👝 Good morning, RVA: No more horrible fencing, phones at schools, and brutal journalism

Good morning, RVA! It’s 73 °F, and today you can expect highs in the mid 80s, cloudy skies, and, fingers crossed, a break in the humidity. Get excited, because today’s just the appetizer; the next couple of days look like real stunners.
 

Water cooler

The horrible fencing surrounding the circle at Monument and Allen is officially down! I saw it with my own eyes yesterday, and you, too, can see it vicariously via today’s crappy Picture of the Day below. Now that the space no longer feels like a tiny, post-apocalyptic island, City leaders can and should start taking actual steps towards “reimagining Monument Avenue”—or whatever it is we want to call it. Richmond made a strategic misstep when we gave control of the process to the VMFA, a state agency, right before the governorship switched parties. That’s OK, we learned a lesson, put a temporary solution in place, and now have the time and space needed to put together a thoughtful, City-run engagement and planning process. It’d be an even bigger misstep to treat all 6,000 of the newly-installed plants (as much as I love plants) as the permanent future for this circle.
 

Megan Pauly at VPM reports on Hopewell City Public Schools’ pilot project to (sort of) ban cellphones at middle and high schools: “Last year, Hopewell City Public Schools started requiring middle and high school students to keep cellphones locked away in magnetic pouches during the school day.” I think I’m mostly against this, but Pauly does point to some interesting, specific issues that result from every kid having access to a phone all day long. But, like, this is the world we live in, and locking phones away in little pouches seems more like a bandaid fix than anything else. The Hopewell Superintendent knows this and gets to the real long-term goal near the bottom of the article, saying “he’d like students to be able to self-manage their cellphone use during the day without [the pouches].” Sounds great, and I guess we add “teach kids how to properly manage living in an always-connected world” to the giant list of things we’d like teachers to cover in addition to World History and Geometry.
 

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams does a better job than I did at processing everything going on at Huguenot High School. Here’s what I wished I had said: “Huguenot, at the moment, requires our empathy and all the supportive energy we can muster. But make no mistake: its anxieties mirror our own and school communities well beyond it.” There are so many larger, systemic, external issues impacting the students, staff, and faculty at Huguenot High School, and it’s naive to think that just school-specific policies or procedures will move the needle. As one student says, “It’s just a heavy time to be an adolescent in our community right now.”
 

If you can stomach it, you should look at today’s print issue of UNC’s student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. They’ve used the entire front page to print the actual text messages sent by the UNC community during this week’s school shooting and subsequent campus lock down. Brutal and brilliant.
 

Yesterday evening, Governor Youngkin finally set September 6th as the date for a Special Session of the General Assembly to get back together and pass a budget.
 

Meghan McIntyre at Richmond BizSense has all the acorn news you could ever use. McIntyre’s written before about that one guy who’s responsible for collecting millions of acorns that then become millions of trees in the Virginia Department of Forestry’s reforesting efforts. Now she’s out to convince you to become an acorn collector, too. Honestly, sounds like a pretty fun and rewarding way to spend some time.
 

This morning’s longread

On the Difficulty of Getting Rid of Books

Many years ago I got rid of most of my physical books, and now I read almost everything digitally. This essay made me miss the process of making room on the bookshelves and sending a new batch of old books out into the world (but not enough to read paper books again—sorry!).
 

I never want to get rid of any books. I don’t get rid of them, per se; rather, I set them afloat, in search of new homes. This means that every year or so, we have to do a “pull,” what booksellers say when they remove from stock those books to be returned to the publisher, “I’m going pull the history section.” I’m tempted to call it a “culling,” but that word seems belligerent; often what’s culled, be it wild animals or irksome villagers, is considered dangerous, at least undesirable. This is not at all how I feel when I decide which books we’ll take to our local used shop for store credit, with any leftovers then donated to the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.
 

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Picture of the Day

No more horrible fencing on Monument Avenue!