Good morning, RVA! It's 63 °F, and this morning we may need to wait for some rain to clear out before the beautiful weather shows up. After all that, expect highs near 80 °F and, fingers crossed, plenty of sunshine. Looks like a great start to a great week.
Water cooler
The RPS School Board will discuss the proposed changes to the speciality school application process at their 6:00 PM meeting tonight. You can find the full agenda here and a great PDF explaining the potential changes here. Each proposed option hopes to achieve the following goal, which I will quote right from the PDF: “Make our specialty schools more reflective of the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in RPS while maintaining their rigor and unique characteristics.” Option 3, the option preferred by the RPS administration, is a bold set of changes. It would prioritize 50% of the seats at each speciality school for economically disadvantaged students, as well as offering seats to the top three scoring applicants from each of the eight RPS middle schools (and the top three private/homeschool students). I think the part of this proposal that will draw an intense amount of public comment is the second to last sentence on slide 31: “Any remaining seats would go to the next highest scoring application — regardless of RPS middle school or [economically disadvantaged] status — with a cap of 5 seats for private school/homeschool students.” That cap of five seats for private school kids will disrupt the future (and financial) plans of a lot of families who hope to send their kids to an RPS speciality school after some time away in one of the region’s private schools. Things to watch for at tonight’s meeting: If families of private school students show up for public comment and if the School Board starts to lean toward Option 1, which lacks the cap on private school students. Megan Pauly at VPM reports on an important timing detail: The speciality school application process begins next months, so the Board doesn’t have much time if it wants to impact this coming round of admissions.
Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports some bittersweet news for fans of zoning and rezoning: Maritza Pechin, Richmond’s deputy planning director, is leaving the City this week to take a job with the U.S. Department of Transportation. Pechin has absolutely crushed her time at the City’s Department of Planning, heading up planning processes for Richmond 300, the Diamond District, and probably a million other things. So while, on one hand, we’ll definitely miss her expertise and capacity, it is always nice to have folks looking out for Richmond at the federal level. Definitely keep an eye out for who gets tapped to fill Pechin’s role and pick up her full plate of really important work.
I’m still so interested in Tortillería Mixteca—this new tortilla factory out on Nine MIle Road—and will continue to link to stories about it, like this one by Sean Jones in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I love when we have a local version of some common thing that we all use and have strong feelings about, like Duke’s. I haven’t tried these specific tortillas yet, but I do love the idea of having a local tortilla brand that we get to be snobby about to our out-of-state friends!
I assume you need no reminder, but, just in case: This month’s Breakaway RVA ride, one of my favorite bicycle-related Richmond things, will roll out from Jefferson Park on Thursday at 5:45 PM. Across a gently-paced 7.5 miles you’ll explore the East End and its lovely parks. Mark your calendar, sign up for the Eventbrite, and give your bike a once-over before heading out later this week. If you’ve never been, check it out, you’ll love it.
This morning's longread
Washington is full of rats. These dogs are happy to help with that.
I’m kind of shocked that this piece about hunting city rats with city dogs made it into the Washington Post. The content warning at the top of the article is not joking around and is not an exaggeration: “This story contains descriptions and images of dogs hunting rats that could upset some readers.” If anything, that’s an understatement. Still though, what is the best way to get rid of rats in an urban environment? I think about it kind of a lot, and this is definitely not the first time I’ve linked to rat content as a GMRVA longread. I wonder if it’s starting become one of my hobby topics?
“Who’s got the rat bag?” says Bill Reyna, a New York rat hunter who has traveled here with his rat terrier named Centauri. The rat bag is a black garbage bag that the Ratscallions tote around in a wagon, along with a first-aid kit and water for their dogs. After a dog kills a rat, a member of the group will put on latex gloves, pick up the rat corpse by its tail, and put it in a bag, which, by the end of this particular night — after they have journeyed to a spot they have nicknamed “Hell’s Alley” — will contain 32 other bodies. Ratscallion tradition is to pose for a trophy photo behind the pile of their kills.
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Picture of the Day
Loving this gradient of beauty berries.
