🏫 Good morning, RVA: 613↗️ • 32↗️; how to reopen schools; and green stormwater infrastructure

Good morning, RVA! It’s 74 °F, and you know the drill. Expect hot, humid weather today and through the weekend. We might could see some rain next week, though!

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 613↗️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 32↗️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 46↘️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 30, Henrico: 4, and Richmond: 12). Since this pandemic began, 263 people have died in the Richmond region. Watching last night’s School Board meeting (more on that below) I learned that you can filter by region VDH’s Number of Cases by Date of Symptom Onset graph that I talked about yesterday! This should have been obvious since in the very chart I linked to yesterday there’s a drop down that literally says “Select Region.” Anyway, this is a fascinating dropdown because you can see how cases are increasing across the Commonwealth, even while they’re decreasing in Central Virginia. Actually, cases are increasing in every region—some more than others—except Central Virginia. Two reminders while playing around with this data: 1) the data are more incomplete the further to the right you get, and 2) the y-axis is not the same on each graph!

I watched about five hours of the Richmond School Board meeting last night, got tired, and went to bed just 30 minutes before they adjourned around 11:30 PM. That’s the middle of the dang night! On the agenda was for boardmembers to hear from public health experts and doctors about how COVID-19 impacts kids and teachers in school settings, hear from Superintendent Kamras’s administration about how the two proposed school reopening plans might work, and then have boardmembers start thinking through how those reopening plans would (or would not) work for the RPS community.

First, I thought the health experts—scientists and doctors from the Richmond City Health District and VCU Health—did a good job of laying out the case that the risk of student-to-student, student-to-adult, and adult-to-student transmission of the coronavirus is low, especially with younger kids. I wish their presentation was posted somewhere online because it was full of facts and stats with full citations because they’re scientists and doctors. The experts, however, were super clear: Any in-person reopening at all involves a non-zero risk to both kids and adults in the school building. Not reopening schools or reopening fully virtual also comes with potentially severe risks to students and families. I keep thinking about these lines from Superintendent Kamras’s email earlier this week: “We have families who will lose their jobs—and their homes—if they need to stay home to watch their children next school year. And we have families who are terrified of sending their children to school because someone at home already has a compromised immune system.” For me, this is the balance we’re trying to strike. How can we protect families who must send their kids to school this fall while also protecting teachers/staff and families from an extremely real and dangerous disease? It’s an incredibly difficult decision that the School Board has in front of it.

The Superintendent’s presentation on the details for reopening, either under Plan A or Plan B, is worth a download (PDF). The first ultra important point in this reopening discussion: All teachers and staff can request to work from home, no questions asked. The Superintendent was very clear about this. Teachers and staff who do not feel safe or comfortable working inside a school building will be given the opportunity to work “a full tour of duty” remotely. If their job requires them to be physically onsite, the district will get creative in finding ways to do their jobs after hours, outside, whatever it takes. The second ultra important point: All reopening options discussed include a fully virtual option for students. Students who do not feel safe or comfortable learning inside a school building will be given the opportunity to do so entirely from home. With all of District’s proposed policy changes, PPE, hand sanitizer stations, extra staffing, RPS estimates the whole shebang will cost and additional $15 million—with $12 million coming from federal money, $1 million from philanthropy, and $2 million from a one-time transfer of capital funds. I didn’t catch what those capital funds are currently earmarked for, but I’d love to know.

After listening to most of the discussion last night, I’m still leaning towards Plan B—which provides a full-time, in-person option for all students plus provides a full-time, fully virtual option for all students. However, I’d love to see more discussion about differentiating that plan for elementary, middle, and high schools. What if we spent the most resources making full-time, in-person school as safe as possible for the youngest kids (and their teachers!), who have the lowest risk and highest need? Then older kids could go mostly or even fully virtual for the foreseeable future?

You don’t have to agree with everything—or anything!—I said in those previous paragraphs. And that’s OK! School Board didn’t make any decisions last night, so if there is something specific you’d like them to consider as they think through this incredibly tough situation, make sure you let them know.

More monuments to white supremacy came down, and it’s honestly getting hard to keep track. Yesterday, the Maury statue’s globe got warehoused along with a Joseph Bryan statue in Monroe Park—we’ll probably want to rename Bryan park, too. After a couple weeks of hard work by the Crews and Cranes of Justice, I think that leaves A.P. Hill at the intersection of Laburnum and Hermitage as the lone bronze Confederate left. Lucky for Hill, whose moldering body is actually interred underneath the intersection, Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says a Richmond Circuit Court judge has granted a temporary injunction on bringing down any more Confederate monuments. Robinson also reports that the Arthur Ashe monument will come down: “Ashe’s relatives made the request, fearing the lone monument to a Black man on the famous street would be damaged in an act of retaliation for the Confederate statues coming down.” The Mayor’s spokesperson says "The matter is still under consideration and we continue to have discussions with the family regarding their wishes.” So that’s a huge bummer.

The Virginia Employment Commission released their weekly unemployment insurance claims numbers for the week ending July 4th. For the first time in about two months, the total number of folks filing for unemployment insurance increased, from 398,669 to 410,432.

The James River Association and Richmond Public Libraries will work together to install green stormwater infrastructure at libraries across the city—I mean, you had me at libraries and stormwater. JRA will host a handful of in-person and virtual charettes over the next couple of weeks focused on the North Avenue, West End, and Broad Rock library branches. If you want to get involved—and, honestly, how could you not—sign up over on their website.

This morning’s patron longread

What sank the Atlantic Coast Pipeline? It wasn’t just environmentalism

Submitted by Patron Blake. As an environmental policy n00b, I loved this look back at the last bunch of years of advocacy against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. We are, of course, living through a horrible moment, but big wins are still possible!

What undid the pipeline in the final accounting may take years to untangle. But interviews with a dozen Virginia opponents of the project pointed to three main drivers of their victory and the developers’ defeat: a growing lack of faith in both Dominion and state government, an increasing recognition of environmental injustice and a legislative shift toward renewable energy that will allow Dominion to replace lucrative capital investments in natural gas with investments in wind, solar and storage.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.

This morning’s Instagram