John Marshall High School (Virginia)

This school division contains public schools serving the independent city of Richmond, Virginia. It is occasionally described locally as Richmond City Public Schools to emphasize its connection to the independent city rather than the Richmond-Petersburg region at large or the rural Richmond County which is located in a different region northeast of the city.

From 1952 to 1961, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. was Chairman of the Richmond School Board. Powell presided over the school board at a time when the Commonwealth of Virginia was locked in a campaign of defiance against the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Interestingly, Powell's law firm had represented one of the defendant school districts in the case that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court under the "Brown" label. Powell did not take any part in his law firm's representation of that client school district. The lawsuit, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, later became one of the five cases decided under the caption Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954. The Richmond School Board had no authority at the time to force integration, however, as control over attendance policies had been transferred to the state government. Powell later became president of the American Bar Association and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

In October 2009, the Richmond Times Dispatch printed an editorial entitled “Dropping In,” briefly outlining a program meant to reduce the number of high school dropouts in Richmond’s public school system. In this article it was revealed that Richmond’s dropout rate was “hovering around 15 percent”. It was also stated on the Richmond Public Schools’ website that the four-year-cohort dropout rate was 14.8 percent for the 2005-2009 cohort, declined from its 16.2 percent rate for 2004-2008.

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