🪣 Good morning, RVA: More School Board fallout, zero-fare in limbo, and native plants

Good morning, RVA! It’s 40 °F, but this afternoon looks stunning. Expect highs in the 70s, sunshine, drinks on the patio, and charming smiles glowing in the golden hour. The beautiful weather continues straight on through the the weekend, and I hope you get a chance to enjoy it.
 

Water cooler

The fallout continues from the RPS School Board’s decision to prioritize 40 open enrollment seats at Binford Middle, a well-resourced school in an affluent white neighborhood, over the needs of more than 400 Black and Brown students on the City’s Southside. Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, on her newly-assigned education beat, has some good coverage of the situation and of yesterday’s press conferences and rallies. An important detail I missed earlier this week: “Binford Principal Melissa Rickey expressed support during Monday’s School Board public comment period for welcoming River City students into her school next fall.” In fact, “the principals of all four middle schools affected by the plan were in favor of the rezoning.” Yet, despite support from principals, the administration, and the community, the School Board’s five-member bloc voted against the plan, citing some hand-wavey, gas-lighty reasons about not being presented with more options. Don’t let them convince you that they’ve had this rezoning plan sprung upon them in a shocking and sudden way! This plan was drafted over the last five months through a community-driven process with plenty of opportunities for those five members to get involved and ask questions. Heck, I’ve known about the meetings for the last forever just because I read the superintendent’s email—and I’m not even on the School Board!
 

Additionally, and like I hoped for yesterday, City Council has started to get involved. NBC12’s Desiree Montilla and A.J. Nwoko covered a press conference outside of River City Middle School hosted by Councilmember Mike Jones, with Councilmember Ellen Robertson and School Boardmember Nicole Jones in attendance. Tap through, watch the video, and then compare and contrast the flat, hollow statements from School Boardmember Jonathan Young about preserving a few open enrollment seats at Binford with the emotional statements from the two Joneses about simply providing a humane and safe learning enviornment for kids on the Southside. I can’t help but see a lot of alignment between Young and the other members of the bloc’s position and the governor’s incessant push for “school choice” at the expense of neighborhood public schools.
 

So what’s next? School Board has a meeting scheduled for this coming Monday, May 2nd, where they will once again consider this rezoning (if you’re feeling up to it, make plans to give a public comment). If I had to predict an outcome it’d be that the Board will pass some version of the existing rezoning plan with a few more open-enrollment seats preserved at Binford. I just don’t think it’s possible for them to do nothing. The longer-term issue is this Board’s behavior. Taking the School District (and the city!) to the brink over every. single. issue. is absolutely exhausting and untenable—which I think is the point! Sowing chaos and confusion is the primary plan for the five-member bloc, and they’re executing that plan extremely well. To what end, though? Other than forcing a wave of resignations, I have no idea, but it’s awful to watch and must be horrible for RPS staff to live through.
 

Wait, one more school rezoning thing! Chris Suarez, also at the RTD, reports that Councilmember Robertson is noodling on how to force RPS to rezone when a school’s enrollment reaches a certain threshold. I don’t know how an ordinance like this would work, but I absolutely love Council creatively thinking through how they can use their authority to prevent the School Board from doing harm to their constituents. Like, are we living in the best possible timeline where one elected body has to pass legislation to prevent another elected body from burning the whole thing down? No, not at all. But this quote from Councilmember Jones gets it right: "We want them to do their jobs better…When they neglect that, I will use whatever means are at my disposal to resolve the issue.”
 

Warren Fiske at VPM has a bit of an update on the region’s search for the money needed to keep GRTC’s zero-fare program afloat. So far, no one—not the City and not GRTC—has offered to cover the $1 million required by the state grant currently subsidizing the rest of the program’s cost. I like GRTC CEO Julie Timm’s quote: “Timm says the reserves are ‘one-time’ dollars that should be spent on ‘one-time’ needs and would not solve GRTC’s need to find permanent funding sources for zero-fare.”
 

Tomorrow, from 9:00 AM – 1:30 PM, Root 5 Family Farms and Keep Henrico Beautiful will host a Native Plant Festival out at Dorey Park (2999 Darbytown Road). Stop by to learn a thing or two about why you should pull out all of the heavenly bamboo in your yard. Pick up a bunch of native plants to replace that garbage and to beautify your living space!
 

This morning’s longread

Why American Teens Are So Sad

I feel like an old man yelling at a cloud, but a big part of the reason teens—and the rest of us—are so sad is that our brains can’t handle what social media does to them. This weekend, consider setting an app limit on your favorite social media app, removing it from your Home Screen, and putting the Libby app in its place. Build a habit of scrolling a book instead of doomscrolling your TL!
 

This sense of doom doesn’t just come from teenagers. It comes from us, the news media, and from the social-media channels through which our work is distributed. News sources have never been more abundant, or more accessible. But journalism also has a famous bad-news bias, which flows from an unfortunate but accurate understanding that negativity generally gets more attention. When we plug our brain into a news feed, we are usually choosing to deluge ourselves with negative representations of reality. A well-known 2019 experiment randomly forced people to stop using Facebook for four weeks before a midterm election. The study found that those who logged off spent more time hanging out with family and friends, consistent with the idea that social-media use displaces pro-social behaviors.
 

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Picture of the Day

Azaleas! Sometimes I try to think about what a person who’d never seen an azalea would think of this entirely pink bush—they look like something out of a fictional rendering of an alien planet.