The opera adaptation of Charles Blow's memoir made history as the first opera by a Black composer. Photo: Supplied photo
On fire: Growing up in rural Louisiana, journalist Charles Blow never imagined his life story would one day be portrayed on the world’s most popular opera stage. His memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, a treacherous story of dysfunction and abuse, opened the 2021-22 Metropolitan Opera season. The adaptation by Grammy Award–winning jazz musician and composer Terence Blanchard made history as the first opera by a Black composer (and Black librettist Kasi Lemmons). Victory Hall Opera’s Miriam Gordon-Stewart hosts a lecture before The Met: Live in HD screening.
Saturday 10/23. $18-25, 12:55pm. The Paramount Theater, 103 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. theparamount.net.
Josh Dorman says his complex dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, a 1998 record by Neutral Milk Hotel. Photo: Eze Amos
Questions of intent and meaning loom palpably over a pair of exhibitions at Second Street Gallery: Josh Dorman’s “how strange it is to be anything at all” and “Dirty Mirror” by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack. Both shows invite extended scrutiny because the artists take unconventional approaches to their chosen forms of expression. Expect to have long looks, but be aware that conclusions may vary: Prepare to be confounded or frustrated or fascinated or delighted—or all of the above.
On the walls of Second Street’s main space, Dorman helpfully admits the open-ended intent of his art, yet he lays his muse bare from the get-go anyway: the 1998 record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. He says that his complex explosive dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to the album and “derive a poetic inspiration” from its “language and internal logic.” Dorman himself—and indeed, a consensus across the internet—believes that the words of the band’s visionary Jeff Magnum are beyond any rational explanation. Where does that leave us?
If that squirrelly meaning best defines the indie rock influence for his work, it’s admittedly difficult to draw direct parallels to the Neutral Milk Hotel songs beyond the borrowed titles and lyrical phrases. At least for me it is, since my familiarity with the group pretty much begins and ends in knowing it’s the favorite band of April Ludgate from “Parks and Recreation.
No matter, though, because there’s a great deal to digest and decipher. In a way, Dorman’s shiny resin-coated ink, acrylic, and antique paper on wood panels are reminiscent of the nightmare fauna in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Faceless human busts lurk, headless animals and beasts hewn of later industrial age debris plunge ass-over-head into waterfalls, helplessly ride conveyor belts, and foolishly climb precarious cliffs. They navigate worlds with opaque perspectives: a pastiche of landscapes folding upon themselves with blueprint guidelines tussling for space against mountain crags while classical columns hover over railway bridges.
Tapestries and cushions, by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack, are currently on display in Second Street’s Dové Gallery. Photo: Eze Amos
Dorman’s most uniquely effective device is his use of depth. What might function as a decorative gimmick in a lesser artist’s hands provides one of the strongest arguments to visit Second Street to see these works in person, as two-dimensional photos fail to capture them. Some employ an inward layering of resin to form swirling wave pools, active insect nests, or in “Villa of the Mysteries” (2018), a flesh-eating cauldron rife with capillary-like root growth. His mix of painting with collage reflects a mind at play—in “Excavating Babel” (2020), Dorman recasts the scissored relics of aged book illustrations into a city of no particular century, pointing its mismatched spires into the nebulous belly of an improbable sky. Psychedelic, sure. But there’s more than simple trippiness here. The problem—or the solution, maybe—is that any kind of narrative will likely only reveal itself to the individual. Like hundreds of Rorschach tests exposed at once, each piece defies you to focus.
More uneven cityscapes await in Second Street’s intimate Dové Gallery, where Doyle and McCormack trade tapestries and cushions. That’s not a putdown, because for all the textile in the space, the products of their handiwork are not what anyone would sanely call comforting.
Textile art rarely trades in urban grit as thoroughly as Doyle does here, with figures striding atop strata of subterranean profundity that is home to a bestiary of surprising beings engulfed in murky topographies. Angry sexuality pops out in the nude flipping us the bird in “Six Feet High” (2018). Others construct hazier moods and dare us to trust our eyes. An outsized female treads upon a sewer grate that leads into a striped-horizon fantasy world, while in “The Witness” (2017), a face lords over high rises and under a graffiti tag-style rendering of the word “SEEN,” while further below, a rift unearths deep space and a passing satellite. “Ebbflow” (2015) features a shadow crossing a starry field, but beneath it, another time and/or another location is let loose.
The deliberately irregular shapes of the tapestries themselves are creations as personal as the artist’s relationship with urban life. And a second connection to Dorman emerges in the difficulty of determining our point of view: Here, too, staking out temporal and geographic assurance is a bitch.
McCormack, Doyle’s show partner, brings an ironic hand to crocheted bird skeletons (“Thicket I & II,” 2020, “Swim Team,” 2021) and lusty westerners (“Libidinous Drifter,” 2021), as well as smirkingly provocative textual pieces like “You Know He Told Everyone” (2021), a banner proclaiming “Edging” (“Modesty Blanket,” 2021), and a pillow topped by a handgun appliqué (“Sweet Dreams,” 2021). McCormack’s works encourage speculation like good gossip; the phrases concoct a humorous, sinister theme that carries the immediate intrigue of overhearing a single line of a passerby fighting with someone on the phone. And as far as stitched pillow messages go, ”Live, Laugh, Love” this ain’t.
“how strange it is to be anything at all” Josh Dorman & “Dirty Mirror” Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack
Retired library workers, Nancy Key, Mary Barbour, and Carolyn Allen, tell their stories in Lorenzo Dickerson’s documentary, Free and Open to the Public. The film debuts at The Paramount Theater on October 21. Photo: Courtesy of Maupintown Media
The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library is the subject of Free and Open to the Public, a film documenting its 100-year history, and the Maupintown Media production offers something most organizations would rather avoid: an unvarnished look at a checkered past.
“The library was looking at its 100 years of service and the current state of public libraries in America…and that is something we want to celebrate and commemorate,” JMRL Director David Plunkett says. “But considering those 100 years, especially in Charlottesville and in the South, it was important for the library to tell a story about the institution. So while the organization now is free and open to the public and libraries are for everyone, there was a time when the institution was only for white families.”
Filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson crafted Free and Open to the Public as a companion piece to JMRL’s “Celebrating 100 Years” exhibit, now on display at its downtown Central Branch. The exhibit traces the library’s history starting in 1916, when Virginia had fewer libraries than any other U.S. state. The local library network was launched in 1919 with a gift of land, one building, and books. The institution opened two years later.
Not a single Black person stepped into a JMRL building until 1934, however, when administrators made the library at the Jefferson School its Fourth Street Branch, which was open to Charlottesville’s African American population.
In 1942, JMRL officially integrated, closing its Fourth Street Branch and ostensibly opening its main location to people of color. Few Blacks actually used the library, though, and it was 10 years before JMRL hired its first African American employee. According to JMRL, the Gordon Avenue Branch’s opening in 1966 “marked a turning point in the integration of the public library system.”
Still, almost 60 years later, JMRL and libraries across the country are reckoning with program, personnel, and content diversity. As a filmmaker focused on social justice issues and African American history in and around Charlottesville, Dickerson is well suited to grapple with the library system’s issues through the years.
“It was a part of the plan from the beginning to tell a truthful and complete story of the library,” Dickerson says. “Over time, the library has become more intentional with the collections they offer the community. It’s certainly grown to be a more inclusive space over its 100 years.”
Dickerson’s film, which was not made available in full prior to its debut this month, promises to bring life and color to its companion exhibit. It will include interviews with former library employees and community members, trace the timeline of the library’s history, display vintage video and photography from multiple library branches, and tell stories to illuminate the past.
Nancy Key, a retired member of the Central Branch’s cataloguing department, talks of meeting longtime JMRL administrator Roland Buford as a child, and later working with him. Ruth Klippstein, former Scottsville Branch children’s librarian, tells the tale of bringing a domesticated wolf into the library for a kids’ program—and fearing that at any moment the animal would tear loose. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t.)
And of course, there are stories of regular folks and their love of books and libraries.
“Where I lived, it was walking distance,” former Gordon Avenue Branch librarian Mary Barbour says in a clip provided by Dickerson. “I think I spent most of my life in the library, especially the children’s area, reading books. Didn’t check ’em out. But then finally—I guess I was showing up so much—the librarian there [said], ‘I think you need a library card.’”
Plunkett says he hopes Dickerson’s film and the Central Branch in-person exhibit will bring more foot traffic to the library, which has flagged since COVID-19 struck—the pandemic being another era of JMRL’s history covered in Free and Open to the Public.
And the JMRL centennial might also serve to bring more attention to Dickerson’s work, something Plunkett says the library has celebrated for many years.
Dickerson and his Maupintown Media production company have produced six original documentaries detailing Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s race relations, each shining a light on a little-understood historical niche. There’s Color Line of Scrimmage, chronicling the 1956 Burley High School football team and its undefeated and unscored upon championship season, Anywhere But Here, about 13 African American men incarcerated in Charlottesville, and Byrdland, which tracks a formerly enslaved family from the plantation to their own land.
“JMRL has shown many of Lorenzo’s films at the library and hosted discussions,” Plunkett says. “We are longtime admirers. He just has the ability to tell a very personal and local story, but it resonates with what is happening in America.”
The Future Land Use Map will be a guiding document for the city as it figures out which neighborhoods are fit for denser housing. Photo: City of Charlottesville
Map moves ahead
The process of rewriting Charlottesville’s Comprehensive plan—and, subsequently, reevaluating the zoning for the entire city—took a major step forward last week, when the Planning Commission unanimously recommended that City Council approve the most recent draft of the Future Land Use Map.
The Future Land Use Map shows which areas of the city could be sites for denser housing. The map has been under discussion throughout the summer, drawing thousands of comments from residents who have ideas about how Charlottesville should grow.
The Planning Commission’s recommended map would allow for increased housing density in many neighborhoods. In the new map, much of the city is designated General Residential (bright yellow, right). General Residential areas allow four units per lot, on the condition that the fourth unit is affordable.
In some other corridors, plots that are currently zoned R-1—allowing for only one unit—will be designated Medium Intensity Residential (mustard yellow, right). On Medium Intensity Residential lots, builders will be able to construct buildings of up to 12 units, as well as detached accessory dwelling units and townhouses. If your street is colorful, it doesn’t mean the city is going to come seize your house and tear it down to build an apartment. The map is a loose guide to what could be allowed in the future.
In earlier drafts, some residential areas had Mixed-Use Nodes, which would have allowed for small chunks of commerce amidst the houses and apartments. Many of those nodes have been removed. Additionally, sensitive community designations have been added, meaning in some areas developers will have to build a higher percentage of affordable units.
City Council will decide whether or not to move forward with the map at its November 15 meeting. Watch this space for additional coverage of the Comprehensive Plan process throughout the fall.
Art from war
Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue was removed from Market Street Park on July 10. Photo: Eze Amos
Confederate statues, once removed from their pedestals, present a tricky problem. Where do you put the unsightly hunks of bronze? Do you leave them in storage forever? Do you donate them to a person or organization that wants them and might allow them to live another life as a rallying point for hate?
The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has an innovative answer to these problems. It’s submitted a bid to take ownership of the recently removed Robert E. Lee statue. Then, it’ll melt the monument down.
The project, Swords into Plowshares, will call upon an artist-in-residence to repurpose the bronze material to create a new public art installation.
Dr. Andrea Douglas, executive director of JSAAHC, said in a press release that she views SIP as “Charlottes-ville’s opportunity to lead by creating a road map that can be followed by other communities that wish to impact history.”
The project will invite input from the descendants of enslaved persons who were disenfranchised by Virginia’s constitution, which entrenched Jim Crow rule. It will seek to represent the community’s desire for ”value-driven, socially-just objects in our public spaces,” Douglas says.
Swords into Plowshares has already raised over $500,000, and is supported by many local and national organizations, including Descendants of Enslaved Communities of the University of Virginia and the Equal Justice Initiative.
The city has received numerous offers from organizations that wish to claim the Lee and Jackson statues, which were taken down on July 10. City Council has until January 13 to make a decision.
In brief
Couric’s confessional
Katie Couric. Photo: Yahoo news
UVA’s prized alum Katie Couric found herself in hot water recently, when it was revealed that her new autobiography includes first-person accounts of multiple less-than-flattering moments. Couric confessed that she withheld inflammatory remarks from a 2016 interview she conducted with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, concerning Black athletes’ decision to kneel during the National Anthem.
It was previously published that the justice called the gesture “dumb and disrespectful,” but Couric said this week that Ginsburg also said the athletes showed “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.” Couric admitted she intended to protect RBG, because the sitting Supreme Court justice was “elderly and probably didn’t fully understand the question.”
Back to the well(ness)
UVA’s new student health center on Brandon Avenue has received more than just a face lift: In fact, the building itself is said to have healing powers. According to Jamie Leonard, director of the Office of Health Promotion, the building was designed to “help physiologically change somebody” as they enter it. Natural wood, hues of blue, and plenty of sunlight offers “a significant mood-booster,” according to a UVA Today article about the space. The four-story building includes a revamped Department of Kinesiology and a pharmacy as well as a wellness suite, reflection rooms, and designated quiet spaces for introverted students. The space even features a state-of-the-art testing kitchen, where students can go to learn how to make healthy meals. Are you feeling better yet?
Jason Kessler (center) and two dozen other Unite the Right organizers and participants go on trial October 25 in Sines v. Kessler. Photo: Eze Amos
Four years after white supremacists invaded Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally, the biggest civil trial in federal court here starts October 25, and could last up to four weeks.
The case is Sines v. Kessler. Nonprofit Integrity First for America filed the complaint in October 2017 on behalf of victims of that violent August weekend. IFA’s strategy is simple: Make white nationalists and neo-Nazis pay for what the suit claims was a conspiracy to engage in racially motivated violence.
“It’s an incredibly ambitious case to bring justice,” says Heidi Beirich, co-founder of Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “A big chunk of organized white supremacy is being sued. I can’t think of another anti-hate case of this magnitude.”
The number of people involved in the case is huge: nine plaintiffs—and their pro bono attorneys, two dozen defendants and their attorneys, jurors, witnesses, court staff, and security. Citing COVID safety, Judge Norman Moon has ordered that they’re the only people allowed in the courtroom during the trial.
Citizens who want to follow the trial are relegated to a live audio feed. Reporters who secure credentials will watch a live video feed from another room in the courthouse.
Plaintiff Elizabeth Sines was a second-year UVA law student who survived both the August 11 tiki-torch march through UVA Grounds and neo-Nazi James Fields plowing his Dodge Charger through a crowd of celebratory counterprotesters August 12, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more.
Marcus Martin and fiancée Marissa Blair were on Fourth Street with their friend Heyer. Martin was captured suspended in mid-air in Ryan Kelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo. So was Thomas Baker, a conservation biologist who still cannot stand for long periods of time without pain. Fields’ car also struck UVA student Natalie Romero and crisis counselor Chelsea Alvarado, and, like plaintiffs April Muniz and the Reverend Seth Wispelwey, they still suffer from extreme emotional distress, according to the complaint.
The trial originally was scheduled for 2019, but has been delayed because some defendants have flouted orders to produce evidence. A judge has granted default judgments against seven defendants, including Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi founder of The Daily Stormer. An arrest warrant has been issued for his colleague Robert “Azzmador” Ray, who has blown off every court order.
Also earning default judgments are the Nationalist Front; the East Coast Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights, the military arm of the Proud Boys; FOAK leader Augustus Invictus; and the Loyal White Knights of the KKK, who protested in Charlottesville in July 2017.
The trial hasn’t started yet, but for the defendants, things are already falling apart.
The court has sanctioned Traditionalist Worker Party founder Matthew Heimbach, Unite the Right’s operations manager Elliott Kline, aka Eli Mosley, and neo-Nazi group Vanguard America and ordered them to pay the plaintiffs’ attorneys $41,000.
Wrote Judge Joel Hoppe, “For now it is enough to say that each Defendant disobeyed at least four separate orders to provide or permit discovery of materials within his control while the litigation slowed and everyone else’s costs piled up.”
Kline also was found in contempt and jailed last year. The plaintiffs won an adverse influence ruling against him, which means the jury will be instructed to assume that allegations the defendants “formed a conspiracy to commit the racial violence that led to the Plaintiffs’ varied injuries” are plausible, according to a court document.
The same ruling has been made against Azzmador Ray and the National Socialist Movement, and the plaintiffs are asking for adverse inference against Heimbach.
Some lawyers representing defendants have asked to be released because of nonpayment or failure to produce evidence, or have cited their client’s “repugnant” behavior in the case of Chris Cantwell, who threatened the plaintiffs’ lead attorney Roberta Kaplan.
Cincinnati attorney James Kolenich is listed on court documents representing a dozen defendants, but now his only clients are rally organizer Jason Kessler, Identity Evropa, and its founder, Nathan Damigo. Kolenich declined to comment about the case.
“Crying Nazi” Cantwell, who was ordered out of Virginia after pepper spraying counterprotesters at the Thomas Jefferson statue August 11 and currently is in prison for threating to rape the wife of a fellow white nationalist, will represent himself.
So will UVA grad Richard Spencer, who headed the National Policy Institute and was a poster boy for the alt-right. He told the court in June 2020 that the lawsuit was “financially crippling” and he can’t raise money because he’s been booted off so many platforms, according to IFA.
The suit is already having an impact, says Beirich. “Some of the groups sued are falling apart.” Spencer’s National Policy Institute is “basically defunct at this point,” she says. “Other groups like the League of the South have descended into infighting and ineffectiveness in the face of the lawsuit.”
Even Beirich, an expert in extremism for years with Southern Poverty Law Center, was shocked at the number of white supremacists who showed up in Charlottesville in August 2017. The suit is “bringing judgment for the victims of the biggest white supremacy rally in recent years,” she says.
“Sines v. Kessler basically said, ‘No, we are not going to let this continue,’” she says. “They’re holding so many different individuals and organizations, who orchestrated that horrible weekend in 2017 financially liable for their activities that caused so much great harm.”
Amy Hagstrom Miller says the future of reproductive rights in Virginia remains uncertain. Photo: Amy Smith
“Right now, Virginia is seen as a haven state,” says national abortion rights advocate Amy Hagstrom Miller. But all that could change with one Supreme Court decision, as Hagstrom Miller knows all too well: She’s lead plaintiff in the challenge to Texas’ Senate Bill 8, which is aimed at undermining the right to choose established in Roe v. Wade.
Hagstrom Miller is founder, president, and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, the operator of nine clinics offering gynecological services and abortions in five states, including Virginia-—Charlottesville became its corporate headquarters when her family moved here in 2016. She has been a leader in efforts around the country to fight outdated and restrictive abortion laws and regulations. In Virginia, her advocacy group, Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, worked with many other reproductive rights supporters to pass last year’s Reproductive Health Protection Act. The Virginia legislation repealed requirements for 24-hour waiting periods, medically unnecessary ultrasounds, biased counseling, and other restrictive provisions.
In other states, however, the anti-abortion lobby has been successful in passing burdensome and unnecessary requirements, so-called TRAP laws (Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers), and trigger laws designed to reinstate abortion bans in the event that Roe is struck down.
“It’s important to connect Virginia to the rest of the country,” Hagstrom Miller says. “Virginia will not be fine if Roe falls.”
Women’s health and reproductive rights have been Hagstrom Miller’s mission for almost 30 years. “[Whole Woman’s Health’s] main lane is providing the best possible reproductive health services,” she says, based on viewing abortion as just one part of the health care support system needed to enable women (and their partners) to make their own reproductive decisions.
“Almost 70 percent of our clients are parents already,” she notes. “Most of them [make the decision to] have an abortion because they can’t afford another child.” The real issue, in her view, is the need to make sex education, family planning, and reproductive health care available and affordable to all people. But apparently, that’s something that has to be fought for.
In 2013, Hagstrom Miller agreed to serve as lead plaintiff in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, challenging a Texas law requiring abortion providers to obtain local hospital admitting privileges, even though the great majority of abortions are not surgical procedures. By 2016, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down the law as imposing an undue burden and therefore unconstitutional, almost half of Texas’ abortion clinics had already been forced to close.
Texas’ latest anti-abortion effort, SB 8, prohibits abortion after six weeks (before most women even know they are pregnant) and allows citizens to bring “bounty hunter” lawsuits against anyone “aiding and abetting” an abortion. The Supreme Court’s refusal to issue an injunction while legal challenges to the law are under way was “shocking,” Hagstrom Miller says. “I was surprised that the Supreme Court issued this statement in a shadow docket, without a trial hearing.” The Supreme Court has agreed to review a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks. That legislation, in fact, was specifically designed to draw legal challenges and thus create an opportunity for the newly conservative court to overturn Roe.
With this heightened focus on anti-abortion efforts, Hagstrom Miller says Virginians can’t afford to be complacent about access to choice. The Reproductive Health Protection Act only passed when Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax cast his tie-breaking vote in the state Senate; restrictions on funding abortions for public employees or those on Medicaid are still in place.
With anti-abortion challenges likely next year, voting in November’s off-year elections (when voter turnout is historically much lower) is “critical,” says Hagstrom Miller. Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe promises to try to enshrine abortion protections in the Virginia Constitution, a process that requires a citizen referendum. Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, meanwhile, has said he’ll “go on offense” against abortion rights.
Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s four delegates are likely to vote along party lines on abortion rights. Statewide, the critical factor will be which party ends up in the majority. Democrats currently hold a 55-45 advantage in the House of Delegates, and a slim 21-19 edge in the state Senate. With one Democrat likely to vote with the GOP on abortion issues, whoever is in the lieutenant governor’s seat could be casting a tie-breaking vote.
“Abortion access has always been used as a political football,” says Hagstrom Miller. “It’s critical that we maintain these freedoms,” especially with the potential for Roe to be overturned or substantially eroded.
“I have a map hanging in my office that I’m looking at 24/7,” she says. The map shows abortion laws in each state. Only a few have codified the right to reproductive choice in their constitutions or through legislation. But 50 years ago, before Roe, abortion was illegal in 30 states and only allowed under certain conditions in the other 20—not a place Hagstrom Miller wants to go back to.
The five school board candidates who are competing for three spots made their cases at a virtual forum last week.
Photo: youth-nex
In addition to electing a new governor and several other local and state leaders, Charlottesville residents will vote for city school board members on November 2. Five candidates are competing for three spots: Strive for College CEO Christa Bennett, real estate agent Emily Dooley, Albemarle County youth entrepreneurship facilitator Dom Morse, school board chairwoman and physical therapist Lisa Larson-Torres, and longtime board member Leah Puryear.
In a virtual forum hosted by the Black Parents Association and the CCS Joint PTO last week, the candidates detailed how they would address critical issues affecting the school district, including racial equity, COVID recovery, school reconfiguration, teacher retention, and staff shortages. Daniel Fairley, the city’s youth opportunity coordinator, moderated the event.
Bennett explained her plans to hold biweekly listening sessions in downtown Charlottesville, allowing community members to easily express their concerns and ask questions outside of school board meetings.
“It’s important to check in with people of color on how they view equity, and what we can do to get there,” she said.
Dooley, who was a teacher and principal for 10 years in central Virginia, said the school district needs to focus less on standardized testing that is “in and of itself rooted in racial inequities,” and more on guaranteeing all students have access to “high level instruction” that teaches critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Larson-Torres and Puryear pointed to the equity work they have championed since joining the school board, including developing a three-year-old program, creating an equity and anti-bullying policy, and hiring the district’s first supervisor of equity and inclusion.
To Morse, CCS could do more to implement equity and social-emotional learning into its learning models. “That looks like supporting our teachers to help them design a curriculum that allows our students to explore their own interests [and] identity,” he said.
Despite the numerous challenges faced during the pandemic, the school district was able to provide laptops and resources to all students, and maintain high graduation rates, said Puryear.
But as schools continue to recover from the pandemic, the district must address learning loss, said Bennett. From her research on what other schools are doing to help struggling students, she learned that high-dosage tutoring—during which a teacher works one-on-one with a student, or a very small group of students, for 30 to 60 minutes—has been “one of the most effective tools.”
Discussing the district’s substitute teacher and bus driver shortage, Bennett suggested the board create a program allowing substitute teachers to receive full-time pay and benefits and commit to working at one school for a year. Dooley also recommended the district expand public transit options for older students, and improve walkability and bikeability to all schools.
“We have to think about ways we provide development for [bus drivers] so it’s an easier position, but also think about how we complete their day,” said Morse. “Can we find ways to tie them into our school district even farther, whether it’s as instructional assistants or maybe they work in the cafeteria as well?”
To retain teachers, all five candidates emphasized the importance of paying them fairly, as well as providing them with support systems and listening to their concerns.
“We need to not make [teachers] feel like they have to be a martyr to their job,” said Dooley. “Teachers being given superficial involvement, or being brought to conversations late in the game has been an ongoing issue, [as well as] teachers being pitted against parents or the community.”
Dooley and Bennett also expressed their support for a collective bargaining ordinance, which would allow city employees—including teachers—to form unions and negotiate their contracts.
Puryear explained that she has worked to increase teachers’ salaries every year since being elected to the school board in 2006, and supported raises for frontline workers during the pandemic. The board is currently working with CCS Superintendent Royal Gurley to better compensate substitute teachers, added Larson-Torres.
When putting together the school district’s next budget, Bennett and Dooley said they would audit current programs and examine data. Morse added that he would prioritize funding for student-facing positions.
This month, Charlottesville City Council unanimously approved the school board’s plan to renovate Walker Upper Elementary School and Buford Middle School. To pay for the $100 million reconfiguration, Bennett—who led the effort to build a playground at Walker Upper Elementary School—said she would draw upon her community organizing experience to advocate for increasing the city’s real estate and sales tax. The incumbents explained that they have already begun searching for funding and reaching out to legislators, and may collaborate with philanthropists on the expensive project.
Before closing out the forum, each candidate pitched why they were the best person for the job.
Bennett stressed that she is the only candidate who currently has a child in the city school system, while Dooley emphasized her years of experience in education. Morse, who was born and raised in Charlottesville, explained that he has lived through many of the disparities they just discussed.
Puryear, whose children graduated from city schools, described her passion for advocating for children, pointing to the nearly four decades she has spent directing UVA’s Upward Bound program. Larson-Torres detailed her personal experience fighting for special accommodations for her daughter at school, which spurred her to run for the board in 2017.
“Every decision I’ve made has been student and equity focused,” ended Larson-Torres. “I will still keep on showing up.”
Since 2018, Charlottesville has had a total of five interim or full-time city managers. Photo: Skyclad Aerial
Earlier this year, Charlottesville City Manager Chip Boyles was brought in to stabilize a shaky local government, but after eight months on the job, he resigned last week.
Following a closed session with City Council, Boyles said he believes he shored up city leadership and boosted employee morale during his tenure, but that his process was “disrupted” when he fired former Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney last month.
“I continue to support my decision taken on this matter,” wrote Boyles in a letter to City Council, “but the public vitriol associated with this decision of a few vocal community members and the broken relationship with Mayor Walker have severely limited my ability to be productive toward the goals of City Council.”
Boyles claimed the backlash against Brackney’s termination—along with Mayor Nikuyah Walker’s pushback—negatively impacted his personal health and well-being. “Continuation of the personal and professional attacks that are occurring are not good for the City, for other City staff, for me, or for my family,” he wrote.
In an additional email to the city staff, Boyles explained that he had planned to stay in his position “much longer,” and believed Charlottesville was going in a “collective positive direction in morale.”
During his brief stint as city manager, Boyles hired several senior-level officials, including Deputy City Manager for Operations Sam Sanders and Deputy City Manager for Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Ashley Reynolds Marshall.
Since 2018, Charlottesville has had a total of five interim or full-time city managers. Last September, Tarron Richardson resigned from the position after just 16 months on the job, claiming he had been restricted and disrespected by city officials. A search firm was hired to find a new city manager, but the firm’s manager told Councilor Lloyd Snook that he had “never seen a level of dysfunction as profound as what he was seeing here,” and that it would be impossible for the firm to recruit a high-quality candidate.
Chip Boyles has resigned as city manager. Photo: City of Charlottesville
Following a series of emergency closed sessions, council appointed Boyles, the former executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission. The councilors emphasized that Boyles would bring much-needed steadiness to local government until they begin a public city manager search.
In a Facebook live after Boyles’ resignation, Walker said Boyles’ actions surrounding Brackney’s firing should have been cause for his termination. She also criticized other councilors for casting blame on her for the manager’s resignation, and not holding him accountable.
“No one is speaking up. Everyone is okay with everything that’s happening. And the only issue is the Black woman who is the mayor,” she said. “They qualify that I’m the issue by saying there’s other Black people in this community who have an issue with me.”
“Chip is not the only issue,” she continued. “There were other issues in the city’s attorney’s office, his office, communications, the police department—there were all people who played a role, and who are protected by at least three of my colleagues and the silence of Councilor Payne,” she added.
Walker defended herself and her record, claiming she has never lied and has stayed committed to her values. She accused Boyles of wrongfully blaming her for the city’s internal issues, and said the city attorney should have alerted her about Boyles’ letter before it was published.
“You all should be ashamed that you are more concerned with your whiteness, white privilege, and upholding those systems than peoples’ lives being changed for the better,” she said.
However, Snook says he is “really disappointed” in Boyles’ resignation.
“He has been doing an excellent job of trying to get senior level management hired,” like Marshall and Sanders, he says. “He got Lisa Robertson on board as the city attorney—all good moves.”
“I saw us heading in the right direction, and then all of these little fires turn into big fires, and all of a sudden everyone’s attention gets turned away from governance,” he adds.
Snook still supports Boyles’ decision to fire Brackney, citing the fact that some of the officers she hired, including Black officers, have left the department.
“We have created in Charlottesville in the last few years…a really toxic culture of what I call the politics of personal destruction,” says Snook. “Any mistake is made, all of sudden [it’s] a cause for termination, heads must roll. We just can’t function that way.”
If any more critical city staff decide to jump ship, Councilor Michael Payne is afraid the city will “reach a point where we can’t maintain even basic functions.”
“City government is in a state of crisis,” he says. “In my less than two years on council, I’ve counted turnover in 20 top leadership positions alone.”
After the city finds an interim city manager and begins the process of hiring a permanent manager, Payne says council will need to work with the city manager’s office to list critical policy priorities—including affordable housing, school reconfiguration, public housing redevelopment, zoning rewrites, and a climate action plan—and create a strategy to get them implemented.
Council is deliberating interim city manager options. Boyles’ last day is October 29.
Brick by brick: Transformative, collaborative, and rooted in intersectional and queer feminism, Patrick Costello’s “Ceding Ground II” is more than meets the eye. A slim, snaking wall reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s serpentine walls that were designed to hide enslaved workers at the University of Virginia, each brick is an earthy amalgam of native perennial grass and wildlife seeds. Gallery visitors are invited to take a brick home and plant it, turning a piece of racist architecture into a blooming plot of beauty. Join Costello and artist Federico Cuatlacuatl for a virtual talk about “Situated Knowledge,” the gallery’s collaborative exhibition.
Monday 10/25. Free, 7:30pm. New City Arts, 114 Third St. NE newcityarts.org.
More than words: Poetic lyricism, creative ambition, and layered, lush production are alt-folk-pop artist Rachael Sage’s specialties. For two decades, Sage has steadily released over a dozen albums, winning awards and touring with an eclectic mix of artists in the process. Created in lockdown, her new band Poetica has a spoken-word album of the same name that is laced with delicate guitar and shiver-inducing lyrics.
Saturday 10/23. Free, 6pm. The Garage, 100 E. Jefferson St., thegaragecville.com.
