🆘 Good morning, RVA: Pedestrian fatality, School Board meeting, and pre-filing season

Good morning, RVA! It’s 29 °F, and you can expect highs in the 50s and the last dry skies for awhile. This week’s current forecast predicts rain for three of the next four days. That’s too soggy for me—I need some time to dry out!
 

Water cooler

The Richmond Police Department reports that a driver hit and killed a woman on the 1400 block of Chamberlayne Avenue this past Friday night. This is the second person killed by a driver on Chamberlayne in the last 40 days, and, to my knowledge, nothing has been done to slow traffic or make this street any safer for people. As this corridor continues to add retail and residential—and as the region looks to improve north-south bus service—we have to start making the street safer now or more and more people will have their lives irrevocably changed by traffic violence. My suggestion: Put up a ton of barrels to create a bus-only lane, narrowing and slowing the entirety Chamberlayne. After that, build some safe, well-lit, and comfortable pedestrian crossings. At least do something!
 

RPS’s School Board meets tonight for one of their regularly schedule meetings, and you can find the full, massive agenda here. RVA Dirt has an agenda preview, which, like the agenda itself, is long. We all know there’s a ton going on in RPS right now, but such a huge agenda necessarily means late-night meetings with important decisions made after most people have (or should have!) gone to bed. In fact, according to RVA Dirt, the Council of the Great City Schools recommends school boards tackle no more than three discussion items per meeting—not almost 20! We’ll see if they even get to “Discuss FY23–24 Budget priorities,” which, after last year’s budge debacle, seems like a pretty important agenda item.
 

Anna Bryson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch continues her reporting on the Governor’s plans to unravel the State’s history standards for K–12 schools. As foretold weeks ago, several national right-wing organizations contributed to writing the new standards, while “the Youngkin administration excluded the input of hundreds who worked on the Northam draft, including Edward Ayers, a historian, professor and former University of Richmond president.” Excluding input from Ed Ayers—shameful! He’s, like, one of our top history guys! Also of note for a document that mentions Reagan six times and Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden a total of zero times: “Former President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, William Bennett, is among the individuals who contributed to the Youngkin draft.” Shocking. Anyway, the State’s Board of Education will hold a special meeting in January to look over a third (fourth? fifth?) draft of the standards that will, theoretically, contain elements from both the Northam and Youngkin versions.
 

We’re definitely in the General Assembly’s pre-filing season, where we get to read reporting about the bills that legislators plan on submitting—with most of them destined to die silent deaths as they wind their way through Virginia’s ancient legislative process. Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has an exciting example with Republican Delegate Tim Anderson’s proposal to delete the ban on gay marriage from the State’s constitution. Who knows if Republican leadership, who control the House of Delegate, will let this bill onto the floor for a full vote—but if they did it, at least this year, feels like it would pass.
 

I took the RVAMAG and GayRVA Reader’s Poll and, first, felt old because I definitely did not know a single DJ on the DJ list—and maybe have never known a single DJ on any DJ list? But then, after I saw that a lot of my responses lined up with the most popular answers, I felt the small spark of whatever remaining hipness I have grow at least two sizes.
 

This morning’s longread

Webb, Keck Telescopes Team Up to Track Clouds on Saturn’s Moon Titan

The James Webb Space Telescope can look at objects incomprehensibly far from earth, like galaxies swirling around just after the birth of the universe. Or it can look across the street at one of our own solar-system neighbors, like Saturn’s moon Titan. I don’t pretend to understand much of this article, but look how charming this one scientist is about seeing a space cloud!
 

Team member Sebastien Rodriguez from the Universite Paris Cité was the first to see the new images, and alerted the rest of us via email: “What a wake-up this morning (Paris time)! Lots of alerts in my mailbox! I went directly to my computer and started at once to download the data. At first glance, it is simply extraordinary! I think we’re seeing a cloud!” Webb Solar System GTO Project Lead Heidi Hammel, from the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), had a similar reaction: “Fantastic! Love seeing the cloud and the obvious albedo markings. So looking forward to the spectra! Congrats, all!!! Thank you!”
 

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Picture of the Day

Nightwing.