The Alexandria City Council’s adoption of a resolution of intent to appropriate funding of the Alexandria City Public Schools by major classification, beginning in fiscal year 2028, implies potentially significant changes to how Alexandria’s public schools are funded.

The School Board asked that adoption of the draft resolution, which was released on March 4, be delayed to permit time for discussion. The Council unanimously adopted the resolution on March 10.

Historically, ACPS has received a lump sum, not classification-based, appropriation from the city. The Council’s resolution can be seen

here.

The resolution cites the major classifications of school funding in Section 22.1-115 of the Code of Virginia: “(i) instruction, (ii) administration, attendance and health, (iii) pupil transportation, (iv) operation and maintenance, (v) school food services and other noninstructional operations, (vi) facilities, (vii) debt and fund transfers, (viii) technology, and (ix) contingency reserves.”

The text of the resolution describes its objective: “…to increase transparency and greater detail in the budgeting and appropriation of funds from the governing body to the schools.” The ACPS FY 2027 budget book, which is viewable

here

is lengthy and detailed at 467 pages and contains extensive system-wide budget data and detailed information. Accordingly, it is not clear how much more transparency and detail can be delivered by budgeting and appropriating by the classifications described in the statute

The headings organizing the budget data in the proposed ACPS FY 2027 operating budget include, “Teaching, Learning and Leadership,” “Technology Services,” “Student Services and Equity,” “Human Resources,” “Facilities and Operations,” “Financial Services.”

What, then, are the expected improvements in “transparency and greater detail in the budgeting and appropriation of funds” that will occur when the Council appropriates funds to ACPS by major classification, instead of by lump sum? Said another way, what are the problems the resolution seeks to solve?

While ACPS operating budgets can seem opaque because of the sheer quantity of detail, ACPS has a credible position that it is already presenting a budget organized by major classification or category. If the goal is simply to require ACPS to adopt the classifications described in the statute, it is hard to see how that will accomplish the resolution’s objectives of increased transparency and greater detail.

The Council considered appropriating funds to ACPS by major classification in the 1990’s according to a former Councilor who recalls a strong desire on the Council, and in the community at large, to get ACPS to fund all-day kindergarten. The former Councilor told me that although ACPS eventually implemented all-day kindergarten, using funding by classification to change a specific program or staffing arrangement did not work because, “categories don’t get you there.”

For example, if the Council concludes that ACPS is spending too much on central office administration it could theoretically reduce funding in the “administration, attendance and health” classification, but doing so does not guarantee that specific personnel or programs will be changed or eliminated.

I remember conversations with School Board members and Councilors in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s about the prospect of the Council appropriating by major classification that involved a practical point: Councilors were apprehensive that School Board members would respond to the public’s school system complaints or suggestions by claiming that the Council had “tied the hands” of the Board through classification-based appropriations. Thus, the thinking went, if you disagree with someone it is not a good idea to give them a weapon to use against you.

As was evident in the 1990’s, appropriation by major classification is a sign that the Council is exasperated with the School Board which was confirmed in the Council’s discussion at the March 10 meeting. Several Councilors were concerned with how ACPS handled specific situations. Budgeting and appropriation by major classification seems to be more about control by the Council than lack of transparency and detail.

The Council’s appropriation of funds by major classification may compound the inherent conflict in a system where authority—the School Board’s duty to set policy and oversee the public schools—is detached from the responsibility to fund the schools.

The future will reveal whether the Council’s resolution substantively changes how ACPS is funded by the city, or whether the resolution is mostly performative.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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In an unpleasant surprise, in mid-January I looked at my online banking program and saw two sizable (for me, anyway) unauthorized withdrawals, one from a checking account and the other from a money market account. The accounts were at a regional bank where I have been a customer for decades.

I immediately notified the bank of the unauthorized transactions. A short time later, I received a message from a bank employee who identified herself as a “client advocate” who recommended that both accounts be closed. I closed the accounts immediately and opened a new checking account at the bank.

It was a second unpleasant surprise when, a few days later, I saw two more unauthorized withdrawals in my new checking account, one through an electronic transfer and one through a clumsily forged check.

I notified the bank and my client advocate again. I was advised to close the new checking account and to terminate my online banking account, which I did. In summary, there were four fraudulent transactions in three bank accounts, including one that had been open for only a few days. I am not an expert in consumer banking security, but here is what I have learned.

Online banking demands vigilance. To anyone using online banking: check your account regularly. A daily review of online banking arrangements is not too often.

Small and unfamiliar offsetting credits and debits are suspicious. When I looked at the transaction history in the original checking and money market accounts, I saw small offsetting credits and debits of less than $1.00 around the Christmas holidays. I suspect, but cannot prove, these transactions were a fraudster testing for a possible later and larger withdrawal. As I used to tell my English classes about literature: nothing happens by accident.

Contact the bank and follow up. If you suspect a fraud, notify your bank immediately and assume the initiative to communicate until the matter is resolved. My client advocate was friendly and empathetic, but things moved forward only when I called to follow up. My client advocate’s title was appropriate—in the weeks after the fraudulent transfers took place I never talked to anyone from the bank’s fraud department, no matter how many times I asked for an explanation of how the fraudulent transfers occurred.

It can difficult or impossible to get a definitive account of how the fraud or frauds worked. I asked representatives of my bank on several occasions for an explanation of how the fraudulent transfers occurred, particularly since the four of them occurred closely in time.

At first, I was told that the most likely explanation was that someone had obtained my checking account number and the bank’s routing number. Account numbers and bank routing numbers are often printed on checks. It did not seem probable that a fraudster who obtained that information from a check would be able to convert it into electronic transfers, but maybe that is what happened.

Next, I was told that my online banking program may have been compromised. Accordingly, I closed that account and established a new one. Finally, I was told that the problem might be with the computer that I used to access online banking. The bank may be uncertain how the fraud occurred or, if the bank knows what happened it is unwilling to provide what could be a roadmap for fraud.

Get ready to make new arrangements. I learned that the accounts in which the frauds occurred do not need to be completely closed; they can be “locked” such that the accounts can process deposits, but no debits or withdrawals can be made without a trip to the bank. Even so, terminating a primary consumer banking relationship—in my case, twice—means redoing direct deposit and direct payment arrangements, getting new checks, a new debit card, etc. The good news is that the four fraudulent transactions were reversed, so my costs were mostly in time and inconvenience.

In February, I was the victim, or unwilling perpetrator, of an email scam. I received a bogus “Punchbowl” party invitation from a friend. The “invitation” was subsequently sent out as an email from me. Again, the experience was unpleasant, but I have learned to appreciate two-factor authentication and randomly generated passwords.

The essential learning, as high school teachers like to say, is that life online requires that, as playwright Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid.”

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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Alexandria is now in the third year after the City Council’s November 2023 adoption of the zoning code amendments known as Zoning for Housing. Accordingly, it is worth reviewing ZFH’s effects and how those effects are being communicated to the public.

The ZFH debate was heated and included confident predictions on all sides of the issue about the ultimate consequences for the city. The most controversial zoning amendment was the elimination of the single-family zones.

So far, the net effect of the elimination of the single-family zones appears to be the construction of one quadplex at the end of a cul de sac at 635 Upland Place.

While the quadplex appears to be the one reported in the public information, nothing more specific is disclosed. The city’s online descriptions of ZFH’s effects could be significantly more informative.

The city’s website includes a Zoning for Housing Implementation Table that contains construction and approval information on projects authorized under seven zoning reforms. Here is the table:

Unfortunately, the ZFH Implementation Table is opaque. For example, in the Single Unit Zoning Reform category, are the “4 Dwelling Units” under “Sites and/or Number of Units Approved To-Date” the same four units as the “4 Dwelling Units are anticipated” under “Comment”? Are the “4 Dwelling Units” the quadplex on Upland Place? These questions show that the table could be improved.

The table would be substantially more useful if it included an interactive map that locates projects by address and gives other information showing the effects of ZFH, including, for example, photographs of projects, lists of permits applied for and issued, references to zoning code sections that authorize projects, and lists of completed projects.

Making the table more useful is not beyond Alexandria’s reach. Arlington County enacted zoning amendments known as the Expanded Housing Option program, also called the “Missing Middle” initiative. Like ZFH, the EHO amendments were the subject of litigation. Arlington’s website provides extensive information about the EHO program including links to photo galleries organized by neighborhood, a permit tracker, and more. Arlington’s EHO tracking information can be seen

here.

A pre-ZFH zoning change allowed the construction of Accessory Dwelling Units, or mini-homes external to, or inside, a main single-family residence. The City Council approved ADUs to increase the city’s housing supply. The table contains a link to the city’s updated list of approved ADUs (currently at 96 units) by date of approval, street address, and whether the unit is external or internal to the main residence. More such links to next-level data in the ZFH Implementation Table, or a true electronic dashboard that links to and tracks source data, would improve public understanding.

There is nothing I know of that precludes public disclosure of the addresses and pictures of buildings approved and constructed under the city’s permit processes. While a notice of appeal has been filed in the ZFH litigation, that a matter is in litigation should not delay the communication of the facts on the ground, or that will be on the ground soon.

An Alexandria elected official wrote me:

There seems to be a perception among those who were opposed to the legislation that the implementation is happening too fast. On the other side, we have a number of residents who feel it’s not moving fast enough. It would be helpful for the community to better understand what data each side is currently using, and what data would be helpful for both to better understand the true picture.

The time to develop complete and rigorous online disclosure of ZFH’s effects is now, or at least soon. The most unfortunate question in civic affairs may be, How did things get this way? We can reduce the probability of that question being asked in the future through better disclosure in the present.

ZFH’s zoning reforms may ultimately be good, bad, or indifferent. In any case, Alexandria would benefit from a more complete picture of the facts about their effects.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https:/aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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About Alexandria celebrated its fourth birthday late last year. The following reviews 2025’s columns to assess the hits and misses, describes a column that involves a mystery, and provides an update on a long-delayed ACPS capital project.

The Hits

January’s column advocating the naming of the Minnie Howard fields after former Mayor Kerry Donley was a hit based on the substantial community support for the idea. On Dec. 18, 2025, the School Board approved this naming proposal in a unanimous vote.

An August column on how the city and its residents process change, and an October column on the importance of Energy Use Intensity (EUI) standard as Alexandria revises its Green Building Policy were also well received.

On the legal front, columns in March and May examined a court challenge brought by Jefferson-Houston parents to the School Board’s decision to convert Jefferson-Houston from a K-8 school to a middle school and the reasons for the subpoenas issued by the defendants to nonparty residents in the Zoning for Housing case that challenged amendments to the zoning code, notably, amendments to the single family zones. Judge Thomas Padrick, Jr. quashed the subpoenas, and on Nov. 12, 2025 he granted the city’s motion for summary judgment in the ZFH case.

Comments were positive about three columns about the Alexandria City Public Schools: an April column on the proposed FY 2026 operating budget, a November column on the School Board’s rejection of a City Council proposal for a pilot program to use DASH busses to transport Alexandria City High School students, and a February column arguing that the Minnie Howard campus of ACHS is effectively the city’s second public high school.

The Misses

June’s column on the importance of corporate memory in city governance and September’s column that surveyed city leaders about priorities for the upcoming legislative and school years seemed like good ideas at the time, but the columns landed without much reaction.

Neither a hit nor a miss, December’s column on the ACPS central office employee who had a second full-time job and the former Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority Executive Director who occupied an ARHA unit was the saddest column of the year.

A Mystery

The July column about a $6.6 million grant administered by the Commonwealth Transportation Board sought by the city to fund improvements at the intersections of Duke Street and Route 1 identified a mystery. Why the city pursued the grant in January 2025 to improve a problematic intersection and abandoned it months later is a question I have not been able to answer. Even so, one elected official told me, “We got out ahead of our skis on this.”

ACHS-King Street Cistern Update

One of the earliest (February 2022) columns urged ACPS to repair the 400,000-gallon underground cistern at ACHS’ King Street Campus. The cistern, which is located under the plaza between the parking deck and the school, was designed to collect runoff water from the building and the paved areas around it to permit water to be recycled for irrigation, chillers, and other uses. When the King Street building opened in 2007 the cistern was considered a forward-thinking design feature, but it has not operated for years.

The cistern repair project has been delayed and estimated completion dates have been pushed back several times. The cistern itself is an underground concrete box, but it requires a system of pumps and pipes to work.

The city is currently soliciting community input on the Taylor Run Infrastructure Stabilization Project. A functioning cistern at the King Street Campus would benefit Taylor Run by reducing runoff-driven erosion.

On September 25, 2025, I received an email from a member of the ACPS Communications Department stating:

ACPS is moving forward with comprehensive repairs and upgrades to the cistern at the Alexandria City High School King Street Campus. The project has faced some planning challenges over the past year but is now progressing. We are working with a dedicated team of experienced contractors and engineers to see the project through. A reassessment of the site was completed in August 2025.

I sent an email to a representative of the Communications Department asking what the “comprehensive repairs and upgrades to the cistern” are, what the “planning challenges over the past year” were, who the “dedicated team of experienced contractors and engineers” is, and why a “reassessment of the site” was necessary.

There was no response.

Here’s to a great 2026!

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com

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“Scandal” is a strong word, but the late October report that Ayanna Harrison, the Executive Director of Support Operations for the Alexandria City Public Schools, also held a full-time job as the chief operating officer for the Kindezi Schools in Atlanta was a profound disappointment.

It was also disappointing that the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority fired its CEO, Erik C. Johnson, in September after disclosures that he and his family were living in an ARHA property in Old Town.

The central question, “What were these people thinking?” is probably unanswerable. Even so, Harrison and Johnson’s situations share some important themes about what really happens when the public trust is violated, even if the behavior is not a provable crime.

In Harrison’s situation, we do not know what could have been done better, or more efficiently, at ACPS if she had devoted her full time and attention to her significant responsibilities. It may be odd that a theft of services can involve one’s own services to an employer, but that is the reality here.

Johnson’s situation was different. By occupying an ARHA unit, he impaired ARHA’s central mission of making affordable housing available to residents who qualify and manage to get to the top of ARHA’s lengthy waiting list.

Years ago, former Mayor Allison Silberberg sought to make ethics in government a central element in Alexandria’s political culture. That effort was an uphill climb because the city seemed relatively scandal-free.

The temptation to normalize the incidents involving Ms. Harrison and Mr. Johnson, or to see them as a small city’s small problems, should be resisted. There are meaningful personal and institutional consequences that flow from each.

According to a Nov. 19 report in the Alexandria Times, ACPS has sued Harrison for $800,000 in Alexandria Circuit Court. She is not currently shown on the Kindezi Schools website. If she seeks other employment her search will be complicated if she encounters human resources personnel at prospective employers who have heard of Google.

Harrison’s situation provides an easy opportunity for criticism about central office administrative personnel and the School Board. Alexandrians’ taxes support ACPS, but residents often have little or no connection to ACPS and are nonetheless free to opine on how the schools are managed. ACPS needs the support of the entire community; Harrison’s actions were damaging.

The Board’s statement that Harrison’s situation, “…has shown that improvements to our processes regarding employee oversight and accountability should be made” recognizes reality, as does ACPS’ hiring of an external auditor. In contrast, the largest ACPS employee group, teachers, has a built-in accountability system: their class schedules.

As to Johnson, the reputational and other consequences he will sustain from occupying an ARHA unit may depend on the outcome of the lawsuit he filed on Nov. 13 against ARHA and its Board of Commissioners in Alexandria Circuit Court. The suit alleges two counts of breach of contract—each seeking damages of $750,000—and one count of defamation seeking damages of $3 million.

Johnson’s complaint, at paragraph 20, alleges, “Practically everyone at ARHA knew that Mr. Johnson was going to be moving into 409 Cook Street. It was not a secret.” The “practically everyone,” according to the Complaint, included members of the then-ARHA Board. City Council totally replaced the Board since this incident came to light.

Paragraph 73 of the complaint sums up Johnson’s case:

Had the Board told the truth—that it was aware that Mr. Johnson moved into 409 Cook Street and that ARHA’s belief when he moved in was that 409 Cook Street was no longer subject to the affordable housing compliance requirements under the LIHTC [Low Income Housing Tax Credit] program and that ARHA’s properties in Chatham Square were all going to be converted in to market rate units, and that the ARHA personnel responsible for ensuring [Department of Housing and Urban Development] compliance rescinded the approval previously reported, the ensuing scandal that erupted and the negative narrative that ended up being perpetuated would have never happened.

As an eminent trial lawyer I worked for early in my legal career would say, “Well, Mark, those are matters for the evidence,” meaning that the claims of the parties will be resolved in court.

Even if a lapse in judgment by a public official may have been widely known the lapse is no less damaging to the agency and the public that the official was duty-bound to serve.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https:/aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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Today’s fun fact: DASH, the name of Alexandria’s transit system, is an acronym for “Driving Alexandria Safely Home.”

There should be a sense of disappointment, and lost opportunity, over the demise of the proposed pilot program to transport a limited number of Alexandria City High School students on two midday DASH bus routes.

The City Council, School Board, senior staff members, and DASH personnel met on Sept. 29 to discuss the possible use of DASH to transport ACHS students, an idea that originated in the Council last January. The pilot program took significant time for the staff from the city, ACPS, and DASH to develop.

The meeting began with a surprise from School Board Chair Michelle Rief, Ph.D.:

While we appreciate the efforts to explore cost-saving strategies and alternative transportation options, we ultimately do not believe this approach is in the best interest of ACPS students, families or staff. In fact, we believe there’s a risk that it could lead to increased costs and diminished transportation services for all students.

My mother, a recognized authority on human interaction, often said, “People can take bad news. They cannot stand surprises.” Mom’s point, which applies here, is that people are more adept at dealing with negative developments they can see coming, rather than bad news that catches them unaware.

The obvious question at the Sept. 29 meeting was, “Why was this meeting convened to discuss a pilot program for DASH to transport ACHS students when the School Board clearly has no interest in it?”

After the meeting, Chair Rief wrote in an email to the Times:

The School Board did not take a formal vote on the DASH proposal. Instead, at our Sept. 11 work session, Board members raised significant concerns, which I later summarized in a written report to the Board on Sept. 24. That document reflected a clear consensus: to continue our current hybrid approach, which encourages but does not mandate DASH use for high school students.

The announcement of the Board’s work session-generated “clear consensus” created strong adverse reactions. Elected officials present used the word “dysfunction” to describe the Council-Board relationship, one Councilor walked out, and another said, “I’ve been here 12 years and this is a 12-year problem.”

What should we make of the Board’s rejection of the proposed DASH-ACPS pilot program? The following takeaways seem appropriate.

The DASH pilot program was an opportunity. Alexandria’s elected officials have been talking about sharing city and ACPS services and improving intra-government efficiencies for as long as anyone can remember. At this point, a chance to coordinate city and ACPS activities appears to be lost. In contrast, later in the same meeting ACPS and city staff members described how they coordinate closely on joint facilities planning.

The least appealing rationalization for the Board’s rejection of the pilot program may be, as I was told, “The DASH pilot program would not really have saved that much money.” A DASH-prepared presentation identified ACPS savings of $282,000 from 16 additional DASH daily trips in school year 2026-2027, and additional costs to DASH of $210,000, resulting in a “Minimum savings opportunity Phase 1” of $72,000.

This is not nothing, especially in a period of intense budget pressures on the city budget that are compounded by the prospect of significantly reduced federal support. And, if the pilot program succeeded, there would be opportunities for more savings in later years.

The absence of specifically articulated reasons for the Board’s “clear consensus” opposing the DASH pilot program may be the most puzzling aspect of this situation. Bus drivers were present in force at the Sept. 29 meeting, and Board members expressed concern about the impact of the pilot program on drivers who would have potentially reduced schedules. However, little more was said about the merits of the pilot program.

If you had asked me on Sept. 29 for the top five reasons why the Board rejected the DASH pilot proposal I could not describe them then; I also cannot describe them now.

With the benefit of hindsight, the reasons for the Board’s rejection of the DASH pilot proposal would have been clearer if the Board had debated and voted on it. Sometimes, there is no substitute for the introduction of a properly seconded motion in an elected body’s public meeting, open debate, and a recorded vote.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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The Alexandria School Board has created a community poll, which closes October 22, soliciting responses to naming proposals at four schools, including the naming of the athletic field complex at the Minnie Howard Campus of Alexandria City High School for the late Kerry Donley.

This is a call to action. You can honor Mayor Donley’s memory by responding to the community poll

here.

Background information on the School Board’s naming process can be viewed

here.

A brief word of caution: the community poll Google form has awkward aspects. It does not appear to allow question responses to be omitted.

In case you missed it, the January 2, 2025 column that ran in The Alexandria Times on this topic is shown below.

The newly installed School Board has an opportunity to begin its term by doing the right thing.

The old Minnie Howard building has been demolished. The grading and other site work for the new athletic fields west of the new school has begun. The new Board can create a lasting and fitting memorial to former Alexandria Mayor Kerry Donley by naming the athletic fields at Alexandria City High School’s Minnie Howard Campus in his honor.

A petition bearing more than 450 signatures urging that the new Minnie Howard fields be named after Donley was submitted in 2024. Last month, the outgoing Board directed Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt, Ed.D. to begin a public engagement process for the naming of Minnie Howard’s fields.

Donley, a City Councilor from 1988 to 1996, Vice Mayor from 1994 to 1996 and 2009 to 2012, and Mayor from 1996 to 2003, died tragically in July 2022 of a heart attack at 66. Donley’s community service involved dedicated work for numerous charitable organizations including Senior Services, Carpenter’s Shelter, the Alexandria United Way, and the Alexandria Campaign on Adolescent Pregnancy.

Donley, more than any political leader in Alexandria’s history, was familiar with athletic competitions at Minnie Howard. He faithfully watched his daughters compete in soccer and field hockey for the then-T.C. Williams High School on the Minnie Howard fields. I heard Donley confidently explain field hockey’s arcane rules, which are nothing like ice hockey’s rules, to befuddled parents and others at his daughters’ games.

Donley, an avid sportsman, was a regular attendee at T.C. Williams basketball games, an environment in which he had many friends. He took a three-year timeout from his banking career to serve a successful stint as the Alexandria City Public Schools Athletic Director.

Political scientists classify Alexandria as having a “weak mayor” system of local government, meaning that the mayor heads the city’s policy-making body, the City Council, while executive and managerial authority is vested primarily in a professional City Manager and his or her appointees.

The city also seems to have an “omnipresent mayor” system: The mayor is expected to be everywhere, all the time. Donley came as close to anyone to fulfilling this expectation by being relentlessly present in public.

As Mayor in the late 1990’s, Donley presciently said that Alexandria was, “…entering an era of bricks and mortar.” He was proven correct around 2002 when City Council-School Board discussions about a proposed $38 million HVAC retrofit to the mid-1960’s T.C. Williams High School building shifted suddenly and dramatically to planning for the largest public works project to that point in the city’s history, a new high school building.

ACHS’ King Street Campus opened in the fall of 2007 to criticism from some Alexandrians who said that it was too large or “overbuilt,” a concern that was eliminated by surging enrollments in the following years.

Donley was a steadfast supporter of Alexandria’s public schools, often describing himself as a “satisfied customer.” He had an upbeat sense of humor and a glad handing political style that could obscure the seriousness of his public service in Alexandria.

He was devoted to his family and his city, and never more so than when he was at the Minnie Howard athletic fields cheering on his daughters and their Titan teammates.

The new School Board should name the new Minnie Howard fields in his honor.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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Two policy review processes underway in Alexandria will have significant effects on the city’s built environment.

The Housing 2040 Master Plan will extensively update the city’s 2014 housing master plan. Early indications suggest that Housing 2040 may be particularly meaningful to the 58% of Alexandrians who are tenants because renter protections are a key component of the new master plan.

The city’s 2019 Green Building Policy is also being revised. The standards for green buildings and energy efficiency are important to developers who bear the expense of constructing housing that complies with the Green Building Policy and to residents who will pay the continuing energy costs of living in those buildings.

Many of the goals of Housing 2040 are aspirational, or values-based. For example, one of Housing 2040’s ten draft goals is, “Enhance housing quality, safety, and livability to support resident security, health and wellbeing.”

The Green Building Policy, which is expected to come to the City Council for a final review and approval this year, also contains values-based goals. However, it also departs in a significant way from prior approaches by moving from requiring LEED certification, a building energy efficiency standard that involves multiple aspects of sustainability, to a single metric on building performance: Energy Use Intensity.

A building’s EUI is the amount of kBTUs per square foot per year the building uses. BTU stands for British thermal units. Each BTU equals the amount of heat needed to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. The prefix “k” stands for 1,000, so a kBTU equals 1,000 BTUs.

EUI, then, is a standard analogous to miles per gallon for cars with a key difference: higher MPG signifies better energy efficiency for cars, while lower EUI signifies better energy efficiency for buildings. Energy efficient buildings are well-sealed and insulated.

While both developers and climate activists generally approve of the move to EUI, the actual EUI number to be assigned in the new Green Building Policy to multifamily buildings is hotly debated. Building codes allow a maximum EUI of 45. The current draft Green Building Policy specifies an EUI of 38 or lower for multi-unit residential buildings and 31 or lower for single-unit residences.

Climate and energy efficiency activists argue that to fulfill Alexandria’s Eco-City goals, and the city’s 2019 Declaration of Climate Emergency which contains a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, the EUI standard for new buildings should be 25 or lower. This, they argue, would be consistent with EUI standards in other jurisdictions, notably New York City, Philadelphia, and the District of Columbia.

Who incurs costs, and when those costs are incurred, is important in the EUI debate. The cost of building housing units that exceed the energy efficiency standards of the past is paid by builders and developers. The energy cost of living in those units is paid by homeowners or passed through to tenants by landlords as rent. Thus, affordable housing advocates argue for more stringent (numerically lower) EUI standards as a way of reducing housing costs.

Developers and builder argue that as businesses accountable to their owners they should not be compelled to unduly subsidize public policy goals, no matter how laudable. The standards applicable in other housing markets are of little consequence, they might argue, because each market and project presents different profitability possibilities.

The business model of developers and builders also effects the EUI debate. When to cash out of a project is a critical decision for developers. Energy costs matter to a developer that builds and owns property, but not to a developer that builds and sells immediately. The decision to cash out is affected by market conditions, access to capital, and other factors.

If a developer or builder sells a project upon completion then the continuing occupancy costs, including those related to energy, are of little concern because those costs will be paid by others. Developers that build and sell see EUI as, at best, a cost of doing business.

This space-constrained summary of the Green Building Policy debate over EUI is a high-level preview. The coming debate will be important and worth watching.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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Labor Day, which we celebrated on Monday, is in many ways New Year’s Day.

Those affected by academic or legislative calendars face increased levels of activity as school begins and the City Council and School Board return from summer recesses.

The idea that life begins anew after Labor Day is not a rigid rule. For example, Alexandria City Public Schools began the 2025-2026 school year on Aug. 18. Even so, it is surely a sign that things are gearing up when a tattoo parlor on King Street offers 20% off all back-to-school tattoos.

In a back to business spirit, I asked Mayor Aliya Gaskins, City Manager James Parajon, School Board Chair Michelle Rief, Ph.d. and Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt, Ed.D. what practical concerns were uppermost in their minds as the non-calendar New Year begins.

Gaskins identified concerns about the effects of several Trump Administration actions. “The impacts of cuts to the federal workforce, immigration enforcement, the [Washington,] DC takeover, the potential impact of tariffs on supply chains and construction projects, and the potential of a local recession.”

Parajon likewise referred to the, “…impact the decisions of the federal administration have on our community.”

The mayor and city manager also agree on the pressing importance of the Waterfront Flood Mitigation Project. Gaskins described an imminent “critical inflection point” for the project, saying, “The longer we wait, the more likely the cost of the project will increase…the pump station is only one component of a larger project.”

Gaskins described the findings of the recently completed community health assessment, particularly those relating to mental health, as a critical concern. The new housing master plan, Housing 2040, is also seen as an essential endeavor, particularly as to anti-displacement strategies and renter protections.

Rief cited several concerns in her written response.

Some of our high priority projects for the coming year include the implementation of new school boundaries, addressing middle school capacity needs, continued implementation of the high school academies model and alternative education.

Rief also emphasized the need for the continuity of keeping staff members.

“Staff retention is a top priority, and to that end ACPS is actively engaged in collective bargaining negotiations with the Education Association of Alexandria,” she wrote.

Kay-Wyatt echoed Rief’s list of priorities and added a few more.

Addressing learning gaps with targeted supports, strengthening facility conditions and building pathways for college, career and community readiness through expanded career and technical education and career academies [are my priorities].

The through line, or common theme, in the priorities identified by Alexandria’s leaders is the unprecedented level of uncertainty.

The Trump Administration effects, actual and potential, identified by the Mayor and the City Manager as primary concerns are profound and seem to change daily. It is impossible for the city or ACPS to plan effectively for every contingency because of the chaos on the other side of the Potomac River.

There is also uncertainty about exactly how collective bargaining will work for ACPS, which depends on the Council for money. ACPS, according to remarks by senior staff members at an Aug. 27 community budget meeting, expects to sign its first collective bargaining agreement this fall.

The collective bargaining process should be expected to drive demand for the improvement of wages and working conditions. The labor movement leader Samuel Gompers who lived from 1850 to 1924, in response to the question “What does Labor want?” is said to have answered: “More.”

In traditional collective bargaining, the employer is responsible for fulfilling the commitments it agrees to in a union contract. However, ACPS requires the concurrence, or funding approval, by the Council to deliver on the terms and conditions it agrees to in a collective bargaining agreement.

A question of incentives arises: Will ACPS negotiate forcefully with its employee groups when it is the Council that pays the bill?

At the community budget meeting, members of the ACPS finance staff confirmed that the ACPS operating budget will require about $19.3 million more than the Council appropriated in the last budget cycle to maintain existing levels of staffing and programs, a salary scale step increase, and a 1% COLA or market rate adjustment.

ACPS adopted collective bargaining in 2024 out of concern for its employees. However, collective bargaining may result in a contract that cannot be fully implemented because of the City’s budgetary priorities and financial condition.

There may be a gap between what is negotiated in the collective bargaining agreement and what is financially feasible, as determined by the Council. If this occurs, ACPS stakeholders may see the well-intentioned collective bargaining process as another disappointment.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com

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Mom’s insight made me think that a substantial portion of Alexandria’s civic debate may originate in the natural human tendency, which accelerates as we age, to resist or be suspicious of change.

The more that proposed changes to the built environment, for example, the reconfiguration of Seminary Road and the proposed changes to Duke Street or the installation of traffic calming measures, affect us directly, the greater the tendency there is to be skeptical about them.

Another set of periodic changes is caused by the ebb and flow of ACPS’ student enrollment in various parts of the city which compels redistricting every few years. Redrawing school boundaries is an endeavor in which change is inevitable, but also hard to process for some people.

When I first ran for the School Board, a hot issue was whether to discontinue the last of Alexandria’s paired elementary schools, Maury (now named Naomi Brooks) and Lyles-Crouch. The schools were paired (students went to Maury, then a K-2 school, and Lyles-Crouch, a 3-5 school) as a desegregation measure. The paired schools had worked well—families seemed content and students seem to suffer no ill effects. Accordingly, many parents at both schools advocated leaving the pairing in place for that reason alone.

The counter argument was that Alexandria’s last set of paired elementary schools were an anachronism and that it was time, finally, to align their grade configuration with the city’s other elementary schools.

The then-Superintendent’s recommendation, which irritated those pressing for an immediate unpairing, was to unpair the two schools as part of the adoption of a larger redistricting plan for all the elementary schools. In other words, if change is inevitable, it is sometimes better to change everything, or many things, at once rather than to change things individually or sequentially.

Another permanent controversy involving the schools, meaning that the issue recurs regularly and there are credible and thoughtful positions on both sides, is whether Alexandria students (and not just those enrolled at Alexandria City High School) should be allowed to attend Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the Governor’s School for this area.

ACPS has historically declined the annual invitation to send students to Thomas Jefferson. It is not possible to reconcile the opposing views: those who would have ACPS send students to Thomas Jefferson have a valid argument that one of the highest purposes of education is individual advancement. The other side, which argues that sending students to Thomas Jefferson would have a negative effect on ACHS course offerings, also has a valid point. Should the status quo be changed? I suspect the issue will come up again.

A local official told me recently, “Alexandrians are generally in favor of progress. However, many of them have problems with change.” The difficulty, of course, is that progress necessarily requires change.

Change, or the fear of the results of change, seemed to be at the heart of some of the objections to the city’s currently stalled in court Zoning for Housing amendments to the zoning code and specifically to the modifications to the single-family zones to permit multi-unit dwellings.

The argument that the effects of the changes to the single-family zones would be gradual and subject to monitoring and review did not move those who were militantly opposed to the changes: they saw an immediate fast-forward to scenarios where the city, and especially the character of their neighborhoods, had changed dramatically and for the worse.

The Muppet Show provides a relevant lesson about change. Statler and Waldorf are elderly gentlemen who sit in the theater balcony during the show and criticize everything that happens.

Their humorous criticisms are often grounded on the conviction whatever is going on is inconsistent with, and thus inferior to, what happened back in the day.

To avoid sounding like Statler and Waldorf, here is a late summer resolution to embrace change in Alexandria. Count me in for another car-free block of lower King Street, the start of curbside composting as a city program, bike lanes protected by rubber pylons, experimenting with ACPS students on DASH busses and, fingers crossed, successful development projects at either end of the city at the power plant and Landmark sites.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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Communications and interactions among Alexandria and Virginia officials on important topics, for example, transportation funding, can generate questions.

Pursuant to a City Council resolution, Alexandria applied for a $6.6 million SMART SCALE grant administered by Virginia’s Commonwealth Transportation Board to improve the intersections of Duke Street with Route 1 (South Henry and South Patrick Streets).

The City’s website describes the Duke Street and Route 1 intersections this way:

Collectively, there have been over 70 crashes at these two intersections since 2014. Of those, 4 resulted in severe injury and more than 20 resulted in non-life-threatening injuries. Both intersections are ranked among the City’s high-crash intersections and are on city’s high-injury network.

The high-injury network is a collection of street corridors where high numbers of people have been killed or severely injured in traffic crashes.

SMART is an acronym for System Management Allocation of Resources for Transportation and SCALE is an acronym for Safety, Congestion Mitigation, Accessibility, Land Use, Environmental and Economic Development.

SMART SCALE applications by localities are competitively scored by Virginia Department of Transportation officials based on calculations of future traffic congestion with adjustments for safety, accessibility, and other factors.

In January 2025, the City’s grant application for Route 1 and Duke Street appeared on a VDOT FY 2026 Staff Recommended Scenario with a SMART SCALE score of 18.90, the highest of four proposed Northern Virginia transportation improvement projects.

However, by May 2025 a VDOT staff presentation showed that the City’s application for the SMART SCALE grant had moved to “unfund” status. A project summary stated that, as to Alexandria’s grant application, “Applicant’s performance has not improved.”

At the May 21 CTB meeting, D.J. Gribbin, the board member representing Northern Virginia, said that he had heard the night before from Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins who said that the “City was not fully aware” of the impending grant application denial.

Virginia Secretary of Transportation W. Sheppard Miller III said at the meeting that “the fact that we took it off [the approval list] was not fully communicated timely” to Alexandria officials. The CTB agreed to suspend Alexandria’s application and to revisit it at the CTB’s June meeting.

The May 21 meeting, and Secretary Miller’s comments about Alexandria’s grant application at 2:00, can be seen

here.

I asked VDOT’s Director of Communications what “Applicant’s performance has not improved” meant. She replied in an email, “The City of Alexandria entered VDOT’s Locality Sustained Performance Program (LSPP) in November 2023. CTB policy establishes the LSPP program and the performance measures used to evaluate the transportation project portfolio of individual localities.”

On June 24, Alexandria withdrew its SMART SCALE grant application to fund improvements at Duke Street and Route 1.

At the CTB’s June 24 meeting, Hillary Orr, Deputy Director of Alexandria’s Department of Transportation and Environmental Services, described the reasons for the withdrawal of the grant application.

“While the project did receive [a] strong technical score, the City made the strategic decision to withdraw this application, this round, to reinforce the progress that we are making on performance improvement and to maintain the momentum and collaboration with the state,” Orr said at the meeting.

The June 24 meeting, and Ms. Orr’s comments at 2:40, can be seen

here.

In summary, Alexandria’s application for $6.6 million in state funding for an important transportation improvement project went from recommended by the VDOT staff in January, to a VDOT staff “unfund” recommendation in May, to suspended at the CTB’s May 21 meeting, to withdrawn at the CTB’s June 24 meeting.

If I could explain this trajectory more completely, I would. In the meantime, I have three questions:

● Why, exactly, did the VDOT staff determine that Alexandria’s performance in VDOT’s Locality Sustained Performance Program had “not improved”?

● How did it become necessary for Mayor Gaskins to intercede with a CTB member or members the night before the May CTB meeting at which Alexandria’s application was to be denied?

● How does the withdrawal of Alexandria’s application to fund improvements at Duke Street and Route 1, in Ms. Orr’s words, “reinforce the progress that we are making on performance improvement” and “maintain the momentum and collaboration with the state”?

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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Some questions about local governance are difficult to answer.

An example: How did the Alexandria City Public Schools open two new schools, Douglas MacArthur Elementary School in 2023 and the Minnie Howard Campus of Alexandria City High School in 2024, with solar panels that are not working because the cost – estimated at a total of $1.4 million – of connecting them to the electric grid is too high?

The answer may lie in two important and connected aspects that affect how the city and ACPS work that are frequently overlooked: contract administration and corporate or institutional memory.

There are some things the city does well: A pothole was recently repaired in Rosemont less than 24 hours after the submission of a 311 request. Even so, there are projects with permanent defects, for example, the incorrectly sized swimming pool at the Chinquapin Recreation Center, that could have been executed better.

Ascertaining exactly how city or school projects sometimes go off the rails can be difficult or impossible.

Staying with the pothole and solar panels examples, the rapid response and job completion on the pothole was managed entirely by city personnel. The Douglas MacArthur and Minnie Howard projects involved architectural and engineering expertise for building systems and design from outside contractors working with ACPS personnel. Even though there were numerous people with design and planning responsibilities, the interconnection cost of the solar panels should not have come as a surprise.

It would be difficult to develop a precise account of who forgot, overlooked, or knew and failed to report the cost of connecting the solar panels. As the proverb states, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” In the absence of a definitive explanation, the solar panel grid connection problem seems to have been a contract administration failure.

We sometimes overlook everyday activities that the city contracts out. If a tree is poorly planted or maintained on a street or another public place, it is the city, through the Department of Recreation, Parks & Cultural Activities, that is responsible. However, it is highly probable that the actual tree planting and pruning was done by a contractor, often Davey Tree.

It is tempting to assume that everything would be great, or much improved, if only city and ACPS personnel were better at administering and managing work performed by outside contractors.

Corporate, or institutional memory, is another important and overlooked factor in the success of city and ACPS operations. Corporate memory about an issue can be important to seeing its complexities, which is an essential step to a resolution, or at least a better path forward.

Those of my generation may overvalue corporate memory because it reflects our lived experience. And, a certain amount of administrative personnel turnover is inevitable. Corporate memory is also affected by the results of elections. For a newly elected local officeholder, the first year or so is mostly training and orientation, particularly with respect to the operating and capital budgets.

It’s difficult to quantify whether city and ACPS operations have been compromised by a lack of corporate memory caused by frequent turnover of senior staff and elected officials. But it appears likely.

Years ago, I asked an experienced Alexandria officeholder what worried them about the city’s future. I was expecting a sage reply about the city’s reliance on residential real estate taxes, or something similar. The answer, paraphrased, was, “I worry about the lack of corporate memory, particularly when I see we are about to make a mistake that we made in the past.”

The quality of contract administration of city and ACPS activities is affected by deficits in corporate memory. Things should not automatically be done as they were back in the day, but experience can provide valuable lessons.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006 and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School.

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The subpoenas issued on behalf of the defendants, the City of Alexandria and the Planning Commission, in the Zoning for Housing lawsuit (Burks, et al. v. City of Alexandria, et al, CL24-1039), are controversial. As of the week of April 21, the case docket showed that seven subpoenas were served on individuals who are nonparties, five of whom are directors of the anti-ZFH Coalition for a Livable Alexandria which was dismissed as a plaintiff for lack of standing.

Some subpoena recipients, and others, assert that the subpoenas are retribution, or lawfare. They argue that the defendants weaponized the legal system to harass residents who objected to the elimination of single-family zones in the ZFH zoning code amendments adopted by the City Council in November 2023.

The argument that the subpoenas, which contain broad information requests, are a fishing expedition overlooks the reality that civil discovery is designed as a fishing expedition. The fishing license is broad, but not unlimited.

Supreme Court of Virginia Rule 4.1 (b) (1) states, “It is not ground for objection that the information sought will be inadmissible at the trial if the information sought appears reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.”

At first, the purpose of the subpoenas is hard to understand because the actors in the ZFH case are the City and its officials. The case turns on whether the City had the power to enact the ZFH amendments and whether it did so in a legally appropriate manner. How could communications or other information from residents have any evidentiary value if the case will be decided on the administrative record—the cumulative factual account of the actions or omissions by City personnel that formed the basis for ZFH’s enactment?

There appear to be two possible grounds for the subpoenas.

First, the subpoenas could reveal statements that could be used to impeach, or attack the credibility of, a witness who testifies at trial inconsistently with what they said in the past. This is consistent with the withdrawal a few weeks ago of a ZFH case subpoena to a nonparty.

Second, the ZFH case’s 30-page complaint alleges acts and omissions by the City, but it also alleges legal conclusions, meaning that the City’s conduct violated legal standards. The complaint alleges that ZFH’s enactment was arbitrarily and capricious and ultra vires, meaning beyond the City’s authority. The defendants may argue that they are entitled to the subpoena recipients’ communications to ascertain whether the communications contain evidence that the City acted beyond its authority, or arbitrarily and capriciously.

The City’s wily outside counsel, McGuireWoods, may assert other grounds for the subpoenas in response to an April motion to quash a subpoena filed by a nonparty recipient.

No prediction is made here about the resolution of issues relating to the subpoenas. The defendants will likely argue that the principle that “the public has a right to every man’s evidence”—described in the United States v. Nixon Supreme Court case about a subpoena for the Watergate tapes—is foundational in the legal system and thus the subpoenas should be upheld even if their justification is flimsy.

Other factors contributed to the issuance of subpoenas on behalf of the defendants for communications, which may have been intended to be private, by residents objecting to ZFH who are arguably funding the City’s defense of ZFH through their taxes.

A subpoena recipient told me that subpoenas were also issued to objecting residents in Arlington’s Missing Middle zoning case—which is now on appeal after a ruling for the residents—for impeachment purposes. The inherent caution of most lawyers would lead to a recommendation to issue subpoenas in the ZFH case.

McGuireWoods’ duty is to do everything ethically possible to win the ZFH case. The City, as the client, would probably be reluctant to reject a recommendation to issue subpoenas by a law firm it is paying, or will pay, fees of several hundred thousand dollars.

Matters may have been compounded because subpoenas were issued during a period when the case was judgeless, meaning after the resignation of Judge David Schell and before the recent appointment of Judge H. Thomas Padrick, Jr. Judges generally dislike discovery disputes, but until recently there has been no judge to review discovery matters.

The ZFH subpoenas to Alexandria residents echo a question present in other contexts: If something can be done legally, does that automatically mean that it should be done?

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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In Part I, we emphasized the importance of metrics and dashboards to measure progress in city government initiatives, especially on housing and development projects. In this final installment, we focus on the city’s youth. Educational support services represent the city’s most significant effort to promote opportunity for all and, with federal and state funding included, the city’s largest budget expense.

We currently lack informative data on the quality of our public schools for all students and the number who lack access to essential resources.

Year after year, state and other academic assessments indicate that many students in Alexandria City Public Schools fall below various achievement standards. The reflexive response has been that a disproportionately high percentage of ACPS students have English-language or other learning deficits.

The criticism and response focus on the wrong data. To understand how well English-language learners are performing, we need to measure their progress, not just their attainment levels. To assess primary grade performance in math, we must determine how quickly students advance to the next level, such as moving from single-digit to double-digit addition, rather than merely whether they can perform double-digit addition.

Some students grasp English well, while others begin with a limited understanding. Some students excel in subtraction and multiplication, but show little progress; others with minimal math backgrounds demonstrate significant improvement. Typical attainment measures are relatively uninformative about both individual students and groups of students.

National or state efforts to assess progress impose top-down mandates and are conducted too infrequently to provide parents and teachers with useful guidance on progress made. Recently published National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, for instance, offer little insight into the progress of individual students. At times, it and similar tests create undesirable incentives.

A former ACPS administrator was urged by supervisory personnel to focus resources on students who are just below the threshold of an upcoming achievement standard. In other words, the administrator was advised to ignore those who are far below or well above the standard.

ACPS rightly raises concerns about the education evaluation program of Gov. Glenn Youngkin if it simply labels schools rather than offers measures that teachers and parents can use promptly to respond to each student’s ongoing longitudinal progress.

None of this is easy, but it is necessary. A primary objective of ACPS should be to help every student reach their maximum potential. We propose investing more in a bottom-up measurement process that teachers and parents find useful, allowing us to report each student’s progress as accurately as possible, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

When ACPS begins measuring each student’s progress from their current level, the data can sometimes be aggregated. Measuring the longitudinal progress of our ELL and other students, such as those achieving more than a year’s gain in performance, will start telling us how effectively our public schools serve them. Until then, we won’t know.

Beyond K-12 education, we hope the city will continue to add and track essential services and supports that are vital for helping very young children succeed, as discussed in the Ready Communities section of the Virginia Department of Education’s definition of School Readiness and in the efforts of Alexandrians through Kids’ First Years. This includes ongoing efforts to assess who is underserved and why.

As a community rich in talent, resources, and collaboration, we should remain at the forefront of early childhood investment. If we can’t succeed here, then who can? Measurement helps us know whether we are achieving our goals.

Please share your ideas for enhancing Alexandria. We will gather them and, with your permission, make them accessible.

Mark Eaton, a former lawyer, served on the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and taught English from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School.

Eugene Steuerle is an economist and co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and of ACT for Alexandria, the city’s community foundation.

They can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and Steuerle@comcast.net. Their newsletters are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com and https://the governmentwedeserve.substack.com.

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Innovative governance always requires adaptation, even in Alexandria, where elected bodies and management generally function well. New challenges include the recent conclusion of federal COVID-19 relief funding, the likely end of a national wealth bubble that includes real estate – the primary driver of Alexandria’s financial health – and the downsizing of the federal workforce.

We encourage the effective use of metrics and dashboards to improve public service. We are just two voices, and we invite anyone who wishes to share additional suggestions.

The city and Alexandria City Public Schools websites are a starting point. These sites could benefit from regular updates and the removal of outdated content. While the city and ACPS publish extensive data, we suggest that greater attention be given to reporting progress toward goals.

This aligns with City Manager James Parajon’s directive for departments to identify and report key performance indicators. The Department of Parks, Recreation & Cultural Activities exemplifies this through its updates on the annual replacement ratio of trees removed to trees planted and the number of trees pruned each year.

Measuring progress requires specifying and tracking goals. Updated public information should be provided occasionally on ongoing initiatives, such as improvements in Internet service, street closures, expansions and bike lanes. Two areas, housing and development projects, deserve special attention.

Housing

Regardless of how a court rules on the legality of the 2023 Zoning for Housing initiative, the city needs to track how effectively it achieves its overall housing goals. This requires broad monitoring of the extent of housing added to existing lots and net changes in both rental and owner-occupied housing based on rent and price.

Understanding the extent of gentrification similarly requires comprehensive, citywide assessments of progress or regression in the quantity and percentage of affordable housing units based on various standards of affordability.

The city’s online list of accessory dwelling units under construction offers a valuable fact-check, as does Arlington County’s online map showcasing properties developed under that county’s Missing Middle zoning amendments, which are currently delayed in court. However, neither approach reflects the overall progress.

Development Projects

Major development projects spark controversy; however, we should not forsake efforts with high expected returns merely because their inherent risk involves a chance of failure. Improved reporting and metrics boost the likelihood of achieving a successful balance.

The efficient use of Potomac Yard remains a valid public concern, and the arena controversy provides important insights. Crucially, the city never disclosed or fully evaluated factors necessary to gain public support and establish a solid foundation for a decision. Here are three examples:

Jobs. Exaggerated claims are common in construction projects. In this case, there was limited evidence provided about its overall impact on employment in the metropolitan area, as many positions would shift between jurisdictions. Furthermore, there was little evidence regarding how many new jobs would have benefited Alexandria residents.

Losses in other areas. The project’s economic viability relied partly on the effects throughout the metropolitan region that were not reported.

Risk disclosure. The financial risks that the city assumed, regardless of how remote or contingent, should have been disclosed early and in clear, understandable terms.

Incomplete analysis can obscure a zero-sum or negative-sum game, where one jurisdiction’s gains are another’s losses. Even more concerning, jurisdictional competition can add to private profit for any firm seeking additional government subsidies at the expense of taxpayers.

A clear lesson is that improved development coordination processes could help maximize the overall benefits for the region from any bidding competition.

Please share your ideas for enhancing Alexandria. We will gather them and, with your permission, make them accessible.

This article is part one of a two-part column.

Mark Eaton, a former lawyer, served on the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006 and taught English at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School, from 2007 to 2021. Eugene Steuerle is an economist and co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and ACT for Alexandria. They can be reached at aboutalexandria@ gmail.com and Steuerle@comcast.net. Their newsletters are available at aboutalexandria.substack. com and governmentwedeserve.substack.com.

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Alexandria’s FY 2026 operating and capital budgets are scheduled for adoption on April 30 so there is still time to consider this year’s budget themes and realities.

Budget work sessions generally show the city’s elected officials as highly dedicated people focused on the common good, not on politics or ideology. We should be grateful because if to govern is necessarily to choose, budget debates are where the choices are considered and made.

In public service organizations like the city government and the Alexandria City Public Schools, every budget choice affects every other budget choice. The City Council looks at the budget with a wide-angle lens; the School Board’s lens is narrower. These differing perspectives, and the Council having custody of the only checkbook, make disagreements inevitable.

ACPS consumes a significant portion of the city’s budget. For FY 2026, $281 million is proposed for school operations and $210 million is proposed for school capital projects.

Introducing more joint operations, or shared city and ACPS services, is a fond hope for some officeholders evaluating this year’s budget. Ideas such as organizing student transportation partially through DASH to reduce reliance on ACPS busses, or combining city and ACPS employees in a single health insurance risk pool, should be welcomed and explored. Unfortunately, staff responses at the March 5 Council-School Board work session suggested that shared operation proposals create modest, if any, savings.

Imagining that circumstances could be other than as they are does not resolve current budget decisions. For example, city elected officials who suggest that Northern Virginia jurisdictions try to persuade the Virginia state government to make direct grants to localities to relieve their budget problems are hoping for a revolution, or at least a significant change in how Virginia has historically operated.

This year’s budget discussions show that it will be impossible to win an argument (in the sense of changing minds) that involves numbers with the Mayor and Council. Their command of the financial facts, including the potential impacts of federal government contraction, is impressive.

Moreover, comparisons with other jurisdictions, for example, ACPS’ requested funding increases as a percentage of the city’s total budget, are of limited utility. Any comparison of Alexandria’s metrics to those of Fairfax, Loudoun or Prince William counties is immediately suspect because of the discrepancies in size, resources, and populations served.

Residents who testify at Council budget hearings seeking, for example, full funding of the George Washington’s Birthday Parade, are doing the same thing the School Board does: advocating for budget allocations to support values they believe in.

Budget discussions now and those that occurred when I was on the Board are alike in that penalizing ACPS through the budget for its shortcomings is the ultimate self-inflicted wound for Alexandria.

A major difference is that now ACPS is expected to successfully address social pathologies-fentanyl, cellphone and other screens, the pandemic-that impact young people more negatively than anything in prior years. A relentless focus on instruction, or what goes on in the classroom, remains essential for ACPS, but things are more complex now. The focus on instruction cannot ignore other imperatives, for example, student wellness.

The budget add/delete process, scheduled for this month, in which officeholders propose budget adjustments often reveals a paradox. People run for office on big ideas: to enhance the city’s quality of life, to improve public education, et cetera, and end up in budget debates on granular issues that involve modest amounts of money.

The Council-School Board work session was notable for calls from several participants for increased collaboration, for example “a way forward together on a new middle school.” One officeholder called for a “tone change,” adding that “working together should not be optional.”

At the work session, some officials expressed an interest in joint Council-Board long term planning. However, the City Manager pointed out that long term plans can rapidly become obsolete or overtaken by events.

The need to work together in a budget season of guaranteed disagreement, and even conflict, was revealed by the personal commitments described by each Councilor and Board member during the Council’s Feb. 1 retreat. One after another, the city’s elected officials committed to communicating with each other. One official raised the stakes by pledging to talk every month with their liaison from the other body.

Some of the city’s officeholders may read this. If so, please pick up the phone and call your counterpart on the other elected body. The stakes are high.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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The Alexandria Circuit Court is an important place for anyone interested in the future of the Zoning for Housing (ZFH) amendments to the city’s zoning code adopted in December 2023 and also in whether Jefferson-Houston will change from its current K-8 grade configuration.

The following is an attempt to distill the issues in the ZFH case (Coalition for a Livable Alexandria, et al. v. City of Alexandria, et al., Civil Action No. CL24-1039) and the Jefferson-Houston case (O’Brien v. Alexandria City Public Schools School Board, Civil Action No. CL25-0000126). The latter is a request for judicial review of the School Board’s decision to make Jefferson-Houston a middle school.

No prediction is made about the final outcomes, and no commentary is offered on the evidence or on the merits of the claims and defenses in these cases.

The ZFH Case

Retired Fairfax County Circuit Judge David S. Schell, who ruled for the objecting homeowners in Arlington County’s Missing Middle zoning case in September 2024, has scheduled the ZFH case for a five-day nonjury trial starting July 28, but this may change. On February 14, a letter from the Circuit Court advised the parties that Schell has fully retired as a “recall” judge—meaning he won’t be part of any cases he had been working on—and that the Virginia Supreme Court had been asked to designate a new judge.

Schell had previously dismissed the Coalition for a Livable Alexandria as a plaintiff in the ZFH case for lack of standing, or an insufficient showing of directly incurred harm. The remaining plaintiffs are Alexandria homeowners.

Count I of the Amended Complaint alleges that in adopting ZFH the City Council and the Planning Commission acted ultra vires, or beyond the authority granted by statute and the City Charter. Thus, the plaintiffs assert, ZFH was void ab initio, meaning null and void from the beginning.

Count I alleges, “City Council and the Planning Commission failed to consider the Comprehensive Plan, which includes the Stormwater Master Plan, the Master Transportation Plan, the Sanitary Sewer System Master Plan, Recycling Program Implementation Plan, Public Spaces Master Plan, the Community Energy Plan, and the Water Distribution Master Plan, among others” and that, “Without adequate studies or investigations, the Comprehensive Plan could not be updated, and the Plan’s elements could not address what is otherwise a drastic increase in density in low density areas.”

Count II alleges that the study performed by the Council and the Planning Commission, “addressed the feasibility of different housing types within low-density neighborhood lot requirements and what would entice developers, but then concluded without the benefit of any other studies that the Zoning Amendments would minimally affect surrounding properties” and infrastructure, “despite drastically increasing population density in formerly low-density neighborhoods.”

Thus, ZFH’s adoption is alleged to be, “arbitrary and capricious and not reasonably related to the public health, safety, morals, and general welfare and thus is void ab initio.”

Count III alleges that the Council and Planning Commission did not comply with the Virginia Code’s provisions for advertising public hearings because they, “did not advertise the November 14 and 18, 2023 public hearings as to the public hearings regarding Ordinances 5514 and 5515 for two successive weeks, and the notice that was advertised appeared more than 14 days before.” Count III also alleges written notice should have been sent by first class mail.

The case may turn on what the Council and Planning Commission considered in adopting ZFH. Last year, the defendants filed a Motion Craving Oyer asking that the Court require that a document sued upon, or a collateral document necessary to the plaintiffs’ claims, be treated as though it were part of the plaintiffs’ pleadings. The parties agreed that the Motion Craving Oyer could be deferred and refiled at the close of discovery. The practical effect is that the factual record before the court may be extensive.

The Jefferson-Houston Case

On January 21, a Jefferson-Houston parent, representing himself, sought judicial review of the School Board’s decision to make Jefferson-Houston a middle school.

The plaintiff alleges that the Board’s decision is flawed because of defective public notice: “The Board did not provide ‘reasonable notice to the public in a newspaper of general circulation in the school division’ at least seven days prior to the Board meeting on 19 December 2024, nor did the Board ever hold a public hearing to receive public comment on any motion.”

The plaintiff alleges, “The Board waited until all opportunities for the community to voice concern about the Board’s improperly noticed proposal to ‘make a plan’ to eliminate elementary education from Jefferson-Houston before amending that plan into the directive subject,” meaning the Board did not adopt a plan, it took final official action. A short description of this claim might be “bait-and-switch.”

Finally, the plaintiff alleges that the Board abused its discretion because it did not properly study or consider the impacts of its decision. On February 26, the Board’s counsel filed a Demurrer asserting various defenses.

The common through lines in the ZFH and Jefferson-Houston cases are not new: the factual record on which local government bodies base their decisions, and the required public notice provisions that precede those decisions, are extremely important.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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On October 24, 2024, The Alexandria Times published a voters’ guide asking all candidates in the city’s elections, “Does Alexandria need a second high school?” The majority of the City Council and School Board candidates answered, “Yes.”

What is the newly-opened 300,000-plus square foot Minnie Howard Campus of Alexandria City High School (ACHS) if not a second high school? Alexandria City Public Schools’ website describes a single multi-site high school but, as a practical matter, Alexandria now has two public high schools about a mile apart.

The essential questions, which are bound up in history and identity, are whether ACPS should continue to operate two high school buildings (and other high school options) under a single name and whether it is time to start planning for a third high school with its own name and identity.

This school year revealed a downside of ACHS’ single-school multiple-campus arrangement in the problems associated with a master schedule for 4,000 students requiring students to move between the King Street and Minnie Howard campuses. Thus far, campus-to-campus student travel has had problems, for example, missed busses. A teacher told me that there is no penalty, no “tardy,” for students late to class who come from the other building.

Entrepreneurs talk about scaling up a business to market prominence. ACPS, aided by the warm “one town, one team” emotions created by Disney’s Remember the Titans movie that was released in 2000, may have allowed ACHS to scale up to a point of diminishing returns for students and teachers.

Identity matters for a person, school, or city. Is it still essential to Alexandria’s identity that ACPS operate a single high school that stretches one name and administrative structure across multiple sites—or would our students and teachers be better served by independently organized high schools?

ACHS’s leadership structure reflects issues related to the school’s size. A high school principal is a demanding position. As a high school’s academic and social/cultural leader, a principal needs clear authority, visible presence in the school building, endless energy, and firm support from the administration and the School Board.

The executive principal who oversees ACHS’ multi-site operations may simply be spread too thin. ACHS has 27 administrators and seven Academy leads—teachers with reduced teaching loads-which creates a challenge for students trying to understand who does what.

The new Minnie Howard campus, a clear success, is larger than most Virginia high schools and reflects the latest thinking about high school education. The fear, an echo of the city’s segregated past, about an inevitably inferior second high school has been overtaken by the facts—the new Minnie Howard is a great building with an excellent staff.

Other cities Alexandria’s size managed to open a second (or third) high school in different ways. My hometown, unfortunately, delayed opening a second high school so long that students from the city’s east and west sides attended school in one building in early and late shifts until a second high school was opened. Many years later a third high school opened.

ACPS allocates students to different middle schools and elementary schools. Why should high schools be different? School officials speak of “getting their hands around” a situation. ACHS, in its current size and configuration, appears to require new approaches.

Minnie Howard could operate as an independent school. At the very least, a grades nine and 10, 11th and 12th grade configuration for Minnie Howard and King Street should be studied to see if the campus-to-campus travel problems can be solved or reduced. This approach might create problems for the new academy organizational plan, but it recognizes a reality: ACHS is organized in four grades.

When I was a T.C. Williams teacher, a City Councilor asked me if Alexandria needed a second high school. I answered confidently that a single high school was part of Alexandria’s DNA.

The city’s genetic makeup has changed since that time.

We can do better for our students and teachers by acknowledging the reality of our two high schools and planning for a third one.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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The newly installed School Board has an opportunity to begin its term by doing the right thing.

The old Minnie Howard building has been demolished. The grading and other site work for the new athletic fields west of the new school has begun. The new Board can create a lasting and fitting memorial to former Alexandria Mayor Kerry Donley by naming the athletic fields at Alexandria City High School’s Minnie Howard Campus in his honor.

A petition bearing more than 450 signatures urging that the new Minnie Howard fields be named after Donley was submitted in 2024. Last month, the outgoing Board directed Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt, Ed.D. to begin a public engagement process for the naming of Minnie Howard’s fields.

Donley, a City Councilor from 1988 to 1996, Vice Mayor from 1994 to 1996 and 2009 to 2012, and Mayor from 1996 to 2003, died tragically in July 2022 of a heart attack at 66. Donley’s community service involved dedicated work for numerous charitable organizations including Senior Services, Carpenter’s Shelter, the Alexandria United Way, and the Alexandria Campaign on Adolescent Pregnancy.

Donley, more than any political leader in Alexandria’s history, was familiar with athletic competitions at Minnie Howard. He faithfully watched his daughters compete in soccer and field hockey for the then-T.C. Williams High School on the Minnie Howard fields. I heard Donley confidently explain field hockey’s arcane rules, which are nothing like ice hockey’s rules, to befuddled parents and others at his daughters’ games.

Donley, an avid sportsman, was a regular attendee at T.C. Williams basketball games, an environment in which he had many friends. He took a three-year timeout from his banking career to serve a successful stint as the Alexandria City Public Schools Athletic Director.

Political scientists classify Alexandria as having a “weak mayor” system of local government, meaning that the mayor heads the city’s policy-making body, the City Council, while executive and managerial authority is vested primarily in a professional City Manager and his or her appointees.

The city also seems to have an “omnipresent mayor” system: The mayor is expected to be everywhere, all the time. Donley came as close to anyone to fulfilling this expectation by being relentlessly present in public.

As Mayor in the late 1990’s, Donley presciently said that Alexandria was, “…entering an era of bricks and mortar.” He was proven correct around 2002 when City Council-School Board discussions about a proposed $38 million HVAC retrofit to the mid-1960’s T.C. Williams High School building shifted suddenly and dramatically to planning for the largest public works project to that point in the city’s history, a new high school building.

ACHS’ King Street Campus opened in the fall of 2007 to criticism from some Alexandrians who said that it was too large or “overbuilt,” a concern that was eliminated by surging enrollments in the following years.

Donley was a steadfast supporter of Alexandria’s public schools, often describing himself as a “satisfied customer.” He had an upbeat sense of humor and a glad handing political style that could obscure the seriousness of his public service in Alexandria.

He was devoted to his family and his city, and never more so than when he was at the Minnie Howard athletic fields cheering on his daughters and their Titan teammates.

The new School Board should name the new Minnie Howard fields in his honor.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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The Hits

Potomac Yard, past and future: An April column on how Monumental Sports Entertainment and Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Wizards/Capitals arena project imploded (“Ted and Glenn, We Hardly Knew Ye”), and a May column about Potomac Yard’s future (“Fretting About Potomac Yard”) suggesting locating the City’s arts organizations there, generated significant comments. Outgoing Mayor Wilson has talked about the importance of “big swings,” or major commercial projects, to shore up the City’s tax base, so arena-sized developments may be coming.

A February column on the importance of high school alternative education programs (“Inflection Point or ‘Rinse and Repeat’?”) for students who have difficulty in Alexandria City High School’s large and complex environment generated reactions, as did the description of a teacher who feared for their safety. There were also comments on a September column (“ACHS Academies, Old and New Again”) on the initiative to organize student academies, a variation on an approach tried years ago.

An October column, “ISO Better School Performance Reporting,” on how school performance might be better measured and reported if standardized test scores were deemphasized in favor of longitudinal progress metrics, while not specific to Alexandria, also drew several comments.

The In-Betweens

Columns on local politics seemed to occupy a middle ground. August’s column, “The Big Timeout,” looked at the effects of the City’s quirky election calendar and the negative effects of this year’s uncompetitive election of all nine members of the School Board. “Good for us, bad for democracy,” a School Board member-elect told me.

March’s column, “Checks and Balances,” tried to make sense of former Mayor Bill Euille’s acceptance of a $260,000 check from a local developer and why the matter was not pursued by legal authorities. The column’s explanation for the situation appeared to be confirmed in a letter the Times published from Euille after the column ran.

July’s column, “Leaf Blowers, Alexandria’s Noise Ordinance and the Dillon Rule” tried to explain the gridlock involving City and state officials over regulating gas-powered leaf blowers. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has issued an opinion confirming that Alexandria has the authority to regulate these devices.

The Misses

January’s column, “Zoning for Housing: An Afterword” tried to put 2023’s zoning debate in perspective. The column seemed like a good idea at the time, but it landed without much effect. As a practical matter, most people had moved on to the Potomac Yard arena debate and other concerns.

November’s column, “Measured Restraint is the Best Course,” about the planned changes to King Street in front of Bradlee Shopping Center, and the impact of the modernization of George Mason Middle School on the green space behind the school, is probably a “miss.” Both situations seem to have progressed too far for there to be any hope of fresh looks by the authorities.

Following Up

A February 2022 column, “Repair the ACHS Cistern,” urged ACPS to repair the 400,000-gallon underground cistern at the ACHS King Street Campus that will collect and recycle runoff surface water. The projected completion date for the cistern repairs was this past spring, which stretched into the summer.

On Nov. 1, ACPS Executive Director of Facilities Dustin Davis said, “There were delays in fabrication of parts needed to complete the project. The remaining work is scheduled for completion during the ACPS winter break to accommodate a required water outage to install the necessary parts.”

On the stalled installation of solar panels at the ACHS Minnie Howard Campus and Douglas MacArthur Elementary School, Davis said, “There is currently not a projected timeline for solar array installation at Douglas MacArthur Elementary School and the ACHS Minnie Howard Campus. Interconnection requirements with electrical substations have required additional planning to complete the project. ACPS Executive Leadership is actively considering options for a path forward.”

Let’s keep hope alive in 2025.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https:/aboutalexandria.substack.com

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