The Albemarle School Board is going to add a rotating non-student representative, Tim Shea reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow. Members of the County Student Advisory Council, a student-run group representing the county’s three high schools, will take turns participating in school board meetings, while board members will start attending the student group. The specifics of the relationship are still being worked out, but there seems to be consensus about the broad outlines.
Category Archives: Education
Charlottesville Tomorrow Teams Up with C-Ville Weekly
Charlottesville Tomorrow is extending its content sharing to a new publication, they’ve announced in an unsigned story, to include the publication of education stories in C-Ville Weekly. No money is changing hands in the agreement, which includes a cooperative venture to put together a voter guide for city and county school board elections in November. The collaboration gets underway in June. Simultaneous to this news is Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Kickstarter-based effort to raise $17,000 to fund a new education-reporter position. The expansion into education marks a noted increase in the scope of the mission of the non-profit, which has focused primarily on development-related issues since its 2005 founding.
It was nearly four years ago that the online-only publication struck a similar deal with the Daily Progress, in a similar deal: the Progress prints the organization’s voter guide, in exchange for being able to run any Charlottesville Tomorrow stories that they want.
City School Buses to Get Stop Sign Cameras
Infuriated by people blowing right by stopped school buses, the city school system is mounting video cameras on the buses to videotape traffic while students are loading and unloading at bus stops, CBS-19 reports. It’s a matter of state law that traffic must come to a halt in both directions when a school bus is at a stop, and a big red “STOP” sign flips off the side of the bus, with red lights flashing on it, just to make sure that everybody is clear on that, but some people still ignore that and drive by the bus at full speed. The danger is that many of the kids getting on or off the bus live on the opposite side of the road, and are taught to cross the road in front of the bus immediately, since traffic is stopped for the bus. Drivers are often too busy doing their jobs to take note of offending vehicles’ license plate numbers, so the intention is that the new system will allow the school’s transportation division to review the tape later to report offenders. The system should be in place this fall.
County Looking at Building STEM High School
Albemarle Superintendent Pam Moran has been talking with UVA about locating a new high school at the UVA Research Park in northern Albemarle, Aaron Richardson reports in the Daily Progress. The Progress was FOIAing e-mails from UVA on a different matter when they stumbled across UVA communications that referred to the discussions about establishing a school focusing on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). It sounds like things haven’t progressed very far at this point, with UVA saying that the university’s administration hasn’t been briefed on it and School Board member Diantha McKeel saying that she didn’t know that Moran had approached UVA.
Crozet Library Loses Some of Their Space
Things just keep getting worse for the beleaguered Crozet library. The Board of Supervisors decided to build a replacement for the shoebox-sized library back in 2006, delayed it over and over again, and the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library finally threatened to close it entirely if they didn’t receive enough funding to keep it open. (JMRL won that political battle, getting the bit of funding that they needed from the BOS, allowing them to remain open, albeit for rather limited hours.) All this despite serving an area that has ballooned in population—they have over 10,000 visits monthly in the summer. Now comes word that the fire marshal has had to limit the building’s occupancy to fifty people, Ted Strong writes in the Progress today, and has ordered the removal of a bunch of stored materials. They’re not allowed to add more storage in the parking lot, so they’re going to have to haul things to and from the old Crozet Elementary School.
With a Board of Supervisors that’s been openly hostile to library funding, it’s tough to see when and how things will get better for the patrons of the Crozet library.