East End schools need $500,000, pronto

Editor’s note: This is the last regular edition of The Lookout this year. You may get some one-off emails from me between now and January, but I’m pausing the normal publishing schedule to recharge a bit before 2025. See you on the other side!—Dave.

The schools that serve students in the East End need half a million dollars’ worth of immediate repairs, according to a recent inspection report commissioned by Richmond Public Schools.

Naturally, the bill for critical maintenance and repairs across the entire citywide school system is even higher: $43.7 million, as soon as possible.

“We need to get ourselves in a position of a proactive state versus a reactive one,” RPS’ chief operating officer Dana Fox told The Richmonder, which reported on the inspection dossier prepared by consulting firm Bureau Veritas (BV) earlier this month. “And the only way to do that is to know where things are about to fail.” 

To the Richmond Times-Dispatch, she referred to the analyses as “our cry for help.”

The project—which began in 2022 and cost RPS some $495,000—is honestly pretty impressive in both scope and depth. Richmond’s ~21,000 students attend 50 schools across the city, and BV inspected them all, generating lengthy assessments of everything from their HVAC systems, to their playground equipment. If you’ve got some time, you might enjoy nerding out with the full complement of PDFs here.

If you don’t have time, don’t sweat it. The Lookout reviewed the individual BV reports for each of the eight public schools listed on the education section of the Church Hill Association’s website, and put together a quick spreadsheet of the key findings. Not sure how legible it’s going to be here, but:

Of the eight schools in the East End, BV found that two (Fairfield Court Elementary, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle) required “no immediate needs;” a third, Henry L. Marsh III Elementary, needs only a $6,500 repair to its playground surface. That’s the good news.

The upper end of the price spectrum is much gnarlier. Inspectors found $122,400 worth of urgent repairs at Woodville Elementary (including foundation work and roof/siding leaks), and put down Armstrong High for a whopping $331,300, citing deficiencies in everything from exterior walls and roofs, to cafeteria steam kettles and entryway metal detectors. Not great!

Councilmember Cynthia Newbille did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Lookout on BV inspectors’ findings at the schools listed here, all of which are in her (and our) district.

📜 Possum Poetry

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🪧 Teamsters picket Amazon’s Richmond warehouses

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters are striking today at seven metropolitan hubs and picketing at “hundreds” more of the $2.37-trillion firm’s warehouses across the country. Some of those are right here in Richmond.

On Friday morning, The Lookout visited the picket line at RIC 4, Amazon’s 2.7-million square-foot facility just past city limits in Henrico County, which handles some of the innumerable Amazon packages that wind up on so many stoops here in Church Hill. Since 6am yesterday, members of Teamsters Local 322, along with the Richmond chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, Richmond for All, and other pro-labor orgs have been demonstrating on Henrico Turnpike, calling on Amazon to recognize and bargain in good faith with some 10,000 unionized employees across the country, which it has been illegally refusing to do for two years.

(Naturally, the company insists the union’s complaints before the National Labor Relations Board is meritless, and has argued that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional.)

Amazon has at least four other fulfillment centers in the Richmond area, and nine total locations here, according to a gauzy March 2024 item from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It employs some 7,000 workers in the region, none of which are currently organized. Local 322’s director of organizing Dwayne Johnson hopes the picket will help to change that.

Between Amazon’s broad River City footprint and the standard holiday chaos, “we’ve got a lot to cover,” he told me this morning. But they’re holding the line even so: he and a DSA member named David (didn’t catch his last name) had union troubadour Billy Bragg blasting from hip-high speaker towers beneath a Teamsters-branded pop-up tent when I arrived at the fulfillment center’s southerly gate on Henrico Turnpike around 8:40am. A block north, Fredericksburg’s vice-mayor Charlie Frye, a longtime Teamster who works at United Parcel Service, picketed the facility’s main gate; in a black Toyota Tundra parked near Johnson’s tent, another UPS Teamster who’d been picketing since the action began yesterday morning caught a nap. Johnson told The Lookout that similar pickets are underway at Amazon’s other fulfillment centers across the city.

The Teamsters are not currently calling for a shopper boycott on Amazon, and to my eye, RIC 4 was operating smooth enough on Friday morning. (Less so at the strikes elsewhere: in NYC, police acting as Amazon’s agents locked arms to help scabs cross Teamster picket lines and arrested several striking workers.) Johnson, who I first met covering the Local 322 drive at Stone Brewing Company’s Fulton Hill plant this summer—which the company successfully busted in October 2024 with help from expensive outside consultants—says the Richmond pickets are less about disrupting the flow of Amazon packages and more about laying groundwork for a future drive by raising the union’s profile with rank-and-file workers coming in and out of the facilities.

Not to mention drivers on Henrico Turnpike. Every few minutes I was there, the picketers got honks and fist-pumps of support from a passing vehicle. “This is the best [location] to be at,” Johnson told me, waving to a pick-up truck driver as he beeped past. “The others are all dead-ends.”

📸 A Very CHill Photo

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