Monthly Archive for October, 2005

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City Schools ISO Geeks

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 24, 2005 in Business and Education. 4 Comments

The Charlottesville School Board has OKd two new technology positions, WINA reports, which is the kind of thing that gets me excited. They want one person to maintain CHS and BMS student records and another — this is the cool one — to run the city schools’ website. So, local geeks looking for work, consider applying for this gig.

Picture this: city school blogs. Get the new superintendent, a couple of principals, and a handful of teachers blogging. Aggregate all of those and put them on the front page of the city schools’ website, and I’ll include them in the Charlottesville blog aggregator, of course. Whoever the new supe turns out to be, a blog is going to make them seem a whole lot more accessible to the people of C’ville. That’s something Scottie Griffin would have benefitted from.

Charlottesville Tomorrow Candidate Interviews

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 23, 2005 in Politics. 1 Comment

Charlottesville Tomorrow has blogged their candidate interviews with all six candidates for Board of Supervisors, complete with the audio of the interview. Those are: Sally Thomas, Gary Grant, Thomas Jakubowski, Dennis Rooker, David Slutzky, and Christian Schoenewald.

Supervisor Candidates Talk Environment

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 23, 2005 in Development and Politics. 1 Comment

All but one of the six candidates for the Albemarle County BoS — Dennis Rooker opponent Christian Schoenwald wasn’t there — attended a candidate forum sponsored by a half dozen local environmental/growth organizations. All of the candidates agreed that population growth has got to be managed — the disagreement was on the matter of how. Though Jessica Kitchin has a story in today’s Daily Progress, better to head over to Charlottesville Podcasting Network and listen to the two-hour podcast.

PACEM Expands Services

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 23, 2005 in General News. 3 Comments

There’s a strong correlation between chronic homelessness and substance abuse problems. This presents itself as cruel irony to some homeless citizens in the area — of which there are approximately 175 in Central VA, in total — who find that they can gain access to the Salvation Army shelter if they’ve been drinking, but aren’t eligible to stay at the Mohr Center unless they’re drunk. It is to help those who fall between the two that People and Congregations Engaged in Ministry (PACEM) was founded by local activist Dave Norris last year. They were open last year from November 15 through March 18, working with 36 congregations in the area to provide shelter in a season when sleeping outside could lead to serious illness or death.

PACEM opened a month early this year, thanks to increased support, and opened for service on the 15th, John Yellig reports in today’s Daily Progress. They’ve also gotten a pair of grants, one that is letting them expand into providing emergency shelter for women and children, and a second that will let them hire a caseworker.

The program seems to be working. A Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission survey taken last January reported a 40% drop in people who said that they couldn’t find any shelter, and a 61% drop in people who had difficulty finding shelter.

10/24 Update: Be sure to check out Dave Norris’ great comment explaining PACEM’s mission.

Census Readjusted Upward

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 21, 2005 in Development and Politics. 2 Comments

In April, the Census Bureau announced that the population of Charlottesville had dropped sharply, decreasing by 8.7% in just four years. A few months later, City Council challenged the Census Bureau on those figures and, yesterday, the feds admitted fault. In fact, there was a 1.6% increase of the population in that period, Sarah Barry reports in the Daily Progress. It appears that the calculation problem lay, as cvillenews.com commenters speculated, in the proper inclusion of UVa students, which is a perennial problem for census-takers.

So for those of us who said that the census may well be right and we, for one, welcome our new census overlords…we suck. And for those of you who got it right, don’t rub it in too much.

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