Category Archives: Not-for-profits

Virginia, School Choice and Charter Schools – The National Map

Posted on March 6, 2023 by | 66 comments

by James C. Sherlock

One of the most curious aspects of discussions about Virginia, school choice, and charter schools is that Virginia progressives attack both as a conservative plot.

And mostly get away with it.

The claim is demonstrably preposterous, but effective so far because Republicans don’t offer an organized response.

I offer a map of the United States annotated with the percentage of public school kids attending public charter schools in 2019.

If Virginia progressives can discern some pattern of red states vs. blue states, they should speak up.

State laws vary, but each of the states with significant numbers of charters has a state-appointed charter authority that is not dependent upon approval by local school boards.

“Conservative” Washington, D.C., had 43% of its public school kids in charters.

Far from being totalitarianism, as goes the progressive line in Virginia, this is the result of popular constitutional amendments in virtually every state shown above in green.

Seems voters in those states wanted parents with kids in their worst schools to have options.

So will the voters of Virginia. Just show them the map during the campaign. Continue reading →

66 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Elections, General Assembly, Not-for-profits, Parental Rights

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Feeding Petersburg

Posted on March 3, 2023 by | 34 comments

Garrison Coward oversees Gov. Youngkin’s Partnership for Petersburg initiative – photo contributed to the Progress-Index

by James C. Sherlock

I have written in this space many times about the struggles of Petersburg.

Petersburg is blessed in one way.

The Progress-Index’s Bill Atkinson and Joyce Chu may be the best pair of local news reporters working in Virginia.

Mr. Atkinson, in a series of reports, has detailed the continuing struggles of that city to get a grocery store downtown.

The big grocers surround the center of the city in more prosperous, safer areas but have not entered there.

Food Markets in Petersburg courtesy of Bing Maps

It is no secret why. Poverty and crime do not attract retailers vulnerable to shoplifting and worse. And Petersburg is among the poorest and most crime-ridden in Virginia.

A recent Petersburg solicitation for interest in building a grocery store downtown drew no bidders.

The Governor has a broad Partnership for Petersburg initiative to help Petersburg help itself  It is run by Garrison Coward, an external-affairs senior advisor to Gov. Youngkin.

He reports that the Governor is “hell-bent” on seeing a grocery store built there.

I will offer an idea. Continue reading →

34 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Charity and philanthropy, Children and families, Economic development, Governance, Hunger, Not-for-profits, Poverty & income gap, Social services

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Virginia Community Schools Redefined – Hubs for Government and Not-for-Profit Services in Inner Cities – Part 1 – the Current Framework

Posted on January 24, 2023 by | 5 comments

by James C. Sherlock

I believe a major approach to address both education and health care in Virginia’s inner cities is available if we will define it right and use it right.

Community schools.

One issue. Virginia’s official version of community schools, the Virginia Community School Framework, (the Framework) is fatally flawed.

The approach successful elsewhere brings government professional healthcare and social services and not-for-profit healthcare assets simultaneously to the schools and to the surrounding communities at a location centered around existing schools.

That model is a government and private not-for-profit services hub centered around schools in communities that need a lot of both. Lots of other goals fall into place and efficiencies are realized for both the community and the service providers if that is the approach.

That is not what Virginia has done in its 2019 Framework.

The rest of government and the not-for-profit sector are ignored and Virginia public schools are designed there to be increasingly responsible for things that they are not competent to do.

To see why, we only need to review the lists of persons who made up both the Advisory Committee and the Additional Contributors. Full of Ed.Ds and Ph.D’s in education, there was not a single person on either list with a job or career outside the field of education. Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Charity and philanthropy, Children and families, Civil Rights, Courts and law, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Efficiency in government, Entitlements, General Assembly, Health Care, Infrastructure, Law enforcement, Mental illness and substance abuse, Not-for-profits, Political Influence, Poverty & income gap, practice of, Psychology, Psychology, Public safety & health, Social services, Threat Assessment

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RVA 5×5 – Holiday Briefing

Posted on December 23, 2022 by | 4 comments

by Jon Baliles

It’s Friday! Which means this newsletter would normally be filled with stories and analysis about what is happening in the RVA region (not all of it good), with an honest and insightful take (so far as that is possible). For instance, this week we could have stories about:

A non-profit that presented a homeless shelter plan to the City in June and still hasn’t received the go-ahead or money to open; so they raised $30,000 on their own this week to open a shelter this weekend because the Mayor and City haven’t been able to get their head out of the sand for SIX MONTHS to execute a contract. If a timeline helps your perspective, the City sent the latest contract to the non-profit on November 13th, which returned it to the City within two days. The non-profit did not receive a response until December 20. Temperatures will get down to ten degrees tonight and won’t get above 32 degrees until Monday. The only explanation has been another word-salad buffet from the mayor’s press office. Shameful.

The first concepts are coming into view about VCU’s 42-acre athletic village across from what will become the Diamond District development. This area is exploding!

At least eight to 10 very old and huge trees (some close to 100 years old) in Mosby Court were razed to the ground this week. Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority said that the trees were being cut “as part of a curb appeal improvement request that came from the City of Richmond to RRHA for several of our public housing sites.” The Mayor’s Office replied that “The city requested RRHA to pick up trash and remove brush — not trees.” This has got to be a government operation. More breadsticks, please. Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in Blogs and blog administration, Children and families, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Efficiency in government, Housing, Not-for-profits, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Uncategorized

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Suggestions to Ease Virginia’s Housing Crisis without Additional State Money

Posted on December 3, 2022 by | 33 comments

Courtesy californiahumandevelopment.org

by James C. Sherlock

The Richmond Times-Dispatch, on cue, wrote in an editorial the other day that more state money was needed to fund local housing.

Maybe.

But that is not the first place to look.

The governor wants to condition development aid to local communities on their reforming land-use policies to permit more construction.

I have a few ideas along that line.

Proffers, also known as conditional zoning, are a recognition that real estate developments have impacts on other properties and on services provided by the local jurisdiction. Fair enough.

The money for roads, sewers and schools has to come from somewhere. Proffers make the developers and their customers pay for a share of capital improvements deemed necessary by city/county planners.

Wielded unpredictably, and sometimes unethically, they are also part of the problem. See the excellent article Politics and Proffers by Matt Ahern for the games played with proffers and their cost to the housing economy.

Then there is low-cost housing.

The Commonwealth by law permits but does not require localities to waive fees for low-cost housing. That law, originally and curiously restricted to only non-profit developers, was updated in 2019 to permit the same waivers to for-profit builders.

Send state housing funds only to jurisdictions that do so. Require in law a limit to the costs of proffers for low-cost housing.

Finally, tax Virginia’s astonishingly profitable non-profit hospitals to help them with their mission of caring for the disadvantaged — in this case in low-cost housing. Continue reading →

33 Comments

Posted in Economic development, Efficiency in government, General Assembly, Government Oversight, Housing, Land use & development, Money in politics, Not-for-profits, Political Influence, Politics, Poverty & income gap

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Embarrassing Non-Action

Posted on October 14, 2022 by | 4 comments

Word from the City of Richmond? Crickets

by John Baliles

The EnRichmond saga continues and it’s not a good read. In fact, it’s pretty awful.

To recap, the EnRichmond Foundation was founded in the early 1990s and had grown to support more than 80 small, local, all-volunteer groups that worked to help Richmond in various ways, many of which focused on keeping the City green and clean. EnRichmond allowed the groups to use their insurance coverage and raise tax-free donations, served as a fiduciary for the funds each group raised, and distributed those funds as directed by the groups.

Suddenly in June, they announced a cessation of operations, and left no transition plan. The Board voted to dissolve the Foundation but left no accounting of the funds it had in its accounts, and then within weeks, the lawyer representing the Board stepped away from their role as counsel.

Here are some headlines (and links) to stories that have appeared since this summer. They are in order both chronologically and from bad to worse: Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in Not-for-profits, Scandals

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Budget Earmarks for Nonstate Entities

Posted on September 12, 2022 by | 8 comments

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

For many years, the most interesting and fun portion of the state Appropriation Act was a section near the end entitled, “State Grants to Nonstate Entities-Nonstate Agencies.” The 2000 Appropriation Act, appropriating almost $36 million for these nonstate entities, is a good example. It included funding for historic courthouses, local museums and historical societies, and the houses of Founding Fathers, as well as for larger, statewide museums and organizations.

Most of the amounts provided were small, especially in the context of the overall Appropriation Act. However, they were important to the local recipients and served to add to the political capital of the local legislators who sponsored the appropriations.

In 2011, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli threw what seemed to be a monkey wrench into this process. In an official opinion, he declared that such appropriations, although they may “serve noble purposes,” were in violation of the state constitution. Article IV, Section 16, of the Virginia Constitution plainly prohibits “any appropriation of public funds, personal property, or real estate…to any charitable institution which is not owned or controlled by the Commonwealth.” For years the legislature had operated under the legal fiction that such appropriations were not to “charitable” organizations, but for “historical” or “cultural” ones. Indeed the title of the budget program used for these appropriations is “Financial Assistance for Cultural and Artistic Affairs.” The Attorney General’s opinion ended that charade. Continue reading →

8 Comments

Posted in Budgets, General Assembly, Not-for-profits, Politics, Uncategorized

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How are Virginians Preparing for the Coming Food Price Shocks?

Posted on May 31, 2022 by | 17 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Virginians have only begun to experience price inflation at the grocery store.

Price increases are in the food pipeline that will be a much bigger problem starting this summer.

Farmers and ranchers invest up front. They borrow money to do it. They are incredibly efficient at what they do, but are at the mercy of input prices. They must wait until their crops and animals are sold to recoup their investments.

Everything farmers and ranchers do with their farm machinery requires diesel. So do the trucks that move crops to those who prepare them for our use and then to market. Diesel prices are expected to reach more than $6 per gallon this summer, a 35% increase from current prices. Inventories are low.

Most fertilizer is an oil derivative and has skyrocketed up to 300% since early 2021. On average, fertilizer in March of this year was 35% more expensive than it was in the fall of 2021, with Roundup up nearly 90%. In six months.

Of course, the feed ranchers buy for their animals comes from the produce of America’s farmers.

Producer prices that reflect what they have paid for diesel and fertilizer and the trucking costs of moving those crops are predicted to reach grocery stores in the summer and fall. That hardly suggests that the 9% inflation recently seen in retail food prices is the end of it.

It is important to ask what our governments and our best charities are doing to prepare. Continue reading →

17 Comments

Posted in Agriculture & forestry, Charity and philanthropy, Children and families, Efficiency in government, Energy, Governance, Inflation, Not-for-profits, Planning, Recession

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The Richmond Times Dispatch, “Hate Groups” and Journalism

Posted on March 9, 2022 by | 40 comments

by James C. Sherlock

The Hanover County School Board (HCSB) is seeking legal assistance in reviewing its transgender policy from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative legal organization that provides its services pro bono.

ADF’s key values that it goes to court to defend are religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.  It has  won 80% of its court cases and played a role in 64 victories at the United States Supreme Court.

The HCSB, the target of an ACLU lawsuit, wants to know if their transgender policy is defensible in court.  ADF offered to review the policy and advise on modifications if any and a defensive strategy for free.

Seems reasonable.

But not to the Richmond Times Dispatch (RTD). Continue reading →

40 Comments

Posted in Charity and philanthropy, Civil Rights, Courts and law, Culture wars, LGBQT, Not-for-profits

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The National Association of School Psychologists is Going to Get Its Members Fired

Posted on February 10, 2022 by | 7 comments

George Will

by James C. Sherlock

I had dinner with George Will once years ago aboard ship. He is very smart, uncannily observant, understatedly amusing and a terrific dinner guest.

He published yesterday in The Washington Post a column, “Witness how progressives in government forfeit the public’s trust.”

The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) has proven that Mr. Will’s observation of progressive behavior has escaped the confines of government and infected nonprofits.

As proof of its commitment to progressive dogma, NASP has published a position statement, Promoting Just Special Education Identification and School Discipline Practices. The redefinitions of roles for and recommended assumptions of authority by school psychologists recommended in that paper are absolutely breathtaking. It unintentionally but very effectively challenges the trust of parents, teachers and principals in the very professionals it represents.

NASP wants them to devalue objectivity, the results of tests that only they are qualified to perform, and assume the roles of school sociologists, principals and assistant principals. Roles the NASP defines, of course, with — wait for it — progressive dogma.

Let’s assume they do that. Two related questions:

  • Who in the schools or among the parents will ever again trust school psychologist evaluations? The NASP has now set them up to be sued. Successfully.
  • What school principal will have them?

Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Health Care, Not-for-profits, Parental Rights, Psychology

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Looks Like We’ll Be Hearing a Lot More from the “F— UVA” Lady

Posted on June 26, 2021 by | 15 comments

Hira Azher

by James A. Bacon

I get a lot of unsolicited emails in my inbox from liberal advocacy groups around Virginia. I don’t block them because I think it’s important to know what people have to say, even if I don’t usually agree with them. Imagine my surprise when an email arrived today, introducing the new communications and digital outreach coordinator for Virginia Interfaith Power & Light — Hira Azher.

Bacon’s Rebellion readers may remember Ms. Azher as the resident of the University of Virginia Lawn who made quite the name for herself by posting “F— UVA” in bold letters on her door. For many, that incident exposed for the first time the depth of animosity toward the university, Thomas Jefferson and established institutions generally that exists at UVa. It certainly awakened me to the degree to which UVa in recent years, most notably during the tenure of President Jim Ryan, has become an incubator of grievance, resentment and hate.

In the letter of introduction to subscribers to the Virginia Interfaith Power & Light newsletter, Azher tells all about herself. Thinking this might be of interest to readers who have followed the Lawn controversy at UVa, I am republishing it here. Continue reading →

15 Comments

Posted in Not-for-profits

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Medicaid and Medicaid Rate Increases Boost Virginia Hospital Profitability

Posted on March 20, 2021 by | 15 comments

The Business of Healthcare

by James C. Sherlock

Virginia in 2018 both expanded Medicaid and increased Medicaid reimbursement rates.  

Those changes orchestrated by Virginia hospitals took effect in 2019 and resulted in a major financial windfall to those same hospitals.

I have compared the 2018 and 2019 Hospitals Operating and Total Margins spreadsheets published by the state through its contractor vhi.org. They provide detailed financial performance information for every hospital in Virginia. The 105 hospitals in 2019 included acute care, rural critical access hospitals, children’s, psychiatric, rehabilitation and sub-acute hospitals.

We will see that when the Medicaid changes kicked in in 2019, Virginia’s wealthy urban hospital systems got richer.  

But we will also see that those same changes rescued the rural hospitals from barely breaking even in 2018 and enabled them as a class to book extraordinary profits in 2019.

We will ask at the end of the discussion whether the state-provided outsized profitability of Virginia’s untaxed non-profit hospital systems may warrant a re-examination of their tax exemptions. Continue reading →

15 Comments

Posted in Antitrust, Business and Economy, Consumer protection, General Assembly, Health Care, Money in politics, Not-for-profits, Public safety & health

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Virginia’s Physicians and Nurses Must Take – Yes, Take – More Influence Over Virginia Health Policy

Posted on February 3, 2021 by | 115 comments

Virginia Health Service Areas and Health Districts

by James C. Sherlock

As I have studied and reported upon Virginia’s struggles in COVID response, many things have come into focus that need to be done better in healthcare. I have reported on a lot of them here and called for changes.

One major, overarching flaw needs attention.  

Virginia’s physicians and nurses do not have sufficient influence over health laws, policy, regulations, Department of Health oversight or health programs.  Physicians and nurses as organized groups largely were neither consulted or listened to in COVID response policy. If you doubt it, ask them. They are beyond frustrated.  

When you needed a COVID vaccination, were you able to get one from your doctor or nurse practitioner? Didn’t think so.

I will recommend here a way to change the balance of influence. It is important to all Virginians that it indeed be altered. Continue reading →

115 Comments

Posted in General Assembly, Governance, Health Care, Money in politics, Not-for-profits, Political Influence

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Probably a Coincidence – COPN, the Monopolization of Health Care and the Marginalization of the Poor

Posted on February 1, 2021 by | 14 comments

by James C. Sherlock

The Business of Healthcare in Virginia

I have been asked many times about how freer markets in healthcare can coexist with our need to treat the poor. I will try to briefly cover some of the complexities of the answer to that question.

And I will show that of all of the government healthcare control systems, COPN is the only one that has proven to disproportionally hurt poor and minority populations by its decisions and their effects.  

And it does so by design. Continue reading →

14 Comments

Posted in Antitrust, Business and Economy, Charity and philanthropy, General Assembly, Governance, Government Oversight, Health Care, Money in politics, Not-for-profits, Uncategorized

Bacon’s Rebellion Challenge: Donate Your COVID Recovery Check to Charity

Posted on May 14, 2020 by | 10 comments

Michael Sparks, creator of the UGK+ Soup: Community First Project, delivers a soup meal to Pearl and Gil Wick. Photo credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch

by James A. Bacon

So, I got my government COVID-19 check in the mail. I like getting money from the federal government, especially when it’s a tax refund. But I did nothing to deserve this particular sum. I have not been an economic victim of the epidemic (not yet, anyway) and I feel totally undeserving, especially when so many other people are suffering. Accordingly, I have decided to donate the sum to a local philanthropy to help Virginians in need. And I urge other Bacon’s Rebellion readers to do the same.

The philanthropy I have selected is Underground Kitchen’s Community First program. There are good reasons to support Underground Kitchen, but many other charities are doing wonderful work as well. I hope readers will take the time to share stories of their favorite nonprofit and explain why they make worthy recipients of readers’ federal-helicopter checks.

Underground Kitchen started as a Richmond-based enterprise providing high-end corporate events centered on good food and good wine, often in off-beat locations such as pastures or alleyways. After hitting it off in the Richmond and Northern Virginia markets, the business went national and was preparing to go international when the COVID-19 epidemic hit and effectively shut it down. Founders Michael Sparks and Kate Houck did a fast pivot. Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in Not-for-profits

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