Virginia Beach postpones its winter decision
Virginia Beach City Public Schools has postponed its decision Tuesday on whether to hold a high school sports winter season in the hope that either health metrics will improve within a week or the Virginia High School League changes its sports calendar.
Superintendent Aaron Spence told parents in the letter that since last week’s school board meeting, his staff has monitored health metrics, talked with colleagues in the region and local health officials. On Monday, Spence talked with Virginia High School League executive director Billly Haun as well as other school division superintendents.
“Afterwards, I met with members of senior leadership and made the decision to postpone any decision on winter sports at this time,” Spence said in his letter. “While we may, ultimately, still need to cancel the winter season, acknowledging the reality of our current health metrics does not mean we must be inflexible to other data points and potential changes at the state level.”
During last week’s school board meeting, the district had set a “Go, No Go deadline” for Tuesday. The date was selected because of the schedule schools faced with the VHSL. The VHSL requirements of practice dates, minimum competitions to qualify for postseason play and dates of season were all factors in Virginia
Beach setting the deadline.
Donald Robertson, the Virginia Beach City Public School chief schools officer, said the division determined the last day to start the winter sports season would be Jan. 4. In order to have sports start Jan. 4, the division needed to have its metrics in the yellow range for seven days, which meant the division needed to be in that range by Dec. 28. But Virginia Beach wanted to make a decision before school let out for vacation.
After a number of meetings, Virginia Beach decided to delay the decision.
“The reason we pushed this back is that there has been some additional conversations with the Virginia High School League on some potential for the Virginia High School League to look at their sports calendar in general, which could provide the division some additional flexibility,” Robertson said. “We’ve also been talking to our colleagues across the state of Virginia and across the 757 in Region 2. So, we decided not to go on Dec. 22 and give things a little more time to see what happens before we return after the holidays.”
Robertson said the division was trying to exhaust all options before making a decision.
“We know that the calendar with seven days of yellow gives us until Dec. 28,” Robertson said. “We also know the Virginia High School League is having some conversations relative to their previously approved sports calendar because Virginia Beach is not unique. Every school in the commonwealth is struggling right now with whether to go back to practices and some divisions who canceled are rethinking that decision if the Virginia High School League makes a different calendar.”
However, Mike McCall, the VHSL director communications, said while the league is flexible and open to reviewing things, he doesn’t anticipate making any changes to the calendar.
“We always review things,” McCall said. “Will we change the calendar? We’re probably not going to, but we’ll always review things.”
McCall said in terms of the playoffs, schools that start late and can’t get enough games complete could get a waiver to compete.
Only one school division — Williamsburg-James City County — has canceled winter sports. All other Hampton Roads school divisions have paused winter sports.
As of Tuesday morning, 23 school division and 40 schools in the state are not participating in winter sports.