Albemarle School Board . member Jason Buyaki has some doubts about climate change.
file photo
Science class was in session at the October 25 Albemarle County School Board meeting, when board member Jason Buyaki paused to question not only the existence of climate change but also the nature of fossil fuels themselves.
Buyaki, who represents the Rivanna district, recently wore a tie bearing pictures of Confederate flags to a meeting to consider banning Confederate imagery from county schools. He later told the Daily Progress he chose his neckwear as a historical lesson about “various flags flown over the U.S.”
His latest lessons, this time in geology and climatology, came as the board discussed a proposal for county schools to commit to using renewable energy sources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Buyaki’s ire focused on the proposed resolution’s second paragraph, which said, “there is scientific consensus regarding the reality of climate change and the recognition that human activity, especially the combustion of fossil fuels that create greenhouse gases, is an important driver of climate change.”
“When I read this thing, there’s a lot of hot buzzwords in here and phrases that are questionable, and we should question it,” he said, according to a video of the meeting. “One of the first ones that strikes me, in the second paragraph, says there is scientific consensus regarding the reality of climate change. No, there is not—There is scientific consensus among the scientists who believe that there is climate change, but it’s a pretty broad field out there with diverse opinions. So that’s my first red flag warning on this.”
A United Nations panel of the world’s leading climate scientists warned in early October that climate change will cause catastrophic damage within decades unless humanity takes drastic action, including sharply decreasing carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
First, though, Buyaki wanted to define some terms.
“I also question the idea that petroleum products come from fossils,” he said. “I think that’s a fair thing to ask.”
He continued: “That was something that was taught to me in school, that oil comes from fossils. And I find that really strange as a concept, that fossils are buried so deep in the earth, and we can pump ’em out. And some of these oil fields run dry, and then 30, 40 years later they can pump out more.”
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, so-called fossil fuels, including oil, coal and natural gas, formed over millions of years when prehistoric plants and animals died and were gradually buried by layers of rock.
After the meeting, three school board members contacted by C-VILLE did not respond to inquiries about whether the board shares Buyaki’s skepticism about climate change. Buyaki did not respond to an email request for comment.
County resident Matthew Christensen, with Hate-Free Schools Coalition of Albemarle, says Buyaki’s remarks are part of a “disturbing” trend that government officials can decide they “don’t believe in science.”
If the school board member is going to deny science, says Christensen, “I don’t think Jason Buyaki has any business being in charge of our children’s education.”
He adds that Buyaki’s Confederate-flag tie was “a signal to people what he stands for.”
The school board will take action on the clean-energy proposal at its November 8 meeting.
Updated November 2 at 2:30pm with comments from Matthew Christensen.
Dr. Rosa Atkins has led Charlottesville City Schools for nearly 13 years. During her tenure, the system has made progress on raising graduation rates and reducing suspension rates, but black students are still more than four times as likely as white students to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended. Photo: Eze Amos
Last week, ProPublica and the New York Times published a scathing indictment of Charlottesville City Schools, pointing out persistent and widening achievement gaps between white and black students. The article also highlighted the overrepresentation of white students in the city schools’ gifted program, and made a general case that the needs of black students and families are not being met.
The piece set off a storm of reactions on social media, with one teacher on Facebook blaming a lack of “support or discipline at home,” while others brought up issues like frequent leadership turnover in city schools, disempowered teachers, and the role of affluent white parents in preventing real change.
The city school system has responded forcefully. In a press conference and a letter to parents, Superintendent Dr. Rosa Atkins, who has been in her position for nearly 13 years, highlighted what she says are the district’s efforts to address these issues, but also acknowledged responsibility. “Our primary response should be to listen and learn from the central truth of this article,” she wrote. “We have not made consistent or satisfactory progress for all our students.”
The city followed up with a survey to parents, and is holding a community forum on Tuesday, October 23.
For many, the issues raised in the story were not a surprise.
Gaye Carey, 34, says she’s been concerned about the achievement gap since her daughter, Lamira, was in first grade at Johnson Elementary and a teacher recommended her for QUEST, the city’s gifted program. Carey, who is African American, says she remembers Lamira being one of only two black students pulled out of class for QUEST. “And I just know [there’s]plenty of smart black kids,” she says, “so I’m just not understanding.”
‘The same thing is still going on’
Lamira is currently in fifth grade at Walker Upper Elementary, and she’s in accelerated math classes, where, again, most of her classmates are white. It’s an experience that seems unchanged from when Carey herself was a student in Charlottesville’s schools.
“When I was in high school, I was in advanced classes and I was one of three black kids out of 27 kids,” she says. “And now it’s going on with my daughter. The same thing is still going on.”
Darnell Walker, who attended city schools from elementary through high school, agrees. “I thought these issues for Black students in Charlottesville would have died a few years after I left CHS, in 2000, but I see it’s still alive, strong, and shows no signs of letting up,” he says in an email.
Like Zyahna Bryant, who was featured prominently in the ProPublica/NYT story, Walker recalls that he was one of the rare black students pushed toward gifted programs.
“I was one of those students who teachers would call ‘different,’ knowing they meant I was nothing like my Black friends,” he writes. “But I definitely was just like them. They were all smart.”
The article noted that white students make up more than 70 percent of students in QUEST (in a district that is 42 percent white). And the percentage of white students who are identified as gifted has shot up from 11 percent in 1984 to roughly 33 percent today.
School administrators say what the piece left out were the active steps they are taking to make the QUEST program more inclusive: Changes in the way students are identified as gifted have resulted in an increase in referrals to the program over the last decade. Still, the overall ratio of white to black students hasn’t changed much.
Bev Catlin, a district coordinator for the program, says the ratios are beginning to shift, but it will take time. In the meantime, the city’s gifted specialists are increasingly “pushing in” to classrooms, collaborating with teachers to offer lessons to students who are not identified for the program—both so everyone can benefit from higher-level lessons and so specialists can identify strengths in students who might have been overlooked.
‘All children have gifts’
The city gives all students a formal assessment for its gifted program in first grade, rather than in second like Albemarle County, because national data suggests that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit from being tested sooner. Being behind “really does compound year to year,” says Christine Esposito, a gifted specialist at Johnson Elementary. “Kids who don’t feel successful in school will start to shut down.”
Esposito says she and her colleagues are always thinking about ways to make the program more inclusive. “If we had the answer, we would have fixed it by now. We come to work and we try our best to do our best for every kid that we see.”
On the high school level, Charlottesville High has instituted an honors-option program, in which students can pursue standard or honors-level credits in the same classroom, instead of being tracked into separate classes. The district says this program has led to a significant increase in enrollment in honors and AP level courses for African American students.
Margaret Thornton, who taught English at CHS when the program was introduced, says it gave her a much more racially heterogeneous class. Students used different texts to tackle the same big questions, and they learned from each other, improving both test scores and engagement, she says. “It’s a completely different way of teaching, when you’re organizing around these big ideas and then exposing students to all sorts of diverse viewpoints,” she says.
While the honors-option program is expanding, eliminating tracking altogether would be a difficult lift. Even among white students, school systems were traditionally designed to categorize and separate students by ability levels, says Thornton, who is now a doctoral student studying detracking at UVA’s Curry School of Education. “We never righted those structures to make them more inclusive and to make school about enriching experiences,” she says.
“Every child should be getting these enriching experiences,” she adds. “All children have gifts that we can be uncovering.I don’t think school as we currently have it is designed to do that.”
What will it take?
Indeed, the one thing almost everyone involved can agree on is that the racial achievement gap is a problem that goes beyond Charlottesville, and that no one has effectively solved it.
“What’s happening in Charlottesville is not at all unique to Charlottesville; this is a nationwide trend that schools are failing our black students,” says a city elementary school teacher who asked not to be identified by name. “My questions are, who is doing this better than us, with a similar population? What do we need to do differently?”
A 2016 Stanford University study of standardized test scores found that Charlottesville ranks with other college towns in the 10 percent of districts with the widest racial achievement gaps, but that these gaps exist nationwide. And it’s difficult to separate the school system’s problems from those of the community itself: Charlottesville is a rapidly gentrifying city with a long history of racial and economic segregation.
Grappling with that legacy, several educators say, will require some deep, long-term work, like rethinking teaching to be culturally relevant, and hiring and retaining more African American teachers.
Justin Malone, who started as principal of Jackson-Via Elementary last year and led Charlottesville High School for four years before that, says he recognizes the problems identified in the story, but that in his experience, Charlottesville City Schools are committed to trying to improve.
“Even before the events of Aug 11 and 12, it’s hard not to just ask yourself, are you doing it right, are you doing it well?” he says. “That’s been the work.”
Multi-media artist Golara Haghtalab collaborated with Computers4Kids to create an interactive artwork titled “Seasons of Light: A Kinetic Experience.” The installation is at The Gallery at Studio IX August 3 through September 2. Photo by Dan Addison
On an overcast and humid evening on the Downtown Mall, multi- media artist Golara Haghtalab seems to fill the Mudhouse with light. She recognizes a barista from when she worked there “a long time ago,” and though Haghtalab can’t remember his name at first, she still strikes up a spirited conversation. With that same palpable, kinetic energy, Haghtalab reflects on her identity as a Turkmen, Iranian and Muslim immigrant.
“The mirror of who you are shatters when you immigrate,” Haghtalab says. “I came to America and the mirror of my identity shattered.”
Haghtalab repeatedly returns to this image of shattered mirror as central to who she is as a maker, scientist and Iranian immigrant. She feels drawn to the Japanese art of kintsugi, which is both a method of repairing art and a philosophy that celebrates what is broken. To fix a cracked piece of pottery, Japanese artists practicing kintsugi fill gaps using gold, silver or platinum-dusted lacquer.
“My philosophy of life is like this art,” says Haghtalab. “When something breaks, they fix it with gold to keep the experience of it, to nourish it and to make it more beautiful.”
Nearly seven years ago, while Haghtalab was in her third year of architecture school, the U.S. Department of State randomly selected her to win a diversity visa. Within six months, Haghtalab, her parents and siblings immigrated to Charlottesville. As lifelong advocates of education, Haghtalab’s parents chose Charlottesville for its proximity to UVA. In Iran and in the United States, Haghtalab says they remained “encouraging in every aspect of education.”
During her first few years in Charlottesville, Haghtalab felt “totally lost.” She found the “machine” of American culture isolating and “scary,” and missed the architecture, culture, stories and languages of Islamic and Persian cultures. After being admitted to and enrolling at UVA, Haghtalab “once again found [her] balance.” She fulfilled a double-major in chemistry and studio art and graduated in May 2017.
“The last three years have been the best in my life…I was able to figure out who I am,” says Haghtalab. “One of my findings through my rediscovery is that I love the arts and sciences together. I stand between these two.”
After graduation Haghtalab worked at BrightSpec, a local startup that specializes in molecular rotational resonance spectroscopy. The company developed a unique software that allows scientists to more quickly obtain the chemical makeup of samples. Haghtalab says her time at BrightSpec greatly impacted her art-making approach and processes, learning ”about chemistry, waves and mirrors, which started to make me feel curious about how to use these materials in my art.”
As a Tom Tom Founders Festival artist-in-residence at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative this past April, Haghtalab incorporated many of those elements in her exhibition “Who is your RGB self?” The solo show featured dance, paintings, poetry and sculptural elements like CDs woven together with metal chains. Haghtalab points out an interactive piece of the exhibition that rendered visitors’ shadows in hues of red, green and blue.
“You see your shadow go in three different directions,” Haghtalab says. “And when you interact with other people, it changes colors.”
After a two-month collaboration with Computers4Kids’ youth members, Haghtalab’s participation- and technology-based art will light up The Gallery at Studio IX for a First Fridays reception on August 3. Though the collaborative installation is titled “Seasons of Light: A Kinetic Experience,” Haghtalab refers to the roughly four-foot by three-foot piece in anatomical terms. The “skin” is a painting of a willow tree that uses limited pigments and might be what viewers see first, Haghtalab explains. Arduino programmable circuit boards, color-changing LED lights and sensors behind the thin painting make up the artwork’s “bones” and “nervous system.”
Haghtalab and mentees at Computers- 4Kids artfully fused each of these elements together to create the experience of watching a willow tree change through nature’s four seasons. As viewers approach the piece, the tree’s leaves go from green to red, orange and yellow. Lights in blue and yellow hues will also illuminate a body of water near the willow tree and the sun, and Haghtalab hopes the exhibition will include in-process images featuring Computers4Kids members.
She says she never imagined she would work with children to complete a piece like “Seasons of Light,” and now “all [she] wants to do is work with kids.” Haghtalab calls herself a STEAMer—an advocate for science, technology, engineering, arts and math. She believes that the future of education is in making those disciplines more inclusive.
“I don’t like to say we need to empower women. We are already powerful,” says Haghtalab. By bringing children together to experience the arts and STEM fields, “you remove the fear.”
“When you work hands-on, you bring everything together. It’s teamwork,” Haghtalab says. “The only indicator of your success is if a lightbulb turns on.”
It’s been a bad year for intoxicated cedar waxwings crashing into CHS windows.
Photo Walker Catlett
You can tell it’s spring when the birds return—and start crashing into the windows at Charlottesville High while drunk on Japanese pagoda tree berries.
Avid birder Walker Catlett, 17, a junior at CHS, saw cedar waxwings flying into windows, and so far has documented at least eight dead and others stunned from soaring into the glass.
Pagoda berry casualties. Photo Jacob Floyd
“I think they could have died because they were intoxicated by the pagoda berries,” he says. The berries ferment, and the birds “can get alcohol poisoning.”
He believes once they’re loaded on berries in the school’s courtyard, the birds bang into the reflective windows.
As he did at the new Brooks Family YMCA last fall when he found injured and dead birds outside its large windows, Catlett alerted the school’s administration.
Says CHS Principal Eric Irizarry,“It’s a great example of a student applying his knowledge and interest to solve a real-world problem.”
The school notified its facilities and maintenance staff, trimmed the berries on the courtyard bushes and applied poster paper to the windows as a temporary fix. And city facilities staffers have volunteered to remove nandina bushes (a flowering plant also called “heavenly bamboo”) around the school before next year’s berry season, says Irizarry.
The administration met with Catlett April 27 to brainstorm interim ideas to get through the migration season, which has resulted in more strikes than the school has seen before. “I believe the school is planning on putting tempera paint on the windows,” he says.
But now, a new problem: A northern cardinal fell victim to the allure of bright shiny surfaces at the Y May 1 and a northern waterthrush collided into CHS May 4.
Olivia Gallmeyer co-edits the Western Hemisphere. Photo Eze Amos
What’s it like to be a teenager in 2018? We figured nobody’s better plugged in than newspaper editors, so we checked in with the editors at Charlottesville High and Western Albemarle, as well as a CHS junior. Here’s what we learned about the differences between city and county schools—and what they have in common.
Olivia Gallmeyer
17-year-old senior at Western Albemarle High School
Co-editor of The Western Hemisphere
Biggest issues: “A lot of people are socially conscious. The statues were a big deal before August 12.” Student stress and academic pressure are “huge,” she says, and there’s parental pressure as well. Of the three Albemarle County high schools, half the students at Monticello and Albemarle take AP courses. At Western, “three-quarters do,” says Gallmeyer.
Characterize WAHS: High achieving. “I don’t think people care about what they’re learning. It’s get through this so I can go to college and begin my life.”
Also, “we are much whiter than the other schools.”
And sport heavy. WAHS is “fanatic,” says Gallmeyer. “It’s all about football in the fall.” And “Spirit Week is crazy here. You’re kind of ostracized if you don’t want to dress up.”
Coolest thing about Western: Lots of options. “We have a lot of support for independent study that people don’t know about,” says Gallmeyer, who has taken drama and worked on the newspaper for four years, and is taking statistics online. She’s also taking a women’s studies class, and she says there are lots of extracurricular activities, including a “super strong” robotics team.
Worst thing about your school: Although it’s improved a lot, Gallmeyer says Western has a huge culture of student stress, and mental health and substance abuse issues. “It’s considered the norm to be stressed, and students brag about, ‘I got four hours of sleep last night.’”
Risky behaviors: Vaping and JUULing. Alcohol use is common, and “weed is a problem also.” Not big: cigarettes and hard drugs.
August 12: Discussion in class began August 23. “To me it was hard to talk about,” she says. Teachers wanted to do it from an academic perspective.
Hangout: Brownsville Market for the potato wedges.
What adults get wrong: “A lot try to lump our age group with millennials.” They also assume teenagers know more about technology than they do. “If a teacher doesn’t know how to run a projector, we don’t know how to run the projector.” Also, “some of us like to read books.”
Obsolete in your lifetime? DVDs, CDs and watching a physical TV. “We do a lot more streaming.”
Describe your generation: “I think what’s going to be huge is coming of age after the 2016 election in such a polarized time.” Some kids have been out since they were 12 or 13. “Feminism and LGBT activism at our age is common.”
Fré Halvorson-Taylor
17-year-old senior at Charlottesville High School
Co-editor of The Knight-Time Review
Photo Eze Amos
Biggest issues: Little diversity in the upper-level classes. After talking to the city schools’ superintendent, Halvorson-Taylor is wondering what social and economic barriers are keeping black students out of AP and honor classes. “Black students are asked, ‘Are you sure you’ll feel comfortable?’ I wasn’t asked that.”
Coolest thing about CHS: “I love its diversity. Every student I come into contact with is passionate about something.” And teachers are their partners in crime, she says. “We aren’t just apathetic, slacking off teenagers. We have our interests. That’s what keeps me going.”
Worst thing about the school: The systemic issues, about which more communication and transparency would be “awesome.”
Hangout: Cook Out, where all high schools convene.
Risky behaviors: “There’s a lot of vaping.” And social media provides a platform for sexist and racist posts, which because they aren’t posted on school grounds, the administration can’t do anything. “That’s the most elusive beast we have,” says Halvorson-Taylor.
Describe your generation: “I’m still pretty hopeful. Local activism is getting younger. I still think we’re going to be the ones to address issues. We grew up with the message of hope in 2008 and 2012. Trump is pretty scary for us. And this wave of bigotry is something we have to actively address.”
What do adults get wrong? Many see technology as an evil that keeps them from seeing the good it does, she says. “I see Facebook as a way to get involved,” and a tool with a lot of potential. “It really is a revolution.”
Message to adults: “Listen to us. Engage us in conversation. Talk to us. We each have our unique voice.”
Cole Fairchild
17 year-old junior at CHS
Photo Eze Amos
Biggest issues: Mainly educational—“Kids struggling with am I going to graduate? Am I going to college? Am I going to have a B?” And segregation. The school is 50 percent black, but in Fairchild’s five AP classes, usually there are only three or four black students. “That’s not unique to Charlottesville,” he says. “Segregation socially comes from academics because you hang out with the same kids you’ve been in classes with since the sixth grade.”
Rivals: Albemarle High, Western Albemarle, but mostly AHS. “We’ve always hated them because they’re the school next to us and we’re always playing them.”
Coolest thing about CHS: Probably the community. “Even though it’s segregated, the students and teachers are really committed to each other,”
Worst: “The lunches are not long enough.”
What do adults get wrong? “We’re not millennials. There’s probably some misperception about young people in this generation not being connected as much, not involved as much. That’s an old-fashioned view. People can communicate and get information in a fraction of a second.”
Risky behaviors: People still get a thrill out of drinking, drugs, and pot is the most popular, he says. “I don’t know anyone who has smoked a cigarette.” Kids are juuling, but it’s not as bad as cigarettes.
Stress: Despite taking five AP classes, Fairchild says, “Personally I think I deal with stress better than a lot of my peers.” Nor is he as worried about college as some. “I’m going to college but I can’t tell you which. Some are really stressed out about that.” CHS offers around 23 AP classes and doesn’t have a limit on the number a student can take. Fairchild thinks taking seven is too many and it should be limited.
Hangout: Cook Out
Biggest difference from older generations: Reading books. “My parents read a lot more.”
Some environmental things will be different, with whole cities underwater in 50 years, he says, and some issues will be the same: war, political issues, social justice causes.
Katrina Callsen graduated from Yale and UVA law and her career has been in education and child advocacy, but her opponent is criticizing her teaching creds and one of her donors.
Submitted photo
With election day less than a week away, some are questioning a school board contender’s candidacy because of her involvement in a certain nonprofit.
Katrina Callsen is running for the Rio District seat on the Albemarle County School Board. The stay-at-home mom and former Teach for America corps member faces Mary McIntyre, a former part-time literacy teacher at Agnor-Hurt Elementary.
Callsen, a Yale alumni who also graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2014, joined Teach for America in 2009 and taught seventh grade math in Boston for two years with the nonprofit, which aims to “grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.”
The problem, says Walt Heinecke, an associate professor at UVA’s Curry School of Education, is that TFA offers limited training, so its candidates “don’t really get a full exposure for how to teach.” TFA graduates go through a five-week teaching course before being stationed in classrooms across America.
Heinecke adds that many TFA grads are short-timers in the field, and are assigned to low-income neighborhoods. “And I just don’t think it’s fair to kids living under those conditions to have those teachers with no real pedagogical training serving them,” he says.
WTJU general manager and activist Nathan Moore, the treasurer for the campaign of Callsen’s competitor, notes a recent donation to Callsen of $7,000 from Leadership for Educational Equity, a TFA-affiliated nonprofit that gives money to political candidates, but whose spokesperson says is not a political action committee. The Virginia Public Access Project also shows a $1,000 donation from Arthur Rock, a TFA principal donor from San Francisco, and a contribution of the same amount from Gary Debode, a New York City-area man active in the charter school movement.
“I’m not just complaining about how much she raised. …In a school board race like this, it smells foul to me when I see this kind of money from a special interest PAC like TFA,” says Moore. “Teach for America has a lovely mission, but because of how it operates, it somewhat disrespects the teaching mission.”
But according to Callsen, TFA in Massachusetts has one of the most rigorous licensure programs in the country. To become fully licensed, she studied at Boston University School of Education, passed the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure, completed two years of professional development and teacher training and submitted yearly reviews of teaching material and evidence of student progress. This was in addition to TFA’s five-week crash course and a bachelor’s degree from Yale.
And in 2012, UVA boasted about the number of its grads that were accepted into the competitive TFA program.
“My campaign has always been about serving children,” says Callsen. “I am qualified for School Board because I work hard, I care about children and my community, I am dedicated to being accessible and am willing to listen to everyone, and I have a proven track record of advocating on behalf of children.”
Aside from joining TFA, Callsen studied educational law and child advocacy at UVA Law and has volunteered with groups such as CASA—Court Appointed Special Advocates, Just Children and Kids Give Back. She says TFA has not offered funding or resources to her campaign, though public records show donations from the nonprofit’s PAC and top donors.
The candidate, who claims to be the only one with roots in the local community, says her decision to teach, go to law school and run for school board have all been prompted by her childhood.
“Growing up in a low-income household, I saw my parents struggle to make ends meet as I worked to achieve the future they envisioned for me,” Callsen says. “I learned that education is truly the pathway to success and, having spent my career in and around classrooms, I hope to bring that unique perspective to the board.”
Correction November 3: Leadership for Educational Equity is not a political action committee as the original headline and story indicated.
Correction November 3: Mary McIntyre is not currently a teacher at Agnor-Hurt Elementary.
As excited fourth-years take their final walk on the Lawn and up the portico steps of the recently refurbished Rotunda, they will no doubt be reflecting on their years at the University of Virginia. Just in the last school year, UVA has made headlines for scientific discoveries, Olympic athletes who have roamed Grounds, and improving sexual assault-prevention practices following the infamous now-retracted Rolling Stone article. As a nod to the class of 2016, we chat with a brother-and-sister pair who are both graduating, a fourth-year who is crossing off items on the 116 Things to Do Before Your Graduate list, a retiring professor who has amassed a collection of found objects in his office and a professor who has taught at UVA for four decades and says he will miss students the most. We also talked to fourth-year Martese Johnson about what’s next for him and how he views his time at the university after his altercation with ABC agents.
Fourth-year attempts to cross everything offher list
Photo: Amy Jackson
Fourth-year Elyse McMillen, a chemical engineering major, decided during her second year at UVA to try to accomplish the near-impossible: Finish the notorious “Things to Do Before You Graduate” list. Being a 2016 graduate, McMillen was tasked with 116 things (each school year another number is added), and she completed 104 by early May. Of the 12 she has left, four will be completed by the time she graduates. Some of the remaining eight are now out of reach, such as snowtubing at Wintergreen, but McMillen hopes to knock off just a couple more before she graduates. To anyone hoping to complete the list, McMillen has one piece of advice: “Take the opportunities as they come because a lot of times you don’t have a second chance.”
Even though McMillen won’t finish the entire list before she graduates, she’s glad she had the chance to experience so much at UVA. “Honestly, I can go down each of these and think of a story for each one.”
Favorite items on the list
Hug Ms. Kathy in Newcomb (Ms. Kathy swipes students’ cards as they enter Newcomb Dining Hall). “I just love that that’s on here.”
Build a snowman on the Lawn. “I’m from Colorado, so snow is sort of my thing.”
Drive up Skyline Drive. “It’s a wonderful drive, so I’m glad that’s on there because people need to do that.”
Just her luck
Nab the No. 1 ticket at Bodo’s. “I got lucky with that one because I worked as part of a research team during the summer of first year and what time we went into the lab was dependent on the cell cycle. So one morning when we had to get up early, we just got up and went to Bodo’s and got the first ticket. There was one other group who came after us and when they saw us they just kind of shrugged and then walked away, but other than that it was pretty quiet. I definitely still have the ticket in a journal somewhere as a pride thing.”
Witness a probate. “I was studying in the Rotunda and a probate just happened outside. They’re pretty secret, so I got super lucky.”
Watch the sunset from the top floor of Culbreth Parking Garage. “I did that by happenstance. I was meeting someone there and they told me to go to the parking garage and I had never been there before and the sun happened to be setting while I was there, so I watched it.”
Siblings share the stage on graduation weekend
Photo: Amy Jackson
Most siblings share the same address growing up, but not many can say they shared an address in college. Even fewer can say that that address was in UVA’s most prestigious living quarters. But third-year graduate student Kyle Gardiner and his younger sister, Gillian, a fourth-year in the College of Arts and Sciences, are the exception.
Gillian and Kyle both live in Jefferson’s original student quarters, the Lawn and the Range respectively, just one street over from each other—and you’ll find the number 33 on both their doors.
According to Gillian, the choice of Lawn Room 33 was not intentional, despite her brother occupying 33 West Range. But for Kyle, the story was slightly different.
“You want to talk about annoying things I had to do for my sister,” Kyle says, explaining that Gillian was abroad when she got accepted to the Lawn. “I had to scout out a lot of rooms on the Lawn and see what she would like…33 was one of the only rooms still left of the best rooms on the Lawn. So that compared with the fact that I had room 33 made it too good of a story not to pick.”
Kyle does admit, though, there are major benefits to attending the same college as one of your siblings.
“We have different types of meal plans, so she can give me access on the weekends at the dining hall. Plus, whenever my parents come to give her something, they’ll bring something for me or vice versa. There are lots of utilitarian benefits,” Kyle says.
Gillian agrees, saying she loves being able to just walk over and hang out with her brother some nights. That doesn’t stop her from finding faults with him, though.
“Because he’s so outgoing, a lot of my friends end up meeting him before they meet me. So I’ll constantly be hearing, ‘Oh, you’re Kyle’s sister,’” Gillian says, something she’s been used to since childhood. “And then when I got into UVA and Kyle came a year later, I was like, finally, things will be turned around and my friends will be saying that to him instead! But it’s still the same way and I still get asked if I’m Kyle’s sister from people I meet.”
Since the Lawn and the Range are such competitive housing areas, both Gillian and Kyle boast an impressive résumé. Gillian is not only majoring in linguistics, minoring in Italian and following the pre-med track, but she is also a member of club soccer and UVA’s co-ed service fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega.
Not to be outdone, Kyle is getting a double masters, with a Master of Public Policy from the Batten School and a Master of Urban and Environmental Planning from the School of Architecture, as well as participating in the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society and volunteering at a local fire station. Their busy lives don’t stop them from indulging in some good-natured sibling rivalry, though.
“…for the first two or three years here he’s been claiming that he’ll be graduating from grad school before I graduate from college,” Gillian says.
Unfortunately for Kyle, his younger sister has him beat—Gillian is set to walk the Lawn on May 21 while he graduates on May 22. This one might sting for a bit.
Collecting decades of memories
Photo: Amy Jackson
Baseballs? Yes. The occasional soccer ball? Sure. You’ll even find an entire pile of glittery objects. But you won’t find more than five or so books on professor Paul Barolsky’s office bookshelf. Barolsky, who has taught at UVA since 1969, says the found-objects exhibit was the result of approximately five years of collecting abandoned items.
“You’ll notice an installation of umbrellas,” Barolsky says as he discusses the wall. “They were left in the classroom and no one came to claim them. So after two or three weeks they became art.”
Barolsky and a former colleague named the collection “Trash and Treasures in Charlottesville,” but Barolsky laughingly admits that when he leaves the office in a month it will most likely become trash.
The growing collection of neglected objects in Barolsky’s office isn’t the only thing that’s changed over the years, though. When Barolsky first began teaching a Renaissance survey lecture at UVA in 1969, the university wasn’t even co-ed.
“The ‘gentlemen,’ as they were called, wore ties and jackets to class,” Barolsky says. “It was a very different place. The culture of the university changed very, very, rapidly in the early ’70s—it was quite an exciting time.”
You won’t see college students walking to class in suits and ties anymore, but Barolsky still teaches the Renaissance survey course that got him hired 47 years ago. While he’s dabbled in courses on Greek art and literature, as well as other art history subjects, the Renaissance survey holds a special place for Barolsky, along with a fourth-year seminar on Ovid and the works that he has inspired.
“Students have done some remarkable things [in that class],” Barolsky says. “Way before formatting was easy, a student did a parody of the Cav Daily with all the articles about Ovid. [The students at UVA] are very playful, they’re very witty and they’re very informed.”
The works of Ovid have been a particular focus of Barolsky’s academic life as well, where he’s produced some of his favorite work. After his retirement this year, Barolsky plans to continue writing essays to get his remaining ideas on paper.
“Most academics are obsessive, and I’m no exception,” he says. “You finish writing one [book] and you start the next one. …It’s as if you’re writing one book and the particular books that come along are almost like chapters in that one big book.”
Although Barolsky looks forward to continuing his work in Charlottesville, he says he’ll miss the “high” of teaching at the university as well as the great work his students have produced.
“Teaching art history is a privileged experience, make no mistake,” Barolsky says. “It takes very enthusiastic talent and students. What can be better than that? What luck that I happened to be there when Frederick Hartt was looking for someone to replace him in the Renaissance survey course.”
Creating lifelong connections with students
Photo: Amy Jackson
“He gets a green tea,” an employee calls as 75-year-old professor James Childress stands in front of the cashier. “No extra ice this time,” Childress replies, clearly familiar with the employees from his frequent visits to the Starbucks on the first floor of Nau Hall.
It’s not just the baristas who recognize Childress. Undergrad and grad students alike shout a quick hello to the professor as they walk by his table, and he cheerfully responds to each one with an individual greeting.
Charismatic and playful, Childress, who has taught at UVA for 44 years and is retiring this spring, likes to joke that he “didn’t know Jefferson well.” Since his first year at UVA in 1968, Childress estimates he’s taught more than 19,000 students and says he loved teaching at the university from the start.
“There’s something about it,” Childress says of UVA. “I do love the place. It’s not a perfect place, but it was small enough that I could really work with people from all over the university and I’ve had really good students that I’ve had a great time teaching, and that’s been a lot of fun.”
Childress teaches in three different departments at UVA, serving as the John Allen Hollingsworth professor of ethics, and teaching as a professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and focusing on bioethics as a professor of medical education in the School of Medicine.
Even professors have favorites, though, and Childress names a lecture class called “Theology Ethics and Medicine” and a seminar on “Just War and Pacifism” as his favorite courses to teach.
“I had 30 students in 1979 and now I have over 300,” Childress says of his lecture course. “There’s a communal part, and I very much enjoy working with TAs.”
In addition to his impact at the university level, Childress will leave behind a legacy outside the classroom as well. Among other things, Childress was a member of President Bill Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, where he dealt with issues of stem cell research and cloning, as with Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal. He presented his findings in the Rose Garden of the White House.
“President Clinton gave us 90 days to prepare a report about what the federal government should be doing about cloning. That meant we needed to consult all sorts of scientists and also people in religious studies and other areas about a topic that is really more of a matter of science fiction,” Childress says. “But if you can clone sheep, you can clone people.”
Childress says one of his fondest memories at UVA was his time serving as the principal of Brown Residential College alongside his late wife.
“What we enjoyed the most was sitting down for dinner and meeting up with three different groups of students every night. We loved all of the things we would put on at the house,” Childress says.
Childress will retain an office in Charlottesville after his retirement and continue to work with the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life, but he will no longer teach his staple courses at the university.
“I won’t miss a lot of the committees and the reports,” Childress says as he watches students pass through the Starbucks, “but I will miss the teaching.”
The aftereffects of Jackie
Photo: Rammelkamp Foto
Ayear and a half since Rolling Stone’s now-retracted “A Rape on Campus” sent shockwaves through the University of Virginia, the school continues to make strides in the way it approaches sexual assault.
Among other things, the university instituted mandatory sexual assault and alcohol training modules last fall for all returning students, as well as introduced an optional Green Dot bystander training program in March 2015. Andrea Press, a professor of media studies and sociology at UVA, says these steps are a great improvement for the school’s sexual assault culture, which she says was “unselfconscious” in the past.
“I think we are in a new era from the one we were in a year and a half ago,” Press says. “Change had begun before the Rolling Stone article—UVA had begun to revise its procedure and its policy. But I think that all of the awareness and the debate helps to make those policies more effective. You can have the policies and not have awareness and if you don’t have awareness, you don’t have people reporting.”
While many of the changes made at UVA as a result of the article are still being instituted, Press stresses the importance of the initial media coverage that “A Rape on Campus” provided for the issue of sexual assault on college campuses.
“It galvanized attention on the plight of sexual assault victims in college and it was really gratifying to see that happen,” Press says. “We had faculty campus-wide meetings, we had protests at frat houses, at parties. We had activist groups formed. It was a moment of great activism among the faculty, and the administration was very supportive of that.”
At the time of the article’s release, both then-Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo and the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity came under fire for their alleged involvement in Jackie’s sexual assault and her choice not to press charges. While both have since filed lawsuits against Rolling Stone for their false depiction in the piece, efforts have also been made on UVA’s side to enact changes in Greek life.
In particular, all fraternities involved in the Interfraternity Council agreed to sign the Fraternal Organization Agreement Addendum in September, which proposed certain regulations for future fraternity functions.
Of particular note, the addendum outlined the number of sober brothers necessary for different functions, requiring a sober brother to be present at all sites of alcohol distribution as well as at the stairs to the residential areas of the house during events. The addendum also set regulations for which types of alcohol were allowed to be served to persons of age and by whom, preventing hard liquor from being served unless the fraternity hired a bartender.
Despite these changes to Greek life at UVA, Press still believes the role that fraternities play in sexual assault needs to be looked into further.
“The jury is out on whether frat culture encourages assault,” Press says. “I would like to see fraternity officials and nationwide officials taking this question seriously and investigating it and committing themselves to changing it, and I haven’t quite seen that happen.”
The Interfraternity Council did not respond to C-VILLE Weekly’s request for comment.
As changes continue to be made on UVA’s campus and other college campuses around the nation, Press encourages the university to be “vigilant” in policy changes.
“We want our students to be safe, and we want our students to have an equal opportunity to pursue their education, and right now that doesn’t seem to be the case,” she says.
By the numbers
Students who completed new sexual assault and alcohol training modules: 97%
Employees who underwent Title IX and Clery Act training: 1,000
Additional funding provided by UVA to Green Dot: $60,000
Number of new full-time employees at Counseling and Psychological Services: 4.2
Minimum number of sober brothers required at fraternity functions: 3
Initial number of faculty trained by Green Dot: 71
Initial number of students trained by Green Dot: 62; 88 additional students have been trained since
Martese Johnson talks graduation and changes at UVA
Fourth-year Martese Johnson made headlines last March when the image of his bloody face after being arrested by Alcoholic Beverage Control agents outside Trinity Irish Pub was splashed across national media. On June 12, charges against Johnson were dropped—and the prosecutor decided to not bring charges against ABC agents Jared Miller, John Cielakie and Thomas Custer.
This March, Johnson filed suit for $3 million against the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control: “all of a sudden, and without provocation, Custer and Miller slammed Martese into the brick walkway, face first, causing Martese to suffer a severe laceration to his forehead and scalp,” says the lawsuit.
We spoke with Johnson about his time at UVA, what changes he’s seen as a result of the incident and what the future holds for him.
Have you noticed any changes on Grounds since the incident?
I think the university is far more on alert in regards to incidents of this nature. I think they’re being very reactive in the sense that they’re trying to prevent anything of the sort from happening again. I think the ambassadors are very cognizant of the way they interact with students and conscious of what’s going on. I think the environment in general has become a lot more positive and that people are really aware of their own actions as well as looking out for each other. …I hope that students at UVA keep trying to make this a better environment and a safer environment, and I know that some students are.
What is it like to juggle a lawsuit with all of your schoolwork and still make time to hang out with friends?
I think that it’s definitely a challenging process trying to juggle multiple things at once. …But I also try to find peace in living in the moment, so while it’s been a challenging process, hopefully it will lead to better things for many people, and I enjoy having the opportunity to possibly be a catalyst for some positive change.
What kind of changes would you like to see?
I would love to see, at the university, a stronger black community. I’m not saying the one here isn’t strong, but in the early ’80s and ’90s the black population was 13 or 14 percent and now it’s dwindled to 6 percent. That, coupled with the fact that there aren’t a lot of tenured black faculty at UVA and there’s not a lot of people for us to look up to at UVA, I think that kind of hinders the black experience here.
On a larger scale, there’s so much inequity in America and so a lot of the things I’ve been working on have not been to make changes at the microcosm of UVA, but to enact large-scale change throughout the U.S. We see African-Americans at the bottom of the wealth gap, experiencing the largest effects of wealth inequality. You see how housing disparities have hurt communities of color. In some neighborhoods of color, there aren’t grocery stores. Even the air we breathe in some neighborhoods is toxic. So I think about these larger issues that all tie into inequity in the U.S. and I hope that we can chip away at them and make a better America for everybody.
What are your plans for after college?
I’m gonna be moving to New York City with at least two of my best friends. I’m gonna be doing creative consulting for a firm called Sylvain Labs—a weird kind of consulting that allows us to wear T-shirts in our office. After work every day I’m hoping to work on an entrepreneurial effort as well as hopefully on weekends still be able to travel and speak to people about issues.
What do you still hope to accomplish at UVA before you leave?
Well, I’m working on one really big thing that I can’t really talk about, but I’m hoping to give back to the university in a big way in the very near future. As well as, you know, tie some knots in terms of friendships and relationships. Make sure that when I leave here I’m in the position to come back and still have an impact here, still have relationships—normal graduation stuff. Hopefully in the next few months or so I can do something really nice for the university.
What have been some of your favorite experiences during your time at UVA?
I think that there were three major milestones in my college career that I’m always going to remember and cherish. The first was my sort of public initiation ceremony for my fraternity, and so becoming a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. Second thing was winning a contested university-wide election for the honor committee and sort of breaking down their system of hierarchy by running without being a member of their support pool beforehand. The final thing was being tapped into the IMP Society. I think that was huge for me because it opened my eyes to the fact that you do not have to be the same as someone for them to be a great friend of yours, and I think that our group has exemplified diversity in so many realms and it’s taught me so much about humans and how we’re all such different individuals.
And I’ll miss UVA basketball games, too.
How do you feel about walking the Lawn for final exercises?
I’m hype. I can’t wait until that scaffolding (on the Rotunda) comes down.
Any final words?
A lot of people look at my experience and sort of make it a reason why they shouldn’t come to UVA or why this isn’t a good place for people of color to be, and I disagree with that wholeheartedly. I think that UVA has been imperfect in a lot of ways, but it’s been the perfect experience for me in that it’s helped me grow tremendously in various ways and taught me how to be strong even in the worst moments. It’s also taught me that there are a lot of problems in the world, similar to UVA, but that there are also a lot of ways to make a change.
So I hope that the students who come after me value their time here and cherish the fact that they can come here as a student and create real change in a community that hopefully will matter to them. Wahoowa! Go UVA.
Rebuilding the Rotunda
Photo: Dan Addison/UVA University Communications
Driving down University Avenue, you might notice the Rotunda’s usual cluster of scaffolding has decreased considerably. Although the UNESCO World Heritage Site is still under construction, UVA’s design team has completed the majority of its renovations, and the project is on schedule to be finished by August.
The first phase included installing a new oculus and copper roof. The second phase began in spring 2014 and expands classroom space in the Rotunda, increases access and enhances programming options at a cost of roughly $42.5 million.
UVA’s historic preservation architect Jody Lahendro says the changes are meant to reinstate the Rotunda as a center for student life.
“What all of us, and the university design team, hope this project does is to bring students back into the Rotunda to have it become an active part of the daily life of the students, a daily part of the education experience,” Lahendro says.
Much of the exterior will be finished this month, allowing graduates to process up the north portico steps, around the terraces of the Rotunda and down the south portico steps.
In Thomas Jefferson’s original 1821 designs for the Rotunda, the building was meant to be the university’s main library, a natural hub for student activity. When Alderman Library became the main library on grounds in 1938, it slowly shifted student study space outside of the Rotunda.
The renovations to the Rotunda’s interior add several new areas specifically designed for student use.
“We’re opening three new student classrooms, new study spaces, and the hours will be extended for students to use,” Lahendro says. “And we’re enhancing the Dome Room for the students to use as a study space.”
The two-year-long renovations have not been all smooth sailing. Some of the outdoor work on the utilities between the Rotunda and University Avenue caused unexpected trouble.
As part of the second phase, four new utility lines had to be added, running perpendicular to utilities that had been installed as early as the 19th century. Difficulties with installation pushed this part of the project back by six months.
“We found many of the utility lines in different locations than the maps had shown,” Lahendro says. “We had to eventually go underneath all of those existing utilities and when we did that we hit rock.”
Although much of this work was planned to safeguard the historical site, Lahendro stresses again that the students are at the heart of the renovations.
“They are the most important part of this project,” Lahendro says, “Our hope is to make the Rotunda part of the students’ educational experience and get them back in there again.”
Capital project
The capitals, the carved decorative tops on the Rotunda’s white columns, will be replaced—both on the exterior and in the interior of the Dome Rome. Master craftsmen in Italy used surviving fragments and 1870s-era photos to recreate the Rotunda’s original capitals; the latest capitals were installed in the late 19th or early 20th century and were unstable and not weathering well.
The public will now have access to the gallery level in the Dome Rome, which puts them on eye level with the new capitals, created by Richmond-based firm Tektonics Design Group. Made of mahogany, each new capital is constructed of several pieces that allows for more detail, says Tektonics’ Christopher Hildebrand.—Erika Howsare
By the numbers
7 Number of capitals Tektonics is building per month
40 Total capitals in the project
250-300 Hours each capital requires to build
10,000-12,000 Total hours to build all the capitals
5 People hired for the project
2,000 Total parts to complete the job
Headlines from the past year
Two UVA grads to compete in summer olympics
UVA will be represented by at least two of its graduates at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Meghan O’Leary, a Jefferson Scholar who graduated in ’08, was a two-sport Division I athlete in softball and volleyball. After graduating, she worked for ESPN, and she picked up rowing in 2010. In 2013 she left ESPN to pursue rowing fulltime and earned a spot on the U.S. Senior National team that same year. In April, O’Leary and her partner, Ellen Tomek, won the final of the women’s double sculls competition at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Sarasota, Florida, to qualify for the Olympics. She’s the first Jefferson Scholar alum from UVA to do so.
Yannick Kaeser, class of 2016, will make his second appearance at the Olympic Games, swimming the 100- and 200-meter breaststroke for Switzerland. He previously competed in the 2012 games. In his four years at UVA he set two school records, swimming the 100-meter breaststroke in 52:47 and the 200-meter breaststroke in 1:53.72. He logs more than 20 hours a week with nine team practices and three weight-room sessions.
One for the history (WELL, science) books
Antoine Louveau Photo: Jackson Smith
Researchers at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine made a discovery that could change the treatment of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and autism.
The finding involves the presence of the lymphatic system—the network of vessels that serves as a connection between tissues and the bloodstream and removes dead blood cells and other waste—in the brain, thus connecting the brain to the immune system, and overturning the teaching in decades-old medical textbooks.
“That makes us revisit the way we think of the brain as scientists,” says Antoine Louveau, a postdoctoral fellow in the neuroscience department. Louveau works under Dr. Jonathan Kipnis, the director of UVA’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia.
Louveau’s findings received massive national attention, including a nomination for Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year.
The class of 2016
At this weekend’s final exercises, 6,671 degrees will be awarded:
4,016 bachelor degrees (119 of these were earned in three years, three were earned in two years)
2,173 graduate degrees, including 296 Ph.Ds, eight Doctor of Education degrees and 15 Doctor of Nursing Practice degrees
482 first professional degrees
Faculty inducted into prestigious academy
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences named three faculty members from the University of Virginia to its membership: School of Law professor and psychologist John Monahan, Professor of English Jahan Ramazani, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor.
They join 33 other UVA scholars elected to the academy, including President Teresa A. Sullivan, who was inducted last year.
UVA fourth-year’s video goes viral
Samuel Reid, a classics major, has taken a photo of himself nearly every day since he was a junior in high school—and no these photos weren’t clogging his Instagram feed. Instead he used the more than 1,100 photos to create a time-lapse, stop-motion video of himself singing Coldplay’s “Life in Technicolor ii.” The video, which received 313,454 views on YouTube as of May 16, went viral and was shown on NBC’s “Today” show.
Highs and lows mark Virginia’s football season
The 2015-2016 season marked the Virginia Cavaliers football team’s 12th consecutive loss against in-state rival Virginia Tech. It was the season the Cavs lost every road game for the third consecutive year. And it was the season Brigham Young University’s Bronco Mendenhall took over as head coach after Mike London’s November 29 resignation.
Despite the team’s losing record, finishing 4-8 in London’s last season, head coach Mendenhall promises change, as he comes off 11 straight winning seasons at BYU. His first rules as coach included stripping players of their jersey numbers and banning Virginia gear, telling his players they need to earn back those privileges.
Of course, you can’t talk about football without talking about the marching band. While the football team was riddled with problems this season, the Cavalier Marching Band fared much better, making a name for itself by appearing in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for the first time in program history.
UVA third-year competes in ‘Jeopardy! College Championship’
Adam Antoszewski, a double major in chemistry and physics, competed against 14 other students whose majors range from literature to integrative biology. His show, in which he went up against Carissa Pekny, a senior at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and Columbia University freshman Emily Sun, aired February 1. Antoszewski was second going into the final Jeopardy! round, in which the clue was, “Teddy Roosevelt called it the one great sight which every American should see (answer: What is The Grand Canyon?). All three contestants wrote the wrong question, with Antoszewski and Pekny both ending up with $0. Sun won the match with $8,999.
Highlights of the Virginia Cavaliers men’s basketball season
Malcolm Brogdon. Photo: Matt Riley
Head basketball coach Tony Bennett, in his seventh season with the Cavaliers, led UVA to another record-breaking year in what some fans are calling the best three consecutive seasons since Ralph Sampson played in 1980-1983.
Highlights include 89 wins during the past three years to surpass the 88 garnered in Virginia’s 1981-1983 seasons.
UVA completed its first undefeated season at John Paul Jones Arena since 1981-1982, going 15-0 at home.
In the NCAA tournament, the Virginia Cavaliers reached the Elite Eight for the first time since 1995. The previous two years the team fell to Michigan State in the Sweet 16 and the round of 32, respectively.
Malcolm Brogdon was named ACC Player of the Year and ACC Defensive Player of the Year, becoming the first player to earn both awards in the same season of play.
ESPN’s “College GameDay” came to UVA for the second consecutive year, and the second time in program history. Second-year student Andrew Board banked in a half-court shot during the show to win $18,000.
Undergrads protest Alderman Library renovations
Renovation plans are currently underway for Alderman Library, which opened in 1938, that will update fire suppression systems and solve plumbing and electrical issues in the building. University staff came under fire, however, when undergraduate students began protesting these renovations three months ago.
Led by fourth-year English major Vanessa Braganza, whose petition to Keep the Books in Alderman has amassed more than 600 signatures, students declared their opposition to any renovations that would cause a large-scale removal of books from the library.
While Interim University Librarian Martha Sites assured students that plans were still in the developmental phase for the renovation, she consented that some books would be temporarily removed by necessity to complete the renovation.
Sites will be replaced by John M. Unsworth as university librarian and dean of libraries on June 25.
By the numbers
Volumes in Alderman (including books, documents and serials): 2.5 million
Volumes added per year: 35,000
Seats in Alderman (for studying purposes): 1,447
Estimated cost for necessary renovations: Between $40 million and $100 million
Estimated cost for full renovations (including restoration of certain spaces): $160 million
This year's festival aims to start conversations between authors and readers.
Every March thousands gather in Charlottesville for the Virginia Festival of the Book, nowin its 22nd year, to celebrate storytelling and literacy. With most events free of charge and open to the public, the festival encourages book-lovers from all over to attend readings and panels, to see some of their favorite writers up close, learn about their process and ask questions. And for authors, whose profession is largely practiced in solitude, it provides the opportunity to meet and discuss their work with their readers.
Finishing the conversation
Writer opens up about free expression
Kelly Carlin Photo: Courtesy subject
Growing up the daughter of comedian George Carlin, Kelly Carlin was always interested in writing and storytelling.
“But I really didn’t take any of that seriously until my mom’s death in 1997, which was a huge awakening,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “Truly. One of those moments where you’re like, ‘Wow, this is real. I guess I need to get on with pursuing my dreams in a serious way.’”
As a result, Carlin, 52, began writing her first one-woman show called Driven to Distraction, which was about how her childhood, so frequently disrupted by her parents’ drug use, distracted her from her true self, and the distraction continued with her own drug use and poor decisions until her mother’s death from liver cancer. When she showed the script to her dad, he was uncomfortable with the fact that it revealed things even he had not known.
“That’s kind of a big theme in the book,” Carlin says of her memoir, A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up with George (2015). “My dad was a great truth-teller and taught me to tell the truth, and yet in our family—because of our dysfunction—we never learned to tell our truth to each other.”
She did a limited run of the show. “There was something for me about being on a stage,” she says, “…being seen and heard, having been invisible my whole life.”
Then she went on to graduate school to earn a master’s degree in Jungian psychology. There, she says, while interning as a therapist, she was able “to practice the art of creating a space, an unconditional space, for other people to have their experiences,” beautifully paralleling the cathartic space that her one-woman show had created.
After graduate school, she told her father she was working on a memoir and he expressed a similar kind of discomfort as he did with her show. Because he was also suffering from heart failure, she decided her book could wait.
Kelly Carlin, A Carlin Home Companion
“I just knew that there wasn’t an extended period of time he was going to be on the planet, and I knew my relationship with him and his comfort was way more important than me writing this book at the time,” says Carlin. “So I put it on the shelf.”
Writing and publishing the book, she says, is like finishing a conversation.
“I feel like there’s a real ending here with this book being out and that I can not only move on from my family’s story and the story of my life up until my dad’s death, but I get to let go of having to be George Carlin’s daughter kind of in a public way,” she says.
Part of her father’s legacy, though, continues through her as she serves on the board of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, and through her position there she has become acquainted with Charlottesville.
“I’m thrilled to be coming back,” says Carlin. She will discuss her work at 10am on Saturday, March 19, at City Council Chambers.—R.L.
Academic pursuits
Former electrician shines light on intellectual freedom
Jen Swann Downey Photo: Ryan Jones
In the fictional realm, a local author’s work is also concerned with truth-telling and freedom of expression. In Jen Swann Downey’s first book, The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand, young protagonist Dorrie and her brother Marcus stumble through a magic door in their local library that lands them in the headquarters for the Lybrarians, a group that travels through time defending those under threat for what they’ve written or said.
Downey says she was inspired to write her middle-grade adventure series because, “Libraries are my amusement park and I’ve always associated librarians with being protectors of intellectual freedom.” The idea for her book began with a vision she had “of people from different times, in their burnished historical forms, sitting down together and doing something prosaic, like eating pickles, and discussing their different views,” she says.
In this fictional world, “I get to explore an issue that has always been important to me: freedom to express one’s beliefs and opinions,” says Downey. “It’s fascinating to me that we embrace that value when looking to the past, but it is much more of a challenge to honor that principle in our own lives.”
Jen Swann Downey, The Ninja Librarians
Though Downey has worked as a community organizer, electrician, lamp shade-maker and repairer of old lamps, and co-owns Carpe Donut with her husband, Matt Rohdie, she says, “Writing was there from the beginning.”
The beginning came in the form of “a little blue diary with polka dot paper on the inside,” says Downey. “I don’t know who gave it to me, but just the idea of, ‘Oh you can write in this,’” was a revelation to her.
In her early 20s, she made a misguided attempt at writing picture books, thinking it would be easy. “I typed up truly terrible, didactic stories, popped them into envelopes and sent them to publishers,” she says. “One starred some talking raisins that escaped from a grocery store.” She shakes her head and laughs as we sit in a coffee shop on the Downtown Mall.
As for who inspired her feisty, sword-wielding ninja protagonist, Dorrie, she says, “It’s hard not to write your first protagonist without having yourself in mind, drawing from struggles you remember, what affected you as a child.” Downey remembers the Vietnam War and Civil Rights strife from her own childhood, and questioning what she could do as a child. “And that informed where Dorrie started out.”
Already, some reviewers have compared Downey to J. K. Rowling. Having raised children of her own, Downey says she’s been reading Harry Potter and listening to the audiobook for 10 years. “I’d be working in some room and off in the distance there was that voice, the master at work.”
Downey will be talking to students at Walton Middle School on Thursday, March 17, and Walker Upper Elementary on Friday, March 18, and will be on the panel at the StoryFest & Pub Day for teen writers at 10am on Saturday, March 19, at Village School. Her second book in The Ninja Librarians series will be published in June.—R.L.
Playing with the past
An author’s alternative history of America
Jeffery Renard Allen Photo: Courtesy subject
Professor Jeffrey Renard Allen, who joined the University of Virginia faculty last fall, stumbled on the subject of his most recent novel in a footnote. In 1998 he was reading neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, when he came across the mention of Blind Tom, or Thomas Greene Wiggins, a 19th-century pianist, and likely autistic savant, born a slave.
Song of the Shank (2014), which took Allen 10 years to research and write, follows Tom from his boyhood through his career, during which he performed for such well-known figures as Mark Twain and President James Buchanan.
But Allen is quick to point out that Song of the Shank is not a strict historical novel. “I take historical facts and use them as points of departure for my imagination,” he says. “Song of the Shank is an alternative history of America. The idea was to capture the time without sticking to strict facts of the time.”
Jeffery Renard Allen, Song of the Shank
“Elements of fantasy play in all of my fiction,” says Allen. “I’m really interested in levels of reality and how these levels are intertwined. I’m interested in what fantasy can reveal about human experience.”
Allen says he was “less interested in the period than in Tom as a character.” But the Civil War draft riots that rocked New York City in 1863 provided an “interesting parallel to Tom’s life and have not been addressed much in popular imagination,” Allen says. “A lot of fiction has been done about slavery in America but comparatively little about Reconstruction.”
Allen will speak on a panel about historic fiction at 10am on Thursday, March 17, at the JMRL Central Branch. As for what’s next, Allen has penned an essay about the Black Lives Matter movement to be published in the revamped Evergreen Review on April 7, an essay on music in a forthcoming issue of Poets & Writers, and he is working on his next novel now that he has settled into life in Charlottesville.—R.L.
Planting the seed
Historical research leads to new novel
Tracy Chevalier Photo: Courtesy subject
Tracy Chevalier was inspired to write her latest novel, At the Edge of the Orchard (2016), by a historical figure she came across while researching the setting for her previous novel, The Last Runaway (2013). Chevalier (author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1999) tells me during our Skype call from her London home that she learned “Johnny Appleseed wasn’t quite the myth that we learned about as children.”
“We learned that he was eccentric and that he wore a tin pot for a hat and went barefoot, and he also spread apples around and told everybody to eat lots of them because they’re good for you,” says Chevalier. “And the reality is that he actually was quite a shrewd businessman and he also sold apple trees that were grown from seed.” She learned from further research that apple trees grown from seed tend to produce sour apples, which are only good for making hard cider.
“So most of the settlers he sold trees to were growing apples not for healthy reasons, but in order to make alcohol to kind of numb the pain of the harsh life they were living,” Chevalier says. “And when I read that I just thought, ‘Wow, that’s really different.’ And I had this vision of a pioneer couple arguing over apples, and one wanting apples to eat and one wanting apples to drink. And that was the basis—that was how the book began.”
From the catalyst of the argument, the characters within the marriage began to take shape, and around them, the landscape. Because of where Johnny Appleseed traveled, Chevalier knew the novel would take place in Ohio and she was intrigued by the idea of the Black Swamp, “the last part of Ohio to be settled because it was so awful.” She says the detail in her novel about inns being built in Ohio simply because that’s where people got stuck in the mud is historically accurate. “One particular road had a reputation,” she says.
Tracy Chevalier, At the Edge of the Orchard
The novel follows this couple, James and Sadie Goodenough, as they try to tame the land, and their son, Robert, as he leaves his family to stake his own claim in California. Chevalier writes James and Sadie in distinctly different ways. “Most of the book is third person, except for Sadie because she is such a strong character that I just felt her voice immediately and I knew that she needed to tell her own story,” she explains. Chevalier came across the English surname Goodenough in her research. She was drawn to it because “It’s a hard name to have,” she says. “All compromise. No one’s expecting too much from you.”
As this is her eighth work of historical fiction, she has by now developed a system and a rhythm. She tends to research for at least six months before putting pen to paper (yes, she actually writes her drafts by hand). For Girl with a Pearl Earring she studied Vermeer, for The Last Runaway it was slavery, for Orchard it was Ohio apple trees and California sequoias. But, she says, “characters build in her head” while she’s researching. Then, after the writing begins, “the story itself throws up questions” and she must return to research. “The story shows you what you don’t know,” says Chevalier. For Orchard, she had to stop writing to learn how to graft trees.
Writing historical fiction “is a convenient and easy way to leave myself behind,” she says. “I don’t want to write autobiographical novels. I could have written science fiction to move to another planet, or I could’ve written about other countries, but I chose to go to the past because I’m interested in my own family history. The more I learn about the past the more I learn about the present, and it makes me feel a part of something bigger.”
Chevalier will appear on the panel with Flournoy pertaining to writing about the American family on Sunday, March 20, at the Culbreth Theatre.—R.L.
Personal connection
Past and present intersect in The Turner House
Angela Flournoy Photo: Courtesy subject
Debut novelist Angela Flournoy’s inspiration for writing The Turner House (2015) came from personal experience and recent history. “I come from a big family and am interested in how that contributes to the way you think about identity, belonging and place,” says Flournoy, from her Brooklyn home. The setting of her novel is Detroit’s East Side. Her father’s family is from Detroit, and through visits there she became interested in the changes that the city has gone through during her lifetime.
When the novel opens, the oldest brother in the family of 13 has seen a haint (or a ghost) from his childhood while driving his semi-truck and it causes him to wreck. The youngest daughter has just been evicted from her apartment and tries to win rent money by playing roulette, while the family learns that their childhood home is worth less than they owe the bank, and the matriarch is no longer well enough to live there alone. The novel addresses the American dream in the face of the economic crisis and the enduring pride of place, in spite of its decline. Flournoy writes in an opening chapter that the arrival of spring reassured the youngest daughter “that the ghetto could still hold beauty, and that streets with this much new life could still have good in them.”
Angela Flournoy, The Turner House
The Turner House eschews categorization as either a domestic or social problem novel. “None of us lives in a vacuum,” Flournoy says. “We all live in society and are affected by legislation and policy.”
Flournoy will appear alongside Tracy Chevalier on the panel pertaining to writing about the American family at 3pm Sunday, March 20, at the Culbreth Theatre.—R.L.
Troubled teen
Zack Bonnie tells story of abuse academy
Zach Bonney Photo: Ryan Jones
As a 14-year-old, “I was an enormous pain in the ass,” Zack Bonnie admits. Still, he didn’t see it coming that his father would drive off and leave him at a boarding school for troubled teens in Idaho in 1988. Twenty-eight years later, he says he’s still dealing with the damage.
Bonnie, son of UVA law professor Richard Bonnie, wrote Dead, Insane or in Jail: A CEDU Memoir about the 30 months he spent at Rocky Mountain Academy. CEDU is a for-profit company that promised to help difficult adolescents and was founded by a follower of the man who started Synanon, a drug treatment program that became a full-fledged shaved-heads cult by the ’70s.
“Abuse was the treatment model,” Bonnie says. The facility “was acting in all ways a cult, disguised as a boarding school for teens.”
In his first few minutes after discovering his father had left, Bonnie is grabbed by the wrists, his hair is cut, and he is told to take off all of his clothes so he can be searched for drugs. He is told to bend over, just in case he is carrying contraband rectally.
He goes to a group therapy session, called a rap, which a staff member tells him is a safe environment to share private things—only those disclosures are used against the teens in shouted, profanity-laden attacks. “There were unbelievable amounts of shame attached to our program,” says Bonnie.
And the students were encouraged to rat each other out for violations of the rules, only in CEDU-speak, they’re called “agreements.”
“I was absolutely brainwashed,” says Bonnie of the behavior modification program.
It took him years to process the experience, and the decision to write about it was difficult. “I knew this was not on people’s radar,” he says. “I knew what I experienced wasn’t right.”
Zack Bonnie, Dead Insane or in Jail
There was other fallout. “My relationship with my parents has been affected by Rocky Mountain Academy and the decision to send me there,” he says. “They were duped, they were lied to, they were defrauded out of thousands of dollars. I was harmed and they paid a cult without knowing it.”
Richard Bonnie, who is the director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at UVA, declined to comment for this article. In the book’s forward, he says his son was out of control and he and his wife were desperate when they enrolled Zack at what an educational consultant recommended as a “therapeutic school.”
“[W]e were not aware of the emotional abuse and heavy-handed behavioral conditioning Zack describes in this book,” writes his father. “I do not doubt Zack’s account of his experience or its detrimental impact on him.”
Rocky Mountain Academy closed in 2005 facing two lawsuits alleging abuse. According to the suits, parents paid $5,000 a month to have their troubled teens there. “Outsourcing the problem kids of the wealthy is a booming business,” a $2 billion-a-year industry, Forbes reported in 2002.
Bonnie says he just wanted to give an accurate account of his experience, and he wants more study of the troubled teen industry.
He’ll be discussing his work at “Hope and Criticism in the Practice of Mental Health” panel at 2pm Friday, March 18, at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library Central Branch.—Lisa Provence
Yours, mine, ours
Panel addresses the human realities of immigration
David Martin Photo: Courtesy subject
Last year, when my son was in the fourth grade, I dropped by his school to have a surprise lunch with him. Across from us at the table sat another father and son. Esteban (not his real name) is one of the kids in the group my son hangs with at school. His dad happened to be visiting that day as well.
The father was wearing work clothes, and he was covered in what looked like dust from a construction site. We didn’t do much more than smile and nod. I could barely hear my son sitting next to me, let alone the two sitting across the table. But I could tell they were talking in Spanish. Esteban had that same look my son had—self-conscious, a bit jazzed by the unusual situation, but really happy. The dad looked uncomfortable, like he felt out of place. But he was there despite his discomfort, to spend time with his son.
I don’t know if the father speaks English. I don’t know where he was born. I don’t know if he’s a naturalized American, or if he’s here on a work visa, or if he’s undocumented. But, after sitting across the lunch table, I can tell you exactly two things about him: I know he works a very hard job, and I know he loves his son.
Any time I hear politicians proposing to round up and deport 11 million people, or talking of the “rapists” coming across our border, or spewing some small-mindedness about the billion proponents of a world religion, I think about Esteban and his dad having lunch together. I mention it not because I think that my (admittedly) progressive sentimentality holds a solution to any of our political dilemmas. Recognizing a father’s love for his children doesn’t help us decide what to do about those who are here illegally. It doesn’t help us decide how many legal immigrants our country can comfortably allow, or how many refugees we should embrace. But what it can do is help us keep our humanity about us as we talk about those things. In this season of narcissism and vitriol, when knee-jerk dehumanization wins news cycle after news cycle, that little glimmer of shared humanity seems like a lifeline.
Tom Gjelten, A Nation of Nations
“A State of Many Nations: Immigration and the Changing Face of Virginia” will be held at 6pm on Thursday, March 17, in Culbreth Theatre (admission is free, but advance tickets are required). The panel is part of a larger Virginia Foundation for the Humanities program operating under the rubric “Humanities in the Public Square” that will kick off at the festival, but will eventually extend to events around the state. According to festival director Jane Kulow, the focus of the program is to explore the human realities of immigration in Virginia. “The idea of the program is to provide an opportunity for conversation,” says Kulow. “We want to raise questions. We may not find any easy answers, but we want to provoke a discussion that offers some chance for civility.”
The festival panel features veteran NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten, whose book A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story recounts the fraught history of immigration law in this country, and interweaves that history with the personal stories of a number of immigrant families whose lives have intersected in the burgeoning melting pot of Fairfax County. Joining Gjelten on stage will be photographer Lloyd Wolf, whose Living Diversity: The Columbia Pike Documentary Project gathers the work of a number of street photographers who are documenting the cultural ferment in the most dynamic multicultural hotspot in neighboring Arlington County. Also featured is Columbia University professor Gustavo Pérez Firmat, whose books Life on the Hyphen and A Cuban in Mayberry explore the strangeness and the richness of the life of the cultural exile yearning for and eventually building a sense of home and a sense of cultural identity.
These are beautifully humane books. Each one of them has a lot to teach us, natives and newcomers alike, about the challenges and opportunities of living together in a plural society. That’s the point the panel’s moderator, David Martin, hopes the discussion will underscore. Kulow tapped Martin to lead the panel because he’s been on the front lines of immigration law and policy for his entire career, both as a professor of international law at UVA and during multiple stints working on national immigration policy—including appointments in the State Department’s human rights bureau, in the Immigration and Naturalization Service and in the Department of Homeland Security.
The whole issue is inescapably political, especially in an election year. But Martin is quick to point out that the focus of the panel will not be law, or policy, or (thankfully) politics. “We’re not here to debate policy proposals,” Martin says. “We’re here to look at some of the human things that have happened as a result of earlier policy changes.”
These books and their authors offer a way to escape the corrosive abstractions of our political dialogue. “It’s a very diverse set of books, but I think there are some strands that hold them together,” Martin says. “Amid all the negative talk about immigration, there are a lot of positive things happening in communities and neighborhoods—stuff that doesn’t fit the pattern at all. People are adjusting and learning how to live together. Let’s focus on that.”—Lawrence A. Garretson
Book review haiku
For some of the other books being featured at this year’s festival, C-VILLE staff wrote short reviews for your reading pleasure.
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VIDEO: C-VILLE Live
Click on the link below to watch our chat with Preston Lauterbach, author of Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis, and Jon Lohman, director of the Virginia Folklife Program for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
Overview:
5:11 — Learn about Lauterbach’s main character, Robert Church, who was born a slave and became the South’s first black millionaire.
12:14 — Learn how the book’s plot evolved out of Lauterbach’s research.
13:07 — Hear how Ida B. Wells, a journalist who helped found the NAACP, “found herself” on Beale Street.
14:25 — W.C. Handy takes Beale Street to another level.
17:50 — Hear more about the Reading Under the Influence: Blues and Brews event, which takes place from 9-11pm Friday, at Champion Brewing Company.
24:35 — Learn how music first drew Lauterbach to Beale Street, a place where everything from swing to lowdown blues could be heard.
28:20 — Learn what W.C. Handy, the father of blues, and hip-hop artists today have in common.
Over the next three fiscal years, City Manager Maurice Jones is proposing $10 million for improvements to West Main Street. Photo by Jack Looney
Charlottesville City Manager Maurice Jones presented his proposed budget for fiscal year 2017 to City Council on March 7.
The $161,871,784 budget is a 3.5 percent increase over 2016’s fiscal year budget, which was approved at $156,391,435. The latest budget is Jones’ sixth version.
“The biggest chunk is going to the schools,” he says, and overall, he is proposing an additional $1.9 million for city schools, along with a 1 percent increase in the lodging tax rate to help offset the cost of school funding. The increase will add $566,000 in revenue.
The tax rate will stay the same at 95 cents per $100 of assessed value; because property values increased by 2.56 percent in 2015, the city made an extra $3.1 million in property tax revenue.
In just two words, Jones says he can summarize next year’s budget as allocating money for “quality services” in the city. And, in his opinion, one of the most significant capital improvement projects in the works is the development of a $1.7 million skate park at McIntire Park.
Renovations to Charlottesville’s circuit and general district courts are also a priority, with $4.5 million projected for circuit court renovations over a five-year span and $500,000 in the current budget for design. An additional $500,000 is proposed for general district court renovations, which will require more than $7 million over the five years.
Over the next three fiscal years, Jones is proposing $10 million for improvements to West Main Street. In five years, $1 million will be used to install new sidewalks and almost $500,000 will go toward maintaining underground utilities.
By 2025, City Council’s vision for Charlottesville is for it to be “America’s healthiest city,” and Jones says the budget supports that by allocating money for keeping up with parks and recreation “to help ensure that people have opportunities to exercise.” Over the next two fiscal years, $1.5 million will go toward implementing the McIntire Park master plan.
Minor changes to some services will save almost $400,000, Jones says. Those include reducing pool hours at the Washington Park Pool and a change to the Charlottesville Area Transit route 7, which will reduce the number of operating buses to six per hour, instead of seven. Wait times between buses on that route will increase to 20 minutes, up from 15 minutes.
Council will meet March 10 for a budget work session.
BUDGET BREAKDOWN
$161,871,784: Total budget is a 3.5 increase over 2016 fiscal year budget
No change: Tax rate stays the same, 95 cents per $100 of assessed value
$63,569,933: City schools get the biggest piece of the general fund budget pie, with an increase of $1.9 million
$3.1 million: Theadditional revenue from property values, which increased 2.56 percent in 2015
$10 million: Amountslated for West Main improvements
Dr. Pam Moran started her 40-year teaching career as a science teacher in Orange County. “From the first time I tutored kids in a summer job as a college student I felt drawn to teach,” she says. “... I still consider my responsibility to be that of a teacher.” Photo: Amy Jackson
Visiting the library of Woodbrook Elementary School, Dr. Pamela Moran, superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools, was in her element. A group of third-graders were busy showcasing their reading skills for a pair of small collies, therapy dogs provided by the Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA. The students rested on pillows or sprawled across the carpeted floor, gently petting the pups and digging into an array of fairy tales and how-things-work books. Not content with watching at a distance, Moran found a seat in the heart of the group, her smile growing larger as she listened to the students.
Stroking the dogs’ footpads, a student asked, “Why are they so rough?’
The SPCA volunteer explained the coarse and leathery flesh was similar to the soles of our shoes, and Moran said she was thinking: “These are the experiences that close children’s learning opportunity gaps.”
As the students filed back to class, Moran took the opportunity to touch base with reading specialist Allison Greene, asking if she felt the weekly program was helping Woodbrook’s students.
“I can’t tell you how much the program means to our students,” said Greene. “They benefit so much. [The moment they leave] they’re already asking when they get to do it again.”
With a smile of genuine satisfaction, Moran watched the students go.
“Our children learn as they move through our schools that community is important and that giving of ourselves to community makes a difference,” Moran would later write in her blog on the school system’s website, reflecting on the system’s partnership with the SPCA. “Our vision for all learners incorporates more than just academic success as an outcome. We also want young people who develop and sustain empathy over time and a value for community. This matters in families, our community and ultimately when our high school graduates become young adults.”
Creating alearning community
As far as accolades and recognition go, Moran has had a big year. In late 2015, based on recommendations levied by the state superintendent of public instruction and advisers from seven of the commonwealth’s top education organizations, the Virginia Association of School Superintendents named Moran State Superintendent of the Year. The distinction placed her in the running for the American Association of School Administrators’ National Superintendent of the Year award. She was then selected from the pool of 49 contenders as one of four finalists to be considered for the top prize, which will be awarded at the organization’s national conference in mid-February.
“I am a representative of a wonderful team,” says Moran. “Any honor I receive comes because of the stories I can tell about our community, our educational staff and our children.”
To put matters more tangibly: Since Moran took the helm of Albemarle’s presently 13,600-student district in 2005, as the Great Recession deepened and the number of Albemarle’s economically disadvantaged students rose, the on-time graduation rate among that population increased by nearly 5 percent (to 86.5 percent), bringing the tally higher than the national average of 74.6 percent, according to the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. In addition, the dropout rate fell by 40 percent, leading the school system’s dropout rate at-large to dip to around 2 percent (compared with the 7 percent national average, as estimated by the Pew Research Center). Also worth noting is the number of at-risk students enrolled in Advanced Placement courses increased by nearly 100 percent; the number of economically disadvantaged students (those eligible for free or reduced meals) earning college credits increased by more than 100 percent; and SAT scores within this population rose by an average 32 points in reading, 26 points in writing and seven points in math.
But Moran is quick to point out that her focus lies with the students themselves, that such outcomes are inherent to maintaining a student-centered directive. In fact, Moran says the biggest hurdle she faced upon taking over the superintendent role—and still faces today—was figuring out how to transform an education system with a well-established bias toward old assessment models of accountability that she felt didn’t serve the students. Along these lines, standardized test score averages are not included in the county’s fact sheet.
“Standardized tests may be an easy way to measure specific content acquisition,” says Moran. “But I don’t know a [single] teacher who wants to teach to the test, as the approach necessarily emphasizes a narrow range of skills and takes time away from learning competencies essential to success after school.”
For Moran, this antiquated approach ultimately results in students having a negative learning experience: the development of a sense of education as an obligation that has been foisted upon them by external agents (parents, teachers, principals, society, etc.); a viewpoint of learning as an imposition they will eventually outgrow. As such, discovering and implementing alternatives is extremely important. If properly executed, these alternatives can lead to impressing a lifelong love of learning upon an entire student population, which, Moran believes, will result in the development of useful skills such as problem solving, effective communication, an aptitude for creativity and the ability to work well in teams.
“You’d think within a school division with the measurables we have you’d find an attitude of complacency, a sense that it’s all good enough,” says Phil Giaramita, strategic communications officer for Albemarle County Schools. “But in an era where so much in America has changed”—according to the World Economic Forum, in 2010, four out of every 10 high-paying jobs didn’t exist in 2004 and an estimated 60 percent of the jobs future graduates will hold have yet to be invented—“education hasn’t changed much since the 1940s. I don’t think there’s anything that drives Pam more than seeing that discrepancy and being determined to find a way to prepare kids for the 2020s, as opposed to the 1950s.”
Under Moran’s watch, this mission of innovation has led to the system-wide adoption of what amounts to a progressively minded mantra.
“She’s always talking about the greater learning community,” says Giaramita. “She’s always asking and encouraging everyone else to ask: What can we do to make things better?”
This penchant for making things better is something that’s been with Moran throughout her 40-year career in education, from her beginnings as a middle school science teacher in 1975 in Orange County, to her serving as principal at Stony Point Elementary for 10 years and her eventual rise to the post of superintendent.
“In my opinion, no profession is more important than education,” says Moran. “Educators change the lives of children and education advances civilization. From the first time I tutored kids in a summer job as a college student I felt drawn to teach. I first considered becoming a school principal when some close teacher colleagues encouraged me to pursue that role, but, in essence, I still consider my responsibility to be that of a teacher.”
Establishing anewmodel
Creating a lifelong love of learning in students is high on Dr. Pam Moran’s priority list—it trumps test scores. Her philosophy is that educational innovation should center on the classroom and be evaluated on whether it enriches the teacher/student relationship. Photo: Amy Jackson
Many of Moran’s accomplishments in the school district occurred during a time when public school systems across the nation were in the throes of a devastating and largely unprecedented budgetary crisis. According to the National Center for Public Education, “78 percent of districts cut budgets in the 2010 [/2011 school year]…[with] 30 percent of districts cutting their budgets between 11 and 25 percent.” Albemarle County Public Schools was no exception.
“What was so interesting about the way Pam dealt with the recession was the fact that when other school divisions were laying off teachers, shutting down arts programs and reducing physical education hours in order to weather the downturn, we didn’t do any of those things,” says Vice Chair of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and former Albemarle County School Board member Diantha McKeel. “Pam was very creative in her ability to be a good steward through the tough times, making the kinds of choices she felt would have as little negative impact on the students as possible.”
What did this process look like on the ground level?
“Pam brought in consultants from VCU to make recommendations for where the cuts could be made to avoid laying off teachers and increasing class size,” says Giaramita. “Ultimately, they pointed to the central office, electricity and transportation.”
Based on the assessment’s suggestions, bus routes were reworked to be more efficient. Updates were made in policy regarding more efficient usage of energy. And, finally, changes were made at the central office.
McKeel says, prior to the recession, there were a number of directors operating out of the county office building whose job it was to oversee policy regarding instructional divisions, such as high school history, math or science. In the opinion of the consultants, it was here cuts should be made.
But how to do it without adversely affecting the teachers and the students they serve? Moran opted to try something new.
“Pam introduced what [came to be known as] the Instructional Coaching Model,” says McKeel. “What this did was reduce the number of administrative personnel in the county office building”—ultimately eliminating nine positions and thus resolving fiscal woes—“while putting into place coaching models for the teachers.”
Teachers from each school within a given division (typically three schools per division) were encouraged to apply for positions within their respective areas of expertise—i.e. math, science, English. Once selected, these teaching experts underwent intensive training (a program Moran developed in-house with assistance from Albemarle’s teaching community and other education consultants) to promote state-of-the-art best-teaching practices and serve as mentors for other teachers at their schools. Once the coaches were in place, new teachers or those facing a problematic classroom situation were encouraged to consult their coach for advice. Because this coach was often someone teachers had previously worked with on an almost daily basis, the relationship was more casual, friendly and more collaborative than that between a teacher and an administrator she may have little contact with.
“It resulted in an atmosphere of trust and collaboration,” says McKeel. “Teachers got excited about working together to become better teachers, and the system provided them with a direct resource to help make that happen.”
Additionally, out of the 22 coaches, there were three to five lead coaches responsible for conducting research, discovering new approaches to classroom teaching and working with administrators—including Moran—to disseminate the best practices to the other coaches, who would then pass them on to the teachers.
“The idea was that, as things in education change so fast, the model can serve as a means of making teachers aware of new developments, and meanwhile provide them with a direct mentor relationship,” says Giaramita.
Although the coaching model had been used in the private sector for years and has, since Albemarle’s incorporation of the approach in 2006, been established as a nationwide best practice, 10 years ago it was on the cutting edge.
“High-quality coaching lies somewhere near the crossroads of good teaching and educational therapy,” says San Francisco principal, coaching expert and Edutopia contributor Shane Safir. “Done right, it focuses on teachers first, helps them develop their best teaching self and [can foster] an educational community that is inclusive and constructed from the ground up.”
And behind the implementation of the coaching system lays Moran’s philosophy that educational innovation should always center on the classroom and be evaluated in terms of whether it effectively empowers and enriches the exchange between teacher and student.
“I am a strong believer that excellent ideas come from inside classrooms,” says Moran. “Our best education ideas come from teachers who experiment, collaborate and problem-solve to reach every student. When we see that a model works, we look to share it across schools so that others can use the model or make adjustments that fit their needs.”
In addition to shifting the impetus of supervisory oversight away from an administrative bureaucracy and into the hands of a support system overseen by the teachers themselves, the ICM provided high-performing teachers an opportunity to pursue greater earning potential while continuing to teach. And beyond a boost in morale and the creation of a system that is used as a best-practices model for schools around the nation, including Charlottesville City Schools, the ICM allowed Albemarle County schools to keep the overall reduction in classroom teaching staff to below 1 percent—in 2009, the state average for such reductions was 5 percent.
When combing through the details of Moran’s approach, it becomes clear the much-celebrated statistical yield of the superintendent’s policies is the byproduct of a managerial style often described by co-workers and colleagues as “student-centered.”
“I want all our children to walk across the graduation stage ready for adult life,” says Moran. “This means supporting learners in partnership with their parents to enter adulthood with what they need to be good citizens, contributors to their communities and lifelong learners.”
However, as shoot-from-the-hip simple as this language may come off, for Moran, this process entails what is often, by the estimations of critics and advocates alike, defined as a progressive agenda.
Moran believes students must be placed at the center of an active educational process featuring multiple learning pathways responsive to the children’s individual interests and learning differences.
“When I think classroom, I think a bunch of kids,” says Lisa Molinaro, a former teacher who’s now the principal at Woodbrook Elementary School. “As educators, Pam encourages us to make sure we’re looking at all of that child, doing what we need to do to reach that child while recognizing it’s always going to require a different pathway.”
Fostering innovative ideas
Mae Craddock, now the librarian at Burley Middle School, helped spearhead the overhaul of the Monticello High School library into a technology- and innovation-focused Media Center. She said with Pam Moran’s support—and more than $1 million in funding—the center saw its annual student visits increase from 400 to 70,000. Photo: Amy Jackson
In 2013, Moran asked each of Albemarle County Schools’ 26 principals to “…work with their school staff to submit proposals on how they would leverage technology, promote active learning and team with one another, all to increase student engagement with the curriculum.”
According to Molinaro, the notion was that, for each principal to come up with an idea pertinent to the learning community they oversaw, they would invariably have to consult their teachers. Then, when principals got together with one another and shared theses ideas, it would kick start a process of district-wide creative collaboration. As opposed to one or two pretty good ideas trickling in, each school was pitched into a dialogue concerning what might be changed to make things better.
At some point during this time period, Molinaro recalls visiting the Woodbrook cafeteria with Moran. After consulting with her teachers, Molinaro discovered that the cafeteria experience was a source of much lament. Students resented the idea of sitting in assigned seats dictated by classroom and place in line. Instead, they wanted to mingle at tables with peers from other classes. Strolling through the geometrically arranged aisles alongside the superintendent, Molinaro gestured toward the tables.
“I said, ‘Pam, these are prison tables, [we] have to get new tables,’” laughs Molinaro. “At which point, she turned to me and said, ‘Write it up and let’s make it happen.’”
Rather than institutional-blue rectangles with bolted-on benches laid out in row after depressing row, what Woodbrook’s teachers envisioned was a sociable array of dinner tables, a café-like environment conducive to conversation and a pleasurable dining experience.
“Now you walk into our cafeteria [and] there are no straight lines,” says Molinaro. “There are tables for four, six, eight, and the kids love it. They go back to class happier, less tense, full of energy and ideas, and more ready to learn than [they] did before.”
In the end, each of the 26 proposals offered by school staff and principals was funded.
“Unsurprisingly, the ideas that came back were exciting,” recalls Moran. “And they worked because they were developed by the staff who knew their students and school communities better than anyone else.”
From 2010 to 2014, an overhaul of the Monticello High School library, spearheaded by librarians Mae Craddock and Joan Ackroyd, resulted in a revamped and renamed Media Center receiving the highest award bestowed by the National School Board Association. The Magna Award, given annually to the one school division in the nation that is “taking bold and innovative steps to improve the lives of their students and their communities,” corresponded with an increase of annual student visits to the space, from 400 to a staggering 70,000.
The change occurred somewhat by accident.
“The librarian that preceded me at MHS, David Glover, had a passion for electronic music,” says Craddock. “So he transformed an old storage room into a makeshift digital music studio, which became extremely popular among the students.”
When Glover became an English teacher and Craddock took over, impressed by the kind of intensive, student participation the studio was inspiring, she thought: Why not develop the concept?
“I saw that the hands-on learning was getting the students involved and excited,” says Craddock. “[And as my] affinity was in engineering, I decided to try bringing robotics, as well as construction tech items”—such as a 3-D printer—“into the library and see what would happen.”
What happened was the library became even more popular. So popular, in fact, Moran decided to not only support the program but expand it. (Costs ran around $1 million, and funding was provided, in part, by leasing the updated space to area businesses in the summer.) This led to a complete reimagining of the library into an innovative, multipurpose center, a Learning Commons.
“What we did was take the concept of a library and tweak it to meet the demands of the 21st century,” says Craddock, who is now the librarian at Burley Middle School. “It’s become a community-oriented space where students can come and say, ‘I have an idea,’ and be provided with access to the tools and expertise to turn that vision into reality.”
While there are still bookshelves, the stacks are largely gone. In their stead, there’s ample comfortable seating—plush cushions abound. A student-run, tech help desk allows less-savvy students to do things like utilize a 3-D printer to “turn their creative ideas into functional products, get help repairing laptops or assistance with other tech problems,” Craddock says. Storage rooms have been transformed into design spaces featuring wall-length whiteboards, tables and computers. The music studio has been expanded, and is used by students to write, record and mix their own music, create podcasts, etc. There’s a writer’s café, a poetry corner and even a sewing area. Teachers frequently conduct classes in the space, enjoying the ample light, high ceilings and lyceum-esque atmosphere. Students come and go throughout the day, congregating in small groups, working on projects, discussing ideas or simply socializing.
“By the end of each year I knew the names of every graduating student,” says Craddock. “It was an amazing transformation that changed the way our students thought about school.”
The thing about each of these examples is how little, if anything, they have to do with affecting some test-based, numerically measurable result. Instead, the impetus for reform stems from a desire to nurture student curiosity, enjoyment and graduates with a lifelong penchant for learning.
“When I watched Burley middle-schoolers in a Socratic seminar earlier this year, debating conflicts in a novel while their teacher listened and asked an occasional question, one student said to me, ‘Teachers in this school value that we think for ourselves,’” says Moran. “When our kids analyze, evaluate and create, whether using a laptop for research or cardboard to make a science project, they are learning to use competencies that will stand them in good stead for their lifetime.”
