Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and we've got another lovely day ahead of us. Get yourself ready for highs in the mid 70s, some sunshine, and every reason in the world to say goodbye to your socks. Slip-ons for life! Bring on True Spring!
Water cooler
It's Tuesday, and the CDC's Community Level in each of Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield is low. The Community Level in nearby Goochland, though, still sits at medium, and the case rate in Richmond and Henrico have definitely increased over the last seven days. I think it is officially time to Keep An Eye On Things™. Maybe stock up on a some masks and at-home tests if you don't have any, just in case?
Yesterday morning, Mayor Levar Stoney and members of City Council put on a stern and combined press conference about replacing George Wythe High School. The Mayor offered School Board's five-member voting bloc "one last effort at compromise," and introduced an ordinance at last night's City Council meeting to release the funds to design an 1,800-seat school that, if needed, could be later expanded. That paper will have a public hearing on April 25th. I can already hear your eyes rolling about what impact a press conference could possibly have over a very intent School Board. But wait! Before you get too cynical about it, check out this thread from last night's Board meeting via @KidsFirstRPS. After 9:00 PM last night, the RPS School Board voted 5-4 in favor of an 1,800-seat George Wythe replacement (Yes: Doerr, Harris-Muhammed, Burke, Page, Jones; No: White, Gibson, Young, Rizzi), with 6th District's Dr. Harris-Muhammed flipping her vote and finally breaking the five-member voting bloc's hold over this process. Whew! What an exhausting couple of months! I don't think you should take last night's vote as any sort of sign about the dissolution of the five-member bloc, and I'm sure they'll continue to exert their majority as we move forward in building a replacement for George Wythe. That said, I appreciate Dr. Harris-Muhammed's decision, which I'm sure was difficult and definitely does not make her life any easier. Also, it's so rare to see a majority of City Council and the mayor publicly on the same page like this. I love it, and I love that, together, they were able to reach a compromise to unstick this incredibly stuck process. Great work! Now on to the next thing!
Longtime readers of this email know that I love the work of NYU journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen. Rosen is deeply critical of the media's coverage of elections, especially their tendency to focus on the "horse race," which has journalists reporting on who is going to win rather than who represents issues and solutions that citizens care about. With most journalism covering the horse-race aspects of an election, it means, oddly, that candidates rarely find themselves in a position to discuss issues that matter to the people that elect them. There is an alternative way to cover an election, though, and Rosen calls it "the citizen's agenda." Here's Rosen explaining the core of this model: "The idea was simple: campaign coverage should be grounded in what voters want the candidates to talk about. Which voters? The ones you are trying to inform. It revolves around the power of a single question: 'What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?'" Locally, and this is very exciting for me, VPM will use the citizen's agenda model in their coverage of the 5th and 7th House District elections. If you live in or near those districts, which is almost everyone reading this email, you've got until May 13th to fill out the aforelinked survey to tell VPM what you want candidates to talk about as they compete for votes. Fill it out, and I'll keep an eye on this project over the next bunch of months!
Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury reports that Governor Youngkin has appointed McKenzie Snow, a former aide to Betsy DeVos, as Virginia's Deputy Secretary of Education. The new deputy, unsurprisingly, has a history of pushing public funding away from public schools towards charter schools. That Governor Youngkin continues to appoint ex-Trump people to his administration really underscores the fact that he is not, in any way, just a moderate guy in a fleece vest.
This morning's longread
The Secrets of the Plant People
Here's part two in an Anne Helen Petersen series about houseplants. Below you'll find what's basically a description of my house. I'm OK with that.
With this piece, we’re going to try and unlock some of those aesthetic motivations of those 1960s and ‘70s “plant people.” If you’re of an age to have memories from that time, you might have memories of a growing number of houseplants in your home: rubber trees, endless ferns, snakeplants (formerly known as ‘Mother-in-Law’s Tongues), proliferating spiderplants suspended in macrame holders, dusty Christmas cacti, clusters of fuzzy-leaved African violets, knobby jade plants, unchanging and treacherous barrel cacti, and, of course, the slowly dying ficus. (A lot of great memories in the replies to the tweet below)
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