Tag: James Sherlock
-
The JLARC Report and Virginia’s Unexecutable School Discipline System
by James C. Sherlock The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) report Pandemic Impact on Public K–12 Education 2022 collected and made available a lot of valuable information. One issue escaped their analysis and recommendations — school discipline. The authors reported student conduct as the number one concern of school teachers, and then failed to address it…
-
What Do We Do When Teachers Quit En Masse?
by James C. Sherlock What makes teachers want to teach? The satisfaction that comes from helping children and adolescents learn and grow into productive, mature adults. It is amazingly powerful. What is required for them to choose to teach? Enough money to live comfortably and a safe, supportive working environment. So that is three: teaching…
-
Housing Cost Burdens in Virginia – A Survey
by James C. Sherlock With all of the public policy discussion of housing in Virginia, it is useful to examine how burdened Virginians are by the costs of their housing. Based on brand new data from the Bureau of the Census, the average Virginia homeowner is in pretty good shape compared to others in America.…
-
Why Not Virtual Instruction for Routinely Disruptive or Potentially Dangerous Students?
by James C. Sherlock So, let’s examine a theoretical. A kid gets thrown out of a high school for a suspected rape. The (ex-) superintendent places him in another high school awaiting trial. He rapes again. What’s wrong with this picture? OK, lots of things. But let’s examine just one solution that can have wider…
-
Handling Threats in Schools is Hampered by Progressive Cultures and Lack of Individual Initiative
by James C. Sherlock Virginia’s school threat assessment and mitigation processes are broken, putting entire school communities in danger. The University of Virginia shootings and the rapes at two Loudoun County high schools were each preventable had the focus been on intervention by authorities responsible to do so. It was clearly not. School cultures are…
-
Grand Jury Report on Loudoun Schools Raises Threat Assessment Issue – Again
by James C. Sherlock Update Dec. 7 at 7:33: LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired yesterday by the school board. That does not begin to resolve the issue of threat assessment. The University of Virginia Threat Assessment Team (TAT), with knowledge of a threat, failed to intervene before tragedy in the case of the student…
-
Great Investigative Reporting of a Heartbreaking Story
by James C. Sherlock For a story that will simultaneously make you angry and break your heart, read “Fathering While Black,” by Asra Nomani and Debra Tisler. It is the story of a guardian ad litem (GAL), Karen Keys-Gamarra, who is reported here to have systematically abused her position to pursue a Black father and…
-
Student Mental Health Crisis Explained – By The Washington Post
by James C. Sherlock The Washington Post, in a lengthy article, “The crisis of student mental health is much vaster than we realize,” wrote about the mental health crisis facing our school children, especially adolescents. Nationally, adolescent depression and anxiety — already at crisis levels before the pandemic — have surged amid the isolation, disruption…
-
Is there a Better Way to Manage Virginia’s State Colleges and Universities?
by James C. Sherlock My wife and I had the pleasure of dining recently with a woman pursuing a career in the financial services industry. I asked her about the leadership of her company. What was the climate in her workplace? She answered that the first thing she learned was to “color inside the lines.”…
-
Suggestions to Ease Virginia’s Housing Crisis without Additional State Money
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.…
-
Are Virginians Putting the State’s Economy on Their Credit Cards?
by James C. Sherlock I wrote the other day about efforts to increase housing in Virginia. That story is very complicated at the levels of the federal, state and local governments. But at the end of that pipeline is the economy. We have read in many places that consumers are spending the savings they built…
-
Profoundly Unethical: UVa Children’s Hospital Hides Child Gender Transition Information from Public Scrutiny
by James C. Sherlock I published a series of articles earlier this year that criticized the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital on its approach to gender transition in minors as young as 11. As a result, the hospital made at least some movement towards change by announcing it was assigning pediatric clinical psychologists to join…
-
Housing in Virginia – Context for Debates
by James C. Sherlock Dick Hall-Sizemore did a nice job earlier today describing the phenomenon in which people are specifically against in a particular iteration public policies that they support in the abstract. The subject was middle income housing in Arlington County. The problem with short articles by anyone (including me) about housing issues is…
-
The Progressive Left Has Only One Story. It is on Endless Loop in the Press
by James C. Sherlock It is called defining the terms of the debate. Sort of like naming a climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act.” The war to define the ground in a headline debate in Virginia is between supporters of either: Virginia DOE’s draft “2022 Model Policies on the Privacy, Dignity and Respect for All Students and…
-
Virginia Mental Health Services in Deep Trouble – A Survey
by James C. Sherlock Nov. 29 updates in blue. Supply cannot begin to keep up with demand. In this case, the consequences involve personal welfare and public safety. And they can be terrible in both cases. Governor Youngkin will propose to the 2023 General Assembly additional funding and policy prescriptions for the state’s mental health…