🎺 Good morning, RVA: Curriculum workgroups, anti-climate plans, and joyful pictures

Good morning, RVA! It’s 52 °F, and today looks warmer than the last two days! You can expect highs near 70 °F and maybe, just maybe, a glimpse of the sun later this afternoon. If you’re one of the thousands and thousands of people out there hoping for a perfect October weekend for Richmond to host it’s biggest and bestest festival…looks like you’re in luck!
 

Water cooler

The reporters have now had the chance to catch a couple hours of sleep and file their stories about Monday night’s RPS School Board meeting, and you can read good recaps from Megan Pauly at VPM and Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Turns out the part I couldn’t track on Twitter yesterday was that School Board’s five-member bloc, after twice failing to scrap the current curriculum, voted to instead create working groups to evaluate the curriculum and create a three-year plan by the end of the current year. I think that’s an unrealistic deadline given that the last month and a half of the year is typically a disaster, but we’ll see what these workgroups come up with in the next 61ish days (42 weekdays (including holidays)). Tap through to Pauly’s piece to see the results of a teacher survey which has the majority of respondents supporting the math and science curricula (57% vs. 43% and 61% vs. 39%, respectively) and about an even split over the reading curriculum (49% vs. 51%). Maybe more interesting, or at least spicier, Jessica Nocera quotes some emails between the School Board and the Virginia Department of Education, which criticize Boardmember Gibson’s habit of constantly launching into surprise motions and says that the Board doesn’t even have the authority to immediately scrap curriculum anyway: “When things are allowed into motion without being on the agenda as an action item, it undermines the processes you all are attempting to institutionalize…The conversations in the two previous board meetings about eliminating the curricula (effective immediately) is not an option for RPS based on the current Memorandum of Understanding.” By the way, Kids First RPS has a whole bucketful of FOIA’d emails, if you’d like to dig into what exactly the School Board gets up to between meetings. The whole situation is exhausting—and I’m not even involved. I don’t know that this is what RPS needs to spends its incredibly limited energy on, but now it’s definitely happening. I’m preemptively thankful for the teachers that decide to participate in these workgroups and hope their work over the coming weeks will result in better experiences and outcomes for RPS’s students (and that they’ll get a chance to take a break at some point before the year’s end).
 

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams has a good column about Governor Youngkin’s anti-trans policies. He talks to Jamie Nolan, co-executive director at Side by Side, who has this excellent quote about “parent’s rights”: “It’s a privileged phrase. It’s rooted in this idea that every youth grows up in a home with two loving, caring, adult individuals who are providing good examples…Every home is different. Every child is different. And every relationship that they have with their parent or caring other is different.” Any thoughtful person would know not every home is supportive of trans kid—in fact, the Trevor Project says “fewer than 1 in 3 transgender and nonbinary youth found their home to be gender-affirming” and “45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.” We need policies that support and protect kids, not policies that potentially put them in danger.
 

Here’s an interesting thing: Richmond’s Chief of Police and Virginia’s Secretary of Public Safety will stop by the Starbucks across from the DMV (2309 W. Broad Street) today at 11:00 AM for “Coffee with a Cop Day.” From the release: “This serves as a moment for members of the community to meet the Chief and the Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security, ask questions, share comments and get to know each other. Building relationships and community engagement is core to public safety and we’re committed to strengthening our relationships one cup of coffee at a time.” Given the RPD’s Alleged Fourth of July Plot, I’m kind of surprised someone from the Governor’s cabinet wants to make a public appearance with Richmond’s Chief. I wonder what the Secretary would say if asked about the RPD Plot?
 

Charlie Paullin at the Virginia Mercury has an overview of the Governor’s new energy plan. As you could have probably guessed, the Gov’s plan would do a whole bunch of anti-climate things, dragging the Commonwealth backwards as parts of our state literally drown while the other parts literally go up in flames. Specifically, the plan would reduce Virginia’s focus on renewable energy, decouple Virginia’s vehicle emissions regulations from California’s, and put a bunch of time and energy into nuclear power. Most, if not all, of the Governor’s proposals would require General Assembly approval, so I don’t see them passing wholesale at the next GA session. Once again, I really, really want underscore the importance of next year’s elections, though!
 

RVA Mag has pics from Big Freedia and PrideFest, if you’re looking for bright colors and lots of joy this morning.
 

This morning’s longread

Portland — Turning the Dial Toward Equity (How Far?)

Longtime readers and transportation nerds will remember when Jarrett Walker came to Richmond and helped redesign our bus system. The new system redesigns were based on the idea that Richmond had a finite amount of bus resources and we could invest them in a new system that prioritized some amount of “ridership” and some amount of “coverage.” Here Walker writes about third priority, equity, and what it would look like to defund low-ridership routes that serve mostly wealthy individuals. It’s an interesting lens and, in Richmond, would probably see a bunch of the express routes cut in favor of increasing service on the Southside and in parts of the East End.
 

One approach you could take is to spend the new resources on the needs of people with lower incomes, while retaining all the services that are there now. This would get you some improvement in equity, but we wondered if that would be enough to match the public’s priorities. So we (staff and we the consultants) decided to put out an illustration of what it might look like to turn the dial even further toward equity. The concept map cuts some existing services to make an even larger investment in equity-improving services. The service cuts happen in places where the service has neither a ridership justification nor an equity justification. These areas are low ridership because of physical features like low density, poor walkability, or disconnected streets. They’re also low equity priorities because they have relatively few people with lower incomes. In shifting service in this way, from higher-income areas to lower-income areas, did we go too far or not far enough? That question is purely about values. It has no technical answer.
 

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Picture of the Day

Rainbow trumpet!