Hurricane Dorian is making its way out to sea and a pleasant weekend awaits here in Arlington.
It will be a weekend of some major events in Arlington, including the annual Arlington Police, Fire & Sheriff Memorial 9/11 5K and the Rosslyn Jazz Festival.
The Labor Day holiday weekend is here and Arlington residents are looking forward to vacations and the extra day off — as well as the start of September on Sunday.
In a poll this week, ARLnow readers said the top three things they were most looking forward to in the month of September were more pleasant weather, the start of football season and pumpkin spice food and drink. This weekend in Arlington you should be able to enjoy all three.
Earlier this month, ARLnow.com posted a story highlighting a spate of restaurant closures on the west side of Glebe Road:“Restaurateurs along the west side of Glebe Road almost unanimously agreed that the biggest challenges for local businesses all stem from traffic issues. …[I]t can be difficult for visitors to find the right places to park.”
But some sources held out hope for west side restaurants:
Thumbs up to Arlington for finally opening its online permitting process. Phase one of moving the permitting process online launches on September 9th with phase two scheduled to follow on in 2020. Another good change coming as part of the process is all in-person filing will be done in one consolidated office location.
Thumbs down to this important line from the homepage: “Estimated review processing times are not changing.” Having recently been through the permitting process in Arlington, I was really hoping the move would help speed up the review process. As it stands the changes might save you a day or two on the front end, but it will have little impact on getting construction projects moving faster. Time is money in the construction businesses, so delays only add to the costs of the housing our county needs.
September will arrive this weekend, heralding the unofficial start of fall.
Yes, the actual season starts on September 23, but with pools closing after Labor Day, football being played, Oktoberfest beer being poured and Pumpkin Spice Lattes being brewed — well, it’s basically fall.
By Claire Noakes
Vacationing families expect a line at the funnel cake stand on the boardwalk, but they shouldn’t be surprised if there’s also a line at the monkey bars back at the schoolyard for the foreseeable future.
It’s a wet and downright cool start to what should otherwise be a very comfortable weekend, weather-wise.
The past week was another that started slow, but ended up being more eventful that one might have expected for the end of August.
On May 31, a gunman killed 12 people and injured 6 more in a Virginia Beach municipal building. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam subsequently called the Virginia legislature back for a July 9 special session to act on a series of gun safety bills. Most of the bills had been under consideration for years.
The Republicans who control our legislature–on a party line vote–successfully passed a motion to adjourn that special session without voting on a single bill:
Yesterday, the Progressive Voice’s Krysta Jones wrote about what has happened in Virginia after the jarring revelations about Governor Northam and Attorney General Herring earlier this year. She tries to answer whether it has been an opportunity for “racial healing and atonement?” It is an important question.
Ms. Jones goes on to discuss things that have been done and things that can be done. Before making a suggested addition to her list, let’s first look at the current state of our politics.
For parents with black children in Arlington Public Schools, hope and wariness accompanies the experience. Like other families, we have hopeful expectations about our community’s excellent schools. We read the headlines. APS Named Top School System in Virginia for the second year in a row. Four of our high schools are ranked in the top 2% of schools nationwide. We hope our children will also be beneficiaries of that excellence. Yet, the data tells a different story. It tells a tale of (at least) two school systems in one County. One which offers countless advantages to white children, the other which offers far less to black children.
The tale unfolds in APS’s own published data recently compiled by Black Parents of Arlington. In one story, a white child enters APS, and from the first years in school, that child has a one in four chance of being identified as gifted. By middle school that child has a 46% chance of being of being labeled gifted. 46%! That “gifted” child will be, at times, clustered with other “gifted” students, and will ultimately end up in higher-level classes which are disproportionately white. Just as the white child’s high intelligence will be presumed, that child’s innocence will also be presumed, with a far lower likelihood of being suspended than their black and Latinx counterparts.
By Krysta Jones
It’s been about seven months since Virginia and the nation were stunned by the revelations that Gov. Ralph Northam “may have” posed in blackface or Ku Klux Klan uniform. In the subsequent days, Attorney General Mark Herring also admitted to posing in blackface.
Astronaut John Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth. He was also an Arlington resident for about 5 years.
The group Preservation Arlington points out that Glenn’s former home, a mid-century rambler near Williamsburg Middle School, is now for sale with the listing hinting — “the value is in the land,” it says — that it will likely be a tear-down. The property is listed for $1,050,000.
