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Schapiro: A Wilder ride for Rao and Youngkin
Doug Wilder always says the loud part louder. In a little-noticed speech this past weekend, the former governor and ex-Richmond mayor artfully laid into the president of Virginia Commonwealth University, Michael Rao, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who appoints the overseers of VCU and more than a dozen other taxpayer-financed colleges and universities. Wilder has attacked both men before. His speech wasn’t necessarily more of the same, though, because Wilder had a different audience. He spoke to newly minted, politically focused university graduates who, he implied, should not follow Rao’s and Youngkin’s examples.
UVa president says he’s willing to accept consequences for breaking up campus protest
“If all of you decide I’m not the right leader, that’s your choice,” said University of Virginia President Jim Ryan. “That’s how I feel.” Though no university officials have publicly called for Ryan to resign, Ryan's tone and demeanor were marked by a resignation of their own at the university's Faculty Senate meeting last Friday. Ryan, alongside Provost Ian Baucom, university Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis and UVa Police Chief Tim Longo, spent an hour answering questions during Friday's meeting of the Faculty Senate, a governing body of roughly 90 faculty representatives from across the university’s 12 schools charged with advising UVa’s leaders on “matters affecting the welfare of the University."
Black waterman villages in Suffolk among Virginia’s most endangered historic places
For years, Mary Hill has watched her Suffolk community of Hobson slowly disappear. Hill is a seventh-generation descendant of Black freedmen who helped build the community centuries ago. They established a self-sufficient oyster industry that thrived along the Nansemond River until pollution devastated it starting around the 1960s. Since then, historical buildings once crucial to tight-knit community culture have been torn down, Hill said. Many who were alive in the village’s heyday have died, and some other descendants moved away and sold property passed down for generations. In their place, developers are building modern, more expensive homes that edge out historic ones. “You have a slow death” of the area, said Hill, who is in her early 60s. She now hopes a new designation will bring attention and funding to the area.
Search warrants claim ‘pattern of money laundering’ at some Va. cannabis-related stores
Newly unsealed search warrants in Washington County allege that some of the cannabis-related stores that were targeted in a region-wide raid last fall were involved in money laundering. Dozens of stores across Southwest Virginia were raided in September. While the ownership structure of many of the shops is unclear, the search warrants show that the homes and banking records of two people who owned multiple locations also were searched. Among the items that were seized were a number of guns — pistols, rifles and shotguns — as well as ammunition, computers, cellphones and vehicles, including two Rolls-Royces.
Kempsville High baseball season ended over ‘racism, hate speech, and harassment’ within team
Kempsville High School’s baseball season is over after “a lengthy investigation” found that “racism, hate speech, and harassment” have been prevalent on the team for multiple years, according to a note principal Melissa George sent to parents in recent weeks. “After our lengthy investigation after we received allegations of racism on the baseball team earlier in April, we have found that racism, hate speech, and harassment have been an ongoing issue for multiple years,” George wrote in the message, first reported by WTKR. “Due to additional information we have through our investigation, at this time we are forfeiting (the May 2) game against (Princess Anne).”
3 Virginia cities in top 10 for highest rates of gun thefts from vehicles, report finds
A new report by the anti-gun violence nonprofit Everytown details the sharp spike in guns being stolen from vehicles across the United States over the last decade and found that three Virginia cities were in the top 10 for guns being stolen from vehicles in 2022. Using FBI data from 337 cities across 44 states, Everytown found that gun thefts from vehicles rose from an estimated 21 thefts per 100,000 people to 63.1 per 100,000 in 2022, the most recent year included in the data. . . . Richmond was fourth in the nation with 218.3 thefts per 100,000 people. Portsmouth was in sixth place with 196.1 thefts per 100,000 people; Norfolk was in ninth with 181.9 thefts per 100,000 people.
A Democratic congressional candidate represented Kessler in the court case to allow Unite the Right
In Virginia’s first congressional district, Democratic candidate Leslie Mehta is facing criticism for representing Jason Kessler during his effort to hold the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The events that unfolded that day resulted in the death of Heather Heyer after a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people who were counter-protesting the rally. Two state police officers also died after their helicopter crashed while monitoring the events. Mehta says that while Kessler and his group represent everything she stands against, the First Amendment rights of Americans should always be defended when they are being used peacefully, as the organizers said would happen in court documents.
Salem pharmacy fined $75,000 for vaccine, drug violations in 2021, 2022
A CVS in Salem delegated the provision of COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 to an untrained nurse who injected a youth with six doses at once, according to state records. One of a dozen violations found in connection with a routine inspection in January 2022, authorities cited the drugstore for posing a danger to the public’s health. The long-pending case was resolved when the Virginia Board of Pharmacy fined the store $75,000 earlier this month for violations of state law including the state Drug Control Act.
Prince Edward schools that helped usher in Brown v. Board of Education still in disrepair
A small group of Robert Russa Moton High School students in Farmville began gathering in secret months before an April 23, 1951, walkout to protest the unequal conditions of school facilities for Black students. “It was the same type of secrecy that was developed during the Manhattan Project,” said John Stokes, one of the walkout’s organizers. “We had to trust everyone so we could pull this thing off.” Students decided to report a fake disturbance downtown, luring Moton Principal M. Boyd Jones away from school on the day of the protest. … When Jones returned to school, the strike was in full force. About 400 students gathered in the auditorium to hear a speech from 16-year-old student Barbara Johns before walking out of the school in protest.
Loudoun considers delayed-start days to give teachers training time
Loudoun County schools is considering delaying the start of classes by two hours on some days in the next academic year to help free up time to offer training for new teaching standards required by the state. The 16 delayed start days would be spread out throughout the year. Dismissal would occur at the same time, district leaders said, meaning students could lose about 32 hours of classroom instruction over the year.