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Spotsylvania School Board considering drug testing all employees after teacher’s arrest
Two recent, alarming incidents in Spotsylvania County Public Schools prompted the school board to act during a Monday meeting that stretched into the early hours of Tuesday morning. The board voted 7-0 to instruct Interim Superintendent Kelly Guempel to bring back information to the next meeting on June 10 to examine the feasibility of implementing drug and alcohol testing for all employees. The testing would occur at the onset of hiring and randomly as well.
Panel Asks Loudoun School Board for Guidance on Renaming Initiative
A School Board committee voted unanimously Tuesday to seek guidance from the full board on the renaming of division schools affiliated with people, places or ideals linked to slavery or the confederacy. The panel was reviewing a recommendation to potentially rename nine schools. The decision came after staff members asked the Finance & Operations Committee on May 7 for direction on how it should proceed with nine school names that had been identified by the Black History Committee of the Friends of the Thomas Balch Library as needing a closer look.
Virginia weighs regulations on hound hunting, citing tensions with landowners
Virginians have hunted deer and bears using hounds for centuries. The tradition has benefits for wildlife management and recreation, state officials say. But they also say they’re seeing rising conflict between hunters and landowners who don’t want dogs encroaching on their property. “This is the most common complaint that the department receives,” Cale Godfrey with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources told a state board earlier this year. “Frequent, repeated instances of unwanted dog presence are the source of many of those complaints.” State officials are now weighing new regulations on hound hunting. This week the department launched a public comment period on two proposals.
Youngkin signs CODI alert bill in honor of Codi Bigsby
On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Glenn Youngkin signed a bill to create the CODI alert in honor of Codi Bigsby, the little boy from Hampton who is presumed dead after his father, Cory Bigsby, was found guilty of his murder. The alert similar to an Amber Alert, but it removes the criteria of the suspicion of abduction.
Chesapeake Bay blue crab population holds strong, harvesters encouraged
The Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources have conducted their 2024 Bay-wide Blue Crab Winter Dredge Survey and found that the population held strong. This news comes after four years of population fluctuations according to Maryland.gov.
An ACLU lawyer defended racists’ free speech rights. Now she’s running for Congress
After growing up learning about the Civil Rights Movement and the importance of people being free to advocate for their beliefs, Leslie Mehta says providing legal help to the racist organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was one of the hardest things she’s done as an attorney. Mehta, who’s now running for Congress in Virginia as a Democrat, was serving as legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia seven years ago when the chapter made a controversial decision to represent rally organizer Jason Kessler in litigation against Charlottesville officials.
Dominion installs first post for offshore wind project
Dominion Energy plunged the first monopile — after the two existing pilot turbines — into the sea floor Wednesday, kicking off construction of the $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project that will bring 176 turbines 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. Installation of the post started mid-morning and was finished by the afternoon. The installation was delayed two weeks because a support vessel’s arrival was late ...
Institutions respond after new state budget stipulates lab school projects need public sponsor
Five of the 12 lab schools planning to open their doors to students this fall have one more hoop to jump through before they can do so. Three of those affected are in Southwest Virginia. College partnership lab schools developed by Roanoke College, Emory & Henry College and Mountain Gateway Community College must find a four-year public institution of higher education to back them if they want to keep the millions in state funding they’ve been granted to launch their concepts, according to details of the state budget signed May 13. The lab schools are intended to foster innovative teaching methods and train new generations of teachers. The adjustment brings the rules for lab school funding back in line with the original plan that was agreed to in the General Assembly in 2022, but a short timeline could create challenges for these projects.
Yancey: Senate candidate blasts ‘podunk local newspaper.’ Umm, Staunton is not ‘podunk.’
A few weeks ago, a journalist in Richmond was writing about the different parts of Virginia and made a snarky, dismissive reference to “whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.” To this journalist whose publication covers “whatever the hell is west of Roanoke,” those were fighting words. I limbered up my typing fingers and wrote a riposte to that description. Then our readers weighed in, offering up suggestions for what visitors to the western part of the state — be it west of Roanoke or not — should see. I considered the matter concluded … Then on Wednesday came news that a candidate for the U.S. Senate had referred to another part of Virginia as “podunk.”
Mapping Arlington’s History of Racially Restrictive Neighborhoods
Northern Virginia’s fraught history of racial discrimination is well-documented. Now, three researchers have mapped out just how prevalent “whites-only” housing was in the early 20th century—and how those exclusionary policies shaped the communities we live in today. Their hope is that their work will inspire current residents to investigate and learn from their property’s past. Covenants preventing non-White people from owning or occupying land were once commonplace in this area. “[The practice] was pretty evenly spread across Arlington,” says Krystyn Moon, a researcher and a professor of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington (UMW) in Fredericksburg.