Author: samanthabaars

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Made In C-VILLE Magazines

Making magic

Photo: Tristan Williams

Women supporting women isn’t just a hashtag or phrase pulled off a trendy graphic tee for members of Boss Babes Cville, an ever-growing support group of local female-identifying folks in all walks of their careers.

Started by downtown business owner and stylist Linnea Revak in 2017, the group took shape with the help of co-director Jessica Norby, a local social media strategist.

“I was a 27-year-old small business owner that needed community—to not feel like I was alone, but instead have camaraderie and support from others in my shoes,” says Revak, whom you’ve probably seen around town in flouncy pastels, or behind the counter of her stylish consignment shop, Darling Boutique, on the Downtown Mall. 

Revak just opened her second storefront, Dashing Boutique, right next door, and, in part, credits her entrepreneurial success to advice she received at one of the group’s meetups from fellow Boss Babe Destinee Wright, a local writer and marketing professional: Release the need to control everything. Letting go is powerful. And so much good has come from just releasing.

That advice came from Wright in the summer of 2019, says Revak, when she was figuring out the next step for her business. “I’d just moved into our new [Darling Boutique] location, needed to hire staff and delegate, but I was still trying to control everything. It was in letting go and delegating to a team that I trust that I saw my business truly flourish.”

With a virtual Facebook group including almost 1,500 members and monthly in-person meetups, the local boss babe says she created the group to be an inclusive and safe space to exchange resources and insights, be vulnerable, to uplift, encourage, and learn from one another.

“I’m a better small business owner because of Boss Babes Cville,” Revak says. “I’m wiser, stronger, more vulnerable, teachable. Each time we’ve had a meetup over the years with guest speakers, I’ve soaked it all up like a sponge.”

The collective wisdom of the group has helped her make important decisions about everything from growth, hiring needs, systems and processes, accounting, and marketing.

“I would be googling so many things if it weren’t for this group!” she says.

Much like the term girl boss, boss babe has seen a recent shift in connotation, sometimes carrying a non-serious tone reinforcing that women in positions of power often aren’t viewed as equal to their male counterparts.

“I believe it’s still an empowering way to define our group, but I do think there’s room for growth in the language we use to talk about female-identifying individuals when it comes to entrepreneurship and business,” Revak says. “If this group’s shown me anything, we’re capable of adapting, learning, growing, and bettering ourselves—together.”

And all are welcome to join.

“The more engaged everyone is, the more sparks of magic fly in the group,” says Revak. “You get out of the group what you put into it. And we’ve seen so many beautiful things come out of it.”

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Magazines Unbound

Bugged: Non-native insects threaten Virginia’s ash trees and fruit harvests.

Recognizing the threat to Virginia’s wine, beer, cider, and fruit yields, the VDOF and Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services undertook an aggressive lanternfly eradication program that started in May and runs until October 31.

With its metallic-green shell and wings, the emerald ash borer looks almost like a smaller version of a brooch your great-grandmother pinned to her lapel. But it’s not a decoration—it’s a killer. The beetle lays its eggs inside ash trees, producing voracious larvae that deplete their hosts of the water and nutrients they need to survive.

Initially detected in Michigan in 2002—a suspected stowaway in wooden packing crates arriving from its native Asia—the borer showed up the following year in Fairfax County, Virginia. In the ensuing decade and a half, it has spread across the northeast, destroying tens of millions of ash trees. A major infestation this summer in Richmond and Henrico County moved the state to issue a quarantine, that is, a prohibition against moving ash firewood across county lines or bringing it in from out of state.

“By not moving the firewood, we’re actually reducing possible exposure to the insect,” says Lara Johnson, a program manager with the Virginia Department of Forestry. “If there’s a valuable ash tree in your yard, you should get it treated.”

Pesticides are available online, at garden centers, or in big-box stores. But Johnson recommends hiring arborists to do the job, because, as certified applicators, they have both the expertise and access to more concentrated treatments. She adds that introducing a systemic remedy before or very shortly after exposure is much more successful than trying to save an infested tree.

A less prevalent but potentially much more destructive non-native species, the spotted lanternfly, sparked a quarantine order this summer in Frederick County and the City of Winchester, about 100 miles north of Charlottesville. Indigenous to China, India, and Vietnam, this planthopper (it has wings as an adult but moves mostly by crawling and jumping) was first discovered in the U.S. in 2014, and now also lives in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. It eats more than 70 species, including stone-fruit trees like peaches and plums, as well as apples, grapes, and hops.

Recognizing the threat to Virginia’s wine, beer, cider, and fruit yields, the VDOF and Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services undertook an aggressive eradication program that started in May and runs until October 31. Elaine Lidholm of the VDACS says crews hit the lanternfly’s favorite roost, the tree of heaven, with a chemical herbicide and insecticide, and followed up with bioinsecticide applications. “Treatments will likely be repeated,” she says.

Lidholm advises that anyone who finds one (or more) of the critters outside of Winchester or Frederick County should capture a specimen and send an email to spottedlanternfly@vdacs.virginia.gov. The sample needs to be submitted for identification and verification,” Lidholm says.

If that sounds like a hassle, just imagine your life without Virginia-made beer, wine, cider, and peaches. See? We knew you’d understand—and help out if you can.

Recognizing the threat to Virginia’s wine, beer, cider, and fruit yields, the VDOF and Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services undertook an aggressive lanternfly eradication program that started in May and runs until October 31.

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Living

Hot topic: Experts discuss global warming and everyday ways to address it

Jeremy Hoffman, an earth scientist at Richmond’s Science Museum of Virginia, says climate change is altering the timing of seasonal transitions. Photo: Courtesy Piedmont Master Gardeners

Have you heard the news? The planet is getting hotter and it’s a real problem. That was the simple but important takeaway from a recent event at The Paramount Theater, hosted by Piedmont Master Gardeners and Virginia Cooperative Extension. Hundreds of attendees learned about the impact of climate change in the natural spaces around them, and what’s yet to come as temperatures steadily rise.

Even for the most conscientious Charlottesville resident, acknowledging and planning for climate change can feel overwhelming. But activists at the Paramount event warned that it’s imperative to know what lies ahead for our region—and our planet—in the face of global warming, and take action.

One simple option is to plant more trees to sequester increasing carbon dioxide emissions. You could not only help the Earth but also naturally cool your home by planting deciduous trees on its east and west sides. “We probably can’t stop climate change rapidly enough, so we’re going to have to learn to live with it,” said Francis Reilly, Jr., of Washington, D.C., the emcee and a master gardener with more than 35 years of experience as an advisor on environmental policy.

Reilly also suggested mitigating the effects of global warming by creating landscapes with woody, carbon dioxide-absorbing plants, and in a way that minimizes mowable grass. (Most mowers still use fossil fuels, in addition to the other environmental issues, like water and pesticide use, associated with lawns.)

According to Reilly, warmer winters mean garden pests like pine bark beetles and corn earworms will thrive. That’s bad. And less snow equals a drier spring. That’s also bad. An increase in frost-free days will make crops more vulnerable to colder temperatures, so that’s also not good—unless you’re growing sweet potatoes, which prefer a hot, dry environment (and which you probably aren’t growing).

Another speaker at the event, Jeremy Hoffman, a climate and earth scientist at Richmond’s Science Museum of Virginia, said we’re now seeing earlier springs and summers at the expense of falls and winters. In Charlottesville, he said, the average last-freeze date each spring has moved up a week—from April 8 to April 1—over the past 120 years. While this technically extends the growing season, it’s still problematic, because if farmers decide to get a head start on planting, their crops can be killed by a surprise frost. Despite climate change, a crop-destroying freeze is still possible, because of the Earth’s tilt, and this raises the probability of food shortages, Hoffman said.

Hoffman also brought up another climate-change fact: Because of warmer weather, the local mosquito season is now 20 days longer than it was in 1970. It also means folks with seasonal allergies are reaching for their Zyrtec earlier than ever. In 2017, Hoffman said, tree-allergy season in Richmond peaked on April 15, about eight days earlier than 30 years ago.

As the evidence mounts, more people have come to understand that climate change is real. Seventy percent of Virginians—and 80 percent of Charlottesville residents—agree that global warming is happening, according to a study by Utah State University, the University of California Santa Barbara, and Yale. Also statewide, 80 percent of people agree that global warming should be regulated as a pollutant. Curiously, only 42 percent think it will harm them personally, and only 21 percent say they became aware of global warming through the media.

Those statistics would suggest that we have a long way to go, even when it comes to awareness of the global rise in temperatures. Hoffman admitted that it can be a hard topic to discuss. To help start those conversations, he gave his audience some easy talking points: It’s real, it’s caused by humans, and there’s hope. Echoing other experts, he ensured that we haven’t yet lost the battle against climate change: “There’s a lot we can do about it.”

Samantha Baars, a former C-VILLE Weekly staff writer, now works for the Southern Environmental Law Center, which was a sponsor of the Paramount event.

Be a steward

Talking about climate change isn’t usually inspiring, but experts at the Paramount event repeatedly stressed how everyone has the power to help mitigate it. The nonprofit group Piedmont Master Gardeners says small decisions you make while landscaping can make a big difference for environmental health. Here are some tips:

• Plant native species in your garden and remove invasive species, because natives save water and provide food and habitat for wild-
life, while invasives can out-compete them and reduce biodiversity.

• Reduce or eliminate your use of toxic chemicals for landscaping.

• Prevent soil loss due to erosion by covering bare soil with ground covers, shrubs, grasses, and trees.

• Grow your own food and support area food producers by going to farmers markets and spots that use local ingredients.

• Conserve water by collecting it in a rain barrel or cistern and using it to hydrate your plants.

For more resources, visit piedmontmastergardeners.org

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News

One way: Wintergreen wants an emergency exit

The lack of an alternate entrance to Wintergreen could spell disaster during an emergency, say fire officials. Congressman Dennis Riggleman has met with the National Park Service about securing a route through the Blue Ridge Parkway. (File Photo)

There’s only one way in and one way out of Wintergreen, where residents and the local fire department have called for a second emergency exit for more than a decade, and where the topography is strikingly similar to that of Gatlinburg, Tennessee—the site of the November 2016 inferno that killed 14 people and injured nearly 200 more.

“Looking at the history of fires in other resort areas with one egress route, I found it striking that it wasn’t done yet,” says Congressman Denver Riggleman, who thought approving a 450-foot second route would be fairly simple. But because the emergency exit would lead to the federally protected Blue Ridge Parkway, approving it has been a challenge.

In March, Riggleman met with the National Park Service, which will need to sign off on an easement before anyone can enter or exit from the desired point.

“The national park is very heavily regulated, as it should be,” says Wintergreen Fire and Rescue Chief Curtis Sheets. “They’re trying to preserve it in its natural state for perpetuity. We get that.”

But, says Sheets, “We want to do this in a way that has the absolute least impact to the environment as possible,” and the best place to put it would be the relatively level corridor between the northwestern corner of the Wintergreen property and the parkway.

It’s crucial to have an emergency way out of the community, which can host as many as 10,000 people on a holiday weekend, because “if something were to happen, then we could get people out of harm’s way. We just want to do all we can,” the chief says.

The best time to have dealt with it would have been in the ’70s, when Wintergreen was built, he adds.

“We admit that it was a mistake,” says Sheets. “Nobody should have ever built a community as large as Wintergreen with only one entry and exit point, but now we’re trying to fix that.”

While some folks who live at the resort worry that a second exit would be abused as a shortcut, Sheets says the fire department could drive two steel beams into the ground with a cable stretched across them, “and we could just cut the cable if we have a catastrophe.”

Another thing worrying some Wintergreen residents is the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which is drafted to cross the sole entrance to the community.

“If the pipeline crosses that entrance and explodes, it could be a catastrophe with up to 10,000 people trapped on the mountain and no way to get out,” says resident David Schwiesow, who notes that the 42-inch high pressure natural gas pipe would be difficult to control if it blows, because the cut-off valves will be between 12 and 15 miles apart.

If the emergency route is approved, the issue then becomes figuring out what to do with the folks who are ushered to the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is closed by the park service during big storms, instances of downed trees, and ice or snow, says Schwiesow.

There’s been some discussion of having Nelson County school buses come to the rescue, he says.

“But they don’t have to, and there aren’t enough of them to transport 10,000 people,” Schwiesow says. “Not to be negative, but there are a whole lot of practical issues to be resolved.”

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News

The fine print: Daily Progress subscription prices skyrocket

Though a subscription to Charlottesville’s daily newspaper will nearly double in July, it’s not alone. Newspapers prices across the country are surging as media becomes more concentrated online.

Print is dead. Print is dying. Newspapers are “toast.” We’ve all heard some iteration of this, and it makes print journalists think about jumping ship.

But as more media becomes concentrated online, and local and national newspaper prices soar to make up for a loss in advertising revenue, at least one media expert is encouraging readers to opt for ink.

“Newspapers have become what one scholar in England called ‘keystone media,’ because they’re the ones dictating the news agenda for the community,” says UVA Department of Media Studies Assistant Professor Christopher Ali. “If you’re interested in local news, you gotta keep picking up the newspaper.”

That’s becoming harder across the country—and here in Charlottesville—because of surging price tags. While C-VILLE Weekly is a free publication, and Charlottesville Tomorrow provides free local news online, the cost of a Daily Progress print subscription has almost doubled from this time last year, according to at least one subscriber’s bill. It showed rates jumping from approximately $265 for the print and online product in 2018 to $478 per year, starting in July.

Publisher Peter Yates did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in a letter to subscribers he wrote, “To continue to produce high quality journalism, in print and online, we must adjust our rates to reflect the cost of doing business while continuing to offer the lowest rate possible.”

The Progress is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, a $210 billion company owned by business magnate and billionaire Warren Buffett—who was the one who recently said that newspapers are “toast” and “going to disappear.”

The Daily Progress obviously isn’t alone. A NiemanLab report published in late January found that the cost of newspapers has more than doubled from a decade ago, and also notes that if publishers didn’t establish the more-than-substantial price hikes, “they’d employ even fewer journalists and be in even worse shape today.”

An annual seven-day print subscription to The New York Times will now set you back more than $1,000 in most of the country, and The Boston Globe comes in at $750. Folks who want to read a physical copy of The Washington Post every day are doling out approximately $650 a year, according to NiemanLab.

The organization also cited a recently-published paper in Journalism Studies, a peer-reviewed academic journal, which studied 25 large American newspapers between 2008 and 2016, and found that seven-day print subscriptions now cost an average of $510 a year, and subscribers are paying an additional $293 on average to have their papers delivered.

“What I’m seeing is the need for a lot of experimentation around pricing options,” says Ali. “There’s no cookie-cutter solution.”

Should papers lower the prices to retain readers? Says Ali, “I don’t think they can.”

In his work, he’s observed news organizations testing paywall options, exploring web hosting in smaller communities, and hosting events for which they sell tickets to generate new revenue.

He calls it a “double-edged sword,” because while newspapers are exploring other funding as a means to survive, they’re also scaling back on their local coverage.

“I think people would be willing to pay a little bit more if the coverage was robust, but it’s not,” says Ali. “A lot of [the money] is going to keeping the lights on, but I’d love to see newspapers double down on the unique aspects they can offer,” which, in his opinion, means “being local.”

For example, no one’s picking up the Progress to read the front-page Associated Press story about what’s going on in Moscow, he says. “We read The Daily Progress because we want to know what’s going on in Charlottesville.”

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News

Affordable option? Church apartments could be a godsend

Reverend Robert Lewis of the Hinton Avenue United Methodist Church says a decline in membership has left the church with unused space—and the congregation would like to convert it into 15 affordable apartments, with some reserved for people with developmental disabilities. Photo by Eze Amos

When a church in the Belmont neighborhood proposed converting underused space into 15 apartments, with a third of them specifically for people with disabilities, some community members were quick to call it a development idea that they could finally get behind.

Others? Eh, not so much.

“Public feedback has not been supportive,” planning commissioner Lyle Solla-Yates wrote on Twitter May 12.

One of those opposed is Raman Pfaff, who lives less than 100 feet away from Hinton Avenue United Methodist, the church in question. “When I moved here almost 20 years ago, I wanted a neighborhood, not an apartment complex,” he says. “The overall concept for having a few units for [disabled] people is great, but the implementation does not match up very well with a residential community.”

Responding to reported complaints about noise, traffic, parking, and other issues, local resident and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie tweeted, “this is one of those times when I wish people would just be honest with themselves and say they don’t want to live next to people who are different than they are.”

The church’s pastor, Reverend Robert Lewis, says the project is a response to changing needs. Membership has slowly and steadily declined across all Protestant denominations for the past four or five decades, he adds, and his church is no exception.

Sunday school at the Hinton Avenue house of worship is just one example.

“Our youth had all grown up and gone to college, and we didn’t have younger folks come along to fill those classrooms,” Lewis says. Now, there’s empty space in the educational wing, which is currently being leased by the International School. He’s hoping a rezoning will allow for one- to three-bedroom apartments there, priced “as affordable as possible,” according to the application.

The project was scheduled to go before the Planning Commission May 14, but was rescheduled for June 11 because of last-minute changes to the application. City staff has already recommended that rezoning to neighborhood commercial corridor—the only zoning available that would allow for building apartments—be denied because Southern Crescent, a cajun restaurant situated a few buildings down Hinton Avenue, is “an ideal endpoint to commercial activity,” according to the staff report.

Lewis says the update to the church’s proposal would prohibit any commercial use for now and any future tenant, unless another rezoning is granted.

If approved, they want to have the new housing built within five years, and expect it will cost “millions.” The church has already raised $200,000, and is hoping to offset some of the cost with tax credit vouchers.

“The sense of support for the mission itself has been very encouraging,” says Lewis, because most people recognize the city’s housing crisis, and that there are even fewer affordable options for people with disabilities. “The possibility that they could be supported in living the fullest life they can is just a godsend to them.”

With the international decline in church memberships, holy spaces across the globe have resorted to apartment conversions—or closing their doors. In Chicago, for instance, priests forecast that up to 100 of the city’s 350 Catholic churches will shutter by 2030, according to a 2017 report from now-defunct Windy City news source DNAinfo. Some have already been recycled into everything from a dance studio to a school for circus performers.

And at Chicago’s Grace Church, another Methodist congregation, leaders are similarly proposing an addition of 20 on-site apartments, and hoping that the revenue will allow the house of worship to continue operating.

But some in Charlottesville aren’t sympathetic to the congregational crisis.

“Let them go broke,” says Belmont resident Doug Ross, noting that people have argued that because the plan is being proposed by a church, it must be good.

Historically, that hasn’t always been the case, Ross says. “No, they don’t get a pass just because they have a cross and ring bells on Sunday.”

More criticism flooded a post about the project on community forum Nextdoor, which eventually racked up more than 100 comments, including this one from Rosemary Evans: “Do you honestly think these newcomers will obey speed limits? Not on your life!”

The comments prompted a response from planning commissioner Rory Stolzenberg, who called the thread evidence of “anti-renter prejudice and discrimination.”

That anti-renter sentiment, he wrote, is “reflected in the dark, sordid history of our zoning code…and the bad-faith obstructionism aimed at keeping new neighbors out [that] we see exhibited at every public meeting.”

“People like you would like to see people like me barred from this city,” he wrote to another poster. “And for too long, you’ve succeeded, pushing us into a housing crisis that sees families displaced every single day.”

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News

A12 appeals: DeAndre Harris attackers contest convictions

White nationalists chased DeAndre Harris into the Market Street Parking Garage and beat him with pieces of the wooden barricades they tore down. (Credit Image: © Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press)

Two men convicted of malicious wounding for attacking DeAndre Harris in a downtown parking garage on August 12, 2017, are appealing their convictions, and the Virginia Attorney General’s office will now prosecute their cases.

Jacob Goodwin and Alex Ramos were sentenced to eight and six years in prison, respectively, for their part in the brutal Market Street Parking Garage beating that Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Rick Moore has repeatedly called one of the worst he’s ever seen.

While the Court of Appeals of Virginia has yet to hear the cases, a single judge granted the petitions to appeal without hearing any argument. Legal analyst Dave Heilberg says, “It’s not unusual, but it’s not what usually happens.”

He adds, “They tend not to give appeals without a good reason.”

Anthony Martin, who represents Goodwin, claims there was insufficient evidence to convict his client of malicious wounding.

“The only actions [Goodwin] had taken towards DeAndre Harris was at the most two kicks,” says the petition for appeal, which notes that Harris had a laceration to his head and an arm fracture, but that there’s no evidence that Goodwin caused harm to Harris’ head or arm. “The only conceivable areas of the body that [Goodwin] touched were Harris’ buttocks or bottom.”

To win an appeal on a claim of insufficiency of evidence is “rare,” according to Heilberg. During appellate review, the court will look at all of the evidence in the light most favorable to the commonwealth. “If there’s some evidence to support the conviction that was given, then it stands.”

Martin also argues that the court erred by denying motions to strike four potential jurors from serving on the panel that convicted Goodwin, including two who admitted to participating in Black Lives Matter rallies.

Jake Joyce represents Ramos—who went to trial the day after Goodwin’s conviction. Joyce alleges the jury pool could have been tainted if potential jurors saw media coverage of Goodwin’s trial.

“Ramos would have a stronger case than Goodwin,” suggests Heilberg, adding that the scheduling of their back-to-back trials could be unprecedented.

Joyce believes the trial should never have happened in Charlottesville.

“The danger was not just that jurors would harbor bias against the Unite the Righters who came to their city and caused a riot,” he wrote in the petition. “There is also danger that the circumstances surrounding the trial and the fear of fallout about their verdict might cause local jurors to decide their verdict on something other than the merits of the case.”

All motions to move August 12-related cases out of Charlottesville have been denied, and Heilberg says there’s a slim chance of winning an appeal on that grounds.

Lastly, Joyce argues that Ramos’ malicious wounding charge should have been reduced to a lesser form of assault, because it’s undisputed that he threw only one punch at the back of Harris’ head. But, says Heilberg, the jury made a factual determination based on the evidence it was given, and “if Ramos and Goodwin are acting in concert…one is as guilty as the other.”

A date has not been set for a full briefing or oral arguments in Richmond.

“Appellate review of criminal proceedings plays an important role in ensuring that defendants were treated fairly and afforded due process of law,” says Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania, who prosecuted the cases alongside assistant prosecutor Nina Antony. “This office welcomes and is confident in that process.”

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News

Indigenous inclusion: Advocates call for UVA American Indian studies center

UVA alum Guy Lopez (fourth from left) has convened a committee of other alumni and faculty to support the creation of an Indigenous Studies Center at the university. Over the weekend, they hosted a symposium to spread awareness and solicit advice on how to proceed. Photo by Eze Amos

Some issues don’t just go away if you ignore them.

Aside from a brief appearance at the May 6 City Council meeting, the last time we heard from UVA alum Guy Lopez was 2002, when the university was considering whether to invest $4 million in the University of Arizona’s Mount Graham Observatory to build a giant telescope on sacred San Carlos Apache land. UVA would then have permission to use it seven nights a year.   

Despite massive resistance from local and faraway American Indians like Lopez, who grew up on South Dakota’s Crow Creek Sioux Reservation, UVA proceeded with the agreement, and promised to mitigate its impact in a number of ways, including “increasing Native American representation at UVA by actively recruiting Native American students and faculty, and by enhancing scholarly research in Native American studies,” according to an October 2002 issue of Inside UVA Online.

Lopez says UVA hasn’t lived up to its promises, and an online tool shows that only 14 Native American students and five faculty were at the school in 2018. Now, he’s calling for an Indigenous Studies Center on Grounds, which he says is the brainchild of the committee of faculty and alumni he convened and Vice Provost Louis Nelson.

“It makes no sense that potentially one of the greatest American universities has had so little inclusion of American Indian scholars and indigenous people,” says Lopez. “The university is missing out on a rich world of knowledge and insight into life on this continent.”

Lopez says other universities have done a better job, and points to Stanford University, where there’s a Native American Cultural Center and annual powwow that draws more than 50,000 people. But “UVA doesn’t know basic facts about American Indian participation at the university,” he says, like who was the first American Indian graduate.

UVA spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn says increasing minority representation, among both faculty and students, is a strategic priority for the university. He says admission representatives have attended powwows and have been involved in the Pathkeepers for Indigenous Knowledge Native Youth Leadership Camp.

Programs on Native American history, culture, and social, legal, and political rights are under consideration, he adds.

Over the weekend, Lopez and his UVA-based committee hosted a symposium to facilitate conversations about the university’s relationship with its indigenous people, gain interest in an Indigenous Studies Center, and solicit advice from others on how to proceed with building it.

Among them was former San Carlos Apache tribal chairman Wendsler Nosie, who flew in from Arizona for the symposium. He says the observatory is “still a major issue back home,” where it adversely affects a sacred space called Dzil nchaa si’an in the Sonoran Desert, a critical habitat of the red squirrel and a place of worship and prayer for his tribe.

Now that conversation about the telescope is resurfacing, Wendsler says they want to be heard.

He and other Apaches, including acting tribal chairman Tao Etpison, requested a meeting with UVA President Jim Ryan over the weekend, and in a letter to Ryan, Etpison noted the school’s alleged “commitment to inclusion, diversity, and mutual respect,” after the events of August 11 and 12, 2017.

Ryan agreed to meet with the representatives of the tribe in a May 3 email, but it got overlooked, leaving the Arizonans to believe he declined to respond. Though they missed the opportunity for a meeting during their most recent visit, Wendsler says he’ll be back.

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News

Pedal to the metal: The path to a more cycling-friendly city

It’s National Bike Month, and Peter Krebs is fired up.

Krebs, who’s the community outreach coordinator at the Piedmont Environmental Council, uses the word
“exciting” more than any other when talking about the new bicycle and pedestrian plan he’s helped develop with the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

The plan, which is being presented to City Council this month, proposes ways to connect some of the area’s most popular cycling and walking spots, making it feasible for more people to get where they want (and need) to go.

“We have amazing destinations, but what’s missing is the connectors to those destinations,” says Krebs. He would know—he’s spent the past 18 months working with the TJPDC and attending more than 100 community input meetings to create the plan, which focuses on Charlottesville and Albemarle but also addresses Louisa, Fluvanna, Greene, and Nelson counties.

One of the first questions the team had to answer is: Who is the cyclist?

“I expect the answer is something that’s changed in me as I’ve done my work,” says Krebs. “It’s a kid just off of training wheels, it’s somebody delivering a pizza, it’s a guy in spandex heading out into the countryside to go ride 40 miles, it’s somebody commuting to work, and it’s me.”

The goal is to create an infrastructure that makes each type of cyclist feel more confident, and one that makes it easier to transcend current jurisdictional boundaries that seemingly only exist because of a line drawn on a map, he says. The same plan will be presented to the county’s Board of Supervisors.

In a large, framed map hanging on his East Water Street office wall, Krebs points to approximately 20 local areas that community members who want to ditch their cars have identified as major frustration points. Perhaps the biggest complaint identified from the feedback he’s solicited over the past year and a half is related to Route 29, he says.

For example, a major draw of the recently-proposed apartments in the Seminole Square shopping center
is their proximity to restaurants and grocery stores such as Kroger, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, but those destinations are still out of reach without a car.

“You’ll be able to see Trader Joe’s from the apartment windows, but there’s no way you’re walking or biking there,” says Krebs.

He’s also heard from parents who want to be able to safely bike with their kids to school. And one of his own biggest frustrations is that there’s no safe way to get to the Saunders-Monticello Trail without driving.

“The gap is about a half-mile only between the sidewalk on the bottom of Monticello Avenue and the beautiful Saunders-Monticello trail,” he says. “Just a half mile. You can see from one to the other, but it might as well be infinitely far.”

Adds Krebs, “They’re complicated problems, but they’re solvable.”

Along with a bevy of other implementation strategies for these places, the new plan proposes a bicycle and pedestrian path under I-64 that would connect Route 53 and the Saunders-Monticello Trail. The city is planning to study the potential connection.

Says Amanda Poncy, Charlottesville’s bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, the new plan “will help us get to where we need to be as an entire region,” but it won’t happen overnight.

“All of these things take time, and transportation funding is definitely a bit uncertain at the moment,”
she says, adding that she’s seeking out state and federal funds that could complement local investments.

In the city alone, however, she says the biking situation isn’t bleak. “If you started drawing three-mile circles around key destinations, there are many
neighborhoods that would connect to those destinations pretty easily.”

The city’s realistic expectation is reducing overall traffic volumes, and specifically single-occupancy vehicle traffic, she says.

“I don’t think as a city staff member I have a vision that everybody is going to lose their car and walk and bike everywhere, but I do want to make it an option for those people who can,” she says. “The safer and
more comfortable we make it for people, the more opportunity [there] is for them to choose a different mode of transportation.”

One of those people is Frank Deviney, who bikes from his home off Old Lynchburg Road in Albemarle to his office near Albemarle High School.

The 10-mile commute takes about 40 minutes, he says.

“It’s hard to go from one side of the city to the other without riding on a dangerous street,” says Deviney. But working for the area’s only League of American Bicyclists-certified bicycle friendly businesses makes it easier.

At Commonwealth Computer Research, Inc., where Deviney is a data scientist, there’s a lax dress code, an indoor room to park bicycles out of the weather, tools provided for bicycle maintenance, and a shower, “so if you get sweaty riding in, you can take a shower and change,” he says.

While obvious benefits include exercise, reducing traffic congestion and carbon emissions, and saving money, Deviney says biking to work is about more than that.

“When you’re riding your bike through the community, it’s nice to interact with the people around you,” he says. “You can smell the flowers.”

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Quest in context: Troubled roots of city school’s gifted program

Former Charlottesville High School teacher Margaret Thornton says her research suggests that city schools' gifted education program, Quest, was created to segregate students. Courtesy photo

Though the gifted education program in Charlottesville City Schools has recently come under fire for its racial disparities, such gaps have existed since the program was created in 1976, and may have even been part of its intention.

At tonight’s School Board meeting, former Charlottesville High School teacher and Ph.D. student Margaret Thornton will present new research that suggests the elite program, called Quest, was formed as a way to keep white students separate from the black students who had recently integrated into the city’s public schools after a time of resistance to desegregation.

Thornton’s report includes a letter from a local woman who proposed a program that the highest-achieving and mainly white students would test into. These students would be pulled out of class to study separately from the others three days a week, the woman, Ms. Smith, said. She also acknowledged that a small percentage of them could be “negroes.”

“It is to be hoped that the plan as outlined above offers a limited form of desegregation, which may placate the fears of those who object to any opportunity of social intermingling of the races, may satisfy the federal courts, and last but not least, may give us a form of desegregated education of which we can all be proud,” wrote Smith.

Roughly 19 years later, in 1976, Quest was born. And its structure was almost exactly the same as Smith’s proposal, says Thornton.

By 1983, Thornton found that 19 percent of the school district’s white students, and fewer than 3 percent of its black students had tested into Quest, prompting city schools to expand its definition of “gifted” to include more students. But the next year, an audit by the U.S. Department of Education still found that black students were underidentified in gifted programs, and overidentified in special education.

At CHS, says Thornton, “walkouts ensued.”

And the issue of the disparity has periodically boiled to the surface of conversation in Charlottesville ever since. Most recently, the topic was raised last fall when The New York Times and ProPublica published a scathing indictment on persistent and widening achievement gaps between white and black students, highlighting, among other problems, the overrepresentation of white students in Quest.

“When people bring up Quest, we get angry,” said CHS 12th-grader Trinity Hughes in the October article. “We all wish we had the opportunity to have that separate creative time. It drives a gap between students from elementary school on.”

Despite efforts by Charlottesville City Schools to address the issue, it’s only gotten worse: the percentage of white students who are identified as gifted has shot up from 11 percent in 1984 to roughly 33 percent today. Overall, white students make up more than 70 percent of students in Quest—in a district that is only 43 percent white.

Thornton formerly taught some “honors-option” English classes at CHS, where students of all abilities are in the same class and examine the same big questions, but use different texts and assignments depending on whether they’re working for honors-level credit. Now she studies similar initiatives (commonly known as “detracking”) at UVA, and says she’s interested in how school leaders and teachers can work together to create heterogeneous classrooms that work for all students.

“Now that I understand how firmly rooted these [gifted] programs are in avoiding integration, I hope we as a community can realize we can’t tweak Quest,” says Thornton. “We have to come up with something new that enriches every student.”

After hearing about Thornton’s research, Superintendent Rosa Atkins invited her to present to the school board. Board chair Jennifer McKeever, who is also familiar with Thornton’s research, says it’s important to recognize the historical context of Quest, and the program should be re-examined.

“Now that we kind of understand better, we have to do better,” she says, adding that two of her kids have been through the gifted program and one has not.

Federal law requires some separation of students by ability, she says, and segregation “is absolutely not” the current goal of Quest.

Says McKeever, “It’s really concerning that this is such a clear indication of structural bias and institutional racism.”

Updated May 3 to correct an error: Quest began roughly 19 years after Ms. Smith’s letter, not 9.