😢 Good morning, RVA: More on School Board, a new school reporter, and the Pulse's last stop

Good morning, RVA! It’s 47 °F, and the cold front has arrived! Grab your flannel and Doc Martens, because today’s highs in the 60s won’t even show up until late afternoon. Honestly, looks like some good bike-riding weather out there—see if you can make some time for it!
 

Water cooler

OK, a few more updates on RPS’s School Board meeting on Monday night. First, you can find the full video here. Second, NBC12’s A.J. Nwoko has a good write up of what actually went down and some of the impacts: “But despite the efforts of a rezoning committee established by the district, after five months of planning and community engagement, which recommended rezoning 400 River City students to Boushall, Lucile Brown, and Binford Middle Schools, the board voted 5–4 against the rezoning proposal. Among the criticism of the proposal, many board members brought up concerns regarding the 40 open-enrollment seats Binford Middle School would lose if the rezoning passed.” To summarize where we are now: School Board’s five-member bloc voted against the recommendations of a monthslong community-driven rezoning process to preserve 40 open-enrollment seats at a school in an affluent, mostly-white neighborhood at the expense of hundreds of mostly-not-white kids on the City’s Southside. If this shocks you, you’re not alone. Scrub to about 2 hours and 56 minutes in the aforelinked video and watch both Superintendent Kamras and Chief of Staff Hudacsko’s emotional reactions to the Board’s decision (if you can stomach it). What a toxic work enviornment; your job is not supposed to make you cry! I’m not really sure what the next steps are for the Board or for the public, but the District is pushing up against a deadline to run the open enrollment lottery and notify parents of the results. Obviously, the School Board’s current inequitable decision to do nothing about River City Middle School shouldn’t be their final ones, but, as always seems to be the case with this group, they’re running out of time. 4th District’s Jonathan Young, who voted against the rezoning, mentions maybe holding an emergency vote at the next meeting to vote on some sort of plan? In the meantime, watch as much of the video as you can, email the School Board with your thoughts and feelings, and make sure to copy your Councilperson and their liaison. If you wanted to take it a step further, post a screenshot of your email to the social media platform of your choice.
 

Super related, Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says she’s now covering Richmond Public Schools for the paper. Reporters are always looking for folks to talk to about their beat, so if you’re part of an RPS family—especially one with kids at either River City or Binford—maybe hop in Nocera’s mentions and offer to chat about the ongoing rezoning meltdown.
 

I enjoy almost everything about this piece by Michael Schwartz in Richmond BizSense about Henrico County hitting pause on a new Willow Lawn development so they can first better accommodate the Pulse. County Supervisor Schmitt, who just recently joined the GRTC board, says all the right things about looking for a park-and-ride for bus riders and making sure the Pulse has adequate space to turn around. Here’s the best part, though: Rather than figuring out how to make Willow Lawn a better end-of-the-line for the Pulse, “One idea on the table to potentially solve most of the problems is to extend the Pulse a bit further west of Willow Lawn to create a new last stop on the line that could be in proximity to more available land.” Love it!
 

Aww man, Council’s Governmental Operations committee meeting scheduled for today got cancelled. I get it, and I imagine they have a lot going on, what with trying to wrap up this year’s budget season. Too bad for them, though, because they’ll miss out on a fun agenda which included the Mayor’s proposed Civilian Review Board (ORD. 2022–091) and the plan to move to ranked-choice voting for City Council elections in 2024 (ORD. 2022–119). I imagine they’ll pick both of these back up next month after things calm down a bit.
 

This morning’s longread

The Renewable-Energy Revolution Will Need Renewable Storage

I will never, ever not be fascinated that we can and do use lakes as batteries. I love this kind of futuristic use of stone-age technology, which basically boils down to lifting things up and down a lot.
 

We already have one kind of renewable energy storage: more than ninety per cent of the world’s energy-storage capacity is in reservoirs, as part of a remarkable but unsung technology called pumped-storage hydropower. Among other things, “pumped hydro” is used to smooth out spikes in electricity demand. Motors pump water uphill from a river or a reservoir to a higher reservoir; when the water is released downhill, it spins a turbine, generating power again. A pumped-hydro installation is like a giant, permanent battery, charged when water is pumped uphill and depleted as it flows down. The facilities can be awe-inspiring: the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, in Virginia, consists of two sprawling lakes, about a quarter of a mile apart in elevation, among tree-covered slopes; at times of high demand, thirteen million gallons of water can flow every minute through the system, which supplies power to hundreds of thousands of homes.
 

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Picture of the Day

The view from the ground, looking up into a forest.