Tuesday, February 15
Warner: Darden prof is “outstanding”
Governor Mark Warner today recognized Dr. Ed Freeman, professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business, as one of 11 recipients of the Outstanding Faculty Award, the highest honor for faculty at Virginia’s public colleges and universities. Freeman responded humbly, telling C-VILLE, “It’s easy to teach when you have great students.” Freeman specializes in ethics in business, as suggested by his loquaciously titled 10th book, How Firms Can Be Profitable and Leave Our Children A Living Planet. Freeman’s award will earn him $5,000; bet he won’t spend it at Wal-Mart.
Wednesday, February 16
Miffed county parents can relax
Albemarle parents ruffled over County plans to redistrict the school system woke up happy this morning. Last night, the Albemarle School Board’s long-range planning committee decided to postpone any major redistricting decisions, following public uproar over their proposals one week earlier. Earlier this month, parents from northern and western neighborhoods denounced plans to send their kids to Monticello High School instead of Western Albemarle. If the School Board adopts the committee’s proposals next month, parents will see few changes in the school districting come fall.
Alston sentence upheld in Sisk killing
Judge Edward L. Hogshire today formally sentenced former UVA biology major Andrew Alston to the three years in prison recommended by a jury last November for the November 8, 2003 murder of 22-year-old Free Union volunteer firefighter Walker Sisk. Additionally, Hogshire recommended three years of supervision for Alston in his Pennsylvania hometown upon release from jail. As part of the hearing, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jon R. Zug played for the judge a profanity-filled snippet from a call Alston placed to his mother immediately following the verdict last fall. In it, Alston says, “Fuck you, Jon Zug,” which Zug argued, proves Alston is “not the angel he’s been portrayed as” by the defense.
Longtime disability advocate dies at 97
Maria Miller, founder of the regional unit of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, died today at 97. According to a statement released by RBD, in 1958 Miller and her husband, Ralph, founded the Virginia Unit of Recording for the Blind, as it was then known, in a small office on Main Street. Three weeks ago, Miller had been honored at a fundraising ball where it was announced that RBD’s new building would be named in her honor.
Thursday, February 17
Senate committee blocks anti-abortion bills
Thanks to the Senate Education and Health Committee, three bills aimed at restricting access to abortion that sailed through Virginia’s House of Delegates were killed today before reaching the full Senate. Among the bills: a measure requiring doctors to tell women that fetuses more than 20 weeks old could feel pain and to administer anesthesia during the procedure; a measure prohibiting the sale of post-abortion fetal tissue; and a measure requiring that abortion clinics be outfitted like out-patient hospitals.
Friday, February 18
NAACP urges parents to step up
Declaring “African-American children in Charlottesville are dying” because of a school system that fails them, M. Rick Turner, the flame-throwing dean of African-American Affairs at UVA and recently elected president of the local NAACP, exhorted black parents to rise up to their responsibilities as “the primary educators” of their children. “White folks are not going to educate your children,” Turner said to a gathering of about 140 people at Pilgrim Baptist Church called by the NAACP. Turner, who has regularly used School Board meetings to cast allegations of racism, even comparing white parents and teachers to Klansmen as recently as Tuesday evening, said tonight, “I know full well that every white citizen in the Charlottesville community is not racist.”
Saturday, February 19
ACC champs win at home
The UVA baseball team took all three of this weekend’s games against Bucknell, the first home series for the ACC champs.
Sunday, February 20
Dave’s O.K. at the box office
Dave Matthews got good news this evening as his film debut, the PG-rated Because of Winn-Dixie, was crowned the weekend’s top-grossing family film. Although it debuted well behind the top two films—Will Smith’s rom-com, Hitch, and Keanu Reeves’ supernatural thriller, Constantine, which both grossed more than $30 million—Winn-Dixie’s third-place $10.8 million finish was enough to best its main competition, the kid-oriented Son of the Mask.
Monday, February 21
Garden plot rentals open
City and County offices are closed today for Presidents’ Day, but when the Charlottesville Parks and Recreation Department reopens tomorrow, it will offer an early sign of spring, taking applications from area residents for garden plot rentals. Call 970-3592 for information.
“Idol” moments
Tonight, Travis Tucker, a 21-year-old UVA student, joins the other 11 male semifinalists to compete for America’s affection—and votes—on Fox TV’s “American Idol.” Tucker was the final male contestant selected last Wednesday to continue in the singing competition. He’ll find out what America thought of him during Wednesday’s 9pm live installment.
Written by Cathy Harding from news sources and staff reports.
Burst of energy in the anti-nuke movement
Proposed new plants spur debate in Louisa
A lot of people may not know there are two nuclear reactors on Lake Anna in Louisa County, just 30 miles east of Charlottesville. Soon there could be two more, if Dominion Virginia Power and the Bush Administration get their way.
That’s right, a federal effort to revive the nuclear industry is getting started right here in Central Virginia. As previously reported in C-VILLE [“Reactor reaction,” January 11], in December Richmond-based Dominion Energy Resources, Inc. (which provides Charlottesville’s power) became the first U.S. company to receive a regulatory recommendation for a new reactor site permit.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says Lake Anna is environmentally suitable for two new reactors. If the NRC proceeds to grant Dominion a site permit at Lake Anna, it will give the nation’s largest energy company permission to move toward building two new reactors.
The nuclear revival is also stoking new anti-nuke protests. On Thursday, February 17, the NRC held a public hearing on its environmental impact statement for the Lake Anna facility at Louisa County Middle School. About 200 protesters and nuclear advocates packed the auditorium to argue the pros and cons of nuclear power.
“This is the first proposed facility in 30 years, so all the people who worked on this throughout the 1970s are getting involved,” says Lois Gibbs, who is something of a celebrity in the local anti-nuke crowd. In 1976, as president of the Love Canal Homeowners Association in Niagara Falls, New York, Gibbs discovered that a chemical company had buried toxic waste near her neighborhood. Four years later the case prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to develop its Superfund for cleanup of toxic sites around the country.
Now Gibbs is director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice in Falls Church. Hers is one of the many groups that turned out to oppose new nuclear reactors in Louisa County. “I suspect this crowd will get larger and larger, at least on the opposition side,” says Gibbs.
But the opposition will have to make a lot of noise to derail nuclear power, which has become very cozy with the Bush Administration.
Two years ago the Department of Energy introduced a program called Nuclear Power 2010, with the goal of building a new reactor in America by the end of the decade. Perhaps as a thank-you, the nuclear industry last year contributed $42.6 million to politicians, with about $32 million going to Republicans, according to Forbes magazine.
Since a meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979 and the Chernobyl explosion in 1986, the nuclear industry has been on the rocks in America. But with a volatile worldwide petroleum market and high costs for air pollution control on coal plants, Bush plans to make nuclear power a “major component” of America’s power supply, according to The White House’s 2001 National Energy Policy.
Guess who’s going to help pay for this nuclear renaissance? According to Forbes, the Bush plan calls for taxpayers to fund engineering costs, as the industry angles for direct loans from the government. Congress has chipped energy companies $64 million in recent years to pay for the kind of permitting work that’s going on in Louisa right now. Forbes predicts Congress will toss the industry another $1.8 billion this year to help get the concrete flowing on new nuclear power plants.
Protestors are making their case, however. A Charlottesville group called People’s Alliance for Clean Energy (PACE) has teamed up with Washington-based watchdogs at Public Citizen to challenge the NRC’s site permits, arguing that Dominion’s application ignored alternative energy sources and failed to consider how the new reactor would affect striped bass in Lake Anna.
On Thursday, about two-thirds of those who spoke opposed the nuclear reactors, citing everything from property values, danger from meltdowns and terrorist attacks, radiation, nuclear waste and the health of Lake Anna. It’s not just liberal outcry, either—on February 8 the Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution opposing the site permit.
And the nuclear industry has mounted a noisy counter-protest. A Richmond-based group called the North American Young Generation in Nuclear has recently formed to shout back at no-nukes protestors. On Thursday NAYGN Vice President Lisa Shell denounced the “scare tactics” of “career anti-nuclear ideologues.”
Indeed, the propaganda flew fast and furious from both sides in the middle school auditorium, and the storm will likely continue. The NRC will take public comment on the proposed site permit until March 1. You can see the NRC recommendations for the site permit at www.nrc.org and at the Louisa County Library.—John Borgmeyer
Small change
Superintendent revises budget, but communication problems remain
The curriculum coordinators are out. The gym teachers and guidance counselors are in.
In the simplest terms, that’s the story of the revised 2005-2006 budget that Charlottesville Schools Superintendent Scottie Griffin presented to the School Board on Tuesday, February 15, three weeks before it’s due to City Council. While she continues to emphasize that curriculum across the division’s nine schools needs to be aligned, Griffin seems to have bent to some demands of outspoken parents and educators. She has turned those coordination duties over to existing teachers within the division who will be paid stipends for the extra work. In so doing, she has freed up about $293,000 in her revised $58 million budget and salvaged the jobs of the two guidance counselors and three P.E. teachers she previously wanted to eliminate.
But if Griffin’s budget could be said somehow to represent a step forward, there were plenty of steps backward on Tuesday night, too, leaving the impression overall that Griffin and the Board may be doing too little too late.
Griffin’s first budget, presented on January 19, spurred much public outcry as it signaled the kind of Central Office consolidation that, many argue, doesn’t necessarily translate to better test scores. Griffin and the School Board have repeatedly stressed that her first task is to raise the achievement of Charlottesville’s underperforming students, most of whom are poor and African-American. The Commonwealth mandates that 70 percent of students pass certain standardized tests, known as the SOLs, and four of the city’s schools have narrowly missed the benchmarks. Griffin, who was hired in July, has not publicly clarified how widespread spending—rather than expenditures targeted solely on the kids who need it most—would close the achievement gap. She didn’t offer much of an explanation last Tuesday night, either. Indeed, Melissa Schraeder, a first-year instructional assistant at Greenbrier Elementary, who made a point of praising Griffin for the impression she made on Schraeder on the first day of school, implored the Superintendent and Board for an explanation.
“In the last four School Board meetings, the achievement gap has not been addressed,” she said. “If someone would show me how the budget closes the achievement gap, I would appreciate it.”
Surprisingly, Griffin’s new budget also includes cuts in preschool spending that total about $119,000 and which, on the surface, seem to contradict her stated goal. Early childhood education is widely regarded as crucial to improving the performance of poor children in school.
Still, Griffin must have considered some of the other criticisms of her first budget. She restored a dean of students position and an assistant principal position, for example, at the city’s upper elementary and middle schools. She also incorporated better raises for everyone in the division, including classified staff that had gotten next to nothing in her first budget (in contrast to the first budget, Griffin also wrote herself a raise of $4,356 this time, to bring her salary to $153,540).
Griffin and the School Board have been criticized on many fronts during the past several months, most notably their mismanagement of public discourse. Parents, teachers and principals have complained about being cut out of the communication loop. And the last three School Board meetings have featured the kind of invective name-calling that would get most students a one-way ticket to the principal’s office. The situation had gotten so bad that by early last week Mayor David Brown went public with his criticisms, telling
C-VILLE that School Board Chair Dede Smith should be replaced in that role.
Yet on Tuesday night, the second verse was just like the first. M. Rick Turner, the new head of the local NAACP, took twice the time allotted to speakers (Smith routinely allows Turner to exceed the five-minute time limit) to repeat his allegations that racism underlies the criticisms of Griffin. “All of Dr. Griffin’s recommendations to upgrade the schools have been denied by the majority of the School Board…because of a program of white control that is tantamount to the Ku Klux Klan,” Turner said.
If Smith felt especially motivated to make a clear step forward on a day when she’d been rebuked for letting communication problems spin out of control, she didn’t show it. She said nothing in response to Turner. Griffin, as is her habit, also remained silent after Turner’s remarks. Instead, it took straight-shooting Board member Peggy Van Yahres to voice outrage at Turner’s characterizations. “To call our staff racist makes me sick,” she said. “I think the Board needs to apologize and the Superintendent needs to apologize for the utter chaos in our system.
“We all know we have systematic problems,” she continued. “We are never going to get [to a solution] with this kind of leadership from the Board and the Superintendent.”
Vice-Chair Julie Gronlund later suggested that the School Board would not conduct an election for a new Chair to replace Smith, despite Mayor Brown’s unequivocal recommendation. “We are all responsible for what is going on,” she says. “To blame one member is unfair.”
It’s probably safe to assume, in that case, that the next budget work session, on Thursday, February 24, will feature a similar forward-backward dynamic. The issue then is whether the steps forward will be decisive enough to answer the lingering questions, What is going on in the school division, and, Why can’t people talk about it in civil tones? The School Board will hear one hour of public comment starting at 5pm on that night in the Charlottesville High School Media Center.—Cathy Harding