Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F, and the rest of today looks clear and cool with highs in the mid 50s. Yesterday, I was big-time underdressed on my bike ride into work, and I won’t make that mistake again today. Throw on an extra layer or two this morning, and wait patiently for this weekend’s perfect weather to arrive!
Water cooler
Yesterday, Governor Youngkin signed Executive Order 28, which directs the Department of Education to issue guidance “ensuring school districts notify all parents of school-connected overdoses within 24 hours, work closely with law enforcement to prevent overdoses, and enhance student education about the dangers of abusing drugs.” You can read the press release here and the full text of the Executive Order here. The Governor, of course, frames this as another plank in his “parental rights” campaign platform, which, I guess. I’m still thinking through—both as a parent and as a person who communicates a lot professionally—how this new guidance would work and what sort of practical actions you could pair with these notifications. It’s an interesting idea, but it makes me think back to the school-wide notifications about COVID-19 exposures during the pandemic—which I’m not convinced were entirely useful. Also, it’s strange/predictable that the Executive Order only looks for “close collaboration” between schools and law enforcement, not, say public or behavioral health folks (or even emergency responders). Anyway, more to come, I’m sure, on how the Department of Education puts together its guidance and how the local school districts decide to implement it.
Axios Richmond’s Ned Oliver and Karri Peifer report that speed enforcement cameras are coming to two school zones (as allowed by the General Assembly), Linwood Holton on the Northside and Patrick Henry School for Science and Arts on the Southside. Speed cameras are certainly _a_ tool to make our streets safer, but they are not the only tool (but we definitely should be using as many tools as we can get our hands on). Related and worth reading, here’s thoughtful discussion about speed cameras over on Strong Towns.
Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul writes about how the Casino 2.0 folks brought the surviving members of the Isley Brothers in for a free concert at one of the Southside early voting locations. This is just the weirdest, most very-Richmond pair of sentences: “Saturday’s day festival — featuring DJs, local acts and food truck fare free of charge to attendees — was on the football and soccer field city officials planned to pave over for a firefighters burn tower before community outcry doused that project. The concert — featuring surviving group members Ron and Ernie Isley and accompanying musicians — began after the polls closed at 5 p.m.” Amazing. So did this promotional stunt work? Well, MPW says that “393 votes were cast at Hickory Hill, triple the average daily count at the center.” However, yesterday Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond reported that, at the concert-less Laburnum Avenue location, folks cast 316 ballots.
This coming Tuesday, Hanoverites will not only have the opportunity to vote for their General Assembly reps but also on whether or not to switch their school board from appointed members to elected members. VPM’s Lyndon German reports on some of the background and work done to bring this potential shift in structure to next week’s ballot. Hanover is one of the last places in the commonwealth with an appointed school board, and it’s also become one of the testing grounds for extreme right-wing, Moms For Liberty-style policies and propaganda. Are those two things related? I’m not so sure. While I think more democracy is probably better, so I hope this referendum passes, I’m definitely not holding my breath that an elected School Board will bring a sudden shift in the Board’s extremist politics.
Today through Saturday, the Richmond Coin Club (promoting numismatic study in Richmond and Central Virginia since 1940!) will host a coin and currency show at the Acca Shriners Center (1712 Bellevue Avenue). I know nothing about coins or coin collecting, but this seems like an incredibly chill way to spend some time on the weekend distracted from whatever else is happening in the world. Coin collecting is so interesting and quirky and “numismatic” is just an excellent word to say aloud.
This morning's longread
In Defense of the Rat
I think rats have joined zoning, combined sewer systems, AI, and social media as Official GMRVA Topics of Interest. To celebrate(?), here’s a really long, really lovely pro-rat essay that I started with a skeptical intent to hate read. The section about altruistic rats helping their rat pals—for no reward, just because!—really flipped my perspective.
If the rat was not the bête noire of the Black Death; if it poses a low risk of disease in many places, and, where it is poses a higher risk, is a better reflection of how poorly our societies care for the vulnerable than the real dangers of the animal itself; if the rat is not aggressive or filthy; if the rat is not a shadow of our worst qualities but instead can reflect our best; and if—perhaps most important of all—we cannot win our cruel war against them, then an obvious question remains. What are we to do about rats? The surprising answer—one that recalls Barthélemy de Chasseneuz’s demand that the voice of rats be heard—may be this: communicate with them.
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Picture of the Day
Like the youth, I’m getting more into the .5 camera.
