MANASSAS -- Manassas leaders Monday night passed a resolution in support of ratification by the Commonwealth of Virginia of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution.

A similar last fall in Prince William County failed despite heavy lobbying from Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly.

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PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Jackie Gaston is throwing her hat in the ring for Coles District School Board.

She’s a special education teacher in Fairfax County as well as a mother of three boys whose experience with PTO’s, meetings in the schools, and school improvement planning teams for her own children in who attend Prince William County Public Schools led her to want to serve.

Keeping good teachers is a big issue for Gaston, 51.

“Teacher retention is absolutely critical,” said Gaston. “We lose most young teachers within the first three years. We’ve got to do more to retain them.”  

Another challenge:  There aren’t enough teachers coming into the industry as there are retiring from the industry. “ On the School Board, she’ll ask “what can we do to bring the best and the brightest to Prince William County and to keep them?” Gaston said.

Building a  “solid mentoring program” for teachers to lean on during the first three years can help with teacher retention. “Because you go through such growth as a new teacher,” Gaston said.

She said this will not only help new teachers but also revitalize veteran teachers and bring new ideas and energy into the mix. Gaston also believes in continuing education for teachers –

“Whether it’s to go for a master’s degree or to learn a new skill, or even just to learn the most updated technology in your classroom…” Gaston said.

She’s also focused on having resources available for teachers, bus drivers, and office staff that could help them such as wellness programs or support groups.

Prince William County, like others, has a bus driver shortage. She said school officials should talk to bus drivers and find out how to get more people to fill the open positions become bus drivers. “What are we going to do if we can’t get our kids to school safely?” Gaston said.

Gaston also says she wants equity for all students.

“I am a special educator, so equity as far as getting the curriculum, understanding the curriculum, performing to the best of their abilities. And I also believe in equity as far as the facility. We’re a growing community, we’re building large beautiful facilities in some of the newer areas. I don’t want to neglect some of the other areas and try to bring both schools and their facilities up to standard, up to what our students all deserve,” said Gaston.

When it comes to getting moving children out of trailer classrooms, Gaston has an idea: modular buildings. It ’s basically a temporary building that had a front and back door that could lock and was equipped with sprinklers and an HVAC system, Gaston explained. She used to teach in one.

She said the modular building was connected to the school and was equipped “with more safety features than just a trailer.”

She suggested that this be something the county look into. One modular building could replace several trailers – the modular building Gaston was in had about 10 classrooms in it.  

“And again, the dream is to have all our kids under one roof,” Gaston said. But until there are more school facilities built, Gaston said, “Let’s look at what all the other options are out there so that we can keep classroom sizes down and still provide the safety that everybody wants.”

Gaston is married to her husband Micheal. The couple has a 27-year-step daugher who lives in Pennsylvania, a 16-year-old sophomore at Osbourn Park High School, and two twin sons aged 13 at Parkside Middle School.

The family lives in the Yorkshire area of Prince William County.

Incumbent Willie Deutsch will seek reelection to the seat.

Lisa Zargarpur will also run for the seat. All eight seats on the School Board are up for reelection on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2019.

PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Paul O’Meara is running as a Republican for Coles District Supervisor.

He previously ran in 2015 for the same office and lost in the primary to Marty Nohe, who today is not seeking election to the Coles seat but rather the Prince William County Board of Supervisors Chairman, At-large seat.

O’Meara’s goals for running are to fix Route 28, to “find some practical solutions” to fix overcrowding in the schools, and “to correct a broken housing policy that has planted the seeds for the explosion in our budget and our current infrastructure deficit.”

“My number one priority is to fix [Route] 28.” O’Meara said. “I think that we need to build the Godwin Drive extension.”

Last month, Governor Ralph Northam left it up to Northern Virginia leaders to fund a fix for Route 28, dubbed the most-congested road in the region. The governor said he wouldn’t allocate state funding to fix the road.

With a price tag of $220 million, the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission (of which Nohe is the Chairman) will fund a portion of the fix.

No matter who pays, O’Meara says it needs to be completed. “I think that it’s within Prince William County government’s authority to build this road and fix [Route] 28.”

When it comes to schools, O’Meara said that even if the county pays hundreds of millions of dollars to build more schools, the private industry could not build schools fast enough to keep up with the need. O’Meara instead believes that redrawing school boundaries may be a better use of taxpayer money.

The Board of Supervisors and School Board members are discussing a $143 million plan to upgrade school facilities that would nearly eliminate all portable trailer classrooms in the county.

Regarding the Board of County Supervisors’ relationship with the School Board, “I think we need to take a hard look at the revenue sharing agreement,” he said. That agreement has the Board of Supervisors automatically handing over 57 percent of the entire county budget to the school division to spend as it sees fit.

O’Meara is also focused on development in the county.

“I think that our housing policy is broken. I think that we have an unhealthy mix of commercial and residential development,” he said.

While working on the Strategic Plan team, O’Meara helped get the Board of Supervisors to approve a “moonshot” goal of increasing the county’s commercial tax base 35 percent, up from about 16 percent. While he thinks that’s an excellent first step, he says there’s a lot more work to do.

O’Meara says commercial development is good for the county “because it generates tax revenue, but it doesn’t create the same liabilities of student generation factors that residential development would do.”

At 35 percent, there would be fewer unmet needs in the county, he adds.

O’Meara is a third-generation Prince William resident. He has a degree in Government International Politics from George Mason University and has managed small businesses his entire career.

His family founded two small businesses in 1960 and 1971 and he assumed business operations from them in 2008 and took over complete control when his father died. He then started working in commercial property management in 2014.

He and his wife Melissa have two children, ages 5 and 2.

O’Meara served on the Prince William County School’s Infrastructure Task Force and helped draft the current Strategic Plan, and is currently a Director of the Industrial Development Authority of Prince William County.

“I’m looking to serve. I have a lot of knowledge of county government.” O’Meara said.

O’Meara is one of many candidates announcing his bid for office this year. A Primary Election will be held June 11.

MANASSAS PARK -- A growing number of drivers are parking their vehicles in Manassas Park neighborhoods. And, it's becoming an issue city leaders must address.

"There's only so much space," said  Donald Shuemaker, a councilman on the Manassas Park Governing Body. "Our population is growing.”

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PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Prince William County is well into its second phase of a pilot archery deer management program that began last year.

If it goes well, the program could become permanent. The pilot stage last year only operated at three sites for six weeks. This year the number of sites has increased to 10 locations and the time for the hunt has lengthened from October 6 to November 16 and then again from December 2 to February 28.

Purvis Dawson, who served as Prince William’s former Chief Park Ranger before he left the post in November, explained that 2017’s main goal was to prove that the county can safely facilitate hunting on county land – and they did.

Now in phase two, the program is more widespread throughout the county for a longer period of time. At the end of phase two, the Board of County Supervisors will decide whether or not they want to institutionalize the program and fund it.

Right now, the program has been administered by the Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department.

Because of the widely differing amount of locations and time periods compared to last year’s program, it’s hard to compare the two years because it’s “apples and oranges,” Dawson explained.

So far this year, 49 deer have been harvested, up from 19 last year. Only groups vetted by the county that have certified, trained, and insured archers are allowed to hunt.

“Anytime they have a hunt they complete a form that tells us when they entered the property, when they exited the property, whether or not they harvested a deer, how many arrows they walked into the property with, how many arrows they left the property with, if they harvested a deer what was the tag number for the DPOP (Deer Population Reduction Program) tag for the deer, things of this nature…,” said Prince William County Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Department spokesman Brent Heavner.

High visibility signs are erected on trees throughout the parks to let people know about the hunt.

“The hunters follow strict guidelines of when they can hunt – they must arrive a half hour before sunrise and then leave a half hour after sunset,” Dawson explained.

The program also utilizes “buffer zones” between populated areas like residential neighborhoods and the parks so arrows do not fly into nearby homes. Hunters are required to shoot from tree stands so the arrow has a downward trajectory “so the ground becomes the backstop in that scenario,” adds Dawson.
Hunters must account for every arrow.

“They have to account for every arrow. If they walk in with eight arrows, and they walk out with seven arrows, there’s another form they have to fill out that explains the disposition of that missing arrow.” Heavner said.

Dawson said that if you’re walking through Dove’s Landing and hear an arrow whiz by you, that’s not a legitimate hunter. That’s a poacher. Dawson also said that because the vetted hunters only use archery, if you hear a firearm in a county park, call the police. That’s not one of their hunters.

“Our hunters have a rulebook,” Dawson said.

PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Willie Deutsch will seek re-election to the Prince William County School Board as its Coles District member. Though School Board races are non-partisan, the incumbent is the first Republican to announce their candidacy for the seat.

All the seats for the school board are up for reelection on November 5, 2019. Deutsch was elected to the school board in 2015, his first time elected to public office.

“Back in 2015, we had a lot of concerns with accountability of the school administration, concerns that the parents weren’t being heard after a number of high-profile decisions.” Deutsch.

The past three years was a busy term for the school board.

“Over the last term, it’s been a very high profile school board, shall we say,” Deutsch said.

The early days were mired in controversy. Deutsch, along with the rest of the elected body approved a compromise vote in March 2016 to name Kyle Wilson Elementary School after the fallen firefighter, the only in Prince William County to die in the line of duty.

The second part of the deal was to rename Godwin Middle School, named for a Virginia Democratic Governor that once embraced segregation but reversed his position by the time he moved into the governor’s mansion, and later founded the Virginia Community College System, to Dr. George Hampton Middle.

The move sparked an outcry from teachers and staff at Godwin community. Hampton supporters, who were hoping to have a new elementary school named for him, accepted the compromise.

Under the leadership of former Chairman Ryan Sawyers who abruptly stepped down earlier this year, the school board continued debating larger social and political issues like gender equality and bathroom usage. Voters last month replaced the unpopular Sawyers with Dr. Babur Lateef.

Special education audit 

Through all of it, Deutsch says he’s been focused on the issues that affect students.

“We have done a lot to address class size overcrowding. We’ve added thousands of additional school seats at every level. We’ve worked very hard to push through an important bipartisan plan with the [Prince William County] Board of Supervisors to add an additional 500 high school seats to one of our latest high schools that we’re currently building and we’ve taken aggressive steps on that front,” he said.

He also pushed for an external audit of the special education department after parents pushed for a review of the system.

An audit found a persistent achievement gap in students with disabilities, despite Prince William County Schools being one of the best school divisions in Virginia according to 2016-17 overall Reading and Mathematics assessment pass rates.  

“External audits are useful to shine some sunlight on places where maybe things are being hidden…” Deutsch said. “We’ve gotten a number of important recommendations and now we are working to make sure that those are actually carried out and that special education is more responsive to parents and students and that students get the services they need.”

Prince William County Schools contracted with Public Consulting Group to produce the audit, which was an in-depth analysis of the Division’s special education services, staffing, organizational structure, and processes. They reviewed data, held focus groups, conducted interviews, and visited schools.

The audit came with 24 recommendations, some of which included hiring a Special Education fiscal officer, assistants to implement technology in the classroom, ensuring that non-verbal students always have access to communication devices, improving the special-education website, and creating “a monitoring system and follow up mechanism when staff are not completing progress reporting as legally required.

Deutsch says he’s an advocate for the taxpayers over school administrators. Prince William County is one of two localities in the state that blindly hands over more than half of its budget to its public school division with zero restrictions on how the money is spent.

“…with about 57% of our property taxes going to the school division, so it’s critical that that money is used effectively,” he said. “We’ve got over 90,000 students now [and that] education that those students receive is critical to the future of this county and so we’ve got to make sure that we have the best school division possible,” Deutsch said.

Removing trailers 

Two of Deutsch’s main issues he hopes to tackle if he is re-elected are a reduction of the 207 trailers or portable classrooms used at schools across the county. And continuing growth of the special education department.

“There’s talk of plans to fully eliminate trailers. We may be able to get very close to that. It’s a matter of building on the work we’ve done over the last four years with adding additional seats across the county, adding some more over the coming term, and making sure that happens.” Deutsch said.

A joint committee of School Board and Board of Supervisors members are formulating plan that could cost as much as $143 million more than what is currently budgeted to fully remove all of the trailers.

“I am fully supportive of removing some of the trailers, not all,” said Occoquan District Supervisor Ruth Anderson, who serves on the joint committee.

There’s also the possibility of a leadership change at the school division’s headquarters in the next few years. Superintendent Dr. Steven Walts’ contract expires two years after the new School Board takes office in January 2020.

“I also believe that the next school board is going to choose the new superintendent of the school division. And I think that’s a critical issue that’s going to define how we move forward. Both who we pick and what that contract looks like is going to be very important.” Deutsch added.

Deutsch has been a Northern Virginia resident since 2007 and currently works in digital communications for a public relations firm called CRC Public Relations.

If Montclair has a 100-year storm, the spillway will be able to accommodate it.

Lake Montclair was lowered to just 20 feet this past summer, leaving residents who are used to summer swimming and boating on high and dry.

The lake’s spillway, an area designed for lake water to spill over the top of a dam in the event of a heavy rainstorm- needed to be fixed. The spillway needed to be widened and deepened and a cutback protection wall was installed underground  – as Lake Montclair also underwent changes to meet the state standards for dam safety regulations.

The repairs come after the state recently changed the “maximum probable precipitation” standards, an estimate to how much rain could fall during a massive storm such as a hurricane.

The values from the 1970’s were 28, 33, and 37 inches of rainfall in 6, 12, and 24 hour time brackets. A study was done by the state and the numbers were updated in 2016 to 26.3 and 30.1 inches for 6, 12, and 24 hour periods based on historical data. Lake Montclair did not meet the new standards.

The updated standards help to ensure the dam doesn’t burst during periods of heavy rain.

The Montclair Property Owners Association also had to widen and deepen the lake and also installed a cutback protection wall – a big concrete wall designed to stop erosion so the lake doesn’t drain into the spillway, said Justin Field, with MPOA.

With the repairs complete, it took about three weeks for the water levels to return to normal.

Maintaining the spillway is a big deal for the surrounding area, Field explained. Lake Montclair is part of the Powell’s Creek watershed, which, according to the Prince William Conservation Alliance, “begins near Independent Hill and flows past the Prince William landfill on Route 234, then on to  Montclair, where it meets the dam that forms Lake Montclair.”

If the dam were to break, that would spell disaster for nearby neighborhoods.  

“There are almost 400 occupied structures that would be damaged, flooded – Route 1 would be affected, I-95 would be affected, all the way out into the Potomac River. So that’s the importance of good upkeep on our dam which we do, and then making sure our spillway met all the requirements that it needed to meet.”

Richard Arvin, Chairman of the Montclair Lake Management Committee, is one of a group of volunteers who manage the maintenance and ecology of the lake. Arvin has lived near the lake for about 15 years.

Many residents complained while the lake was dry. One of the fears from residents was that fish would be killed.

That didn’t happen.

“We did not have a fish kill. We didn’t kill anything off.” Arvin said. Arvin explained that they had discussed the impact to wildlife with the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and they weren’t concerned.

With the low lake level, he also said it was an opportunity to get some projects done that they wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.  The association repaired swim platforms, added new fish, held a lake clean up, and a lot of residents repaired their docks. “So there [were] some advantages,” Arvin said.

They also found a sunken pontoon boat at the bottom of the lake.

Despite the inconvenience for those who wanted to enjoy the lake, Field said summer was the best time to close the lake. The warm weather was a benefit because of the backfill material that needed to dry out.

He also explained they didn’t want to risk running into delays during colder weather that would cause the project to go into the next summer. This way, they figured they could just affect one season of recreation rather than several.

“We bit the bullet, understanding it was going to be an inconvenience but the summertime was the best time for us to do it, get it done, so we that could enjoy [one] compliance with the new state regulations, and then just have our lake back next summer for a full recreation season.” Field said.

This should be the last time the lake will be lowered to this extent. Other than the annual lowering of around three feet that happens near Thanksgiving, Field said they don’t foresee the lake to be lowered to anything near the level it was lowered during this project.

The 108-acre lake sinks 54 feet at its deepest point.

MANASSAS -- A medical clinic now operating where an abortion clinic once sat is expanding thanks to doctors and volunteers who are giving of their time and expertise.

The Mother of Mercy Free Medical Clinic provides free, quality healthcare to low-income individuals who are uninsured or under-insured in western Prince William County, Manassas City, and Manassas Park.

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MANASSAS -- Micron is making an effort to get to better know its neighbors.

On Monday, company leaders addressed a packed room of politicians and business leaders at a Prince William Chamber of Commerce Economic Development Committee meeting.

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WOODBRIDGE -- A total of 67 citizens gave impassioned pleas for and against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during the Prince William County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.

Woodbridge Supervisor Frank Principi put the item on the agenda, urging his fellow Supervisors to declare support for a constitutional amendment introduced in the early 1970s that aimed to give equal rights to women. After hours of testimony from residents, Principi could not get a single one of the supervisors to second his motion.

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