INSIDE Goochland County Sheriff’s Office hosts National Night Out > page 7
Volume 66 Number 32 • August 19, 2021
Mas k hysteria? As debate over mask mandates rages on, some Goochland parents have threatened to pull their kids out of school and compared forced face covering to child abuse
Supervisors mull rumble strips for county roads with high crash counts Discussion comes weeks after recent GHS graduate was killed on Route 522 By Roslyn Ryan Editor
By Roslyn Ryan Editor
W
hen Goochland resident Lorraine Peck got up from her seat to speak during the Aug. 10 county school board meeting, she suspected that many of those in attendance would not agree with what she was about to say.
Peck, after all, was there to ask school board members to stand with Goochland County School Superintendent Jeremy Raley and support the recently announced decision by the school division to require all students attending Goochland County Public Schools to wear face coverings until further notice. The decision, which was shared with parents via e-mail prior to the meeting — and several days before a directive issued by the State Health Commissioner (see sidebar) effectively forced school divisions across the see Masks > 3
Masks mandated for K-12 students On Aug. 12, the State Health Commmissioner issued an order requiring “all individuals aged two and older to wear masks when indoors at public and private K-12 schools in order to inhibit spread of the virus, as recommended and described by the CDC.”
Amid rising concerns about the number of serious accidents occurring on several county roads—the most recent involving the death of a 2021 Goochland High School graduate killed in a motorcycle accident on Route 522 on Aug. 2 — county leaders are taking a new look at a solution already being used in Louisa and Powhatan: rumble strips. According to Goochland resident Jonet PrevostWhite, who addressed the Board of Supervisors during the Aug. 3 monthly meeting, both roads have seen far too many harrowing crashes in recent years. Prevost-White, who serve as the Director of Public Works for the town of Dumfries in Northern Virginia, urged board members to consider installing the road features, which she noted have proven to significantly reduce injuries and fatalities resulting from automobile crashes. Centerline rumble strips, Prevost-White explained, are made up of a series of milled or raised elements intended to alert drivers through vibration and sound that the vehicle has gone outside the bounds of the traveling lane. “They are very effective in saying, ‘Hey, you’re drifting,’” she noted, and can help save an inattentive or drowsy motorist from making a fatal mistake. Prevost-White pointed to research from the National Cooperative Highway Research Program see Rumble strips > 14
