Under fire

Shortly before midnight on November 15, a houseless Black man named Lawrence was reportedly violently detained by both Charlottesville and University police on the Corner.

According to eyewitness accounts given to Defund Cville Police, three UPD officers pushed Lawrence into the brick wall in front of Cohn’s. A dozen more officers soon arrived on the scene, and slammed him to the ground. Four pinned him down with their knees, digging into his back and ribs.

While witnesses and Lawrence’s wife asked multiple times why the officers were detaining him, they reportedly did not provide a clear answer. One officer accused Lawrence of trespassing on UVA Grounds, while another said they needed to question him and resolve a dispute with his wife.

The officers then pressed down onto Lawrence’s neck, claiming he was biting them, though witnesses say he was not. They allegedly did not let him go until another officer arrived and deescalated the situation.

Lawrence was then allowed to sit up and answer questions, which were not related to the incident, claim witnesses.

Because of the extent of injuries, Lawrence reportedly could barely walk or stand. When he was taken to the hospital, it was revealed he had three broken ribs, and multiple cuts and abrasions on his arms, wrists, side, and feet.

After Defund Cville Police’s account of the incident sparked outcry on social media last week, UVA’s Chief of Police Tim Longo released a statement about the “difficult encounter,” failing to mention Lawrence’s extensive injuries, or the large number of officers reportedly on the scene.

According to Longo, a UPD officer witnessed a verbal altercation between Lawrence and a woman outside a store on the Corner. He approached the couple and asked for identification. While the woman provided it, Lawrence refused, and walked away, crossing University Avenue onto UVA Grounds.

Another officer soon arrived on the scene, and recognized Lawrence from a previous incident at UVA hospital, during which Lawrence “became disorderly” and was banned from coming back onto UVA Grounds.

The officers followed Lawrence, told him he was trespassing, and tried to detain him. Lawrence went back to the Corner, which is off UVA Grounds, and attempted to leave the scene. The two officers then pursued and restrained him “for further investigation,” resulting in “several minutes” of “active resistance and struggle,” Longo writes.

A UPD supervising officer later deescalated the situation, ordering that Lawrence be allowed to sit up for questioning and evaluated by medical responders before allowing him to leave the Corner.

“Upon review of the incident, the Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney has determined that none of the officers acted unlawfully,” stated Longo, who has now begun an internal UPD review into the incident.

One officer has been placed on administrative leave. Defund Cville Police demands every officer involved in the incident be fired immediately, and calls on the community to support Lawrence as he recovers from his injuries.

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Quote of the week

“Enough is enough. When do we start fixing it and stop covering up things?”

—South First Street resident Angela Barnes advocating for installing security cameras during a CRHA meeting last week, following a recent murder in the public housing community

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In brief

Get registered

Jackson P. Burley School, Charlottesville’s Black high school during the age of segregation, was added to the National Register of Historic Places last week. Burley opened in 1951, “part of an effort [by] many jurisdictions in Virginia to support segregation by constructing new and well-equipped separate but equal high schools for African American students,” reads the NRHP listing. The school was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register in September.

Jackson P. Burley School PC: Skyclad Aerial

Cool your jets

Just after Thanksgiving, UVA’s football team flew down to Tallahassee, ready to take on the 2-6 Florida State Seminoles. But upon arrival, the team was told the game had been postponed due to uncontained coronavirus among FSU’s players. It’s the third time this season the Cavaliers have had an opponent cancel on them due to COVID.

School outbreak

Five students at Woodbrook Elementary School tested positive for coronavirus last week, and are currently quarantined at home. The students and staff who attended classes with the students were also asked to self-isolate for 10 days. On November 9, Albemarle County moved to Stage 3 of reopening, welcoming about 2,700 students—mostly pre-kindergarteners through third graders—into schools for hybrid learning.

Supply chain training

Virginia is running its first round of vaccine distribution tests, reports the Virginia Mercury. The state Department of Health is overseeing 50 sites around the commonwealth as they practice transporting COVID-19 vaccines, in hopes of being prepared when the first shipments of real vaccines begin to arrive later this month.

For weeks, Filadelfia Soto—along with hundreds of other teachers in Albemarle County—was left in the dark. She had received emails with “general information about school board meetings,” but nothing about how the school division planned to reopen in the fall, or when teachers could weigh in on the issue.

So when division staff rolled out three reopening scenarios—all allowing students to return to classrooms for face-to-face learning—at a July 9 school board meeting, she was as surprised as she was disappointed.

“They went from moving the opening date from August to September…and then all of a sudden they said we are reopening schools face-to-face,” says Soto, who teaches Spanish at Woodbrook Elementary School. When she heard the plans, she felt like she had no choice but to participate in risky in-person learning.

More than 600 teachers—nearly half of those in the division—share Soto’s sentiments, and signed an open letter criticizing their exclusion from the planning process, as well as a lack of consideration for their needs and concerns. Pointing to the rising coronavirus rates in the area, they believe the proposed face-to-face models are “unequivocally unsafe,” and have urged the school board to reopen schools virtually.

“Virtual is not the ideal learning environment for all students, but we must begin there. The rising rates of illness and death across Virginia and nationally do not make me feel confident entering into a building,” says Adrienne Oliver, an instructional coach for ACPS. “We need to begin there also because we’re going to end up there in some capacity.”

Oliver and her colleagues also believe face-to-face learning puts marginalized communities, specifically those of color, in greater danger.

“It will be our most well-resourced families who opt their children out of that learning environment because they have the means. Which means you’ll then have school buildings that are filled with students who depend upon the resources that the school system can provide for them,” says Oliver, who is Black.

“Black and Latinx people…are [disproportionately] dying from this illness. To have a school that could potentially be filled with vulnerable students in any capacity places the burdens of the illness upon them,” Oliver says.

In response to community backlash, the district sent out a survey to teachers on July 10, asking them for their thoughts about reopening, and if they’d like to be part of a reopening task force. And on July 14, Superintendent Matt Haas announced he would draft an online-only option for the school board to consider at its July 30 meeting, when a final decision will be made.

But there is still a lot more equity work to be done, teachers say. Though ACPS sent out a survey to families last month, asking them if they preferred a hybrid or online reopening, the response rate was only 50 percent, says instructional coach Dr. Vicki Hobson.

“The voices of our most marginalized families…need to be central in the decisions that affect them. We need to find out what it is that they want and need, and how we can support that,” adds Hobson.

“We also need to consider how we’re asking for information. Some families don’t have access to devices or the internet in order to respond to an online survey,” she says. “We need to [have] alternative ways to get information, such as personalized phone calls with those we haven’t heard back from.”

In addition to contacting every family, the district should hear from all staff members, as well as community members and organizations, Oliver says.

Though distance learning did not go well for her eighth grader in the spring, parent Amanda Moxham believes that a virtual reopening is safest.

“We’ve been paying attention to the data locally around the number of cases and increases, and looking at the spikes across the country. And knowing that so many students will be returning to UVA this fall, there are [a lot of] dangers that exist,” says Moxham, who is a community organizer for the Hate-Free Schools Coalition of Albemarle County. “I don’t want to contribute to forcing teachers back into a physical school building who are not comfortable being there…[or] to increasing case numbers.”

Moxham is hopeful that teachers will be able to create a more effective distance learning model, such as by implementing live classes, before school starts on September 8, but is also frustrated with the district’s lack of outreach.

“What could have saved a huge amount of time was…[if] they had actually talked to the teachers first,” she says.

For the students who cannot learn from home, the district could work with community members and organizations to create alternative, yet safe learning options, suggests Moxham. For example, it could assign certain teachers a small group of students, and allow them to teach at outdoor locations.

But regardless of the school board’s decision, the district needs to figure out “how to make virtual learning equitable,” says Hobson. It should not only gather feedback from families about their experience with it in the spring, but also train teachers, set up more Wi-Fi hot spots, and distribute more laptops.

“We have a chance to do so much better than the virtual learning that we provided in the spring,” adds Oliver. “We see this as an opportunity to shift educational practice for the better.”