The Washington Post - 14.03.2020

B4 eZ su THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAy, MARCH 14 , 2020

dents, comes “in response to growing concerns and anxiety in our community about the coronavirus,” interim superintendent Cintia Johnson wrote in a mes- sage to families. Johnson’s m essage, li ke a lmost every other email and statement from school districts, rang with the promise of plans. officials vowed they would offer regular updates to families — at least twice a week in Loudoun County, once a day in Alexandria — and promised to send more detailed instructions on how virtual schooling would work. Emails spelling out plans for online classes or meal programs would come that evening, authorities said, or the next day — or just “soon.” In the District, the already difficult undertaking of remote learning becomes more compli- cated because many District students lack computers and reliable access to the Internet. The closures will affect more than 52,000 students in the Dis- trict’s traditional public school system. Nearly 50,000 charter school students will also be out o f their classrooms. A spring break that was previ- ously scheduled for late April has been rescheduled to begin march

remote learning is scheduled
to begin march 23. Students are
expected to return to school
April 1.
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor
Lewis D. ferebee has said teach-
ers will work to provide learning
resources to students offline and
online, and the mayor said teach-
ers and staff would report to
work monday so they can make
plans for students to continue to
learn during the closure.
ferebee said students left
school friday with textbooks and
worksheets, and families can
pick up additional work in com-
ing days.
raymond Weeden, executive
director of Thurgood marshall
Academy Public Charter School
in Southeast Washington, said he
is considering purchasing mo-
bile hotspot devices for some
students so they can access

tries heavily affected by covid-19, health officials said. Concerns over the pandemic continued to disrupt daily life in the D.C. region. maryland Senate President Bill ferguson (D-Baltimore City) raised the possibility of adjourn- ing the 90-day legislative session early for the first time since the Civil War. The State House is already closed to visitors and public wit- nesses as lawmakers race to finish work o n hundreds of bills. ferguson said the decision will

Thomas franck, the director of the Peninsula Health District in central Virginia, said the cases there — plus two that were reported Thursday — constitute “a community o utbreak of covid-19.” four of the new cases are con- tacts of the two earlier cases, franck said in a news release. The fifth case involved a man whose means of exposure is still un- known. Another of the new Virginia cases is in Prince William County. A woman in her 60s fell ill after returning from one of the coun-

at least march 29. The National Archives was closing its research rooms and presidential libraries because of the virus, also effective Saturday. The National Park Service said national p arks remain open. D.C. officials adopted emergen- cy r ules friday banning gatherings of 250 or more people, which Ho- gan did in maryland a day earlier. They said gatherings may include no more than 10 people from pop- ulations d eemed at-risk, including those over 60 and people with chronic medical conditions and compromised i mmune systems. The ban does not apply to schools, workplaces, residential buildings and health-care facili- ties. officials also urged the cancel- lation of activities and gatherings for seniors. Bowser announced the closure of the District’s public library system as of monday. Late Thursday night, montgomery County said its public libraries would close as well. The District’s C herry Blossom festival Parade, which was scheduled for April 4, has been canceled, organizers said. Prince William leaders canceled all public events and meetings, closing senior centers, community centers and county-owned fitness centers until further notice.

darr [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Vozzella reported from Richmond. Fenit nirappil, antonio olivo, Michael e. Ruane, Justin george, erin Cox and Rebecca tan contributed to this report.

be made on a “day b y day” b asis. District Judge Patricia mitchell issued an order stopping all evic- tions for 15 days in montgomery County, m aryland’s m ost populous jurisdiction. County Council mem- ber Will Jawando (D-At Large), who worked with the county’s sheriff to recommend the order, said it will help struggling tenants keep a roof over their heads as the state takes dramatic steps to cur- tail t he spread o f the virus. In the District, the U.S. Holo- caust memorial museum said it would close a s of Saturday through

“ramp up” telemedicine, which is medical c onsultations online. ritenour said that doctors in states that haven’t been hard-hit might have the capacity to assess Virginia patients via telemedicine but cannot do so now if they’re not licensed to practice in Virginia. Without the federal government easing regulations, he wondered whether neighboring states could form a sort of compact to allow it. He also suggested that medical supplies could be similarly shared among states. “We’ve been working on it for a number of years actually,” Northam told reporters afterward, referring to telemedicine and the expanded broadband that such a service would require in some parts of the state. “But I think this is a good example of why tele- health and access to broadband for all Virginia is so important.” maryland lawmakers, mean- while, fast-tracked legislation to lift their state’s restrictions on telemedicine. Hogan said that the state is trying to “ramp up and catch up” and that he doubts the country can expand testing enough to meet demand. Hogan, who chairs the National Governors Association, also said he is bracing for “surges” in emer- gency rooms and hospitals that could exceed existing capacity. “frankly, at some point soon, we’re not g oing to be into testing as much b ecause the hospitals w ill be overwhelmed a nd unable to do the tests,” he said in an interview with mSNBC. The new Virginia cases r eported monday included five in rural James City County, population 67,000.

gion hovered around 59, according
to a Washington Post analysis. re-
ported cases nearly doubled over-
night in Virginia to 30.
maryland has reported 18 cases,
and the District has reported 11,
although their official tallies have
shifted slightly from those num-
bers because of the locations
where some patients live or were
tested.
With t he Trump administration
facing bipartisan criticism over
the availability of U.S. testing, the
government on friday announced
steps to address the problem, say-
ing it would partner with the pri-
vate sector to set up drive-through
testing sites.
The urgency of the issue was on
display throughout the greater
Washington region.
In Annapolis, the maryland
General Assembly gave initial ap-
proval t o a bill t hat gives Gov. L arry
Hogan (r) the authority to reduce
the cost of testing for the virus.
D.C. health officials said private
labs will be required to share their
results with the city government.
officials said they’ve only been
able t o test up to 15 kits a day at t he
city’s public lab — below the 80-
test daily capacity they predicted
last week — while they wait for
robotic equipment to speed up
processing of test samples.
Hospital doctors and adminis-
trators in Virginia who met with
Northam said they could use the
state’s help to obtain more testing
kits a nd supplies.
rhodes r itenour, vice president
for external and regulatory affairs
for Bon Secours Health System,
said he hoped the state could

dmV from B1

Cherry Blossom Festival Parade is among c anceled events

JaHI CHIKwendIu/tHe wasHIngton Post d.c. mayor muriel E. Bowser (d) addresses the media Friday at the University of the district of columbia community college a bout the city’s response to the n ovel coronavirus pandemic.

morning. “It was 24/7,” said Tanja mayer-Harding, a humanities in- structor who helped compile the packets. “We put in as much work as we possibly, possibly could.” for students in third grade and older, all of whom receive Chromebooks from the school system, the packets will be sup- plemented with online program- ming, mayer-Harding said. School officials have also devel- oped specialized versions of pa ckets for prekindergartners, students with learning disabili- ties and students with limited grasp of English. Arlington Public Schools, by contrast, provided few details friday. In a four-paragraph mes- sage, Johnson, the interim superintendent, said officials would evaluate and monitor the c orona- virus outbreak daily and provide updates to families in the system. Her statement was co-signed by Peter Noonan, superintendent of falls Church schools, which serves 2,700 students. Johnson and Noonan wrote that they would send “additional logistical details of the closure” later in the day. fairfax County Public Schools, whose 1 88,000 students in Northern Virginia make it one of the largest school districts in the nation, was last to join the slew of cancellations. Several hours after Northam made his announcement, school officials wrote in an email to families that the system would remain shuttered from monday through April 10. for mona Hassan, an 18-year- old senior at South Lakes High School in reston, the closure came far too late. for at l east a week, she and her friends had been urging the school system to shut down, convinced they might contract the coronavirus in the hallways, then pass it to more vulnerable parents and relatives. Students at South Lakes were planning to stage a walkout Tuesday in pro- test of the decision to stay open, Hassan said. “I can’t believe it took the governor,” she said. “We had to wait for that to be safe.” H assan said she is unsure how she will fill the next month off from school but that she’ll likely spend much of it inside doing homework — a commitment that would please mayor Bowser, who warned against excess leisure time at a news conference friday afternoon. “We are very concerned about idleness among our teenagers,” Bowser said, “so we hope our families are thinking about ways to keep our young people en- gaged.” for some students, staying inside to learn may be a tough sell. [email protected] [email protected]

until mid-April.
It fell to Virginia Gov. ralph
Northam (D) to put the capstone
on the day — announcing in the
early afternoon that he was or-
dering all public schools in Vir-
ginia closed for at least two
weeks.
“This is a fluid and fast-chang-
ing situation,” Northam said.
“We are taking this action to keep
Virginians as safe and healthy as
possible.”
maryland announced Thurs-
day that it planned to close all
public schools, as coronavirus
cases in the Washington region
continued to mount — to nearly
60 as of friday evening.
The sudden shuttering of so
many schools will bring massive
challenges — feeding students
who rely on school-provided
lu nches and breakfasts and en-
suring that children in lower-in-
come families, or with less-stable
household situations, do not fall
behind academically while stuck
at home.
It also throws hundreds of
part-time employees such as sub-
stitute teachers into financial
limbo, leaving them without a
source of income for an uncer-
tain stretch of time.
Above all else, educators must
confront one question — how to
keep teaching hundreds of thou-
sands of children from afar in
what amounts to a weeks-long
experiment in virtual education
for which no one had time to
prepare.
In an online question-and-an-
swer session held the night be-
fore the onslaught of closings,
Alexandria Health Department
Director Stephen Haering ar-
gued against shutting schools for
that very reason.
“The downside to closing is
kids will get educated in such a
different way,” Haering said.
“A nd, if that way were a better
way, we would be doing it al-
ready.”
Sitting alongside Haering, Al-
exandria City Public Schools Su-
perintendent Gregory C. Hutch-
ings Jr. repeatedly insisted he
would not close schools until
directed to do so by the city
health department. Shutting
down, he said, was a decision
with immense, unpredictable
co nsequences and should not be
taken without significant provo-
cation — and “we do believe that
kids need to be in school every
day.”
But the rapidly evolving situa-
tion with the coronavirus, super-
intendents and local officials
wrote in statements and emails
to families friday, made it un-
thinkable to do anything other
than close. Authorities sought to
walk a line, acknowledging the
high stakes and historic nature of
the moment — a nd the pandemic
— while assuaging parents’ fears.
The closure in Arlington,
which serves roughly 28,000 stu-

scHools from B1

Educators deal with how to keep teaching from afar

JaHI CHIKwendIu/tHe wasHIngton Post c hildren are released Friday from ludlow-Taylor Elementary in the district. d.c. schools will be closed at for least two weeks.

learning materials online. He is also looking into setting up a larger Wifi network near a public housing development where many of his students live so they can log on and use online materials. Weeden estimates a third of his students lack reliable Inter- net and said it is his responsibili- ty to ensure they receive an education during the closure — no matter the cost. He is hoping to send students home with school Chromebook laptops during the shutdown.

“our options are to do it or not do it,” Weeden said. “We are morally obligated to do it, and we’ll figure out how to do it.” In Alexandria, educators on friday morning distributed hast- ily a ssembled “distance learning” packets to 9,000 middle-school- ers. The eight-page documents include educational a ctivities — f or example, measuring a child’s shadow at 10 a.m. and again at 2 p.m. — and arts and crafts projects. They also offer physical exercises such as jumping jacks, walking around the house to identify every source of water or dancing to classical music while learning about famous compos- ers. The packets, which give students something to do each day, are designed to carry them through roughly two weeks without school. At Hutchings’s re- quest, Alexandria employees worked long hours this week — in some cases pulling all-nighters — to finalize packets by friday

“We are morally

obligated to do it, and

we’ll figure out how to

do it.” Raymond Weeden, head of thurgood Marshall academy in southeast washington, on educating students during the shutdown

BY PAUL SCHWARTZMAN

The Uptown Theater, the last of the District’s grand movie palaces and a beloved destina- tion for generations of Washing- tonians, has closed its doors, leaving a void for cinephiles who yearn for fresh popcorn and a screen as vast as the horizon. AmC Theatres, operator of the 8 4-year-old theater, shuttered Thursday after its last showing of the Pixar film “on- ward,” surprising the family that for four decades has owned the Art Deco landmark on Con- necticut Avenue NW. “of course I’m upset,” said Te d Pedas, who, along with his brother, Jim, were the owners of the Cleveland Park theater before passing much of their inter- est to Ted’s three children a few years ago. “I hate to see any movie theater close,” he said. “It’s in your blood. I love that theater.” Pedas, 88, said he received no explanation from AmC, which was approaching the end of its lease march 31. He fears that no entity will step forward to oper- ate the 800-seat Uptown as a cinema because streaming ser- vices have made it difficult for theaters to earn a profit. “right now you couldn’t give it away to anyone,” Pedas said. ryan Noonan, an AmC spokesman, confirmed the closure without providing an explanation. Two years ago, the company proposed replacing the iconic “Uptown” sign over the awning with “AmC.” But AmC discarded the idea after protests from neighborhood residents, some of whom vented their anguish on Cleveland Park’s Listserv on friday and vowed to reopen the theater. “We are going to save the Uptown!” Sauleh Siddiqui, a Cleveland Park resident wrote, using the theater’s closing as an opportunity to announce his candidacy for a neighborhood advisory commission seat. “We’ve seen old movie theaters turned into pharmacies and Burger Kings before. This will not happen here.” Built b y Warner B ros. i n 1936, the Uptown’s first screening was of “Cain and mabel,” a romantic comedy about a cho- rus girl and a boxer that starred Clark Gable and marion Davies. over the years, the theater was the site of celebrated premieres,

including “2001: A Space odys- sey” in 1968 and “Jurassic Park” in 1993. The theater also became a cultural and architectural touchstone for its neighborhood and beyond. “The Uptown Theater is hugely significant not only for Cleveland Park but for the entire city,” said rick Nash, president of the Cleve- land Park Historical Society. “It’s probably the most recog- nizable building in the Cleve- land Park neighborhood, the jewel in the crown on the neighborhood’s Connecticut Av- enue shopping district.” Aviva Kempner, a documen- tary filmmaker who lives in the District, said the Uptown, with its single screen and two levels of seating, represents a cine- matic tradition that has faded away. “It’s the classic old theater,” she said. “To sit and watch a move at the Uptown is heaven. This is very sad.” The Pedas brothers, who at one time managed a number of art house theaters across the city, purchased the Uptown in the late 1970s. for a time, the Uptown drew large crowds with blockbusters such as “Dick Tra- cy” and “The Dark Knight.” But changing tastes of audi- ences, as well as tech innova- tions that made watching movies a t home p ossible, ticket s ales eroded at the Uptown and other theaters across the country. “A s ingle theater o f that size is a relic, a dinosaur,” said Bill Durkin, an attorney who has worked with the Pedas family’s Circle management Company. The family’s top priority is to lease the Uptown to “another theater,” Durkin said. “But our property may not be rentable because of changes in the movie business.” The Avalon Theater, two miles north of the Uptown on Connecticut Avenue, faced a similar plight when, under a different name, it closed in

Neighborhood leaders
cr eated a nonprofit group that
raised funds and reopened the
theater two years later.
Larry Enten, 70, a landscaper
who has been going to the
Uptown for 40 years, hopes the
neighborhood unites to pre-
serve the theater, which he said
“harks back to an earlier gener-
ation when you could go to the
movies to escape the heat and
the big screen was like eye
candy.”
“I don’t have a dime to spend
on it but what a great idea,” he
said. “Every neighborhood
should have a supermarket, a
liquor store and a great movie
theater.”
[email protected]

THE DISTRICT

A screen gem fades into

history as Uptown closes

Warner Bros. opened the movie palace beloved by Washingtonians in 1936

The Washington Post - 14.03.2020

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