News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA.
In today’s Daily Progress, James Fernald has a story about the achievement gap in Charlottesville schools. It’s really long, and actually has a few graphs, so I figure it’s probably pretty good. I haven’t actually read it, but, y’know…it’s got a lot of words. And that’s got to count for something.
Hey, it’s exam week, what can I say?
Former county school board member Gary Grant has announced his candidacy for the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, WINA reports. He is seeking the Republican nomination to represent the Rio District, which is being vacated by incumbent David Bowerman. Also running for the Rio seat is Tom Jakubowski, making his third attempt at the BOS.
At least one other person plans to announce his candidacy for the seat.
05/03 Update: Claudia Pinto has a story in today’s Progress.
At last night’s City Council meeting, it was announced that an advisory committee will be put together to help the School Board find a replacement for outgoing superintendent Scottie Griffin. In today’s Progress, James Fernald writes:
The committee will include two School Board members, a former school board member, a former city councilor, a PTO council representative, a city school staff member, the city manager and a representative from an organization involved with low-income families.
Board chair Dede Smith has said that they’re not going to consider race or sex in their hiring (which would be illegal to do, wouldn’t it?), but fellow board member Muriel Wiggins says that, on the contrary, the new superintendent must be black.
This will end in tears.
Internal squabbling among leaders of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, once the nation’s foremost hate group, has led to the departure of a number of well- established, activist members and to the formation of a new hate group called the “National Vanguard.”
[…]
The purged members of the NA created a new group called “National Vanguard” and a number of local units have aligned themselves under the banner of this group. National Vanguard is based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where [Kevin] Strom lives. National Vanguard is the name of the magazine and news-oriented Web site run by Strom while he was with the NA. The new group has appointed a board of directors, but has not tapped a “leader” thus far.
[…]
The NA and National Vanguard factions are currently battling over which one is the “true” group to carry on the anti-Semitic and racist legacy of William Pierce, the longtime leader of the group who died in July 2002. The stated goal of the National Vanguard is to supplant the NA.
Strom and his various organizations list contact information as post office boxes in Charlottesville and Earlysville. Both Strom and National Vanguard maintain extensive websites.
It’d be frightening if it wasn’t so pathetic.
The list of tenants that will be in the new Hollymead Town Center (note that there is not, in fact, a town of Hollymead) has been announced by the shopping center’s developers, reports David Hendrick in the Progress:
The Target and Harris Teeter are tentatively scheduled to open in late July and on Aug. 17, respectively.
Other ventures making their initial foray into the local market are the pet-centric supermarket PetsMart, Chevy Chase Bank, and the restaurants Bonefish Grill, Sakura Japanese Steakhouse & Sushi Bar and TGI Friday’s.
Familiar names expanding into the complex include Starbucks, Gamestop, Bubbles Salon and Spa, Hair Cuttery, Wells Fargo Financial and Nextel.
Remember, kids: shop local.
74-year-old one-man Democratic revolution Ham Caldwell died of cancer on Monday, John Yellig reports in the Progress. I got to know Ham when working on Al Weed’s congressional campaign, for which Ham also volunteered extensively. A slow-talking bear of a man with a fantastic drawl and a remarkable wit, Ham was best known to Charlottesvillians for his regular letters to the Daily Progress on political matters.
His last missive before his death, written during the Terry Schiavo case last month, addressed a topic closer to home than perhaps readers were aware. It’s classic — and top-form — Ham Caldwell:
If I find myself in a state similar to the poor woman in Florida and if Senator “Pinhead Ricky” in any way interferes with my wife, Kathleen, in meeting the mutual obligations of our marriage or harasses her in any fashion, I make this solemn promise: I will make every effort to find and tap an here-to-fore unknown source of physical power somewhere beneath my sub-consciousness state.If I succeed, I will briefly shuck off my comatose state, rise with focused intensity, and rip out “Pinhead Ricky’s” soft pink lungs and eat them. This vow also extends to “Spit-Cup George” Allen who is Santorum’s political running buddy and sadly his intellectual peer. Also throw in Lassie look-alike, Virgil Goode who is automatically spring-loaded to the politically sleazy position. Nothing is really bad enough for opportunistic dreck, like these people, who exploit an issue like this for political gain. I wish that I could express this more strongly.
The bone deep hypocrisy of Republicans is shamefully shown as they howl about the moral values of the sacred institution of marriage between a man and a woman. Then they blithely vote to negate a basic mutual obligation of marriage. If Republicans do not trust their marital partners to make a final hard decision that is an inherent in marriage, they should immediately sue for divorce.
Ham A. Caldwell Jr.
They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
Piedmont Virginia Community College adopted a new strategic plan on Wednesday, which includes all kinds of great uses of a $1.67M federal grant for purposes of student retention and preparing students for college work, but the totally rad bit is their plan to offer high-speed wireless internet access throughout both of their buildings this summer. After a year and a half of always-on WiFi across the Virginia Tech campus, it was a real bummer to find that I had no access in any of my classes at PVCC this semester.
WiFi+Google=better classroom learning experience.
Bob Gibson has the story in today’s Progress.
Because I sure don’t.
City Council is now accepting applications for the three positions up for renewal on the board come June 30, James Fernald writes in today’s Daily Progress. Applications are due by May 19.
Two people have already applied for a position. The first is the 45-year-old David Randle, a UVa graduate and marketing consultant, who would like to move away from centralized curricula and management and “get things back from track.” The second — oh, God, I love this — is Kenneth Jackson, past and current City Council candidate, a man with a stabbing problem, but he’s apparently put that behind him now in favor of service on the school board or, possibly, Council, presumably depending on which pans out.
My advice to applicants? Watch your back. The competition is…er…cut-throat.
It appears that the Rolling Stones will be playing at Scott Stadium this summer. In today’s Progress, John Yellig writes that three UVa sources have confirmed that the “major announcement” that Musictoday has planned for Tuesday will be that the news will be that the legendary rock band will be playing in town. Presumably, proper confirmation and details will be available in a few days.
WINA: Byron Brown will not seek reappointment to the School Board.
Daily Progress: At Thursday night’s school board meeting everybody played well with others ran with scissors.
On Saturday, Bob Gibson wrote about UVa’s new environmental initiative:
A pair of buses in the University of Virginia’s 30-bus fleet have started using a biodiesel fuel that is 20 percent soybean oil.
[…]
“We are going to test it out for at least two months,” [Rebecca White, director of UVa parking and transportation] said. “My hope is that we would convert totally to B20,” the common name for the biodiesel blend, as long as drivers and mechanics continue to notice no operational differences.
Totally cool.
Christine Solem and John Coles, owners of Satyrfield Farm, haven’t been put off by the General Assembly’s refusal to pass a bill permitting them to sell their unpasteurized cheese. They’re giving it away. In today’s Progress, Liesel Nowak writes:
“Most of our customers are outraged that they can’t buy it anymore. They’re incredulous,” Solem said. “More and more people want raw milk and cheese from the farmer they know.”
If it’s not raining, Solem said, she and Coles give away nearly 80 pounds of chevre at the market, and bring home somewhere between $500 and $600, about $200 more than when they sold it.
WINA: Bill Igbani is out, leaving Peggy Van Yahres as the only expiring member who may seek re-appointment by City Council.
Writes James Weissman:“Newsweek has a cover story on America’s Best High Schools. Using a strange metric, C’ville clocks in at #485.” Some of the methodology is explained, but James is right — it is kind of a weird system.
Rich Collins, Democratic candidate for the 57th District House of Delegates seat, was arrested last Saturday for trespassing. Collins was campaigning in front of Whole Foods when the property manager of the shopping center asked him to leave. Collins refused, the police were called, and Collins asked to be arrested on principle, saying that the shopping center is functionally public, and he has a First Amendment right to campaign there. The police disagreed, and he was taken into custody.
The Daily Progress has an editorial on the matter, which runs down the basic story, concluding that “[h]e is raising a legitimate public issue in perhaps an unorthodox way,” but that “it probably doesn’t rank in the top 10 on the list of issues facing Virginia.”
Disclosure: I’ve been known to volunteer my time for the Collins campaign. My fiancee is the campaign manager. We’re also blood brothers in the local chapter of the Illuminati.
Paul Chedda — the Executive Director of the public housing authority for less than a year — was given the boot on Wednesday. He was an import from New York, brought in for the job, and is said to have just been bad to work with, unable to accept criticism. He ended up firing most of the maintenance department, leaving just two employees to make repairs in all seven public housing developments, leaving a $9.5M repair backlog. The board basically hated working with him, so they made use of a severance clause in his contract. Chedda followed Del Harvey, who resigned out of the blue in May of 2003.
John Yellig has the skinny in the Progress.
Christian J. Schoenewald, age 32, just moved here from Loudoun County two years ago, and thankfully knows everything that’s wrong with Albemarle and just how to fix it…though on the specifics, not so much. In today’s Progress, Claudia Pinto reports that he’s seeking the Republican nomination to run against Board of Supervisors incumbent Dennis Rooker. Schoenewald claims that Loudoun has implemented “zero-growth policies” that have bizarrely led to “wall-to-wall condominiums and the traffic is horrible” — he proposes removing our non-existent growth restrictions in order to preserve the rural character of Albemarle County.
There’s no word on what brand of carpetbag that he prefers. Not that I’m bitter.
According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Scottie Griffin is one of the seventeen people who have applied to be the superintendent of the Pulaski County, Arkansas school district. The $142,659/year job is available after the current superintendent retired after just three years. Their school board is going to pick out finalists in the next week or so to pick out finalists. Hopefully that school board will do a better job on background checks than Charlottesville’s.
A pool over a dozen masochists have joined Peggy Van Yahres (seeking reappointment) in applying for one of the three positions on the school board that open July 1. Bill Igbani and Byron Brown have said that they will not seek reappointment. New applicants are Louis M. Bogard, Jean S. Chase, Alvin Edwards, John J. Gaines III, Blair Hawkins, Kenneth Jackson, Sue Lewis, Brynda Loving-Kotter, Joseph Mooney, Chad Everette Thorne, David Randle and Karen Waters.
The most notable of the bunch, in light of recent controversy, would have to be Alvin Edwards, as he was an outspoken advocate of Scottie Griffin and, consequently, opponent of the school board.
James Fernald has the story in today’s Progress, which includes brief bios of each applicant.
The opening words in a Progress article today about The Virtual Community Chalkboard:
I am Waldo’s Large Intestine.
Erm. Thank you, Liesel Nowak.
Ted Bridis writes for the AP:
The CIA is conducting a secretive war game, dubbed “Silent Horizon,” this week to practice defending against an electronic assault on the same scale as the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks.
The three-day exercise, ending Thursday, was meant to test the ability of government and industry to respond to escalating Internet disruptions over many months, according to participants. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the CIA asked them not to disclose details of the sensitive exercise taking place in Charlottesville, Va., about two hours southwest of Washington.
This, presumably, is at the National Ground Intelligence Center. Totally cool. Thanks to James Weissman for the tip.
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette is wise to Scottie Griffin’s checkered past, nine days after they wrote that the Charlottesville Superintendent has applied for the same position in Pulaski, Arkansas. Like local media outlets, who often found Griffin scarce as hen’s teeth when interview came time around, the Arkansas paper wrote that Griffin “could not be reached for comment despite calls to her numbers in three area code zones.” They interviewed both City Councilor Blake Caravati and outgoing school board member Bill Igbani for the story.
A password required — grab one at BugMeNot.
According to an e-mail sent out by Charlottesville Republican chair Bob Hodous (and a conversation with the candidate), Tom McCrystal has pre-filed for the Republican nomination for the House of Delegates. As the only guy to do so, that makes him their man. He’s the vice president of Creative Perspectives, a media shop located downtown. McCrystal will be going up against the winner of the Democratic primary, to be held on June 14, which is a three-way race between Rich Collins, Kim Tingley, and David Toscano.
Disclosure: I’ve volunteered my time for Rich Collins and I’ll inevitably volunteer for whomever wins the nomination, but I might also write Tom a little check because then he can’t say that I never did nothin’ for him.
It seems that just about everything of any merit in this country ties back, in some way, to Charlottesville. To that end, consider Walter Pincus’ story in today’s Washington Post, “Analysts Behind Iraq Intelligence Were Rewarded“:
Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq — the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets — have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said.
The civilian analysts, former military men considered experts on foreign and U.S. weaponry, work at the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), one of three U.S. agencies singled out for particular criticism by President Bush’s commission that investigated U.S. intelligence.
To many folks — myself included — the role that Charlottesville’s NGIC plays in the intelligence world is a mystery. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that they did anything this high-level.
Only once in my memory has NGIC been in the news, and that was just a few days ago, when they headed up the “Silent Horizon” internet war games.
Charlottesville Podcasting Network has a new series — they’re running WNRN’s “Wake Up Call,” the Sunday morning talk show hosted by Rick Moore. Episodes will be podcast weekly, on an evaluation basis. This week’s show is described as such:
Rick gives a passionate salute to Memorial Day and then talks politics with Steve Bragaw of Sweet Briar College. Rick and Steve talk about the filibuster controversey, George Allen’s political future, and the race for governor in Virginia.
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