Zombies, mummies and superheroes attended the annual Halloween celebration on S. Lee Street in Old Town.
Thousands of costumed kids and adults walked up and down the closed-off street starting at 5 p.m., furthering a tradition that goes back decades. Residents of Lee Street spend thousands on decorations and candy for the throngs of costumed guests.
NBC4 Washington even declared Old Town as one of the best places to be on Halloween.
🎃🍫 One of the best places to be on Halloween is Old Town Alexandria.
News4's @TommyMcFLY joined the trick-or-treaters, including Sen. Mark "Mad Chef" Warner. pic.twitter.com/M7zOYGRIu3
— NBC4 Washington (@nbcwashington) October 31, 2023
Nearly 1,200 signatures have been collected in a new Change.org petition asking for a holiday for Alexandria City Public Schools students the day after Halloween, on Nov. 1.
According to the petition:
For students of ACPS, along with people amongst the world, the day after Halloween is tough. Feeling ill and exhausted after a long night of walking and eating is not what students want to come to school the next day with. Students will be tired, sick, and overwhelmed, since the educational quarter just ended. Students will be unable to focus and put their best effort if they have a raging migraine, or bad exhaustion. Cancel school the day after halloween!
The petition launched on Oct. 30. In 2019, a similar petition raised more than 4,000 signatures.
There is no change listed in the ACPS calendar, and school is scheduled normally.
Thousands turned out in costumes for the 27th annual Del Ray Halloween Parade on Sunday.
This year, the parade was named one of the top 10 Halloween Parades in the country by USA Today.
The Del Ray Business Association parade started at Mount Vernon Avenue and E. Bellefonte Avenue and ended with live music and prizes at the Mount Vernon Recreation Center athletic fields.
“We couldn’t have made such a successful event without more than 100 volunteers,” said parade organizer Gayle Reuter. “We start planning for this months in advance, and it takes so many neighbors and friends to make it a success.”
Del Ray’s next big event is the 48th annual Alexandria Turkey Trot on Nov. 23.
The @AlexCityTitans Zombie Band was out in force for the best Halloween Parade on the planet in Del Ray!
Amazing and creative costumes!
Thanks to @visitdelrayVA for making it happen. pic.twitter.com/4KtyPp3FR2
— Justin Wilson (@justindotnet) October 29, 2023
Another great Del Ray Halloween Parade is in the books! pic.twitter.com/yjlrAkjElq
— Canek Aguirre (@CanekForCouncil) October 29, 2023
Another amazing Del Ray Halloween Parade this afternoon! pic.twitter.com/DIGmAUrnXk
— Alexandria Sheriff (@AlexVASheriff) October 29, 2023
One of #AlexandriaVA favorite traditions, the Annual Del Ray Halloween Parade! I had such a fun time judging the Pet Costume Contest! Over 50 pets entered the contest this year! @visitdelray pic.twitter.com/I7KVGtsH2b
— Alyia Gaskins (@Alyia4ALX) October 29, 2023
The Alexandria School Board’s preferred options to restructure itself are “dead” as-is, mostly due to a lack of engagement with the Alexandria City Council, City Council Member John Taylor Chapman told members of the School Board on Monday night.
“I think you’re losing Council by not really engaging with them right now,” Chapman told the City Council/School Board Subcommittee meeting Monday night. “Given the response I’ve seen from my colleagues, I think you have even more of an uphill battle than you had before, and that’s not a good thing if this is supposed to be a process that’s collaborative.”
Earlier this month, the Board started evaluating restructuring options, including increasing term lengths from three to four years, reducing the number of School Board members — there are nine covering three districts — and whether there should be at-large seats.
The Board, in a work session, whittled down their preferred restructuring alternatives to three options, all of which increase terms to four years, maintain the nine-member structure and stagger their elections starting in 2027.
In order to enact these changes, the School Board must approve a resolution, followed by a City Council public hearing to revise the city charter. If the charter change is approved, the Virginia General Assembly will then vote on making the change official in the Virginia Charter.
Mayor Justin Wilson said Chapman summed up the Council’s feelings on the matter.
“I think Councilman Chapman read the tea leaves correctly about where we’re at right now,” Wilson said.
Chapman said that Board Members need to work one-on-one with their City Council counterparts to gain consensus before a plan is officially offered.
“I think that there are some overarching impacts to voters in our city,” he said. “And I think Council is keenly aware of that and we need to make sure that School Board is keenly aware of that as well. Unless those conversations happen one-on-one, I’m not sure everyone will feel comfortable that that is fully understood.”
School Board Chair Michelle Rief said that Chapman’s suggestion is “wonderful.”
“(The process) has been a little muddled, but here we are,” Rief said. “I think we do want to engage with you.”
The nine-member School Board has been elected in concurrent three-year cycles coinciding with City Council elections since 2012. The Board’s high turnover after the Nov. 2021 election saw six new members joining three incumbents, and members say school leadership suffers when more than half of the body spends upward of a year getting accustomed to their offices.
City Council Member Canek Aguirre didn’t mince words at a town hall meeting when he said that the School Board has too many members for a district with about 15,000 students.
“I’ve been very clear with my School Board colleagues that I am not supportive of changes unless they’re willing to reduce the number of members on their board,” Aguirre said.
Aguirre said other jurisdictions have either small boards with similar student populations or larger boards with larger numbers of students.
“Arlington County, which has about twice the size of our student population, has five members,” Aguirre said. “Loudoun County, which I believe has around nine members, has like three or four times the number of students that we have. To me, it’s absolutely ridiculous that we have nine people on there and this is part of what leads to so much discontinuity.”
The School Board members and their City Council liaisons are below.
District A
- Board Chair Michelle Rief — Mayor Justin Wilson
- Board Member Jacinta Greene — Council Member Canek Aguirre
- Board Member Willie Bailey — Council Member Canek Aguirre
District B
- Vice Chair Kelly Carmichael Booz — Vice Mayor Amy Jackson
- Board Member Tammy Ignacio — Council Member John Taylor Chapman
- Board Member Ashley Simpson Baird — Council Member Sarah Bagley
District C
- Board Member Meagan Alderton — Council Member Sarah Bagley
- Board Member Christopher Harris — Council Member Alyia Gaskins
- Board Member Abdel-Rahman Elnoubi — Council Member Kirk McPike
Alexandria parents are up in arms over a staffing crisis within Alexandria City Public Schools.
Kelly Organek says that her ninth-grade son at Alexandria City High School’s Minnie Howard campus hasn’t had a geometry teacher since school started in August and that he only recently got a new biology teacher.
“We are in a staffing crisis that is not okay for our children,” Organek testified to the School Board last Thursday night (Oct 5). “Since August 21, my son has had to teach himself biology and geometry. We have no way to know if he’s learning the material.”
ACPS staff also provided an update on staffing woes. The school system currently has 55 central office vacancies, as well as more than 100 licensed and non-licensed school-based positions. Just how many teachers are needed is not clear, and ALXnow is awaiting a more comprehensive breakdown of ACPS staffing needs.
“We’re at a point now where people are just looking for bodies to put in classrooms and that makes me so sad,” said Board Member Meagan Alderton. “I think the people on the ground, the HR (human resources) folks, have got to do the work.”
The ACPS employment page lists dozens of vacant positions, including high school science, math and history teacher jobs.
“We do know that the last couple of years have been very challenging for all of our staff,” Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt said.
Margaret Browne, the ACPS director of recruitment and retention, said she is working on streamlining the onboarding process so that applicants can start work faster. She also said that ACPS advertised positions on radio stations, television, newspapers and online media, and that she and her staff conducted 13 job fairs in-house and traveled to 40 career fairs around the country last school year, including to Puerto Rico.
“I anticipated that we were going to do a large number of events last year and I’m ready to set a new record (for job fairs),” Browne said. “We’ll go down the Eastern Seaboard. This time we are going west and we’ll also do Puerto Rico again.”
The school system is also short 15 bus drivers and is offering an additional 5% raise for drivers over the course of the next three years.
Browne said that ACPS will also focus on marketing to people switching careers within associations and military organizations.
David Paladin Fernandez has been an ACPS 6th and 8th grade general education teacher for eight years. He said that his salary has been frozen half that time, and that due to an impasse over collective bargaining that the school system is running short on special education teachers, bus drivers, paraprofessionals, guidance counselors, therapists, audiologists and more positions.
He also brought a red velvet cake to the School Board meeting.
“Our district is facing a staffing crisis like we’ve never seen, and our management would rather spin stories than face the reality that their recruiting and retention efforts are simply not enough,” Fernandez said. “School Board members, tonight you have heard and will hear from a number of Alexandria citizens who have been personally impacted by the decisions ACPS management has made under your watch. These citizens come to you asking, nay demanding that you start holding management accountable because the things that they are saying to the public do not match the actions we see. It’s as ridiculous as offering cake at a School Board meeting.”
Rene Pascal, the acting head of human resources for ACPS, said that teachers should feel incentivized to work for ACPS by paying smaller premiums on their health plans (see graph in above gallery).
Alexandria City High School parent Sarah Schultz said that ACPS is not being transparent on staffing woes.
“We’re asking our children to receive instruction without teachers,” ACPS parent Sarah Schultz told the Board. “We feel strongly that ACPS should not take the stance that online classes are a reasonable substitute for in-person instruction, especially for required courses and question the equity of moving groups of students to online while the rest of the students receive in-person instruction.”
Two ACPS recruitment videos made earlier this year are below.
(Updated 8/24) A group of adventurers slowly entered a dimly lit tavern with a locked cage at the center of the room. The commoners of the town, including the party cleric’s brother, were locked in that cage.
As the group filed in, suddenly from out of the shadows, things began to crawl forward. As the group of children at the Alexandria Library listened eagerly to Dungeon Master Aly Ahn describe what was lurking in the shadows, one of them hopefully suggested “Kittens?”
The table erupted in laughter and Ahn said it was one of her favorite moments in an ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign occurring monthly at the Alexandria Library.
For those out of the loop, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is a popular tabletop roleplaying game where a dungeon master weaves a narrative and a group of players embodies various fantasy archetypes on a quest.
Ahn, who is used to working with children in after-school programs, set up the Alexandria Library’s D&D campaigns. The program’s turned into such a success that Ahn said more volunteer dungeon masters are needed to keep up with the demand from local kids.
The campaigns have their roots in Ahn’s work in an after-school program during Covid.
“When students went back to school and it was still virtual, my program was able to accommodate children whose parents could have them at home for virtual schooling,” Ahn said. “When 2:30 comes around, the kids needed something to do. We were trying to be mindful of close contact and I thought: oh, I can teach them how to play Dungeons and Dragons.”
Ahn said her older brother tried to teach her the game when she was a child, but she really fell in love with the game when she started playing with friends in 2019. In early 2022, some of the quarantine campaigns fizzled out, and Ahn said she felt the itch to play again. She reached out to the library and started a campaign for local kids in June 2022.
The campaign was originally aimed at pre-teen players, but ended up mostly with players between eight and ten years old.
Ahn said running a D&D campaign for children is different than running a campaign for adults. She started off with modules written specifically for younger players and avoids saying things like a character or creature dies.
The campaign has been popular enough that Ahn’s enlisted the help of other volunteers to help run other campaigns to keep the group sizes more manageable. Fewer players per campaign means each player gets more time to shine.
“It’s difficult to keep them invested and [keep their attention],” Ahn said. “That’s why we’re constantly looking for new volunteers. This past weekend, we had 12 kids, which is a lot. There was only one time when I, by myself, had to run a 12-person table. Now with three [dungeon masters] we have four or five kids per table.”
Most of the adventures have been episodic “one-shots” but now that the players have a more firm grasp on the game, Ahn is starting to work in the backstories of the characters to build an overarching campaign to help the children practice roleplaying.
Ahn said one of the crowning moments of her work with the Alexandria Library Dungeons and Dragons campaign was when one of the players started to run their own game with their parents and some of the others in the group.
In general, Ahn said the game has been great for teaching children teamwork, outside-the-box problem-solving, and letting them take chances in a safe environment:
Liam O’Brien from Critical Role once said there was a moment in the [campaign] where it struck him that the [dungeon master] wasn’t there to be their enemy, he was there to turn them into heroes. That’s something that stuck with me. That’s something I can do with the kids as well. I want them to practice looking out for each other, working together as a team, and learning how they can contribute and how they can help others around them.
Ahn said Dungeons and Dragons, the current 5th edition in particular, is built so that no one player can do everything.
“Wizards can literally reshape history and can mold things the way they want things to be, but they can’t cast cure wounds — you’ll need a ranger or cleric or alchemist for that,” Ahn said. “It’s designed for teamwork. Kids will say ‘I’m a wizard, why can’t I do this?’ and it’s because one person can’t do everything.”
The next session is Saturday, Sept. 16, from 1-4 p.m. at the Kate Waller Barrett Branch Library (717 Queen Street). Ahn said the campaign can use all the dungeon masters it can get and the best way for people to get involved is to reach out to their library’s volunteer coordinator.
Photo via Alexandria Library/Facebook
School is back in session, and this year Alexandria City Public Schools wants to make sure kids go to class.
That was the message from outside George Mason Elementary School (2601 Cameron Mills Road) this morning, where Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt and School Board Chair Michelle Rief joined teachers and staff in welcoming back students. Kay-Wyatt said her priorities this year are on improving the welcoming culture within ACPS, academic achievement and absenteeism.
Kay-Wyatt said she didn’t get much sleep the night before school started.
“We really want to focus on making sure that all of our family and our students are welcome into our schools,” Kay-Wyatt said. “We’re also going to be focused on instructional practices and academic achievement. And then my third priority for the year is around absenteeism, and really focusing to get strategies and initiatives in place to make sure that our students are in school within school on time, so they can engage in all that we have to offer them.”
More than 15,000 ACPS students got up early for school today. In the wake of the pandemic, chronic absenteeism increased exponentially over the last several years within the school system.
It’s also the first school day for new George Mason Principal Christopher Finan.
“Our staff has been working very, very hard to get ready for this day,” Finan said. “Our teachers, our instructional assistants, our custodians, our cafeteria staff, our front office staff, everybody has been working very hard. I’m happy to say we are ready to go and excited to have students and staff back inside of our building. This year at George Mason we are focusing on our teams, leveraging all of the passionate, dedicated and skilled individuals, our staff, our families, our community members to ensure that we support student success across the board.”
Rief asked that parents reach out to the School Board as it embarks on next year’s budget.
“We welcome your input as your School Board,” Rief said. “We have a very full agenda this year and we want to hear from our parents.”
Salma Faqirzaava wants to be an attorney, but that future was impossible in Afghanistan. Now she’s back in school and learning English in Alexandria.
Eight months ago, Salma and her parents moved to Alexandria, where she enrolled in Alexandria City High School, finding herself navigating the busy hallways of the second largest high school in Virginia.
“I knew zero English when I arrived,” Salma said through an interpreter. “When I first came I didn’t know the alphabet. Now I think I’ve learned 60% of how to read and write, but I still have a problem speaking it.”
The 16-year-old hadn’t been to school in two years. The Taliban shut down girls schools following the 2021 U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, and Alexandria received hundreds of families as refugees.
On Saturday, Salma and nearly 70 Afghan children were recognized for participating in a summer reading program. Three times a week throughout the summer, the kids attend reading classes at William Ramsay Recreation Center (5650 Sanger Avenue).
The program is led by Northern Virginia Resettling Afghan Families Together (NOVA RAFT), a nonprofit that supports the refugees with furniture, groceries and other basic needs.
“A substantial group of Afghan students at the high school are years behind,” said NOVA RAFT co-founder Dan Altman. “Initially they were incapable of comprehending what was going on around them, basically. Some of the teenage girls here were pulled out of school when they were in fifth grade in Afghanistan.”
Altman said that most of the 70 kids in the program had a second grade reading level or lower, and that their growth has been quick. The reading class was part of an ongoing educational, cultural, and psychosocial program that started eight months ago.
Altman said he needs volunteer tutors.
“We need more volunteers who will work directly with the kids,” Altman said. “We provide all the training and everything else. That would be huge to be able to get some more volunteers.”
The recognition ceremony at the recreation center was attended by a roomful of Afghan refugees, as well as Alexandria City Council Member Alyia Gaskins, Council Member Canek Aguirre and School Board Member Abdel Elnoubi.
“Of course, keep learning English, but don’t forget about your language, culture and history,” Aguirre told the families. “They are not only important to you, but also to this country. Your perspectives that you bring is what is so beautiful about the diversity of the United States. And to all the young kids, most of the jobs that I got were because I could speak another language.”
Salma says she wants to be an attorney to help families with legal issues like hers. She said she misses her siblings still in Afghanistan, and that even though she can cook the same food here it tastes different.
“I want to study the law,” she said. “I like that the schools are open here and everyone can study whatever they want.”
(Updated 8/11) After years in development, City and Alexandria City Public Schools leaders will cut the ribbon of the refurbished Douglas MacArthur Elementary School next Friday (August 18).
The project took three years of planning and two years of construction, and the 154,000-square-foot school at 1101 Janneys Lane will open for the first day of classes on August 21.
During the last two years, MacArthur students used the old Patrick Henry Elementary School as swing space. The new school has an 840-student capacity and ACPS projects the student population to stay at around 775 students over the course of the next decade.
MacArthur’s three-level “Forest” plan sets the school back from Janneys Lane, putting classrooms at the rear of the building and providing a view of nearby Forest Park. The $75 million project was initially planned to wrap in January, and construction delays elicited criticism from Vice Mayor Amy Jackson.
Jackson has one child who graduated from MacArthur in the swing space and another who will attend the refurbished school.
“I was concerned that construction wasn’t getting off the ground fast enough,” Jackson told ALXnow. “My children wanted to see the school one more time before they started, but I realized that we could still get on the property. So I took a video, as much as it caused angst with the community and school board, but when I’m asking staff several times and can’t get an answer, I took it to the public and sure enough the ball then got rolling the fencing was put up on the perimeter and they got the ball rolling.”
The event includes a brief tour and will be held from 9:30 to 10:15 am. Remarks will be made by Mayor Justin Wilson, School Board Chair Michelle Rief, ACPS Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt, ACPS Chief Operating Officer Alicia Hart and MacArthur Principal Penny Hairston.
ACPS will share the event on Facebook Live.
More than 700 new backpacks will be handed out on Saturday afternoon at John Adams Elementary School (5651 Rayburn Avenue).
Alexandria law firm Blaszkow Legal, PLLC, is sponsoring the giveaway, which includes other school items and will be held from noon to 2 p.m.
“The driving force behind this project was a desire to help the local community at a time when many may truly need it,” said Blaszkow Legal CEO Joseph Blaszkow. “Many families are still recovering from the pandemic. We are striving to help take the edge off, so they can get the new school year off to a great start.”
Earlier this year, Blaszkow Legal was presented with Volunteer Alexandria’s Business of the Year award.
There were a number of backpack and supplies giveaways last month, and Shiloh Baptist Church’s upcoming back-to-school giveaway on Saturday has reached capacity. That event includes free boys haircuts, food and school supplies.
The first day of school for Alexandria City Public Schools is August 21.
