🚧 Good morning, RVA: New school construction, new school funding, and banning TikTok

Good morning, RVA! It’s 32 °F, and today you can expect slightly cooler temperatures than the last couple of days or the next few days. Highs will stay in the mid 40s, and lows will dip below freezing for the next several nights, too. Unfortunately, no chance of snow for as far as the eye can see, but that does mean the holiday week ahead might shape up to be a perfect time for bikes, bikes, bikes!
 

Water cooler

This story is a long time coming: Anna Bryson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that construction has finally started on the facility that will replace the old George Wythe High School. Due to the incredibly spicy (and, at times, interminable) back-and-forth between School Board and the Mayor a couple years back, community members will have to wait until 2026 for the new building to open. But that’s in the past, and now we’re making real progress—and it’s just the start. Here’s RPS Superintendent Kamras: “We probably have another 30 or so buildings that need to be rebuilt just like this…But this is one in particular that we’ve known for quite some time was really in disrepair, and kids probably a generation ago deserved a new building. So to be able to provide it now is just absolutely wonderful.” I hope we can keep up this momentum and that the process to rebuild the next 30 schools goes smoothly and moves quickly.
 

A couple months ago, Governor Youngkin and the General Assembly put together a bucket of $418 million to fund public school districts and the solutions they come up with to recover from pandemic-era learning loss. Each district was tasked with putting together a plan, and, as of yesterday, they’ve all done so and you can go forth and download the PDFs at your leisure (because you’re probably looking, here’s Richmond’s, Henrico’s, and Chesterfield’s). Richmond Public Schools has about $9.5 million dollars to work with and have split that between two main programs: “hiring 60–90 retired teachers and other educators to provide small group tutoring during and after school” and extending the contract of an existing literacy and math tutoring organization. I think funding must be allocated to districts on a per-pupil basis, because Henrico schools take home $17 million, while Chesterfield banks $22 million. This seems like a straightforward case of equality over equity—why not give more support to the districts with the students experiencing the highest levels of learning loss? Maybe the funding formula is more complex than “$X per-pupil,” but I couldn’t find those details this morning!
 

If you want, you can tap through to the RTD and read Eric Kolenich’s early reporting on Governor Youngkin’s plans to ban kids from using TikTok. Keep in mind that these early, splashy bills often only exist to generate headlines and stories (just like this one!), and many of those bills will never even escape their first early-morning committee hearing in the General Assembly. However, Virginia’s legislators did ban PornHub last session, so they’ve sort of set a precedent for ineffectually banning internet things while not understanding or addressing the core issues they actually care about. So maybe keep an eye on this one. Also, I can’t not think about this TikTok of Boomer legislators talking about TikTok. Treat yourself this morning and watch them all.
 

This morning’s longread

Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle

Copyright, fair use, creative licensing, and how things end up in the public domain used to be one of my hobbies (like AI and rats, these days). Then, at some point, it just seemed like the American government was content on forever extending the rights of copyright holders endlessly into the future—with the specific intent of making sure Mickey Mouse never ended up in the public domain. Seriously, that’s a real and true thing! Tap through to read a really informative history of copyright in the United States and how in just a couple of weeks Disney’s iron-fisted grip on its creative works law relaxes just the tiniest bit. Pretty exciting stuff!
 

Hence the triangle. Disney is both an emblem of term extension and its erosion of the public domain, and one of the strongest use-cases in favor of the maintenance of a rich public domain. Mickey is the symbol of both tendencies. Ironies abound. It may not be exactly the same as an oil company relying on solar power to run its rigs, but it is definitely in the same “massive irony” zip code. All of this makes the year when copyright finally expires over Mickey Mouse highly symbolic. The love triangle between Mickey, Disney, and the public domain is about to evolve, and perhaps even resolve, in real time.
 

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Picture of the Day

A serene, post-storm 311 request waiting to happen.