Sur-prise, sur-prise, sur-prise, as Gomer Pyle used to say: Panels hand-selected by the leadership of Fairfax County Public Schools have come down on the side of, well, the leadership of Fairfax County Public Schools when it comes to keeping two purportedly naughty books on high-school shelves.
The decision was announced, perhaps as smugly and self-righteously as humanly possible, by school officials yesterday.
The books were yanked after a parent complained (and started reading passages at a School Board meeting) in September. One can say that was the snowball that, six weeks later, led to Glenn Youngkin winning the governorship. But with the coast now clear (or so they think), those same school leaders want the books back in libraries.
Haven’t read them so I can’t judge their literary merits. But it’s very clear that if anyone thought Northern Virginia school boards were going to tone down their we-know-best attitudes based on election results, that’s just not going to happen until the public really rises up.
BUILDER’S GROUP CRANKY OVER BIDEN POLICIES: It’s been interesting to watch the verbiage coming from two major housing trade organizations – the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders – over the past year.
While the Realtors’ group seems to be going full-bore “woke” and seeing everything through the lens of equity (whatever that nebulous phrase truly means), the homebuilders’ organization is being more aggressive in pushing back against the Biden administration on specific items
Consider this comment, put out as a press release, from National Assocation of Home Builders’ president Chuck Fowke. He said it was “inexplicable and extremely disappointing” that the Biden administration was attempting to end logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, while simultaneously increasing tariffs on Canadian lumber.
The efforts “will exacerbate housing-affordability woes as builders continue to struggle with lumber supply-chain bottlenecks that have added thousands of dollars to the cost of a new home,” Fowke said.
(And not just added thousands to the cost of a new home; good luck getting a home built in a timely manner these days, as it just can’t be done.)
Ah well, elections have consequences, don’t they? More people seem to be figuring that out every day.
GO, WARHAWKS! Had things turned out differently and my parents not moved from Vienna to the wild west of Fairfax County in the middle of my eighth-grade year, I would have gone on to attend James Madison High School.
(Fun fact: Had I done so, I would have been a classmate with Jessica Kelty, who years later would be the attorney for the Journal Newspapers when I was the editor. Ah, fun times fighting off unionization efforts and the like while there…)
I bring this up because, while my alma mater Herndon High School had a football season with no wins, Madison is rolling along in the football playoffs, competing Saturday for the region title. So I’ll “adopt” the Warhawks in their game against Centreville and wish them the best.
– Scott McCaffrey