Good morning, RVA! It's 64 °F, and more sunshine awaits you today. Expect highs in the pleasant low 80s and a chance of thunderstorms near midnight.
Water cooler
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Justin Mattingly has a bunch of budget-related updates from last night’s RPS School Board meeting. Something to keep your eye on for next year: The Board approved the Superintendent’s plan to use one-time money to fund recurring operating costs. This, of course, means schools will either need to make cuts elsewhere to keep this money or will ask for more operating money next year. Jot it down in your text file of Things To Remember Several Months From Now.txt and we’ll come back to it.
Tangentially related, Richmond Public Schools did not run out of toilet paper and does not require donations of basic supplies. Superintendent Kamras sets the record straight on Twitter and also says to message him directly with any issues.
One final thing on schools. Remember when I briefly dug in to the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights data a couple months back? Justin Mattingly has some more details on how laws signed by the Governor last week 💸, and sponsored by local legislator Jeff Bourne, aim to reduce suspensions overall while also reducing the racial inequity in who gets suspended. Inequitable suspensions are a region-wide problem, and something to keep in mind as Henrico and Chesterfield bring on new school superintendents and the former a new director of diversity, too. If you want to get into it directly, you can look at the data yourself, including suspensions by race, for Richmond, Henrico, or Chesterfield.
Our region’s leaders, fresh off of hanging out together at the Greek Festival, just launched a Text-to-911 Service. Mac Konrad at Richmond Magazine has the details. I will accept and celebrate all concrete signs of successful regional collaboration—no matter how small.
Who’s ready to reboot conversations about building a new baseball stadium in Richmond? Is it you? Or is it no one at all? J. Elias O’Neal at Richmond BizSense says the ABC has final permission to move their warehouse and free up potential space for a new ballpark.
I got this email from the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild announcing the winners of the 2018 Virginia Craft Beer Cup (PDF). Scrolling through the list I see a bunch of Richmond-Area breweries and a ton of new beers I should seek out and try. Ross’s Personal and Special Congratulations go to Legend’s Brown Ale for still being delicious after all these years.
Sports!
- Squirrels fell to Reading, 5-6, and move on to a new series against Trenton tonight at 7:00 PM.
- Kickers continue to work their way into the U.S. Open Cup tonight at 7:00 PM against MLS’s Philadelphia Union.
- Nats begin a short series with Tampa Bay tonight at 7:05 PM.
- Caps scored six goals on the way to a 6-2 win over the Golden Knights in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Caps lead the series 3-1.
This morning's longread
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This piece is from 2007, just four years after the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry.
Jefferson Howell, a retired marine lieutenant general and the plainspoken director of the Johnson Space Center, ends the debate when he sits down at the radio, considers his words, and bounces his voice off a satellite into the space station's dry, recycled air. "I have some bad news," Howell says, and because it's Howell who's delivering it, Pettit and Bowersox know exactly how bad before he gets it out: "We've lost the vehicle." Nine words. That's all. Everything else is left unspoken, and in the quiet, the blanks are left for each of them to fill in on his own. In the way the parents of missing children hang on to the faintest hope that their loved ones are just lost, not lost for good, Pettit and Bowersox wonder whether any of Columbia's evacuation systems triggered, and whether any of their friends are floating down to a cloudless earth under parachutes.
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