive Instructional Program.”
The program alone, however, doesn’t explain why Wise County, where CIP was born, has proven so successful.
There are 65 Virginia school districts participating in the program, says CIP Director Matt Hurt, and “we have 10 years of data showing that some school districts adopting the program have great success, while in other districts CIP hardly moves the needle.”
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