Category Archives: Government workers and pensions

Assault and Battery in Schools – Virginia Law and School Division Policies Make “Marks” of Principals

Posted on April 15, 2023 by | 10 comments

by James C. Sherlock

This is addressed directly to Virginia public school principals.

You are compliant with current Virginia law whether you report assault and battery to police or do not.

Bad law makes for bad policy.

Depending upon your school division, your requirements may vary. A lot.

In gambling, and this issue is a big gamble for you, if you don’t know who the mark is, it is you.

The current law on reporting of assault and battery to police reflects a poorly conceived and poorly written attempt by Virginia Democrats in 2020 to break what they called the “school-to-prison pipeline.” They made reporting to police conditional upon on-scene medical and legal findings – by you.

The Board of Education has done nothing to improve the matter. School divisions are all over the spectrum on what to do about reporting. You cannot carry out either the law or many of the school division policies without personal jeopardy. Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Corruption and Scandals, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Culture wars, Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12), General Assembly, Government workers and pensions, Unions

Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” and the Suppression of Debate

Posted on April 8, 2023 by | 71 comments

Herbert Marcuse. Courtesy Britannica

by James C. Sherlock

There have been countless articles here on the tyranny of the left on Virginia college campuses. And nationwide.

I need not summarize them here.

But I think it useful on a weekend to consider the origins of that movement to better understand it.

It did not spring up randomly, and it continues to flow from its source, Herbert Marcuse and his book Repressive Tolerance (1965)*.

Marcuse abandoned the working class as a source of subversion of capitalism in 1964’s The One-Dimensional Man.  He

put his faith in an alliance between radical intellectuals and those groups not yet integrated into one-dimensional society, the socially marginalized, the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other ethnicities and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable.

You may recognize that target coalition.

Herbert Marcuse has been the campus left’s philosopher since the 60’s radicals were suckled on his writings and remained in academia. Their students have come now to dominate the heights of the culture, including academia, Hollywood, the media, and teachers’ unions.

What I call the “stupid right,” more useful to the left than to conservatism, seeks to use some of Marcuse’s tactics in an equally destructive way. But they remain a fringe.

They seek a different coalition, most of which utterly rejects them.

Because they are destructive of society. Continue reading →

71 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Culture wars, Education (Early Childhood), Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), General Assembly, Government workers and pensions, Marxism, Politics

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Private Hospitals show Virginia’s State Hospitals, Colleges and Universities the Way to Efficiency

Posted on March 9, 2023 by | 46 comments

Valley Health Winchester Medical Center

by James C. Sherlock

We read far too often about funding “crises” in government institutions and programs.

The general public, me included, would be far more attentive and sometimes supportive if government would follow the lead of private companies and continually right-size itself and emphasize customer-facing services.

The health care industry — or rather the private healthcare industry — consistently shows the way.

Even not-for-profits are not for losses.

Count, if you can, the number of times in your life that a government organization has announced job cutbacks in administration in order to optimize expenditures and provide better service.

Yeah, me neither.

Students at one of my favorite state schools (it is northwest of Richmond and west of Orange County) are protesting that their faculty is underpaid.

The solution to that problem, if indeed the Board of Visitors considers it a problem, writes itself. Continue reading →

46 Comments

Posted in Children and Families, Education (higher ed), Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Regulations and Government Oversight

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What Do We Owe To and Expect from a Special Ed Teacher?

Posted on February 27, 2023 by | 16 comments

Abigail Zwerner
Courtesy AP

by James C. Sherlock

On February 16, USA Today published a story by Jeanine Santucci. That is the latest in an excellent series of reports on the shooting of Newport News first grade teacher Abigail Zwerner.

Her article, “Virginia 6-year-old who shot his teacher exposes flaws in how schools treat students with disabilities.” raises questions that Virginians need to answer.

  • What, exactly, do we expect of special education teachers and what do we owe them?
  • What training and resources must we provide?
  • How do we keep them safe?
  • How do we get enough people to accept the challenges and risks?

Any school official or teacher will tell you:

  • That the best-organized parents in K-12 education are special-ed parents;
  • That federal law is very prescriptive and provides little room for error on the part of the schools;
  • That schools’ (meaning taxpayers’) liability for error is open-ended; and
  • That special-ed continues to get more challenging, especially after COVID accelerated the number of emotionally disturbed children and adolescents.

Few school divisions will claim to have any of that under control.

 JLARC in 2020 concurred with that assessment in Virginia.

Longstanding shortage of special education teachers persists, and many school divisions rely on under-prepared teachers to fill gaps.

IEPs are not consistently designed effectively.

School divisions are not consistently preparing students with disabilities for life after high school.

Continue reading →

16 Comments

Posted in Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Culture wars, Education (Early Childhood), Education (K-12), General Assembly, Mental illness and substance abuse, Public-Employee Unions, Unions

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Richmond’s Skinny Budget: Low Stakes Poker, High Stakes Rhetoric

Posted on February 27, 2023 by | 9 comments

by Shaun Kenney

Virginia’s General Assembly managed to pass the Richmond equivalent of a continuing resolution to fund the government until Senate Democrats and House Republicans can hammer out a compromise on corporate tax breaks.

One will have to pardon me for not getting terribly wound up about tax breaks for corporations while small businesses and working families are struggling with back-to-back  years of 9 percent inflation from Washington.

Meanwhile, much of the damage done by the Northam administration with regard to Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements, gender ideology, and the long litany of progressive efforts to remake Virginia were left both untouched and unchallenged.

Even school choice — the marquee legislation championed by Lt. Governor Winsome Sears — was left to die in committee.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are promising a “brick wall” against House Republicans until they get what they want — in other words, reneging on the pledge from conferees to honor a $950 million tax cut. The stopgap fixes the $200 million shortfall snafu created by the Virginia Department of Education’s spreadsheet, puts another $25 million into the Virginia Retirement System, and another $100 million towards cost overruns for existing building infrastructure. What mystifies most is that the Senate Democrats haven’t been precisely clear on what they want beyond platitudes for higher salaries for bureaucrats, public education, higher education, etc. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Efficiency in Government, Elections, General Assembly, Governance, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Leadership, Taxes, Uncategorized

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Unconstitutional Viewpoint Discrimination in Virginia K-12 Teacher Evaluation Standards

Posted on February 25, 2023 by | 31 comments

Daniel Gecker Esq., President of the Virginia Board of Education. Appointed to the Board of Education by Governor Terry McAuliffe and reappointed to a four year term by Governor Ralph Northam. Date of expiration of appointment – June 30, 2023

by James C. Sherlock

Progressives, in the fullness of their dogma, oppose the entire Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights is specifically structured to limit the powers of government, which progressives find not only unsuitable, but unimaginable.

In the Golden Age of Progressivism in Virginia, 2020 and 2021, they controlled the governor’s mansion, the General Assembly, the Attorney General’s Office and all of the state agencies.

With total control, they took flight.

They have always known what seldom occurs to conservatives not prone to offend the Bill of Rights.

With total control of state government, progressives can enact and have enacted laws, regulations and policies that violate both the federal and state constitutions.

They know it will take a decade or more for courts to push back. Meanwhile they can call opponents “haters.”

After which the worst that can happen is that nobody is held accountable. Except the taxpayers.

I just exposed unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination in the University of Virginia’s hiring process. that was implemented starting in 2020.

The same fertile progressive imagination is also present in the Board of Education’s new (in 2021) Standard 6. “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Equitable Practices performance indicators” (starting on page xv) in “Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers“(Guidelines). Continue reading →

31 Comments

Posted in Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Courts and law, Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Education (K-12), Ethics, General Assembly, Governance, Government workers and pensions

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RVA 5×5: Needed Resources for Human Resources

Posted on February 19, 2023 by | Leave a comment

by Jon Baliles

Last week we had a story about a glut of open positions at Richmond’s City Hall and the difficulty in filling them. Lo and behold, the Richmond Free Press this week put out an article about the struggle to fill positions as the department responsible for filling those positions (Human Resources, aka HR) is upside down and employees are being told to reapply for their jobs. In case you didn’t read last week’s edition, the HR department has a lot of vacancies which makes it hard to fill any vacancy in any department. HR “is involved in every aspect of employee services, from hiring and retention to designing and administering classification, compensation and performance evaluations, overseeing employee data, handling employee grievances and providing training and development.”

Think of it like a clogged sink — it takes forever for the water to get through. And reporter Jeremy Lazarus notes that word has leaked out that everyone in the department was “told at a staff meeting in early February and urged to reapply for new positions that are being advertised, but that there were no guarantees they would have jobs. But three department employees have separately told the Free Press that effective Friday, all of the remaining full-time employees are to be laid off except for the three top managers….”

And one employee spoke directly but anonymously: “We’ve been told our department is the heartbeat of City Hall, but we’ve been left in the dark. None of us knows what will happen. Maybe we’ll all get rehired. Even so there will be fewer people left to do the work,” the employee said, as result of the transfers that have already taken place.

“I don’t know how everything we’re involved with will get done,” one of the employees said. “The city is fortunate. Instead of running for the exits, for the most part, everyone has stayed on and kept focused on the work. But it becomes so stressful when the reward for loyalty is uncertainty and worry. This is not what we signed up for.”
Continue reading →

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Posted in Efficiency in Government, Governance, Government workers and pensions, Public-Employee Unions, Uncategorized, Unions

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Where Is the VEA on School Safety?

Posted on February 6, 2023 by | 71 comments

by James A. Bacon

Greetings from sunny Costa Rica, the well-run Central American nation that bears less resemblance these days to a banana republic than to the United States!

Costa Rica dedicates some 7% of its GDP to education, according to Wikipedia, and its population is 97% literate, which, if you think about it, might be higher than the literacy rate of the U.S. I wonder if Costa Ricans have the same kinds of scandals in their schools that we do in Virginia.

I am prompted to such musing by a recent article in The Virginian-Pilot, which reported allegations that the infamous six-year-old terror of Richneck Elementary School in Newport News who shot his teacher had previously choked another teacher “until she couldn’t breathe.”

It has been amply demonstrated by now that the Newport News public school system had done an atrocious job of keeping its teachers safe. Which raises yet another question, which I have not seen asked anywhere: Where is the Virginia Education Association, the organization that purportedly fights for better  working conditions for teachers? Continue reading →

71 Comments

Posted in Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12), Public-Employee Unions, Uncategorized

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Push to Return Federal Workers to Offices – Monsoon or Squall in Northern Virginia

Posted on February 5, 2023 by | 53 comments

The benefits of 60 years of headlong federal government expansion, Northern Virginia edition.

By James C. Sherlock

The federal government has for nearly three years been paying very expensive leases for D.C area office buildings that are virtually empty.

COVID emergency.  Or was.

Now it is a battle between the comfort of federal employees with working from wherever they can get a good network connection vs. actually showing up at the office.

The feds report that as of the beginning of this calendar year, 47% of federal employees were still working remotely.

Since civilian federal employees thankfully still include people who work in other than an office as their normal place of work, we can assume that more than 47% of Northern Virginia federal workers are working remotely.

And we can assume they like it.  Would you like to try to get to D.C. every day from, say, western Fairfax County, much less the exurbs, if you didn’t have to?

Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Democratic mayor of Washington D.C have formed an unusual coalition to get them back to the office.

Beltway Democrats in the House fought it there and have lost so far .  Senate Democrats and President Biden, mindful that federal employees are one of their most dependable voting blocs, are unlikely to follow the House’s lead.

But it is secretly kind of fun to consider that Northern Virginia would sort of explode if they all tried to return in the same week.

Perhaps the experience would prompt efforts to return some of NOVA to a semblance of livability by distributing the headquarters of most of the agencies across the country.
Continue reading →

53 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Demographics, Efficiency in Government, Governance, Government workers and pensions, Infrastructure, Land use & Development, Politics

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Preparing for the Costs to Government of Virginia’s Generation COVID

Posted on January 4, 2023 by | 90 comments

John Littel, Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources

by James C. Sherlock

To justify her insistence on keeping schools closed, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in February of 2021, “kids are resilient and kids will recover.”

She brought that same message to Virginia.

In one of the strangest choices in Virginia political history, Terry McAuliffe brought Weingarten to Virginia to campaign with him on the last weekend of his losing gubernatorial campaign.

Thus sealing his defeat.

It turns out, as it was always going to, that you can’t keep kids out of school for up to a year and a quarter, homebound, and expect all of them to “recover.”

I will call here those in K-12 during COVID school shutdowns Generation COVID (Gen C).

I wrote the other day of an estimate by a renowned educational economist that the 1.2 million Gen C kids in Virginia public schools would lose several hundred billion dollars in lifetime earnings because of un-repaired damages to their learning of all types.

His critics here argued into the night about study methodology, but none denied costs at some level would be there. They did not offer their own estimates.

John Littel, Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources, has the job of preparing his agencies for the lifetime social costs of those children. Continue reading →

90 Comments

Posted in Children and Families, Culture wars, Education (K-12), Governance, Government Finance, Health Care, Mental illness and substance abuse, Public safety & health, Public-Employee Unions, Resilience, Unions

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Projected $312 Billion Cost of Lost Earnings of Virginia K-12 Students due to Pandemic School Closures

Posted on January 2, 2023 by | 98 comments

Courtesy Eric Hanushek

by James C. Sherlock

Over $312 billion in present value.

That is the estimate published by Stanford’s Eric A. Hanushek of expected economic losses attributable to Virginia’s pandemic school closures.

Virginia students in the COVID cohort can expect on average 5.5 percent lower lifetime earnings.

History indicates that the economic losses will be permanent unless the schools get better. Just returning schools to their pre-pandemic performance levels will not erase the lost learning.

Recovering from the pandemic requires swift and decisive improvements to the schools.

That number is an estimate, but a scientific one. Dr. Hanushek has better credentials with which to make that estimate than perhaps any other economist in the world.

For perspective, the $312 billion present value of projected losses to the Virginia economy due to COVID school shutdowns represents about seven years of state revenue realized from Virginia sources in the 2021 and 2022 biennium.

Even the money pales by comparison to the developmental and emotional damage done to the children.

But feel better.

His estimate of similar losses to California exceeds $1.2 trillion. Continue reading →

98 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Economic development, Education (K-12), Public-Employee Unions, Unions

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City of Norfolk Allowed Its Animal Shelter Manager to Work Remotely. From Florida.

Posted on August 31, 2022 by | 59 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

To those who argue that remote work is lovely and only Luddites believe people should actually show up in their workplace every day, I offer THIS as an extreme example of what can happen.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that earlier this year some bonehead in the city of Norfolk gave the manager of the city’s animal shelter permission to move to Florida and work remotely until her replacement could be hired.

But guess what the long-distance manager did? According to The Pilot, in July she took a second job at another shelter in St. Petersburg.

There are all sorts of ethical questions about the actions of this city worker who continued to draw a fat Norfolk salary — courtesy of taxpayers — of $85,500 while living almost 1,000 miles away.

My real beef is with HER manager who okayed this insane arrangement. Continue reading →

59 Comments

Posted in Efficiency in Government, Government workers and pensions

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Status of Public Employee Collective Bargaining

Posted on July 30, 2022 by | 8 comments

Public sector workers organize in Loudoun. (Service Employees International Union)

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The Virginia Mercury has performed a service by compiling a list of the status of public employee bargaining in the Commonwealth.

So far, eight jurisdictions have adopted ordinances authorizing collective bargaining agreements. There is activity in another six localities.  “Activity” is defined as campaigns advocating collective bargaining agreements or local government officials drafting such agreements.  One locality has rejected collective bargaining.  Continue reading →

8 Comments

Posted in Labor and Workforce, Public-Employee Unions

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Bacon Bits: Your Tax Dollars at Work

Posted on July 21, 2022 by | 30 comments

The Big Dig ain’t got nothing on us. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) board has approved $250 million in additional funding to pay for cost overruns on Phase II of the Silver Line rail project, which, incidentally, was supposed to begin service in 2018, and Metro officials now hope will begin this fall. Fairfax County will have to cough up $40 million more, Loudoun County $12 million more, and MWAA $10 million more, reports The Washington Post. The balance will be foisted on the motorists using the Dulles Toll Road. By way of comparison, Phase I of the Silver Line was only $220 million over budget and only six months late.

That’s a lot of laptops. Two Fairfax County school employees and a third man have been charged with stealing as many as 35,000 laptops stored in a county warehouse and scheduled to be auctioned. The losses were estimated at $2 million. The laptops were loaded onto a box truck that arrived at the warehouse without the necessary paperwork. Police charged Fadi Atiyeh, owner of Attyah Computer Recycling, as well as Franque Minor II and Mario Jones Jr. who were employees at the warehouse, reports The Washington Post. The Fairfax County HR website says the county has 12,000 workers. That’s three laptops per employee, unless the county is handling the school system’s used laptops as well. The schools have more than 17,000 employees.

Fewer police, more violent crime. The City of Roanoke has seen an explosion in violent crimes this year. The number of firearm-related woundings and killings has surged: nine homicides so far this year compared to six during the same period in 2021, and 25 aggravated assaults compared to 19. Police Chief Sam Roman says the department’s priority is interrupting “the cycle of gun violence.” In addressing City Council, he pointed to more counseling and mentoring services for at-risk youth and the Groceries Not Guns program, which exchanges unwanted firearms for supermarket gift cards. Continue reading →

30 Comments

Posted in Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Government workers and pensions, Transportation

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Help Wanted: 300 Full-Time Jobs. Must Be Willing to Go to Work every Day

Posted on July 12, 2022 by | 17 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

Big headlines last week. Virginia state workers began an “exodus” when Governor Glenn Youngkin forced them to come back to work.

Youngkin announced on May 5th that he expected state employees to return to the offices they vacated when COVID struck in March of 2020.

The nerve!

You could hear the howling from Richmond all the way to Virginia Beach. Especially from Democrats, still indignant that voters booted them from the top three offices and eager to gin up dissatisfaction with the amiable new governor.

How dare the governor require workers who draw public paychecks to show up for work!

How dare the boss tell employees what to do!

How dare anyone tell state workers to take off their PJs! Continue reading →

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Posted in Government workers and pensions

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