😞 Good morning, RVA: An unconscionable decision, inside the Coliseum, and paving continues

Good morning, RVA! It’s 40 °F, and you can expect a windy day with cooler temperatures. It’ll take a couple of days, but, by next week, we should be back up in the 80s. Enjoy the chillier temperatures by spending too much time thinking about when and what to plant in your garden.
 

Water cooler

Yesterday, the four members of RPS’s school board who voted to move forward with rezoning River City Middle School issued a joint statement that you must read (via School Boardmember Nicole Jones’s Facebook). To quote a bit: “The school board prioritized school choice that advantages white and affluent families over the safety and security of Black and Brown students on the southside. We must fight the ugly stain of racism and inequality that interferes with the decision-making of this board…The choice made by five school board colleagues on Monday, effectively abandons 400+ children to overcrowding in River City in order to preserve ~40 open enrollment spaces in one of the better-resourced schools in the district is a clear dereliction of that duty we have to make hard choices. It is overt resource hoarding, and people who purport to be about equity but refuse to make decisions based on the reality of our physical spaces and budgetary constraints are engaging in political theater and nothing more. The entire River City community will pay the price of this unconscionable decision.” I agree with all of this, including the defeated, fatalistic tone. I’m not really sure what, if any, next steps folks in the public have to deal with a School Board majority who seems dead set on destroying the institution they’ve been elected to lead.
 

OK, enough doom and gloom, let’s move on to some possible next steps by different folks:
 

• Individually, you can, of course, email the school board, your City Council rep (and their liaison), but, so far, that seems to have had limited impact. It’s starting to feel like ongoing, in-person, collective action will be needed. Protests? Demonstrations? Occupies? I have no idea!
• Next, I wonder if at some point City Council (or the Mayor) will have to get involved to protect the safety and wellbeing of children and families in their districts. Mostly, I’ve been refreshing Councilmember Jones’s Twitter feed for a statement or a plan or a rallying cry or something. At some point, regardless of what the City Charter says about who is responsible for what, this mess will end up in their laps. If you’re emailing folks this morning, you could consider asking/begging your Council rep for help.
• Finally, the City’s unelected leadership—think philanthropists, the booster class, tourism folks, nonprofit leaders—are going to have to start organizing. A dysfunctional school system is a real easy way to convince folks not to move to or invest in Richmond. Not only that, but should Superintendent Kamras quit (and, honestly, why wouldn’t he at this point) the subsequent instability could last for years. The five-member bloc of School Board are doing real, long-term harm to the City in ways that don’t have a lot to do with schools directly and a lot of folks should concerned.

I don’t have a good sense for who all’s doing the organizing around this, but, like I’ve said before, I get most of my RPS news from Kids First RPS. They’re holding an RPS Parent Townhall tonight at 5:30 PM at the Carrillon Pavillion in Byrd Park. We’ll see what comes of it, but I think there are only a couple ways remaining to encourage a change in behavior from the five-member bloc.
 

For a bit more, read through this piece by Richmond Magazine’s Scott Bass—the best reporting I’ve seen thus far.
 

Related to the previous paragraphs or not, you decide!, but I loved VAPLAN’s tweets covering the General Assembly’s discussion of the Governor’s attempts to force a new election of the Loudoun County School Board. Scroll through to see good talking points on how we already have a constitutional process for that! Here’s Sen. McClellan: “We have a process in place when elected officials have neglected their duty, there’s a mechanism, it’s the recall process.” Sen. Lucas has the final word, though: “Update- this is now sitting in my trash can in the Senate. The Loudon School Board stays right where it is.” Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has some more background and a look at the rest of the GA’s veto session.
 

You should definitely not break into the Coliseum at night, do dangerous stuff, and take a bunch of pictures. However, if anonymous reddit users did decide to do that, I will definitely enjoy any pictures they post.
 

As of today, the Broad Street repaving project has moved on to the section between westbound Meadow Street and Arthur Ashe Boulevard. That means the Alison Street and Science Museum Pulse Stations are closed (delightfully indicated by a 🍗 and a 🧪 in the aforelinked tweet), so keep that in mind as you travel in and around the Fan! All things considered, I’m pretty impressed at how quickly and efficiently crews have knocked out this hefty public works project.
 

Reminder! The second Reconnect Jackson Ward Feasibility Study community event takes place tonight from 6:00–8:00 PM at Ebenezer Baptist Church (216 W. Leigh Street). If you haven’t yet, stop by and learn more about how to repair some of the damage caused by our decades-old decision to rip a highway through a thriving neighborhood.
 

This morning’s longread

How farmers in Earth’s least developed country grew 200 million trees

Trees: helluva drug! The best part about this article about the methodical reforestation of Niger is that it didn’t involve planting tons of saplings that usually end up dying—just letting new trees grow from old stumps. 200 million trees later, and farmers and families are seeing all kinds of tree-adjacent benefits.
 

Field trips told him roughly how many trees there were on a typical acre. Some villages had 20 times more trees than before. Today, Tappan and colleagues, based on the trees they’ve seen popping up in new villages during additional field visits, suspect the regeneration may have expanded to nearly 15 million acres. Tappan thinks 200 million is a low estimate of the number of new trees in Niger. And the number is still increasing as the trend spreads. Unlike other efforts, this one started from the ground up. No one is paying farmers for their trees. “This large-scale re-greening is all voluntary,” Reij says. And evidence suggests it can address environmental and food-security issues in Niger far better than more expensive tree-planting campaigns.
 

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

Picture of the Day

Bikes and beers. Definitely too old for parts of this photo.