POST Local

This post has been updated.

In the fall of 2009, Chris Shumway paid a visit to his old grade school in Vienna, Wolftrap Elementary.

He had been a student there in the 1970s, and then had grown up and gone off to New York to work on Wall Street. By 2009, he was managing his own multibillion-dollar hedge fund, Shumway Capital.

He visited Wolftrap with the idea of donating something to the school in honor of his third grade teacher, Candace Leyton, who died in 2003 at age 54 of breast cancer.

Wolftrap’s principal, Anita Blain, said she told Shumway that the school had established a beautiful courtyard. Would he like to donate a bench? Or perhaps a tree?

“He said, ‘I’m really thinking more substantial,’ ” Blain said, recalling the conversation.

“He said, ‘Do you need a building?’”

Blain swallowed her shock — “Things like that just don’t happen,” she exclaimed — and embraced the offer. And Monday at noon, Wolftrap will hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the Candace Leyton Innovation Learning Lab.

What first appeared to be a failed campaign to nab Justin Bieber as her prom date instead earned a Virginia high school senior and her sister invitations to one of the biggest awards shows of the year.

According to the Daily Press, Cady Elmer received the invitation to Sunday’s Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas via a video message from Bieber himself. The video was broadcast Saturday night at her prom.

“I’m going to have a car waiting for you so you can come to the Billboard Awards with me tomorrow. That’s exciting right? I mean, do you think that’s exciting?” Bieber said in the video.

How would you fare on Virginia’s new and more difficult generation of state math tests?

The exams, which are being given across Northern Virginia this month, are designed to require critical thinking, not just memorization and arithmetic. Pass rates are expected to drop, perhaps steeply.

Test yourself below on questions from an older and easier version of the exam — the 2010 math Standards of Learning tests, released by the Virginia Department of Education and available online.

More than 50 teachers, parents, taxpayers and activists took advantage of an opportunity Tuesday to offer the Fairfax school board input on next year’s budget.

Some spoke in favor of benefits for parent liaisons, who translate language and culture for immigrant students and their families; expanded foreign language opportunities in elementary schools; and more money for adult education programs.

Others criticized the salaries of central-office administrators (which have grown faster than teachers' salaries, according to one group’s analysis) and the practice of farming out professional development and teacher training to consultants. (Fairfax will pay the Disney Co., for example, $50,000 to provide a leadership workshop for 50 employees, each of whom will receive Mickey graduation ears at the conclusion of of the training.)

And still others addressed the big issue that the school board will have to resolve before it finalizes the budget on May 24: employees’ pay and retirement benefits.

“It’s time to put your money where your mouth is,” South Lakes High School teacher Lauren Ashley Villa told the board Tuesday. “Otherwise, it’s patronizing to hear you on the air touting that FCPS has the best school teachers, absent of the tag line that you don’t pay them a third of what they are worth.”

Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn was ranked the 10^th best high school in Virginia by U.S. News and World Report – the first time a Loudoun County school has been included among the top 10 state schools since the list was created in 2007, according to school district spokesman Wayde Byard.

Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn. (Courtesy Loudoun County Public Schools)

 The school, ranked 178 nationally, also received a gold medal based on the students’ “college readiness index” – meaning their exposure to, and understanding of, college-level material.

 David Spage, director of high school education for Loudoun County Public Schools, described a “symbiotic connection” between teachers and students at Stone Bridge that helped bolster the school’s performance.

 Students at Stone Bridge are currently preparing for their math SOL tests, Spage said.

“If you go over there at 8 o’clock in the morning, an hour before school, there are cohorts of students already in math classrooms,” he said. “There are teachers who are there, not on contract time, not compensated, but sitting down next to a kid asking questions or standing up in front of two or three kids and helping them understand.”

 Staff and students have the freedom to explore individualized instruction, Spage said, which helps keep them engaged and committed to the material.