Press Rewind podcast
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The week’s top stories
-A trial has been set for next year in the case of a former Stafford County teacher who filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against four female former H.H. Poole Middle School students. Michele Egan alleged that the students assaulted her during a January 2024 brawl that was caught on video, and that she suffered traumatic brain injury and partial blindness. Taft Coghill Jr. has the details.
-Low water flow and high water temperatures led to a die-off of river redhorse fish in the Rappahannock River recently. Last weekend’s record-breaking weather left the river suffering, according to Friends of the Rappahannock, Adele Uphaus writes.
-The Fredericksburg School Board on Monday approved new start times for all schools except for preschool programs. The move was presented as a way to improve transportation in the division, which last year saw a lack of bus drivers, prolonged bus rides, and delayed arrivals and departures, Uphaus reports.
-In other education news, the Stafford School Board will meet this week to finalize its budget for this fiscal year. That’s because the county Board of Supervisors voted last week to take back $2.4 million in local revenue the School Board previously requested because the locality is getting more money from the state than it planned for. The supervisors are exploring using the previously allocated education money for employee bonuses. Uphaus has the story.
-King George Sheriff Chris Giles is retiring after 36 years working in law enforcement, 34 of them in the county. He will step down at the end of this year, and he’s petitioned the King George Circuit Court to appoint Maj. Patrick Weston as sheriff to fulfill the final year of his term. Before arriving in King George, Giles was the Bowling Green police’s town sergeant, Coghill writes.
Go figures (numbers in the news)
25 — As in, Sept. 25. That’s the release date for the album “Songs From The Knoxville Project” by Angela Easterling. It tells the story of her family’s journey from western North Carolina to East Tennessee during the Civil War. But this doesn’t sound like your father’s kind of history lesson. Stephen Hu talked to Easterling in advance of a show she’s performing at the downtown Fredericksburg library. The story is in our arts and entertainment newsletter, Free Time.
What they’re saying
“They were not property, though the law once called them so. They were not items in a ledger, or tally marks in a census that refused to record their names. They were mothers, they were fathers, sons, daughters, people who woke before dawn, who loved, who grieved, and who themselves grieved for those who laid them to rest.” -Kim Taylor-Wilson, member, Stafford County’s Architectural Review Board. She was talking about enslaved people buried on land where a data center project is planned.
Sunday read
Free Press Editor-in-Chief Joey LoMonaco has begun a series of stories on youth gun violence in the Fredericksburg area and what is being done to address the issue. The first installment looks at Spotsylvania County’s Olde Greenwich community, which saw a mass shooting more than a year ago.
