👹 Good morning, RVA: Low COVID levels, gun violence, and big sculpture

Good morning, RVA! It’s 57 °F, and it’s rainy. You should expect the rain to continue for most of the morning and into the afternoon, with it maybe tapering off a bit as the day wears on. Saturday things dry out, and then, on Sunday, more rain. It’s a weekend full of wet weather, and I hope you find some time to curl up somewhere with a book or a horror film and something nice to drink, which, honestly, sounds lovely to me.
 

Water cooler

Yesterday, two RPS students were shot in the parking lot outside of George Wythe High School. One student suffered life-threatening injuries and remains in critical condition. Superintendent Kamras’s email from last night has more details on the incident and how adequate state funding for education can help deter violence in our schools and in our communities: “Like a doctor, I wish we could simply write a prescription to fix everything. While it’s not that simple, there is some medicine on the counter: roughly $1 billion in education funding. That’s what the Senate version of the state’s budget would add to Virginia’s schools, while the House’s would siphon that money off for tax cuts, which would largely benefit the state’s richest residents and richest corporations. That $1 billion would yield about $20 million for RPS. That’s enough money to hire 235 more counselors. Just think what that would do for the students at Wythe and the rest of our schools.” Kamras asks that folks email the legislators who sit on the General Assembly’s budget committees and demand the education funding found in the Senate’s version of the budget (in his words, he humbly requests that you plead with them to invest in our children). It’s absolutely unfathomable that we have the money to invest in education—it’s just sitting right there!—yet Virginia’s Republicans would rather continue their work to defund public schools and further enrich the wealthy at the expense of our children.
 

It’s the last week of the month, so I think it’s time to check back in on our region’s COVID-19 Community levels. As of last night (and over the last bunch of weeks at this point), Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield all continue to have low CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. In fact, the entirety of the Commonwealth and most of the United States sit at a low/green level, with only 74 localities nationwide (out of 3,221) at a medium or high level. I imagine that, at some point, CDC will start to transition away from Community Level as their go-to metric, but, until then, I’ll check in with it about once a month—just to keep an eye on things. Summer has, historically, been a chill(ish) time for COVID, but I’m pretty interested to see if this fall brings with it another mini-peak. However! That’s a million years from now, and we’ve got the wide-open road of summer stretching out ahead of us first!
 

This makes me laugh: Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond reports that the City still is still under a State of Emergency…from Hurricane Irene in 2011. In fact, Richmond has a handful of open States of Emergency (including the one about COVID), all of which will soon end with an ordinance submitted by the Mayor. Kind of makes you wonder what other legislation is sitting around on the books that we’ve just totally forgotten about.
 

RVA Mag has a nice preview of Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s newest sculpture exhibit, “Incanto: An Oasis of Lyrical Sculpture.” This stuff is big—like, big enough to walk through and around—and looks pretty neat. Plus the artists, Kate Raudenbush and Sha Michele, have some ties to Burning Man. If I’m honest with myself, an exhibit at Lewis Ginter is probably about as close to actual Burning Man as I will get in my lifetime.
 

Last night, Jerry Springer died after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few months ago. As I was reading those headlines this morning, I scrolled past this video of GWAR on The Jerry Springer Show, which is, in it’s own way, kind of charming? A discussion of violence, parenting, and media on a trash TV talkshow by people wearing ass-less chaps is, I think, a decent way to start your morning.
 

This morning’s longread

The Wages of Overwork

Anne Helen Petersen has a great piece on the Culture of Overworking and how pervasive it is at all levels of the workplace. Tap through for some pretty depressing graphs from Pew, one of which shows, out of people who don’t use all of their paid time off, 49% of them don’t do so out of a fear of falling behind on their work.
 

I still believe that companies are capable create unbreakable guardrails that protect us from our own worst habits. Companies can enforce PTO minimums, and not just discourage but enforce breaks from communication; they can backfill appropriately and refuse scenarios in which giving 120% is the only way to complete the amount of work that’s expected. You can even give workers flexibility for that three-peak day, if that’s what they want — so long they also underline that the times between the peaks shouldn’t be for work. I also still think these policies serve organizations well in the long term: they reduce burnout, and turnover, and sloppy work. But most companies don’t think in the long term, at least not when it comes to employees.
 

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Picture of the Day

It’s officially showy rhododendron season.