Good morning, RVA! It's 68 °F, and today looks nice. Expect highs in the upper 80s and sunshine. While this week does look hotter than the week that was, the long-term forecast still lacks any of those sweat-through-your-shirt, melt-into-a-puddle, spontaneously-combust-on-the-sidewalk days.
Water cooler
School Board will host their emergency meeting—at which they will theoretically do something in reaction to the District's COVID-impacted SOL scores—tonight at John Marshall High School (4225 Old Brook Road) from 6:30 PM until question mark. Here’s the agenda, but it's just three items: public comment, "discuss academics," and a closed session. KidsFirstRPS speculates on a couple different scenarios of what exactly they could get into tonight, but without any clear communication from the Board it's really hard to know what to expect. I hate this. I hate the vagueness from boardmembers, which at this point feels intentional, that's designed to...what? Create panic and fear among RPS families? I don't know how you can say to a reporter, "There may be some suggestions to change personnel. We don't know yet, so I don't want to put in an alarm into the public," follow it up with zero further information, and not expect to do exactly that—raise a huge alarm to the public. The Mayor even felt like he needed to weigh in! I guess we'll all tune in on YouTube to see what tonight amounts to: a round of nine speeches, putting the superintendent on double-secret probation, outright firing him, or none of the above.
VPM's Megan Pauly reports on the first class at the Maggie Walker Governor’s School after they stopped using an achievement test as part of admissions, hoping to create a more equitable process. The stats seem pretty clear: "The percentage of new students admitted to Walker who are Black was 4% in 2020, when both the achievement and aptitude tests were administered; 13% in 2021, when neither test was administered; and 8% in 2022, when only the aptitude test was given." Researcher and professor Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, who knows more about these things than most, is unsurprised, saying "We like to pretend that these aptitude tests are objective measures, but they are riddled with bias, both in this historical sense, but also, in terms of how the tests are constructed...There's a body of scholarship that calls the SAT — the Scholastic Aptitude Test — the wealth test because the performance on the SAT is so correlated with family socioeconomic status." Tangentially related, one thing I learned only semi-recently is that Algebra I is required to even apply to Maggie Walker, which means kids and families across the district need to start thinking about these sorts of things right as middle school starts. So it's not just about making sure kids know that the Governor's school exists, but it's also about getting as many kids prepared so that it's even an option for them at all—which I know, first hand!, is something RPS is working on.
Via /r/rva, this neat 1901 map of Henrico County. One of the commenters links to this 1911 map on the Library of Congress website that’ll let you zoom and scrolll a bit. Every time I look at one of these maps I get so sad that, before we tore them all out, I had a trolley running just a block from my house.
For $22 you can get yourself a "CARS RUIN CARYTOWN" T-shirt that not only would be perfect attire at next year's Watermelon Festival, but will help raise money for RVA Community Fridges. If I see you out wearing one of these, I will definitely give you a Robert Redford Knowing Head Nod.
Richmond Magazine's Best & Worst 2022 list is out. I link to it mostly because the concensus "Best thing Gov. Youngkin has done so far" is..."Nothing." You may also see a familiar daily zoning and rezoning email mentioned in the Best Email Newsletter category, and I encourage you to just skip right over the contradictory "Worst thing about Richmond's growth" category entirely.
This morning's longread
Radiation for dummies
Fingers crossed, on August 29th (less than a week away!), NASA will blast off Artemis 1, an uncrewed mission around the moon and back. Atop the massive Space Launch System rocket, the Orion spacecraft won't be empty, though. Two dummies filled with sensors will take the trip out and around the moon to measure how radiation impacts the human body—specifically the female body. Neat stuff!
Fitted with more than 5600 sensors, the pair will measure the amount of radiation astronauts could be exposed to in future missions with unprecedented precision. The flight test will take place during NASA’s Exploration Mission-1, an uncrewed trip to the vicinity of the Moon and back to Earth. Radiation poses a major health risk to people in space. Astronauts on the International Space Station receive doses 250 higher than on Earth. Away from Earth’s magnetic field and into interplanetary space, the impact on the human body could be much higher – up to 700 times more. Two sources of radiation are of concern: galactic cosmic radiation and virulent solar particle events. This radiation could increase the crew’s risk of cancer and become a limiting factor in missions to the Moon and Mars.
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