Making the green grade
Local pols score on environmentalists’ report cards
Call it the age of the report card. Children have to pass a standardized test to graduate from school, Top 10 lists abound for everything from all-time movies to worst hairdos of the past century, and TV shows live and die by the ratings they receive.
If it can’t be quantified…well, it might as well not matter.
It’s the same for elected leaders, who see scores of scorecards issued after their legislative sessions end. Designed like voter guides with a narrow focus, such reports scrutinize all the big issues—business, health care and the environment, to name a few.
Among the most recent of State and local interest is a report card released this month by the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, which for the past four years has rated State lawmakers’ environmental records.
The league, a lobbying arm for nonpartisan environmental groups that can’t make political contributions without losing their non-profit status, looks at key floor and committee votes it perceives as decisive and uses them to issue a score—from 0 percent to 100 percent—for each member of the General Assembly. The results are posted online at www.valcv.org.
Not surprisingly, lawmakers from the Charlottesville area, where sprawl-control and land preservation are hot tickets, faired better than average. Democratic State Delegate Mitchell Van Yahres, an arborist who owns a tree-pruning and -cutting business, got a solid 86 percent, raising his four-year cumulative percentages to 83 from 71. Republican Delegate Robert Bell dropped a notch this year, to 64 percent from 67 percent, but beat out most in his GOP cohort.
And State Senator Creigh Deeds, a Democrat who likes to say he lives "in the country," scored a perfect 100 percent, earning the "Legislative Hero" title from the conservation league. But even he takes the praise with a dose of reserve.
"I’m pleased to have been honored," he says, "but you have to keep this stuff in perspective. The AFL-CIO grades lawmakers. So do Pat Robertson’s people. You can’t think about how you’re going to be scored on votes before you take them."
Political observers say elected officials love to shy away from scorecard results, good or bad, because tooting their own horn on one platform could come back to bite them in the rear on another. But local environmentalists say this report and others like it help voters who yearn for objective data on issues they care about.
"Politicians like to say it doesn’t really count," says Kay Slaughter, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center and former City Councilor. "They all say, ‘I’m for apple pie. I’m for the environment.’ But this gives people something to really talk about. This is their record. You can look at it and get a pretty good sense of where they are."
Slaughter, who stresses her organization doesn’t endorse or support any candidates, was herself the subject of a vote tallied in this year’s environmental report card. The House committee measure effectively preserved her post on the state’s Water Control Board.
It may have sent a message that conservationists can’t be kept out of the Commonwealth’s regulatory loop, but it’s also a good example of the relatively few and nuanced votes from which the scorecard draws its hard-number conclusions.
Another such vote included a successful bill that paves the way for the State to buy land for a future interstate highway, I-73, which the Virginia League of Conservation Voters opposed. It was the only "wrong" vote on Van Yahres’ report card.
He says he supported the bill not because he’s in favor of the new highway, but because he likes to "keep our options open." The fact that the acquisition is also a good investment for the State doesn’t hurt, Van Yahres says.
Lisa Guthrie is director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters and the brains behind the scorecard. She says she has already begun to see legislators use the report as a campaign tool, a good sign of its effectiveness. Still, she acknowledges the shortcomings behind using grade-school tactics to analyze a complex system.
"This is the best we can do in this situation," Guthrie says. "This is just a snapshot."—Robert Armengol
Tree of life
Tracing their roots, blacks can be torn about their master-slave ancestry
Until recently, Julian Burke considered himself the third in a line of Julian Burkes going back to his grandfather. But a few years ago, in the middle of a 10-year project to write his family history, Burke stumbled onto a long-lost family secret––his light-skinned great-grandfather, also named Julian Burke, had renounced his blackness, married a white woman and lived the rest of his life as a white man.
"It was the first time anybody in my family knew there was a fourth Julian Burke. He had to shun his black family, and my grandfather held that against him the rest of his life," says Burke. "My grandfather never spoke of his father again after that."
Earlier this month, as the descendants of Monticello slave Sally Hemings gathered at Monticello, the contentious matter of her sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson again took the stage. The Hemings clan has been in recent years the most visible symbol of the intimate conflict between slavery, racism and family ties. But many blacks of less famous parentage wrestle with identity questions arising from their blood relationships to men who enslaved their ancestors.
"It’s very, very common," says Burke, who founded the Charlottesville-Albemarle African-American Genealogy Group to help blacks trace their family histories.
In Burke’s own case, for instance, after continued research, he uncovered an 1810 inventory of slaves owned by William Fitzhugh at Chatham Plantation in Stafford. It includes the values of 22-year-old Billy Burke, Julian’s great-great-great-grandfather, who was worth $400; and his 52-year-old father, Lewis, worth $200.
A white man named James Burke owned a nearby plantation, and his son, Silas, became overseer for Lewis’ family. For that reason, Julian Burke believes his family is a branch of the James Burke clan. "I don’t have proof of that, but it’s very likely," he says.
Tracing black history is very different than tracing white history, says Burke. "Because of record keeping and literacy, white histories can go back ad infinitum. With blacks you have that wall of slavery," says Burke. If a person’s descendants were kept by a wealthy owner, as Burke’s were, there may be records of their age and values. But since all slaves were given new names, the trail always goes cold.
"You don’t know your African or West Indian ancestors. That name is lost forever," says Burke, who has recorded the history of both sides of his family in a pair of 400-page volumes called Lest We Forget: A Tribute to My Ancestors.
Josh Rothman, who earned his Ph.D. at UVA and now teaches history at the University of Alabama, has just written a book about interracial sexual relations in slave-era Virginia. While it was technically illegal for blacks and whites to fornicate, it was also exceedingly common, especially between masters and slaves.
"Whites knew it happened all the time," says Rothman. "If you were genteel, you didn’t joke about it, but it made great gossip."
Families who discover interracial ancestry react variously, says Rothman. Some blacks are outraged, some whites feel tainted. Other times, both sides are excited by the discovery.
"It changes how they see themselves, and how they see their families," Rothman says. "It raises some deep psychological issues."
Back in North Garden, Burke now performs genealogical research for others. He helped Lenora McQueen, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, to trace her family history back to some of Central Viringia’s largest plantations—Redlands, Carter, Hardware. McQueen says her family’s oral tradition connects them to the Hemings-Jefferson bloodline, but her research hasn’t yielded any conclusive proof.
McQueen, the daughter of a black father and German mother, says she has communicated online with some of her white relatives in Albemarle’s Lewis family. "I think I’m related to half the County," she says. "They’ve all been very accepting…as far as I can tell."
The master-slave origins of her family provoke mixed feelings, she says. On one hand, she says, it hurts to think of her ancestors kidnapped from their homes and shipped to America like animals. She does not know whether the relationships were consensual, but according to her research the masters sometimes left money and property to their mixed-race children.
"It’s very confusing. It’s hard to know what to think," McQueen says. "I look at the slave masters as family. There is actual blood between us." ––John Borgmeyer
Art from the heart
Tim Rollins on the craft of high-octane teaching
In the early 1980s, conceptual artist Tim Rollins, UVA’s Arts Board Resident Artist for 2003, took a public school teaching job in South Bronx, New York. Raised in rural Maine, the experience was one he calls "a real eye-opener"—wild dogs, broken windows, crumbling school building walls and crack use running rampant. After the first day, Rollins promised himself he’d stay only two weeks.
But that’s not how it worked out. More than 20 years later, Rollins still calls South Bronx home, continuing to spread the word with his Art and Knowledge Workshop, appropriately nicknamed K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), around the United States and the world.
With numerous works of K.O.S. art hanging in more than 50 museum collections worldwide, K.O.S. is now recognized as an artistic saving grace among kids who hate school, but long for creativity in their lives.
The rest is art history.
Kathryn E. Goodson talked with Rollins, who was recently appointed Distinguished Professor at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, on the final day of his three-day multimedia workshop for UVA Art Museum, "Summer Arts @ the Museum 2003." An edited transcript of that interview follows.
Kathryn E. Goodson: How did you get into this notion of saving kids through art?
Tim Rollins: When you see people with those weird bumper stickers that say "Art works" or "Art saves" or whatever it might be, it’s truly no joke. For children who are academically at risk—art works.
With the K.O.S. kids in South Bronx, they needed this program, and I’m from Maine, where if you need a barn, you build a barn. So we built the program. We raised money, used my salary and got a small seed grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. I was so angry that these kids were just being tossed aside that I got them painting. I used a high-energy teaching method and mixed works of art with the classics of English literature. The kids loved it, sometimes staying until 9 at night and coming in on the weekends.
But the work is no good if I’m the only one doing it. Workshops like this must be everywhere and open to everyone, not solely the kids that can afford it. Arts need to be the core of every curriculum.
You’ve conducted multimedia arts workshops with kids from Lawrence, Kansas, to the Navajo Nation, to Tjorn, Sweden. How would you rate the job we’re doing with Charlottesville kids in relation to the arts?
It feels good to me. I love the idea that the UVA Art Museum makes such a connection with a broad range of kids in this area through the making of art. I also love Southern kids—they’re so much more polite than their Northern counterparts. But they’re also surprisingly open, enthusiastic and eager to try new things.
I have to say that the last time I was visiting in March and April, Charlottesville High School was putting on its version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was really outstanding. If that’s any indication of the level of excellence, then yes, it’s a good job.
Some of your workshops, including the Summer Arts program at UVA, focused on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What’s the reason to interweave an art program with plays?
As far as using A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I love kids’ initial excitement about plays—they immediately detect the magic of the complex plots. I always want to recreate that through art. In this group for instance, the kids watched the play and instantly all of them related to the character of Puck. So I had them find a flower—a magical flower unlike any other—and through drawing and painting they created their flower onto the pages of the play, and all the individual pieces the kids made will be displayed as one large work here at the Museum in the fall.
Someone recently remarked to me that my classroom was like a Pentecostal tent revival. My teaching style involves a lot of drama and energy, certainly. But teaching for me is not only a gift, it’s a calling. I use teaching as a medium.
Solomon’s choice
Venable dilemma pits two bad ideas against each other
A diluted form of busing—that relic of the desegregated South—apparently continues in the City, and school officials have proposed a solution that could itself engender new problems. On July 17 at 7pm, the City School Board will meet to discuss a redistricting proposal that affects roughly 24 students from the 10th Street/Grady Avenue neighborhood, an area predominantly poor and black. Rather than walking to class at Venable Elementary on 14th Street, these students attend Greenbrier Elementary, distantly located off 29 North, where, it is generally understood, they benefit from smaller teacher-student ratios than obtain at Venable. The children of the 10th Street/Grady Avenue neighborhood, who it is proposed should begin attending Venable in August, have been subject to a lengthy bus ride to Greenbrier since at least the early 1980s, according to Ron Hutchinson, superintendent of City schools.
"I think probably racial and socioeconomic factors were taken into consideration," Hutchinson says of the way district lines were drawn back then. "It would be speculation on my part that those factors were involved."
Speculation also surrounds the timing of the proposed remediation.
"The only reason that I know is what school board members have stated publicly," says Venable Principal Malcolm Jerrell, "that students who live as close to Venable as these students should have the option of attending their neighborhood school."
Off the record, some Venable parents who question the wisdom of the proposed change intimate that School Board members want to urbanize Venable, which consistently outperforms other City schools on standardized tests and has relatively few poor children on its rolls.
But the School Board’s official reasoning for wanting to redistrict the 24 kids has more to do with the students’ convenience than the tangled issues of race and class.
"The reason it came forth is the proximity to the school," says Linda Bowen, chairperson of the City School Board. "It just did not make sense that these kids are being bused right past Venable to Greenbrier."
Still, Venable’s current ratio of students to teachers might most concern all parents involved. The school’s strained human resources, a point made clear by the table at right, is matched by a lack of physical space to accommodate new classes.
"Right now what we would have to do is turn the staff workroom into a classroom if an additional class were added," says Jarrell.
Hutchinson insists that if these new students were to be incorporated into Venable, classes would stay well within Virginia’s standards of quality, the State’s acceptable student-to-teacher ratios for each grade.
None of the officials seemed particularly concerned about either the influx of new students—a number consistently depicted as comparatively small, despite the overhaul of a staff workroom—or the implications of redistributing a group of poor black children into a school where sheer numbers suggest they’ll get less individual attention.
"A lot of people are assuming things," says Dede Smith, the co-chair of the City School Board. "Those who have voiced concerns are overestimating the impact."—Aaron Carico