Special Memorial Day Parade Edition May 23 - 29 , 2024
Falls Church, Virginia • w w w . fc n p . c o m • Free
Founded 1991 • Vol. XXXIV N o . 15
The City of Falls Church’s Independent, Locally-Owned Newspaper of Record, Serving N. Virginia
Forecaster Warns of Economic Turbulence
CELEBRATING DIVERSITY
Chamber Event Speaker Says F.C. May Be Exception by Nicholas F. Benton
Falls Church News-Press
According to News-Press sources, residential real estate prices have gone up 9 percent in the City of Falls Church just since January, and 50 homes have already sold in the City since then, with another 20 in the process of selling. This compares to 80 homes which sold all of last year here. This stunning news came forth at Tuesday’s monthly luncheon of the Falls Church Chamber of Commerce, where Dr. Keith Waters of the George Mason University Center for Regional Analysis spoke about what he called “an existential crisis” facing the region now, even though he acknowledged that the City of Falls Church is “crushing it” in terms of economic development right now. But the biggest issue facing the region, which Falls Church may not be able to avoid eventually, is the fact that the kinds of jobs that attract and retain a skilled workforce of professionals, centered on federal government jobs, may be leaving. In the past, even during the Great Recession of 2008 and during the Great Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020-22, the jobs and workforce lost in the region were on the lower end of the economic spectrum, less skilled and lower paying. But now, the job losses in this region since the pandemic have been of a higher skilled and better edu-
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REPRESENTATIVES CELEBRATING ASIAN American, Pacific Island, Native Hawaiian cultures appeared prior to the Falls Church City Council meeting Monday out in front at City Hall to entertain an assembled crowd with dancing and drums. (News-Press photo)
Analysis: Meridian Music, From F.C. to Carnegie Hall
by Nicholas F. Benton
Falls Church News-Press
A number of weeks earlier than usual, the Class of 2024 of Falls Church’s Meridian High School will be graduated in a ceremony on the turf of the school’s main athletic field next Tuesday, May 28. It was a particularly remarkable year for students in the school’s instrumental music program led by the Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award-winning and Fulbright Award recipient Mary Jo West, in her 26th year as director of the program. It was made dou-
bly special by the visit of scores of Meridian students performing as a wind ensemble to the historic stage of one of the world’s most iconic spaces, the Carnegie Hall in New York City in early April. In the program handed out to the Carnegie Hall audience, the 14,500 souls constituting the City of Falls Church community were highlighted for their “unwavering commitment to educational excellence” and “robust support from boosters, the administration and the community.” West’s instrumental music achievements at Meridian High have been augmented by the work
of drama instructor Shawn Northrup and choral instructor Jamie Sample. Far from merely an “extracurricular” offering of the Falls Church school system, those programs are central to the educational goals of the system, and that has nowhere been better expressed than the new 550-page compendium entitled “Music and the Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness” edited by the famous soprano Renee Fleming, who is currently performing with the New York Metropolitan Opera’s production of the groundbreaking new production of “The Hours.”
This epic work consists of dozens of important essays kicked off by Fleming’s own essay, “Music and the Mind.” In it, she cites the National Institutes of Health’s new “brain initiative” that identifies the brain as “the most complex known object in the universe,” the “biological need to express and create,” and music as “more than just a distraction that has long-lasting effects on the brain.” It is about the evolution of “the power of art to affect our minds and bodies.”
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