Local private schools see growth post-recession

Early this month, the Albemarle County Planning Commission heard from not one but two private school headmasters at its regular meeting in Lane Auditorium at the County Office Building. The institutions themselves were very different: Tandem Friends School, a 44-year-old Quaker middle and high school, and Regents, a small Christian K-through-12 academy founded in 2010. […]

Mentor shift: When the student becomes the expert operator

Most kids use their Wii remotes to race cars or battle bad guys while playing games on their TV. C’erra Rhodes uses hers to teach other middle school-age girls how to solder metal. The 13-year-old created a “Wiimote” as a project through Computers4Kids in Charlottesville, an organization that teaches tech skills to middle and high […]

UVA student introduces yoga to local PE classes

At 9am on Monday, when most of us were grumbling about returning to the office, a small group of fifth graders was spreading yoga mats out on a gym floor, taking deep breaths, and preparing for a short yoga session. UVA third year, athlete, and practicing yogi Bennett Reck led the kids through a 15-minute […]

Education Beat: Albemarle school board begins cuts

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors last week adopted a tax rate of 79.9 cents per $100 of assessed real estate value—a 3.3-cent increase over the previous rate of 76.6 cents—but even with the hike, the county schools are $3.9 million short of their $164.3 million funding request. During a work session last week, the […]

Sleep on it: Charlottesville considers the science of school start times

For years, Charlottesville’s fifth- through eighth-graders have hustled to make a first school bell at 7:40am. But the city schools are now debating how to institute a schedule shift that would push their day later—largely because science shows such an early start time is bad for adolescent brains. Starting in middle school, kids’ rapidly developing […]

Education beat: County balks at funding Yancey learning center and other school news

Our education reporting appears thanks to a partnership with Charlottesville Tomorrow. The funding future for an “intergenerational learning center” at Yancey Elementary is unclear after the Albemarle School Board met last week. “We need to define what the programming for an intergenerational center is to get a better vision of where we take this,” school […]

Seeing white: Snow days pile up, schools struggle to make them up

If you’re a parent of school-age children in Central Virginia, chances are you feel like your kids have been out of school as much as they’ve been in school this winter. For working parents, it’s been a scramble. On the heels of yet another snow storm that caused delays in Albemarle and Charlottesville, now it’s […]