Affordable Housing 101

Photo: Fumigene / Flickr

Charlottesville is undergoing an affordable housing crisis. So the non-profit organization IMPACT (Interfaith Movement Promoting Action by Congregations Together) invited Dave Leibson, the Vice President of Alliance for Housing Solution in Arlington to provide an “Affordable Housing 101” crash course at the Church of the Incarnation in Charlottesville.  WMRA's Marguerite Gallorini reports.

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Dave Leibson has been managing and supporting affordable housing in the U.S. and abroad for 40 years, so he knows why it matters.

LEIBSON: If you're concerned about education: the success of our children - very much wrapped up in the housing, in the neighborhoods they live in.

About 40 people came to listen carefully to his talk. The goal: to provide the community with some tools to be effective advocates for affordable housing. He underlined the importance of partnerships and government help.

LEIBSON: You're going to need help, whether you're trying to develop something or whether you're just advocating on policies. You can't do affordable housing without government help. The numbers just don't work.

He also underlined the importance of negotiations when planning new affordable housing projects.

LEIBSON: Just to illustrate for example in Arlington, people who manage the budget don't want to do a bond for housing. But, what if they did a bond to do some of the infrastructure that's required for the housing? Suddenly I can take some of the cost off that project, the finance people don't have to say the taxpayers were doing housing finance: win-win.

And it’s not just about the current crisis: it’s also about the future.

LEIBSON: Twenty years from now, you're going to be as dense as Arlington is, I know it, and you should be planning and building your tools for that now.

This story appeared on WMRA News.

Digging Into Virginia's History of Sterilization

Lulu Miller / Photo: Kristen Finn

Lulu Miller, former Radiolab producer and co-founder and co-host of Invisibilia on NPR, is currently a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to write her book: Why Fish Don’t Exist,looking at how we categorize the world.  Virginia performed the second-highest number of forced sterilizations in the country, and a chapter in her book focuses on the not-so-old practice of eugenics. WMRA’s Marguerite Gallorini reports.

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In the 20th century, eugenics included the forced sterilization of people deemed “unfit” by the State – which could mean mental illness but also promiscuity, homosexuality, or even swearing. It was legalized after a Supreme Court ruling following a case in Virginia in the 1930s, and has never been overturned since. Lulu Miller recounts how Mark Bold, while he was a law student at Liberty University, started asking questions about this law.

LULU MILLER: What everybody told him was that it was actually technically in this weird purgatory where it's legal at the Constitutional level, never been overturned, but on a state-by-state basis, every single state had repealed it. So you couldn't really get sterilized because it's not legal at your state - you know.

But he dug further. And then he saw it wasn’t really dead, like in West Virginia for instance. Note that this happened in 2010:

MILLER: He wondered if that might be one of these weird arcane laws that no one actually obeys. So he decided that he would call the circuit clerk's office in Charleston, West Virginia. He invented a fictional daughter who is 22 years-old - so above the age of 21 - and he imagined that she was promiscuous and that she had intellectual disabilities. He took a deep breath, he called them up, and he said he was the father wanting to get her sterilized.

The clerk on the other end of the phone said that he just had to file a motion for sterilization and that the judge would most likely agree to it because, in her words, "they know it needs to be done."

MILLER: He was just shocked and chilled by her tone, just how regular it was.

Mark Bold now runs the Justice for Sterilization Victims Project. Today, many victims are still living. The State of Virginia officially apologized to the victims in 2002, and in 2015 the General Assembly set aside  25,000 dollars for each of them.

This story appeared on WMRA News.

Virginia's Teacher Shortage

Some experts say the teacher shortage in Virginia is now a crisis. And not only is there a downward trend in enrollment in teaching curriculums overall, but the lack of African-Americans in that field is even more alarming at a time when diversity in classrooms is becoming increasingly necessary. WMRA’s Marguerite Gallorini has this overview.

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Crowded classrooms and less one-on-one attention for students, overworked teachers who also have to serve  as social workers and psychologists, plus mountains of paperwork… The situation in Virginia schools has gotten worse.

STEVEN STAPLES: I think we're approaching what we would call "crisis proportions."

Steven Staples is the State Superintendent of Public Instruction at the Virginia Department of Education.

STAPLES: As of last year, there were over 1,000 vacant positions in October of the school year when obviously students were already back in school. So that's a pretty serious problem I think for all school divisions.

Mathematics, Special Education and Science are the areas with the most need – but the problem is reaching across the entire curriculum spectrum. That includes teaching jobs in elementary schools, which used to be the easier positions to fill. Part of the problem is a shrinking pool of teaching students in the pipeline.

JIM LIVINGSTON: To make problems worse, since 2008, there's been a drop of 30% in the number of college students enrolling in teacher preparation programs in the Commonwealth.

That’s Jim Livingston, President of the Virginia Education Association.

LIVINGSTON: What's happening is our teacher pipeline is literally drying up at a time when we are seeing a spike in retirements.

Everyone agrees on a number of factors: there is pay…

LIVINGSTON: Currently, at the end of last year, Virginia now ranks 32nd in average teacher salary: almost $8,000 behind the national average.

There is the cost of training…

STAPLES: Many universities ended up moving to a five-year program where students would need to stay to get a master’s in order to get licensed, not what it previously been undergraduate. And what we're hearing from some colleges and universities is that kids were willing to stay and get a four-year degree and come out and teach, but that fifth year was costly, and they thought that impacted it.

Also, the profession has lost respect over the years.

DIAS: I can talk with older mentors in the community who can tell me stories about when they were growing up, teachers were kind of on the same level as doctors and lawyers, and now teaching doesn't get that same respect.

That’s Tamara Dias. A former Spanish teacher, she is now the Executive Director of African-American Teaching Fellows, an organization in Charlottesville working to develop and retain African-American teachers to support the schools in Albemarle County and Charlottesville City. She mentions another factor: the high test requirements to become a teacher in Virginia.

DIAS: I've had colleagues that wanted to be teachers and are now teachers in North Carolina or in Maryland because of one test or one score. I also have teachers who I'm friends with in Virginia who took a test four times. And so you're thinking about playing $100-plus four times just to become a teacher in a field where you already don't make a lot of money. [laughs]

House Delegate David Toscano says he is well aware of the issue.

DAVID TOSCANO: In this next budget, I think the governor will have more money for teachers and I am going to be fully supportive of that; and we'll try to be working on some new regulations that will make it easier for teachers to want to stay in the profession. We can pass some laws to do that, and we can pass some budgetary amendments that will change the salary schedule for teachers.

But there’s something else: parallel to the general trend, African-American students are even less likely to enroll in teacher preparation programs.

DIAS: I have other students who would say "I'm a first-generation college student and I have to make it and I have to be able to come back and help my family. I can't help my family on a teaching salary. 

According to the Virginia Department of Education, nearly  half of students in public Virginia schools are minority students, while only 16% of teachers are non-white. In Albemarle County, a third of the student body is non-white, but  only 8% of their teachers are non-white. And Dias says that’s important.

DIAS: For the nation to be so diverse, for this to be such a diverse community, and to have students say that "I've never had a teacher who looks like me:" that is impactful.

So what can be done? Statewide measures could encourage more student teachers, whether it be in the form of grants, by taking down some barriers to licensure through loan forgiveness or reverting to an undergraduate degree.

STAPLES: I think you'll see some of those percolating through policy decisions either on the General Assembly side or the State Board of Education side over the next few months.

As for teachers of color, the Virginia Department of Education partnered with the Virginia Education Association to set up a Virginia Minority Educator Recruitment Summit back in February - another one is planned for the spring.

DIAS: We actually offered six of our fellows the chance - we took them down to Richmond for the Summit. A lot of our fellows - because we’re still trying to increase diversity - are the only teachers of color in their schools. So for them to attend a professional conference where they can meet other teachers of color was a great opportunity. They kind of got to see role models because they saw people who are in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and in education so they could see "This is what I could do in 15 or 20 years, here's how I could still impact education."

This story appeared on WMRA News.

Limiting Weapons at Rallies

A petition, a state lawsuit and a bill proposal from Charlottesville all aim to address the issue of violence at public rallies such as that experienced on August 12. / Photo: Marguerite Gallorini

The aftermath of August 12 in Charlottesville prompted many responses, including a report that was released on Friday [Dec. 1] citing multiple problems with the police response to the white supremacists that rallied over the summer.  But there have also been calls for more regulation of weapons and private militias in the city. WMRA’s Marguerite Gallorini has this overview of those proposals.

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[Crowd demonstrating]

One thing that comes up regularly in conversations about August 12 is the frightening display of heavy weaponry in the city’s streets that day. It was a wake-up call, and some citizens responded.

DAVID SWANSON: I started up a petition asking the City of Charlottesville to prevent anyone from bringing weapons - guns, knives, sticks - to rallies in public places with public permits, and I have gotten no reply whatsoever regarding knives or sticks.

That’s David Swanson, an author and anti-war activist from Charlottesville.

SWANSON: But there is a law that has a list of several cities and counties in Virginia where supposedly you are allowed to ban at least certain kinds of guns, and Richmond is on that list, and Charlottesville isn't - and this is what I've been told by folks here in Charlottesville and by our Delegate in government in Richmond, is that you have to be on that list.

To address this, Democratic House Minority Leader David Toscano is proposing changes during the next General Assembly session starting in January.

DAVID TOSCANO: I predict that there will be many gun safety measures introduced in this General Assembly session. As to Charlottesville and Albemarle, we want to put in a bill that will allow us as a locality to regulate weapons in public spaces like ten other localities are already allowed to do in Virginia.

At the last City Council meeting [November 20] Lisa Robertson, Chief Deputy City Attorney for Charlottesville, cited the example of a similar bill in Tennessee.

LISA ROBERTSON: It's exactly what we need: Tennesse is a Dillon's Rule State, they're a State that allows open-carry of weapons without a permit and conceal-carry of firearms with a permit. They're very similar to us. And as of July 1st, they adopted a bill that allows localities the same authority as the governor has given State agencies at the local level to regulate these things in public spaces. What they've said is that if you have a large event that's taking place for instance in a park, if you take certain steps to manage the area and to control the entrances and to do searches of people on the way in and to post the area's been one that during that event, you're not allowed to have firearms in that area, you can do things a certain way.

SWANSON: A bill through the Virginia legislature that would make very clear that every locality has the right to ban weapons at its own discretion I think would be an excellent step. The next step would be for the State of Virginia to ban or at least restrict weapons statewide.

While not about weapons specifically, there is now a state lawsuit against private militias. Philip Zelikow, attorney and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, recalled a case that can provide a precedent for Charlottesville.

PHILIP ZELIKOW: I remembered, from my own experience in litigation against right-wing extremist groups in the 1980s, back in Texas, that Texas, like most states, has laws that prohibit private armies. They prohibit paramilitary groups arming themselves and coming to political confrontations. They prohibit self-appointed peacekeepers. These are old laws; some of them go back to the very founding of the Republic. So Virginia, like most states, also has these laws in the books.

Drawing from this, the City Council of Charlottesville joined the Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection in filing a state lawsuit asking “to prohibit key “Unite the Right” organizers and an array of participating private paramilitary groups and their commanders from coming back to Virginia to conduct illegal paramilitary activity.”  But what about the Second Amendment? Here’s Professor Zelikow again.

ZELIKOW: Whatever you think about the right to bear arms for individual self-defense, this is not a right that then allows you to elbow aside the local sheriff and make yourself the sheriff of your county, and organize twenty of your friends with assault weapons to set up a private militia. That's not what the Second Amendment was meant to protect. The Second Amendment explicitly says that militias are to be "well-regulated," of course, by the State. Then they meant the States, that individual States each had the job of keeping the peace and organizing the militias. If everybody could organize their own militias and everybody could organize their own police, democratic government would disappear.

Regarding the lawsuit, motions to dismiss are pending in the state court. As for the petition, David Swanson hasn’t heard back from City Council members, but he said he would check in with allies, like the local Amnesty International or the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, to see how they could press City Council to act. Indeed, Jason Kessler recently announced he applied to hold another rally to protest against “government civil rights abuse” at an anniversary rally in Emancipation Park on Aug. 11-12 of next year.

This story appeared on WMRA News.