Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and today’s weather looks fine as temperatures will top out in the low 90s. No rain on the schedule, and it looks like we’ll see the first bits of Dorian show up in town—mostly in the form of strong winds—tomorrow evening. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden has a more detailed forecast for you.
Water cooler
Yesterday, in front of Mary Munford Elementary School, folks handed out these flyers from State Senator Glen Sturtevant in opposition to RPS rezoning options that would pair Munford with other, less-White elementary schools. Justin Mattingly and Graham Moomaw nail the overt grossness of it in the first sentence of this piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “State Sen. Glen Sturtevant, R-Chesterfield, said Tuesday that he’ll push to ‘save’ two high-performing, majority-white Richmond elementary schools that might be merged with majority-black schools.” Sturtevant says he wants to introduce new state law that would “require an intervening school board election or referendum to take place before a new re-zoning plan can go into effect.” I mean, we elect school board representatives to do a job, and part of that job includes rezoning school districts. In fact, Sturtevant, once a school board member in Richmond himself, voted for a rezoning back in 2013, less than a single year after winning the 1st District seat in 2012. Double in fact, that 2013 RPS rezoning led to further racial segregation in our elementary schools. Here’s a 2016 paper from Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Kimberly Bridges, and Thomas J. Shields (PDF) that describes “a rapid, politically charged and resegregative school closure and elementary school rezoning process” that “was associated with a dramatic increase in racial segregation between elementary attendance zones over a short period of time.” So who initiated this fast and inequitable rezoning? Then School Board members Glenn Sturtevant and Kim Gray. Current and actual 1st District School Board member and one of the nine people with the actual authority to rezone schools, Liz Doerr, released a statement (Facebook) saying, in part, “I just wanted to remind the Senator and his campaign team that he actually represents many more schools in Richmond who will be impacted by this [rezoning] plan other than just Fox and Munford.” Using the first day of school to pass out segregationist political flyers—at a dang elementary school!—is one of the most garbage moves I’ve seen from a local politician in a while, and I will now link you to Ghazala Hashmi, the Democrat running against Sturtevant in Virginia’s 10th Senate District.
Speaking of Democrats running against Republicans, Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has a helpful cheat sheet of the state-level races that could possibly flip seats in the General Assembly.
I put the audio from this past FrIday’s Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission up on The Boring Show podcast. Also, as soon as last night’s presentation to Council’s Organizational Development Committee gets posted, I’ll throw that up there, too. I think you should consider all of these North of Broad discussions the beginning of the 2020 budget season—get excited! You can, of course, subscribe to The Boring Show podcast here, making sure you never miss hours of audio from a select set of theoretically fascinating public meetings.
J. Elias O’Neal at Richmond BizSense says the City’s Planning Commission approved the rezonings necessary for the Fulton Yard project to move forward. City Council will get their crack at it on September 9th and the Henrico Board of Supervisors will weigh in on September 10th.
Oh no! Jon Burkett at WRIC says police believe they’ve identified TV Head and have search warrants for a home in Twin Hickory and involve “an abandoned building in Goochland, and a TV drop-off at Deep Run High.” If this kid is convicted of “felony wearing a mask in public,” the mask being an old TV crammed on their head, I’ll be pretty bummed. Save TV Head!
For your calendar: The fourth Annual Afrikana Film Fest will take place September 12th – 15th. Style Weekly has a preview of what films you can expect, including a few clips from Harriet.
This morning's longread
Standing at the Crossroads (PDF)
I’ve been meaning to read this PDF from The Commonwealth Institute for months, and it seems appropriate to finally crack it open now as we start talking about this coming year’s budget process.
In Virginia, lawfully present immigrants with permanent residency must establish a 40-quarter (10 year) work history, concurrent with the federal five year requirement, before qualifying for Medicaid. Virginia is one of only six states to have such a requirement. Though work quarters of spouses and parents can be included in the calculation, single immigrant adults without parents in the United States would have to wait 10 years or more for health coverage. Older immigrants who arrive in the United States later in life may never be able to satisfy this requirement.
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