Arlington Public Schools is pausing for one year the rollout of changes to its Spanish immersion programs at Claremont and Escuela Key elementary schools.
The pause and how it was communicated have upset parents of students most affected by the shift: rising second-graders. In speeches to the School Board, an online petition and interviews, this group of parents is calling on the Arlington School Board and school administrators to reverse course.
An Arlington summer camp teaching teenagers firefighting skills could go up in smoke this year.
Camp Heat, which annually enrolls around 25 teens, is on the chopping block in the county’s budget draft. Cutting the free five-day camp to save $47,000 is part of a plan to maintain the Arlington County Fire Dept.’s current $76 million budget in Fiscal Year 2025.
(Updated at 11:05 a.m.) Arlington Public Schools Superintendent Francisco Durán has proposed a 2024-2025 budget that he says avoids new expenses in a lean fiscal year compounded by state funding uncertainty.
He presented an $824.7 million budget — which increases the current budget by $12.2 million, or 1.5% — to the Arlington School Board last week.
Unionized trade workers have tentatively negotiated with Arlington County for wage increases and safety protections for the next four years.
Predicting a budget gap in the 2025 budget, however, the county says it will have to raise taxes or make budget cuts to pay for these provisions, according to a fiscal analysis the Arlington County Board is set to hear about during its Saturday meeting.
(Updated at 8 p.m.) Despite protest from some students, faculty and alumni, Marymount University will be removing some majors, mostly in the humanities, from its catalogues.
On Friday, the Board of Trustees voted 20-0 to move forward with the plan, university spokesman Nick Munson said. He asserted that the change was faculty-led and administration-supported and the eliminated majors were “no longer serving Marymount students.”
(Updated at 4:10 p.m.) Marymount University is cutting several degrees to save money, but in the process has angered some in the school’s community.
In a bid to cut fruitless vine branches, the school is eliminating 10 degrees and programs — mostly in the humanities, including theology and English.
Arlington’s fire and police unions are poised to lose a battle to change the pay scale the county uses — one that union representatives say contributes to ongoing staffing shortages.
This year, the Arlington County Police Department has hired 29 officers and lost 52 officers, Arlington Coalition of Police (ACOP) President Randall Mason told the Arlington County Board in a meeting earlier this month. It will lose five more by February 2023.
The Arlington firefighters union says the county’s proposed 2022-23 budget underfunds the fire department and puts residents in unnecessary danger, but county officials dispute the characterization.
The union wants the budget to support having someone with Advanced Life Support training on each fire department vehicle, something that county officials say is not necessary. ALS providers are certified to treat critically ill patients with life-saving drugs or intravenous medicines, among other training that goes beyond basic emergency medical care, also called Basic Life Support.
Months after parents and students wondered if rising freshmen in Arlington could attend Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the results are in.
The Class of 2025 will include Arlington kids, although the exact number is not known.
About 2,000 students who left Arlington Public Schools after buildings shuttered in March 2020 have indicated they will not be returning this fall, according to APS staff.
This enrollment information — which could alter the budget for the 2021-2022 school year — landed in the laps of the Arlington School Board and school administrators during a budget work session Tuesday evening.
Pandemic Doesn’t Change Amazon’s Plans — “Schoettler, who oversees Amazon’s global portfolio of office space, said the past year hasn’t changed the way the company thinks about its office strategy… Amazon still views the office as the best place for work because of the ability for employees to collaborate, and it still envisions its footprint centered around large corporate campuses like its Seattle headquarters and its HQ2 development in Northern Virginia. ” [Bisnow, Twitter]
Sheriff’s Deputy Charged with Fraud — “India Middleton, a deputy sheriff with the Arlington County Sheriff’s Office, was indicted in Georgia by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service on conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Middleton was one of 10 defendants indicted in a multi-state scheme to submit fraudulent loan applications for non-[existent] businesses as part of the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), according to a U.S. Department of Justice release.” [Patch, Arlington County]
