Good morning, RVA! It's 70 °F, and today we've got another hot one lined up. Expect highs near 90 °F and every reason in the world to wear an undershirt.
Water cooler
The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Jessica Nocera reports that 2,231 Chesterfield County Public Schools students are in quarantine as of this past Monday, the District's fourth week of in-person instruction. About half of those are elementary school students who are not yet eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. Remember: Fully vaccinated and no symptoms usually means no quarantine. Over two thousand students in quarantine sounds like a lot—and it is!—but, for context, it's 3.7% of their entire student body. The District has put together this dashboard tracking cases and quarantines, which is pretty interesting, and I'm sure we'll see more of this type of article in the coming weeks.
One quick update on the mayor's vision for spending the $155 million of ARPA funding: The City has put together a nice map showing the location of the proposed capital projects. You can see how a couple of the proposed trails would connect together to make getting around certain parts of the Southside a whole lot easier and safer. Also, check out all of that "corridor beautification" along our major transit thoroughfares! Could that mean sidewalks, bus shelters, and, gasp, maybe even separated and protected bike lanes? I have no idea and don't see "corridor beautification" listed in the presentation from the other day. I assume we'll learn more today or tomorrow when the second round of public engagement launches. Stay tuned, and get ready to fill out another survey!
Meg Schiffres at VPM reports on some of the community reactions to the Civilian Review Board Task Force's recommendations and has a very, very early (and unsurprising) City Council vote count. At the moment, Councilmembers Jones and Lynch "say they generally support the task force's recommendations." This makes complete sense as they helped put together the Task Force to create a CRB in the first place. Now, we just have to find three more votes—which, if I were to guess, will require compromising on at least some of the Task Force's recommendations. See the conversation about retroactive disciplinary power in the aforelinked article for an example of something that may need to be dropped or limited to get to five votes on Council.
This past weekend, Richmond Public Schools launched "a new augmented reality historic walking tour that aims to showcase untold stories of Black resilience in Richmond,"—Jake Burns at WTVR has the details. Designed by RPS students, the app will help folks learn the "full history of Richmond: the good, the bad, and the ugly," says Superintendent Kamras. Check it out, and you may even hear some familiar voices...like National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson!
The Richmond Folk Festival announced their full lineup as they plan to bring all sorts of live music back to the banks of the James River, October 8th–10th. Attendees are "strongly encouraged" to be fully vaccinated, wear masks, and maintain six feet of distance while attending the festival. You can read their full COVID-19 guidelines here.
This morning's longread
The Supreme Court is drunk on its own power
This article in Vox about the Supreme Court will bum you out. It does try a little too hard at times to find a false balance between how Republicans are destroying our democracy and Democrats. Still, I learned a ton about how the Court's supposed to work.
The Supreme Court, in other words, is wading into areas where it possesses little expertise, and where it doesn’t even have the staff necessary to make informed decisions (the State Department employs about 13,000 foreign service officers to conduct diplomacy with other nations; an associate justice, by contrast, has four law clerks). For decades, the Court warned other judges against deciding questions that the judiciary lacks competence to decide. Now, however, the conservative justices on the Court appear to believe that they are omnicompetent — and that they can even decide complicated political questions after very briefly considering a case that arrives on their shadow docket.
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