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Jeanine’s Memes
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Anarchy Visits Another School
Albemarle High School. Photo credit: Daily Progress by James A. Bacon
Teachers don’t feel safe in Albemarle High School, reports The Daily Progress. Within one recent week, a student punched a teacher in the face so hard he (or she) required medical treatment, while another student issued threats against teachers and classmates via social media and email. The newspaper reports other incidents such as a student slapping a language teacher in the face, a student throwing a chair at a teacher, and a student throwing an uncapped water bottle across the room.
โStudents are roaming halls unchecked,” a teacher told The Daily Progress in an email. โStudents are regularly cursing teachers out with NO repercussions. Consequences are inconsistently applied, if applied at all.โ
โI want to assure you that we take the safety and security of our students and staff seriously, and such incidents will not be tolerated in our school,โ Principal Darah Bonham communicated to parents.
Perhaps Bonham is serious about “not tolerating” violence. But how did the situation deteriorate to the present condition? (more…)
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Bacon Meme of the Week
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Max: Youngkin Right To Veto Minimum Wage
By Derrick MaxThere is a near-universal consensus among economists that increases in the minimum wage harm low-skilled workers the most.ย Originally designed to mimic racially discriminatory laws elsewhere, the minimum wage continues to be a means of picking certain classes and geographic locations over others.ย For example, the minimum wage benefits the high-cost-of-living areas in the Northeast over the lower-cost-of-living areas in the South. (more…)
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Time for a Fairfax County Salary Freeze
by Arthur Purves
Local government compensation is better than private sector.
On April 30 the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors will vote on next year’s (FY2025) tax increase. The supervisors have advertised a 7% increase in real estate and car taxes to help pay for $360 million in raises for 38,000 school and county employees.
School raises are 6% and county raises range from 4% to 10%. By comparison, the county says that inflation is 2.5%. For next year, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, under Chairman Jeff McKay, is proposing a 7.1% or $618 tax increase for the typical residential household. This is the second largest tax hike in ten years, exceeded only by last year’s 8.9% increase.
Next year’s tax hike is made up of an average 6.5% or $531 increase in the combined real estate and stormwater tax, both of which are based on household assessments, plus a 16% or $87 increase in the car tax.
This continues the supervisors’ quarter-of-a century habit of increasing residential taxes three times faster than household income. They are advertising a 4-cent increase in the real estate tax rate, from $1.13 to $1.17 (includes the 3-cent stormwater tax), on top of a nearly 3% average increase in residential assessments.
Unless they hear from homeowners, the supervisors will probably adopt a rate of $1.16 when they finalize the budget on April 30, in hopes that homeowners will be relieved that the rate increased 3 cents instead of 4 cents. (more…)
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VMI Eschews Standards of Excellence, Devalues Diploma
by Joseph D. ElieAs an alumnus living in Florida, I have a dearth of information about what is happening at the Virginia Military Institute on a day-to-day basis.
I see the superficial social media postings from the public relations department, the Superintendent, and the Commandant; but I crave the scuttlebutt that tells the truer story.
The recent editorial, โClass of 25: The Elephant in the Room,โ in The Cadet was very enlightening, provided much-needed insight and served, in effect, as a detailed report on the Institute.
The editorial also revealed why the administration didnโt want a student newspaper committing acts of journalism โ as it validated my own suspicion that Breakout and the entire Rat Line itself have been rendered much less difficult.
From this yearโs Breakout videos, the Rats seemed to merely be going through the motions when compared with videos from past Breakouts. The energy, enthusiasm, and the spirit were gone.
The Cadet editorial outlines how VMIโs core standards have been made less rigorous for the sake of maintaining the enrollment retention rate, particularly with regard to the nature and rigor of the Rat Line.
The Rat Line energizes the entire Corps of Cadets. It is an annual rite of passage that the upper classes have historically zealously preserved.
The Rat Line was once extremely difficult to complete and doing so resulted in justifiable pride and a tremendous boost of self-confidence.
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UVA As a “Maze of Predatory Systems”
by James A. BaconIf you visit the latest exhibit at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, “EscapeRoom,” it takes no more than five or ten seconds for the artists’ message to sink in — the amount of time it takes to read the signage at the entrance:
The University of Virginia (UVA) is a site of reckoning. The legacies of slavery and white supremacy reverberate throughout its built environment. EscapeRoom confronts the frameworks of injustice that contemporary audiences inhabit and inherit in relation to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. … EscapeRoom charts critical routes through a maze of predatory systems.
Inside, the exhibits contributed by multiple artists elaborate upon the white-supremacy theme. Five 3D-printed pieces of porcelain, for instance, are described as giving “materiality, scale and dimension to the many ‘tools’ that mediate state violence visited upon Black victims: horses, batons, guns, tear gas, and more.”
A mobile made of steel sheet metal “examines violence visited upon Black people at the hands of the American state. It attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world.”
To set foot in the EscapeRoom is to enter a world of victimhood that would have been entirely justified a century or two ago but seems tragically out of date 60 years after the passage of Civil Rights legislation, the enactment of the Great Society’s war on poverty, and the dramatic transformation of attitudes toward race in America — not to mention the implementation of Racial Equity Task Force recommendations at UVA itself that made the exhibit possible in the first place. (more…)
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In Their Own Words: Jefferson, Whiteness, and Dicks in the Sky
Meet Marisa Williamson. The Harvard-educated assistant professor in the University of Virginia art department works in video, image-making, installation and performance art around themes of “history, race, feminism, and technology,” according to her UVA faculty page. Most recently, she co-curated the EscapeRoom exhibition at the Ruffin Gallery, which we highlight in a companion article.
Williamson, who has worked at UVA since 2018, was one of the first faculty members hired under the “Race, Justice and Equity” initiative made possible by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
She described her approach to art in a 2021 conversation with Tori Cherry, a Charlottesville artist and UVA Grad, hosted by Charlottesville’s New City Arts.
“One of my big goals is to unsettle and to figure out how to haunt, how to keep things moving, how to agitate through these various forms of performance and monument,” Williamson said. (more…)
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Call the Governor a Spoiled Brat? That’ll Work!
Not a visual that communicates the Democrats are leading an army in this fight. It screams loneliness. By Steve Haner
A senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee just called the Governor of Virginia a spoiled brat, which of course became a headline. Is everybody getting the nonsense out of their systems? It is time for the grown-ups to intervene or we will be stuck in a stupid loop until July.
The state budget as it passed a few weeks ago will not stand. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) will either impose line-item vetoes that drastically reduce the available revenue, or he will veto the entire $188 billion document. He has sufficient votes behind him to sustain those vetoes. (more…)
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Factoid of the Day: Nation’s Worst Mail Delivery
How bad is on-time mail delivery to Central Virginia? According to U.S. Post Office inspector general figures, it is the worst in the country. Postal service is so bad that a Richmond electoral official warned voters not to risk letting their ballots, in the words of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “be swallowed by a dysfunctional Postal Service.” — JAB
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The Letter
by Joe Fitzgeraldย
โGimme a ticket for an aeroplane.โ
Depending on your age, you may think of this as the opening to the Box Tops biggest and most iconic hit. If you donโt follow pop music, you may think any song that begins with โgimmeโ might be from a news story about a county school board chair.
The line of course kicks off the 1967 hit, โThe Letter.โ Those two words are being bandied about now in reference to a document the Rockingham County School Board (RCSB) says people canโt be allowed to see.
The Letter was apparently written to the RCSB from the law firm that represented it beginning when LBJ was president and ending last week. โTo the RCSBโ is the certain part. It may have been from the firm, or from one attorney in the firm.
I have not seen The Letter. I have not talked to anyone who has seen The Letter.
But a lot of people seem to know what is in The Letter. If it was written to the five people on the county board, and each one of them had a single conversation about it, and each of the people spoke to . . . etc. More people have heard about what was in The Letter than have actually seen it. But the degrees of separation mean the knowledge of whatโs in The Letter has been paraphrased more than once.
The single thing from The Letter that everybody seems to know is that The Letter and not the county School Boardโs secret actions ended the firmโs relationship with the county board. Everybody knowing it does not make it true, but if it is not true, the School Board should perhaps show it was not fired as a client. The board could show that by releasing The Letter. (more…)
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The Cost of Not Voting
by Joe Fitzgeraldย If I were a more articulate man, I could explain what sorry shape the governments of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County are in right now.
Rational people have little doubt about the county. The biggest government expense, the school system, is currently being run by people who do not know what they are doing. Thatโs one possibility anyway. The other is that theyโre causing randomly divisive chaos on purpose.
In the city the schools are being run well, but the city council approves housing as if it were free. The schools will be overcrowded soon enough. Five years? Ten? We canโt afford to build another one.
Relationships are being destroyed. The city flirts with leaving the Chamber of Commerce. The county board casually damages the shared technical center. Massanutten Pique would describe their behavior. (more…)
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Jeanine’s Memes
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VCU Wins Free Speech “Green Light” Rating
Photo credit: Babs Reh, Flickr by James A. Bacon
Congratulations to Virginia Commonwealth University for winning a “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) after making conscientious efforts to improve its formal free-speech policies. VCU is now one of five universities in Virginia and only 64 nationwide with the designation.
Since 2018, VCU revised several policies governing dorm room decorations, computer use, student conduct, sexual harassment, and reservation and use of campus spaces. But VCUโs sex-based misconduct policy remained a problem, according to FIRE.
“VCUโs old policy included a laundry list of behaviors, such as mocking and name-calling, that the school might have classified โ and therefore made punishable โ as sexual harassment. It was both overbroad and vague,” said FIRE in a statement.
โA single insult or joke does not qualify as sexual harassment,โ explained Laura Beltz, FIRE director of policy reform. โIt has to actually be a part of a pattern of conduct that meets that definition of harassment before being punishable. But that was not made clear under the old policy. For all students knew, they were always one strike away from getting in deep trouble on account of something they said.โ (more…)
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Bacon Meme of the Week
