🛴 Good morning, RVA: More great NTotY content, special election, and a new purveyor of fine electric scooters

Good morning, RVA! It’s 56 °F, and today you can expect highs near 80 °F with plenty of sunshine. Enjoy!

Water cooler

I’ve got more to share about National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson! In his email yesterday, Superintendent Kamras linked to a video of Robinson’s remarks after accepting the major award that you need to watch and will probably make you cry. What an absolutely incredible guy. I’m so stoked that the message coming out of Richmond right now, one that’s being heard on the national level, is laser-focused on equity and love. Other leaders in the region: Take this opportunity to ride in Rodney’s wake and publicly double down on equity!

National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson also authored a guest post for Google’s blog about his story and about Teacher Appreciation Week, which started yesterday and I totally did not mention it—my fault! Richmond Public Schools has some resources to help you show our local teachers some love. Make an RPS Teachers Rock sign, print it out, and let a teacher near you know how much they rock. If you’ve got a tale about a specific time of rocking, definitely go ahead and share it with communications@rvaschools.net.

The Richmond Times Dispatch’s Mark Robinson sat in on City Council’s special meeting yesterday and reports, as expected, that Council would like to have a special election for the 5th District coinciding with the General Election on November 5th. There’s 182 days between now and then, which feels like forever, but blink and it’ll be gone. I’m sure it’s hardly enough time build up a successful election campaign for City Council, so good luck to all those folks who feel called to serve and submerge themselves in the extremely…unique…world of local politics!

Yo! I’m still waiting for electric scooters and dockless bikes to return to Richmond and fill our streets with folks easily getting around without the use of a car. To that end, Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense says Bolt Mobility has rented some office space near the Diamond, which I guess means that they’ll drop some of their Christian Bale-era batmobile-looking scooters soon?

The Virginia Mercury has a new Virginia Explained! This one, by Mechelle Hankerson, looks at how Virginia’s history textbooks are vetted. Dang, the explicitly racist history of the Commonwealth’s textbook process is really something else.

Sean Gorman, at the RTD, says Chesterfield County has a new on-demand van service for County residents with disabilities, lower incomes, or are over 60 years old. Unfortunately, it’s focused mostly on moving folks around within the County and costs $6 per ride, making it unaffordable for regular, day-to-day usage. This sort of service is necessary and useful, but certainly not a replacement for fixed-route buses, in which the County has yet to invest. Still waiting on that bus down Route 1 to John Tyler, Chesterfield!

This morning’s longread

What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With

I’m working on being better at this in my own marriage, which is embarrassing because I’ve already been married for an eternity. If you’re going to be progressive, be progressive in your relationships, too.

The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior. Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?

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