SPORTS: Six-game Cedar Run District football schedules are finalized. PAGE 9
October 28, 2020 | Vol. 19, No. 44 | www.princewilliamtimes.com | 50¢ Covering Prince William County and surrounding communities, including Gainesville, Haymarket, Dumfries, Occoquan, Quantico and the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park.
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Countdown to Election Day
Manassas, Manassas Park, Dumfries will pick local leaders Nov. 3 By Jill Palermo
Times Staff Writer
‘Lifting people up’ PHOTO BY MIKE BEATY
Manassas officials unveil Saturday, Oct. 24, a bronze statue memorializing Jennie Dean, a Manassas native born into slavery who went on to found the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth in 1893.
Manassas unveils long-awaited Jennie Dean statue By Jill Palermo
Times Staff Writer
“She is leaning forward with her hand extended, lifting people up,” Manassas Mayor Hal Parrish said Saturday morning, as dignitaries pulled a black shroud from a long-awaited sculpture memorializing Jennie Dean, a Manassas native born into slavery who founded the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth, which educated thousands of Black high school students from the 1890s through the 1930s. The 6-foot bronze statue was unveiled during a morning ceremony that attracted a socially-distanced crowd of more than 100 and included speeches by Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, Sen. Mark Warner, Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-10th, and others instrumental in the multi-year effort to bring the statue to fruition. Parrish, who will retire this year after a third term as Manassas mayor and a total of 27 years on the city council, led the event, which was held in front of Jennie Dean Elementary School on
Wellington Road. The school is built behind what once the site of the industrial school. Dean, whose given name was Jane Serepta Dean, worked as a domestic in Washington, D.C., but was born and lived in Manassas and spent almost 10 years after the Civil War raising money to open the school. Dean eventually accumulated enough money to purchase 100 acres and chartered the industrial school in 1893. Its first building dedicated by Frederick Douglass in 1894. Speakers remembered Dean as an everyday person and a woman of faith who worked tirelessly to establish what was then the only high school serving black students in all of Northern Virginia. Fairfax, himself a descendant of the enslaved Simon Fairfax, who was freed in 1798 by Thomas Fairfax, the ninth Lord Fairfax, called Dean someone “who was able to see a ray of hope in the middle of a lot of darkness.” See JENNIE DEAN, page 4
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In a presidential election year, the top of the ticket gets most of the attention, but voters in Manassas, Manassas Park and Dumfries are also choosing local leaders to serve on their city and town councils in the Nov. 3 contest. In Virginia, most local elections happen on the “off years,” the odd-numbered years between the federal elections. But that’s not the case in the cities of Manassas, Manassas Park and the Town of Dumfries, where local leaders retimed their elections a few years ago to include more voters.
Theresa Coates Ellis
Michelle Davis-Younger
See ELECTION, page 4
School Board approves staggered return-to-school plan By Jill Palermo
Times Staff Writer
All Prince William County students who choose the school division’s proposed “hybrid plan” could return to schools for in-person learning by the start of the third quarter, which begins Feb. 2, under a plan the school board School Board Chairman Dr. approved last week. The plan is tentative and will Babur Lateef depend on local COVID-19 health metrics and available staffing, Superintendent Steven Walts told the school board during yet another marathon and sometimes contentious meeting that stretched beyond 1 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 22. See RETURN TO SCHOOL, page 2
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