🏟️ Good morning, RVA: Horrible guidelines, new rezonings, and a School Board meeting

Good morning, RVA! It’s 62 °F, but warmer weather returns today and continues until Thursday. Expect highs near 90 °F and lots of sunshine. The end of this week looks pretty nice though—now just to maintain until then!
 

Water cooler

This past Friday, Governor Youngkin’s administration issued new, horrible guidelines for how public schools should treat transgender kids. From Hannah Natanson at the Washington Post: “The administration of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) this weekend sharply restricted the rights of transgender students, sending schools into turmoil and drawing strong denunciations from Democratic legislators and some educators, but earning applause from Republicans…The new ‘model policies’ — a version of which must be adopted by all of the state’s 133 school districts next month — will require transgender students to access school facilities and programs matching the sex they were assigned at birth. The policies also make it onerous for students to change their name and gender at school.” You can read the new model policies here, ghoulishly titled “2022 Model Police’s on the Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools”. About the new policies, RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras says, “This is unacceptable. Public schools should be welcoming and inclusive, not exclusionary. The very least we can give our students is dignity and respect. This action takes it away.” Democratic legislators say the new policy violates the spirit of a 2020 law passed by the GA and, as such, will be challenged in court. We’ll see. We’ll also see how progressive school districts respond should VDOE adopt this new, regressive policy. We’ve watched conservative school districts, like Hanover County’s, decide to just…not comply…with current policies that protect trans students, and those districts have suffered literally zero consequences.
 

Related, I thought this was a really good insight from Ned Oliver and Karri Peifer at AXIOS Richmond: “The administration’s rollout of the policy offers a textbook example of Youngkin’s strategy of delivering dramatically different messages to different audiences. Youngkin exclusively announced the policy to a right-wing national media outlet, the Daily Wire, on Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, his administration never issued a press release to Virginia-based media outlets, instead emailing reporters to promote efforts to hold down college tuition costs.”
 

The City’s Planning Commission meets today with a few interesting items on their agenda. First, they’ll look at rezoning parts of the area around the Coliseum and designating a bunch of “priority streets” (ORD. 2022–246). You can scroll to the very bottom of the actual ordinance PDF to see the map of existing zoning (p. 12) and a map of the new proposed zoning (p. 13). Basically this simplifies the zoning map and replace a handful of disparate zoning districts with a smooth, contiguous Research Park District. Now that we’ve got the Diamond District underway, redeveloping City Center is up next! Second, Planning Commission will weigh in on the plans to landscape Marcus-David Peters Circle (aka Lee Circle). For your weekly dose of Intense Public Comment, tap through and read some of the letters in support / opposition of these plans! Seems like some folks are upset that the proposed plans will not include seating or space to gather, which would honor what the Circle evolved into over the course of the summer of 2020. It also seems like a similar number of folks are upset that the proposed plan will be too inviting for people looking for a place to sit or gather, not wanting to relive the summer of 2020. It’ll be fascinating to see what Planning Commission recommends—and which half of the people they enrage—before this ultimately heads back to the Urban Design Commission for a decision. Finally, Planning Commission will see a presentation on the proposed zoning ordinance rewrite. Deep nerd stuff, for sure, but something this newsletter will be VERY excited about.
 

RPS’s School Board meets tonight and you can find their agenda here. Unfortunately, looking at the agenda before the meeting is not a great way to learn what the School Board will actually end up discussing. I would not be surprised at all if some new, hugely consequence motion was introduced tonight, well past the hours good decisions are made. Since I’m an old person (and also because I have important newsletter tasks to attend to very early in the morning), I’ll be fast asleep before any of the real action starts. However, I promise to poke around on Twitter tomorrow to see what horrors unfolded in the dark of night, though.
 

This morning’s longread

The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books

This charming interview with one of the creators of choose-your-own-adventure books is written in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure book! This bit below, about marking each critical decision point with your fingers—so you can flip back if things turn out poorly—pretty much describes my experience.
 

Anson Montgomery, who still writes and publishes Choose books, sometimes gets letters from young readers confessing their cheating habits: scanning ahead for desirable endings, backtracking to redo choices. Their confessions carry top notes of guilt, he says, but he suspects that, beneath this anxiety, they actually relish their transgressions. They enjoy a reading experience that gives them something to confess. A former reader tells you about keeping one finger marking the page at every crucial choice point to which he might need to return, until all his fingers were slotted into the book—as if he were playing it like a wind instrument. Anson believes that frustration is also part of the appeal of these books: “As a kid, you might not know it, but you also want frustration.” You don’t want to get the most triumphant ending right away. It’s most satisfying to reach Ultima after you’ve been frustrated, over and over, by following the rules.
 

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

Picture of the Day

Appreciating these early-fall blooms.