Tag: James Sherlock
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Flushing the Sewer at VDOE
by James C. Sherlock I have reported for four years on the unrelentingly woke and destructive Board of Education (VDOE) and Superintendent of Public Instruction (SOPI) memorandums, instructions, guidance, model policies and reading lists. I do not exaggerate, the last SOPI published his personal reading lists to an audience he clearly thought hungry for them.…
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School Threat Assessment Teams Revisited
by James C. Sherlock I wrote on February 12 of this year about what I consider an indicator of a potential overreach by the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). FCPS security has published an RFP for corporate support for web search to support its threat assessment team. Since that article, I have conducted extensive email…
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A Time for Conservatives to Speak Out
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes in life we come to a major fork in deciding who we are and who we are going to be going forward. Donald Trump was quoted in the New York Times as having on Tuesday “praised Mr. Putin’s aggression as “genius” and called the Russian leader “very savvy” for describing…
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Causes of the School Funding “Crisis”
by James C. Sherlock Read the story, “House and Senate lay out dueling visions for education funding in Virginia,” in the Virginia Mercury this morning by the reliably thorough Kate Masters. If you follow it, you, like everyone else in Virginia, can pick a side or pick provisions from both houses that you prefer. What you…
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Patient Safety and You
by James C. Sherlock In my career in private industry, I worked for a time with the testing and implementation of a hospital operational management system. My work there was shaped in considerable part by the 2000 report of the National Academy of Sciences, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. I came…
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“Frozen” Property Taxes
by James C. Sherlock I admit my fascination with how newspapers present various issues. It is an important window into the information their readers are getting. City manager and county executive proclamations that property tax rates are “frozen” are meant to sound like fiscal constraint. Consider this headline from The Washington Post: “Fairfax County executive…
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Everybody Wins – Nurse Practitioners for Underserved Communities
by James C. Sherlock The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing has instituted a terrific program thanks to a wealthy alum who gave $125 million to recruit and train nurse practitioners to practice in underserved communities. The Leonard A. Louder Community Care Nurse Practitioner Fellows program will be tuition-free and students who still need help…
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Headline – The Richmond Times-Dispatch Needs Help
by James C. Sherlock Finally some good news about the dumpster fire that has been the Virginia Unemployment Commission (VEC). Governor Glenn Youngkin has reported definitive progress — real numbers in reductions of backlogs. Here is the full Richmond Times Dispatch (RTD) headline on the story reporting those improvements. Youngkin claims progress in reducing backlog…
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The Real and Present Threat of Flooding in Virginia Requires Coordinated Action
by James C. Sherlock An editorial in The Virginian-Pilot this morning is titled, “A worrisome, watery future,” and is built around an update on flooding from NOAA. It is a grave situation. NOAA projects one foot of combined sea level rise and subsidence here in Hampton Roads by 2050. The adjacent map has not been…
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Virginia ACLU Sues to Keep Schoolchildren in Masks – Forever
by James C. Sherlock The ACLU of Virginia is suing under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in United States District Court in Charlottesville to keep all Virginia school children in masks. Potentially forever. The lawsuit contends that Governor Youngkin, with his EO making masks optional, “has effectively barred…
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A Dangerous Overreach in Public School Policy
by James C. Sherlock Disturbed by the actions of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), I have just finished reading Threat Assessment and Management in Virginia Public Schools: Model Policies, Procedures, and Guidelines (Model Policies), a publication of the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). It enjoins schools to investigate everyone, including “persons unaffiliated with the…
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The National Association of School Psychologists is Going to Get Its Members Fired
by James C. Sherlock I had dinner with George Will once years ago aboard ship. He is very smart, uncannily observant, understatedly amusing and a terrific dinner guest. He published yesterday in The Washington Post a column, “Witness how progressives in government forfeit the public’s trust.” The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) has proven…
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LCPS Superintendent Ziegler and the Superintendent of Public Instruction
by James C. Sherlock Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) can generously be described as “troubled” during the tenure of superintendent Scott Ziegler. You know, the guy who got left holding the bag when his predecessor fled the state. To make a very long story short, his fate is in front of the new Superintendent of…
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State Interest in the Operating Efficiency of Virginia’s Nonprofit Hospitals
by James C. Sherlock Virginia’s nonprofit hospital systems are partially funded with taxpayer money, pay no taxes, and are protected from competition by the state. The state, having provided all of those advantages, needs to make sure its citizens reap as much benefit from them as the hospitals do. Yesterday I wrote that the…
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Virginia Should Regulate Healthcare Monopolies as Public Utilities
by James C. Sherlock I am a capitalist, but we haven’t had capitalism in the healthcare market in Virginia since the Certificate of Public Need (COPN) made its way into the Code of Virginia in 1968. If we repealed COPN today, we’d still be left with the monopolies it has created and protected. All that…