The eminent social philosopher, my mother, told me, “As people get older, they don’t change, they get more so.”
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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Who said “Alexandrians are generally in favor of progress. However, many of them have problems with change”? It’s worthy of Churchill or Twain.