Good morning, RVA! It's 65 °F, and today you can expect highs in the upper 80s and a chance for storms later this afternoon. If you plan on spending some time outside, do it before cocktail o’ clock!
Water cooler
After a jillion days, the majority of public school students in Richmond and Henrico are BACK in school buildings today! As a parent of an RPS middle schooler, it’s wild, stressful, exciting, and strange to think about. Who knows what this coming season—the Fall of Uncertainty—will bring, and I think families, in as much as they’re able, should prepare to be flexible and ready for change. Given the level of community transmission at the moment, COVID-19 will most likely find its way into schools right from day one. You should expect positive cases and you should expect quarantines, but you should also expect schools to work hard at implementing their COVID-19 protocols and layered mitigation strategies. I imagine this will play out unevenly, with some schools and classrooms completely and utterly disrupted while others quietly go on about their business. It’s good for students to be back in buildings with teachers and friends, but it’s scary, too—especially for younger kids who are still ineligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. We’ll learn a ton in the next couple of weeks, we’ll read dozens of shocking headlines, and then, with any luck, we’ll settle into some sort of rhythm. The Fall of Uncertainty is gonna feel real weird, and I hope that you’ll have grace and patience with the friends, family, and coworkers in your lives who have kids heading back to school this morning. If you want some more feels, watch this three-minute video from RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras to kick off this new season.
Yesterday afternoon, Style Weekly dropped this huge announcement on Facebook: “Style Weekly will cease publishing after the Sept. 8 edition. We thank our talented staff for their award-winning efforts and our loyal readers for their support. Thank you, Richmond.” I have personal, first-hand knowledge of what it feels like to shut down a local new biz, and, let’s me tell you, it sucks. I feel for the folks at Style and for what they’re processing this morning as their last issue goes out. It’s bad for Richmond to lose local media outlets, and the current environment doesn’t seem especially fertile for encouraging new ones to pop up. If you want to commiserate with folks, hop over into Style’s mentions on Twitter.
Sounds like today’s the day the Lee Monument comes down—depending on your goals for the day, avoid the area or get down there as quick as you can. Photographers beware, because Ali Rockett at the RTD says the FAA has banned drones in “a 2-nautical-mile radius around the statue” until 11:59 PM on Thursday. I think you should probably expect a different environment from when the City took down the rest of the monuments a year ago. This video from @RVAdirt shows you the lack of respect the State has for residents of the City as they shoulder their way into our neighborhoods and onto our sidewalks to take down their own Confederate statue. I don’t get a strong “we’re honored to participate in this important and historic community moment” vibe—at least from that video. Tangentially related, the Governor’s office put out this press release listing all of the items that went into the new time capsule that’ll replace the probably racist stuff in the old time capsule being removed today. Read through the full list here, which has some pretty neat stuff like an expired vial of the Pfizer vaccine, that picture of the ballerina posing on the Lee statue’s plinth, and a piece of the tarp from the unveiling of the Rumors of War statue. You can watch the removal of Monument Avenue’s last Confederate statue live over on VPM.
I totally blanked on City Council’s American Rescue Plan Act work session yesterday! Look at this fascinating PDF listing out all of the councilmembers’ proposed ARPA expenditures. The total, $355,805,00, is just a liiiitle more than the $77 million available, so I hope Council spent some time trimming and cutting yesterday. Scrolling through this list, I see a lot of tactical, one-off projects—things like 3rd District food programs, 200 ballistic vests for the Richmond Ambulance Authority, improvements to Rudd’s Trailer Park, and the Broad Rock Sports Complex. None of these things are bad, necessarily, but none of them make me feel like Council has taken a holistic and strategic look at how to spend this once-in-a-generation bucket of cash. Who knows what they got into yesterday, but ultimately I’d like to see all of those pet projects dropped (which are still good and probably needed!) in favor of larger investments into big huge game changers like child care, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, a Health Equity Trust Fund, funding existing master plans (parks, riverfront, bicycle, and the regional housing framework come to mind), and universal broadband.
This morning's longread
This is 'Breaking the News'
An apropos longread for the day of Style Weekly’s last issue.
For many reasons, the sprawling, messy, but informative realm of the personal blog became a less and less natural fit to the structure and responsibilities of major publications, which of course have never been more crucial to our democracy. But I believe that the kind of communication and connection blogs made possible—between writer and reader, between writer and theme, among writers and readers who eventually formed a community—may also be even more important than before. I know it matters to me.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
