Good morning, RVA! It's 68 °F, and today looks pretty nice. Enjoy highs in the 80s, sunshine, and other regular summer stuff like slip-ons, evening strolls, and condensation dripping down the side of a mason jar. I think you can expect more of the same for the next couple of days, too.
Water cooler
Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden will host a Celebration of Life for Jonah Holland on Sunday, October 2nd at 10:00 AM. In the meantime, if you'd like to help her family in some way, you can find information on donating to her children's VA529 accounts at the bottom of the aforelinked page. Ride safe out there!
RPS School Board hosted their emergency meeting last night, which, ultimately, had zero public outcomes. You can see the presentation the Superintendent put together here, which highlights some of the positive ways RPS students performed on the SOLS when compared to students statewide.
Four things happened at this meeting. First, a shortened public comment period that was a mix of opinions, with maybe a slight majority of folks worried about the Board making major changes to either the administration or the curriculum less than a week before the start of the school year. Second, a round of speechifying by boardmembers with everyone upset about the SOL scores, some pointing fingers at other folks for pointing fingers, and a few voicing concerns about the process that even led to this meeting in the first place. Third, Boardmember Gibson introduced a motion to scrap the current curriculum and draft an entirely new one in 68 days. That motion failed in an interesting way with Boardmember White breaking from the five-member bloc to vote against. Fourth, the Board went into closed session to talk about...something.
About the third thing, which is probably the most interesting one at this point, I have absolutely no experience or expertise in "curriculum" and have no idea if the current curriculum is good or bad. I do know, however, that 68 days is a laughably, unseriously short amount of time to tackle a project of this size. In fact, the original motion required establishing working groups for each subject, and I'm not even sure you could get those groups set up for their first meeting in 68 days. This effort to suddenly and immediately overhaul the curriculum sets everyone up for failure. It's yet another example of boardmembers introducing and voting on sea-change motions with literally no heads-up. The public and almost no notice about this emergency meeting, the motion was not on the agenda, and several members of the Board hadn't even heard about it until Gibson read it aloud. This is horrible governance and, regardless of what you think about the curriculum, you should be upset by this continued abuse of public process by our School Board.
Finally, smarter people than myself had some good thoughts. Councilmember Addison is frustrated by the Board's misplaced focus over the last year. I like this point in particular: "The Superintendent proposed a budget increase to staff up our schools with the resources needed to help our students thrive out of the pandemic. That budget was cut by $6m before being sent to Council. That could have funded over 70 ESL teachers." Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams points out a horrifying possibility, that if the Board does decide to fire the Superintendent "A memorandum of understanding between RPS and the Virginia Department of Education appears to require the state Board of Education to sign off on his eventual replacement. If you want Gov. Glenn Youngkin controlling RPS, then go ahead. Make his day."
As for what's next? Who knows. It seems like there's enough momentum behind changing the curriculum that we'll have more conversations about that moving forward—hopefully in a thoughtful way that's not so insulting to the public. And if anything major came out of the closed-session conversations relating to personnel or organizational changes, I guess we'll find out soon enough. School starts on Monday and (I think) the Board meets again on September 6th.
RICToday has some neat info and history about the WTVR TV Tower on Broad Street. Did you know that at one time it was the tallest freestanding radio tower in the country? Also, I had no idea that tower was switched off in 2009. As that part of the city fills in, it's kind of neat to have this huge, mostly-sculptural tower as piece of the landscape.
Another day, another anti-car propaganda T-shirt! $25 bucks and a couple of taps gets you a fun MF BROOM fan shirt, with proceeds benefiting Bike Walk RVA. Let's be clear: This is a T-shirt celebrating a bike-lane street sweeper. Yes, I think that is awesome, and, yes, I bought one just now. Honestly, I think I could use more shirts featuring good Richmond infrastructure. I'd wear a T-shirt celebrating the Potterfield bridge, the Franklin Street Bike Lane, or maybe the new Leading Pedestrian Interval signal-timing in the Fan.
This morning's longread
Trying to Tame the Islands That Won’t Stay Put
Reading this piece about all the work and money that goes into keeping the Outer Banks from dissolving into the ocean makes me wonder about if/when we just give up. I know everyone in Richmond loves the Outer Banks, and I know that island tourism supports a ton of people's lives, but I dunno! Is it sustainable to keep pumping sand and building bridges to connect smaller and smaller islands for forever?
One way Dare County is adapting is by embracing a multimillion-dollar plan to replenish its eroding beaches with millions of cubic meters of sand pumped from dredges positioned offshore. The sand helps provide some protection and keeps the tourists happy. But sand is only a temporary solution, and powerful nor’easters and hurricanes can gouge an artificial beach in just hours. All of which means, once you begin to pump sand, you pretty much commit to keep pumping, a lesson the town of Nags Head has learned. This year, the popular resort is embarking on its third round of beach repairs since 2011, when it initially pumped nearly 3.8 million cubic meters of sand onto its beaches at a cost of $36-million. Hurricanes in 2018 and 2019 swept away much of that sand, and in July, the town began pumping sand again along more than seven kilometers of shoreline at a cost of nearly $14-million.
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