The lights were off and the door was locked in Shreya Mahadevan’s fourth-grade classroom at Johnson Elementary School. Small bodies huddled quietly behind a wall of backpacks—their teacher in tears. “It was really scary. Petrifying,” says the 9-year-old girl about the lockdown her school was under last October, when a man in nearby Johnson Village […]
The lights were off and the door was locked in Shreya Mahadevan’s fourth-grade classroom at Johnson Elementary School. Small bodies huddled quietly behind a wall of backpacks—their teacher in tears. “It was really scary. Petrifying,” says the 9-year-old girl about the lockdown her school was under last October, when a man in nearby Johnson Village […]
August 12 bills killed After white supremacists invaded Charlottesville with violent clashes that left activist Heather Heyer dead and the community traumatized, legislators carried bills to the General Assembly to give localities more muscle in avoiding such gatherings in the future. Attorney General Mark Herring also wrote a couple of bills to combat white supremacist […]
If you thought 2017 was a year like no other, well, 2018 will likely continue to ride the tide of the unprecedented, at least according to what we’ve seen in the new year’s first week. The General Assembly begins its session January 10 with a tsunami shift from last year’s seemingly unbreachable 66-34 GOP majority. […]
Senator Creigh Deeds celebrates a newly expanded space at The Women’s Initiative, which provides mental health services through a sliding scale walk-in clinic. The new space on East High Street includes a large room for physical activities that promote trauma healing and additional therapy offices designed for tech-assisted and live supervision for clinical training. […]
The Charlottesville park bounded by Jefferson, North First, Market and North Second streets isn’t the only Lee Park under heavy scrutiny. Last July, a group of folks in Dallas led a demonstration at Oak Lawn’s Lee Park to demand that a General Robert E. Lee statue be removed and the park renamed. Activists felt called […]
The day after news broke about the $6 million wrongful death lawsuit he’d filed in his son’s 2013 death, Virginia state Senator Creigh Deeds refused to discuss the suit, but says the decision to file “was always a consideration. Since the beginning of the republic, the legal system has been in place to make changes […]
The slaughter of unarmed people has become a regular feature of American life. Relatively unknown Umpqua Community College in Oregon joined the body count list with nine gunned down in the October 1 rampage. President Barack Obama made his 15th speech on mass shootings since he took office, according to CNN. “We’ve become numb to […]