🧱 Good morning, RVA: Does RPS have a budget?, angry superintendents, and spring garden tips

Good morning, RVA! It’s 32 °F, and I’m not wearing socks, which was a mistake. Other than that, today looks lovely with dry skies, highs in the 60s, and plenty of reasons to spend time outside with your best pal. Tomorrow though…tomorrow looks like a cold, wet disaster—perfect for staying in and getting caught up on the latest film in The Conjuring Cinematic Universe.
 

Water cooler

I listened to a bit of City Council’s Education and Human Services committee yesterday and will throw the audio up on The Boring Show this morning because it’s probably worth your time (at least at 2x). After listening in and reading this statement from Richmond Together, it seems like a ton of unanswered questions remain about RPS’s budget. This bit from Richmond Together’s statement causes me the most anxiety: “Even more worrying, it is our understanding that the School Board Chair on March 1st transmitted to the Mayor and City Council a short letter summarizing the total proposed budget totals for RPS…but did not attach a completed budget…this means that no actual budget has in fact been sent to the City.” The letter goes on to show a bunch of receipts from previous years of when School Board sent the full operating budget over to Mayor and Council: FY17, February 11th; FY18, February 21st; and FY22, February 18th. In fact, I looked in my own PDF library, and I added the RPS’s FY22 budget on February 22nd, 2021. I don’t know what’s going on or why the School Board is slow-walking their own budget, but it’s dysfunctional and will almost certainly end poorly (for everyone involved!).
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Mel Leonor reports on a letter all 133 state superintendents sent to Governor Youngkin challenging his attempts to ban teaching about equity and systemic racism. You can read the full letter here, which has some great quotes like: “division superintendents disagree with your assumption that discriminatory and divisive concepts have become widespread in Virginia school divisions without your having involved educators in formulating that position or without having provided evidence to support that position.” And, remember, this is on behalf of literally all of Virginia’s superintendents. A couple weeks ago, the Governor “scrapped dozens of resources for schools aimed at promoting diversity and equity, calling them divisive and at times discriminatory,” which was the impetus for this letter. I didn’t write about it at the time because it really felt like one of those things done specifically to make liberals angry (which it did). But, I’ll tell you what, 133 superintendents across all of Virginia’s localities are likely not a uniformly liberal group of folks—in fact, I’d say, on the whole, they’re probably pretty split on their political beliefs. It’s impressive that the Governor managed to make all of them angry.
 

Chris Suarez, also at the RTD, listened to more of Council’s Education and Human Services committee meeting than I did and reports on the Superintendent’s recommendation to renovate—rather than demolish and rebuild—Fox Elementary. Suarez closes with this sentence: “Sarah Abubaker, the school division’s spokesperson, said the School Board will make a final decision about whether to rebuild or renovate the school.” Sounds ominous given everything above, but with the Superintendent, the 2nd District Councilperson, and the 2nd District Boardmember all on the same page we should be good.
 

Spring has sprung, and that means Peggy Singlemann, Maymont’s Director of Park Operations and Horticulture, has another great post over on VPM about what to do with your plants and gardens. Trim your rose bushes! Prune your perennials! Plant your cool-weather crops! Budget season aside, this is one of the best and most exciting times of the year.
 

If you’re looking for something to get into on a blustery Saturday, John Marshall High School’s boys basketball team will face Redford High School in the VHSL State Class 2 Championship. Fred Jeter at the Richmond Free Press has the write up on the Justice’s path to the Championship, and you can get your tickets online. Tip off is 2:00 PM at the Siegel Center.
 

Reminder: Clocks spring forward this Sunday! That means Daylight Saving Time starts, which is something I can never remember and have to look up. For me, the longer days mean more daylight for evening bike rides!
 

This morning’s longread

Explore the ambition of Notre Dame Cathedral’s faithful restoration

I opened this up and thought, “Oh, a cute infographic from National Geographic about Notre Dame’s restoration, I’ll scroll through real quick.” Ten minutes later I was still scrolling and zooming and reading.
 

Notre Dame Cathedral has endured for more than eight centuries. Built to reflect the church’s spiritual reach, its audacious, towering walls and buttresses remain as much a marvel today as they were in the Middle Ages. The cathedral was commissioned in 1163 by a landowning clergy with power over much of Paris. By the 1300s, the city had become France’s royal, judicial, and intellectual center.
 

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Picture of the Day

An empty parking lot downtown. Think of all the things this could be!