Good morning, RVA! It's 62 °F, and the hot weather returns. Expect loads of sunshine and highs near 90 °F. I think Fake Fall is over.
Water cooler
Tonight, Richmond's School Board will hold a public hearing to discuss what to do (if anything) about George Mason Elementary before the school year starts. Garet Prior at Richmond Forward has a detailed post about the options on the table and how you, if you're a member of the Mason community or not, can get involved. I think I'm with Garet that Option #3 sounds like the best choice: Mason students move to Franklin Military and Franklin Military students move to Community, while money is accrued for a long-term solution.
Read this piece by the RTD's Debbie Truong about the region's almost 3,000 homeless students. When we think about homeless students, it's kids who "lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence"—that includes sharing housing with friends and family, living in hotels, staying in shelters, as well as living in places that are in no way residences like tents, parks, and abandoned buildings. As the number of homeless students in the region increases (especially in the counties), local jurisdictions have been forced to increase the number of people working to help serve these kids.
Ned Oliver has a few details about the City's efforts to do some ethics reform in the wake of last year's Mayor Jones Church Situation™. As with most things city-related, a task force will be formed as soon as Council gets around to passing the ordinance (PDF)—scroll down to page seven to see the ten tasks the task force will...be tasked with. If things move forward according to plan, Council will see this ordinance on their September 11th agenda.
Hilary Langford and Karen Newton have compiled a list of their top-10 favorite local breweries and, I assume, have ranked them in descending order. In my humble opinion, which no one asked for, Triple Crossing's Pride of Monroe is the best beer brewed in town and the fact that it's not on this list scandalizes me.
Richmond Magazine has a Q&A with Bev of Bev's Ice Cream that is so ultra charming I may die.
It's here! The pilot episode of my newsy interview podcast about Richmond, tentatively titled The Roundabout, dropped yesterday. I talked to Jon Baliles, the City's Senior Policy Advisor for Innovation, about his side hustle of helping organize the RVA Street Art Fest. If you'd like to see this sort of thing happen on the regular, please chip in a couple of bucks on the ol' Patreon. I want to make this sort of thing a regular feature of Good Morning, RVA, but need to raise about $500 more per month to make it happen. Special thanks to Kelley Libby who produced this episode and made me feel like a real radio person!
Sports!
- Squirrels won four straight against Erie and will take the day off to celebrate.
- Kickers couldn't get it done against Saint Louis FC, falling 0-1.
- Nats lost two of three over the weekend to the Rockies and will pick up a game against the Marlins tonight at 7:05 PM.
This morning's longread
Confederate monuments are about maintaining white supremacy
This piece in the Washington Post by UR Assistant Professior Julian Maxwell Hayter talks about the real reasons Richmond constructed its Confederate Monuments.
These statues and the laws they represent continue to have implications. Richmond was more segregated in 1980 than in 1940, and to this day, an appalling legacy of deeply concentrated black poverty characterizes it and other cities that are lined with Confederate history. Contemporary assaults on Confederate monuments do not simply challenge the romanticized narrative of the Confederacy’s Lost Cause. They are an effort to expose the deep legacy of segregation that followed in the 150 years after General Lee surrendered at Appomattox.