August 13 - 19, 2015
Fa lls Chur c h, V i r g i ni a • ww w. fc np. c om • Fr ee
Fou n d ed 1991 • Vol. XXV No. 25
Falls Church • Tysons Corner • Merrifield • McLean • North Arlington • Bailey’s Crossroads
Inside This Week Council Authorizes Bond Sale of $6.55 Million The Falls Church City Council voted unanimously to authorize the sale of $6.55 million in bonds to cover a wide array of capital improvement and other expenses, with the exception of two items, it had approved earlier this year. See News Briefs, page 9
New ‘Mason Row’ Plans Coming to Council Sept. 8
F.C. Schools Top Region in Annual SOL Report Card, New Year Looms Football Scrimmage Friday, New Teacher Orientation Readied by Nicholas F. Benton
Falls Church News-Press
The revised application by the Spectrum Development LLC group for its 4.3-acre Mason Row project at the intersection of N. West St. and W. Broad should come before the City Council for a public presentation at its next meeting on Sept. 8. See News Briefs, page 9
Paul Krugman: GOP Candidates & Obama’s Failure to Fail What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. See page 12
Press Pass with Preservation Hall Jazz Band
Ben Jaffe, the 44-year-old creative director of Preservation Hall, readily admits that New Orleans has changed a lot in the almost 10 years since Hurricane Katrina. See page 22
Index
Editorial..................6 Letters..............6, 23 News & Notes.10-11 Comment........12-15 Calendar.........16-17 Business News....18
Food & Dining.20-21 Classified Ads .....24 Comics, Sudoku & Crossword...........25 Critter Corner.......26
OSCAR AWARD-WINNING ACTRESS Julianne Moore and Oscar-winning producer Bruce Cohen, both J.E.B. Stuart alums, have joined the movement to rename the Falls Church school named for a Confederate general. (Photo: Drew Costley)
J.E.B. Stuart Alums, Oscar Winners Join School Name Change Fight by Drew Costley
Falls Church News-Press
Oscar Award-winning actress Julianne Moore and Oscar Award-winning producer Bruce Cohen, both alumni of J.E.B. Stuart High School, started a Change.org petition on Monday, Aug. 3, calling for the Fairfax County School Board to rename the Falls Church high school after Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice. Marshall, who lived in the
Lake Barcroft community in the Falls Church area of Fairfax County from 1968 until his death in 1993, was also the chief architect of the winning legal strategy in Brown v. Board of Education that led to the eventual end of legal segregation in America’s school system. “Not only was Marshall the first AfricanAmerican Supreme Court justice and a civil rights leader, he was our neighbor and a member of our community,” the petition reads. Moore, who went to Stuart
from 1975 – 1977, and Cohen, who graduated from Stuart in 1979, have been friends since their early teen years. Their petition, which is separate from the original petition calling for the Fairfax Couny School board to change the names of Stuart, Robert E. Lee High School and W.T. Woodson High Schools started by a group called Alumni for Change, has over 26,000 supporters. That’s compared to less than
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While the relatively privileged circumstances that many of the students in the Falls Church School System enjoy is credited with their collective top rate performance again this year in the annual Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) report, if you talk to the school system leadership, a lot of it is also due to extraordinary teaching efforts. Students in the small Falls Church system ranked first in the Northern Virginia region according to the annual SOL report issued Tuesday with a 92 percent pass rate for all students in reading, 86 percent for Loudoun County schools, 86 percent for Arlington, 85 percent for Fairfax and 83 percent for Stafford. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the poorest performing school systems were Manassas City at 72 percent, City of Alexandria at 71 percent and Manassas Park at 71 percent. But the emphasis of the report, as always, is on rates of improvement, and all the above-named schools, including Falls Church’s, showed increases in their pass rates. In reading, Falls Church improved by a single percentage point. In math scores, Falls Church City Schools came in best in the region there, too, with a pass rate at 90 percent, equal to last year, while Arlington County was 87 percent, Loudoun County 85 percent, Stafford County 84 percent, Fairfax County 83 percent and Culpepper County 82 percent, and Alexandria was at the bottom with 69 percent.
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