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November 18, 2020 | Vol. 19, No. 47 | 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.
‘It was so good to have them back’
County sees sharp drop in detained youth By Daniel Berti
Times Staff Writer
Mountain View principal describes her students’ return to school By Jill Palermo
Times Staff Writer
When the buses pulled up to Mountain View Elementary School on the first day of in-person learning for kindergarten and pre-K students, most carried just one or two students. They were met by teachers in face masks who directed the 5- and 6-year-olds down hallways marked with blue tape -- to help them spread out -- and then into a classroom with desks set several feet apart and stocked with individual sets of crayons and supplies. Teachers were told to avoid giving hugs, but it didn’t always happen. Students were also required to wear masks but sometimes struggled to keep them pulled up over little noses, said Mountain View Principal Adriane Harrison. “We had one little girl, we saw her nose all day,” Harrison said after her students had left for the afternoon. “We had to remind her all day to keep pulling it up.” But aside from those few hiccups – the undeflected hugs and the sagging face masks – the return to in-person learning went mostly without a hitch at the Haymarket school, which welcomed only 14 students back to the building on Tuesday, Nov. 10. “It was a good day. It was good to see them,” Harrison said of her school’s youngest students. “It was so good to have them back.” Across Prince William County’s more than 60 elementary schools, about 3,410 kindergarten and pre-K students returned to school for optional in-person learning last week, according to school division spokeswoman Diana Gulotta. At the request of Superintendent Steven Walts, the Prince William County School agreed to bring students back into school buildings on a staggered
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PHOTO BY DOUG STROUD
Mountain View Elementary School teacher Carrie Murphy hugs a kindergarten student arriving at school on their first day of in-school instruction. schedule, starting with the youngest grades. Prince William County is currently in the moderate-to-high range of community spread of COVID-19, which means only certain students with disabilities, those learning English and those in pre-K through third grade are allowed to return to school, according to the Virginia Department of Health guidelines. In Prince William, preschool and kindergarten students were the first to be allowed to return and will be followed by first-graders, who are scheduled to begin during the week of Tuesday, Dec. 1. Second- and third-graders are scheduled to begin on Jan. 12. The county also moved forward with plans to allow high school students in certain career and technical classes to return for either morning or afternoon sessions on Mondays, which began Nov. 16. See RETURN, page 2
INSIDE Business...............................................9 Classified............................................16 Lifestyle..............................................10 Obituaries...........................................15
A proposal to rePrince William place Prince WilCounty Juvenile liam County’s exDetention Center isting juvenile jail with a new facility Annual operating budget: $5 million has won the support of the Prince WilStaff: 56 liam Board of CounAverage daily ty Supervisors and population in 2020: sparked a backlash 17 from young county activists in recent months who question the need for a new youth detention center. Amid the debate, county records show a sharp decrease in the number of youths being detained in the current facility over the last year partly because of the pandemic, but also because of new policies put in place by the county’s progressive Commonwealth’s Attorney Amy Ashworth, who was elected in November 2019. The proposed facility has been approved for up to 48 beds at an estimated to cost of between $39 and $46 million. It’s a step down in size from the county’s current 72-bed facility, but the detention center hasn’t held more than 40 detainees since 2018. And since the pandemic, the population has dropped even lower, fluctuating between eight and 19 youth detainees between April and November of this year. As of the first week of November, only 13 kids were being held in the facility. In an email Friday, Ashworth said the low population of the juvenile jail can be attributed to several factors including the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted prosecutors and judges to take steps to make sure youth offenders were not placed in congregate settings. See DETENTION, page 4
Opinion.................................................8 Puzzle Page..........................................6 Real Estate..........................................14 Sports.................................................11
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