It’s been a scorching week in Alexandria, punctuated by two major crime events.
Someone was shot multiple times in an alley several blocks east of the Braddock Metro station last Saturday, followed on Monday afternoon by the city’s fifth homicide this year — the fatal shooting of a 29-year-old man on W. Glebe Road in Arlandria.
Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) has a new School Board chair and vice chair.
In a unanimous vote, with no other candidates nominated, Michelle Rief was chosen as the new school board chair, succeeding Meagan Alderton in the role. The term of leadership is one year.
(Updated 7/18) School Board Chair Meagan Alderton was reelected back on Jan. 5, but seven months into a one-year term, the Chair and Vice-Chair positions are up for election again.
Earlier this year, the School Board voted to change the timetable for Board elections to July rather than at the first meeting of the year in January. The new election is scheduled for Thursday, July 20, at 6:30 p.m. at the Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) central office (1340 Braddock Place).
Alexandria School Board members spoke with leaders from nearby school districts on staggered terms and board sizes and the takeaway was: Alexandria’s School Board is too bloated and too prone to rapid turnover.
Last night, Alexandria’s School Board hosted a panel to discuss potentially staggering Alexandria’s election cycle and adjusting the size of the board. On the panel:
One of the biggest changes being considered is a proposal to potentially stagger the election cycle for Alexandria’s School Board.
Currently, the Board’s nine members serve three-year terms representing three different districts and their elections are concurrent with the City Council elections.
A longtime Alexandria City Public Schools educator and an assistant principal from Fairfax County Public Schools are the finalists for the principal position at Mount Vernon Community School (MVCS) in Del Ray.
Jen Hamilton, the ACPS dual language coordinator, and Eneida Thomas, the assistant principal at Braddock Elementary School, answered questions Monday night in a Zoom meet-and-greet moderated by former Alexandria City High School principal John Porter.
(Updated 4:20 p.m.) Alexandria’s School Board is meeting tomorrow for a seemingly innocuous budget revision, but city leaders say the truth is the School Board is walking back a potentially illegal decision made without communicating with the City Council.
Like previous work sessions, a joint City Council/School Board meeting became tense as the discussion turned to funding. The fiscal year 2024 combined funds budget for Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) details the revenues and expenditures.
Longtime Alexandria City Public Schools administrator Alexander Duncan III was formally announced last night as the new executive principal of Alexandria City High School.
Duncan, the ACHS Minnie Howard Campus administrator, will replace ACHS Executive Principal Beter Balas, who announced his departure last month.
A longtime ACPS educator and a principal from Chesterfield County Public Schools are the finalists for the executive principal position at Alexandria City High School.
Alexander Duncan III, the Minnie Howard Campus administrator, and Marcia Rice, principal at Meadowbrook High School, answered a variety of questions Monday night in a Zoom meet-and-greet moderated by former ACHS principal John Porter.
It’s a day of happiness in Alexandria, as more than 900 Alexandria City High School seniors graduated this morning at George Mason University’s EagleBank Arena.
Perhaps student speaker Lenhle Vilakati put it best when she said: “Today we finally break apart and become our own people. Today we finally have to go off into bigger things and be amazing.”
(Updated 6/5) Parents and teachers at a School Board meeting last night said the rollout of a new plan to split specialist teachers across schools has been an unmitigated disaster.
The change affects Alexandria City Public Schools’ (ACPS) encore teachers: teachers who run classes like music, art and physical education. A new change announced in an email earlier this week, without public discussion or meetings, would split these teachers across multiple schools throughout the district.
