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SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/LOCAL EZ RE C

JOHN KELLY

In the 1950s, a “shabby

edifice” in D.C. was home

to CIA photo work linked

to the U-2 spy plane. C3

LOCAL OPINIONS

Montgomery County ends

student meal debt for

many, but the need to do

so is, itself, a shame. C4

OBITUARIES

Thomas Murphy, 96, led

the history-making merger

that in the 1990s united

68 ° 79 ° 83 ° 78 ° ABC and Disney. C9

8 a.m. Noon 4 p.m. 8 p.m.

High today at

approx. 4 p.m.

83

°

Precip: 0%

Wind: SSE

3-6 mph

Tiny Pound, Va., has only a part-time police chief, scant

business taxes and a lot of infighting over what’s left

EARL NEIKIRK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

She read the sign at the exhib-

it’s threshold. Every day, it said,

more than 100 people in the

United States are killed with

guns, and 200 are shot and

wounded. Each week, guns kill

700 people — each of them repre-

sented by the 700 bricks used to

build the four glass houses before

her.

The sign invited her to walk

through, to spend time with the

lives inside each brick, to reflect.

And then it asked her to act.

House number one.

A mix-tape CD in a yellow case

for Leslie, 24, featuring “Bennie

and the Jets.” A student ID for

16-year-old Blair, killed in Chica-

go while shielding a friend from

bullets on the bus after school. A

SEE MEMORIAL ON C5

their elementary school in Uval-

de, Tex. In both mass slayings,

young men used semiautomatic

rifles to gun down their victims.

Those killings have dominated

the news cycle, but they represent

just a fraction of the epidemic’s

toll in the United States. The

memorial, created by the MASS

Design Group, Purpose Over Pain

and the Everytown for Gun Safety

Support Fund, was built to con-

vey what the headlines could not.

Oertley, who works in con-

struction in Chicago, had flown

to the nation’s capital for a Me-

morial Day weekend getaway,

and she had come to the National

Building Museum early Saturday

to learn about architecture. But

then she saw the Gun Violence

Memorial Project.

BY KATIE METTLER

Shawna Oertley stepped into

the stark white room, silent but

for the muffled sounds of sullen

voices. Immediately, she was

overwhelmed.

Before her were four houses

the size of a small sheds, all built

of 700 glass cases shaped like

bricks. Etched onto each was a

name and death date. Inside were

small objects meant to represent

a whole life, now gone.

Oertley, 58, had found herself

inside the Gun Violence Memori-

al Project.

It had been two weeks since 10

Black people were killed inside a

Buffalo grocery store, and four

days since 19 children and their

two teachers were killed inside

At gun violence memorial, visitors

reflect on recent U.S. mass killings

BY DANIELLE

DOUGLAS-GABRIEL

In a tight labor market, where

competition for workers is fierce,

companies are making a play to

attract and retain employees by

offering to pay their student

loans.

Take Inova Health Systems,

which announced this spring

that it would contribute $150 a

month to pay down the education

debt of employees who have been

on the job less than three years,

and $250 a month to those who

have been there longer.

“We know that our team mem-

bers have a lot of choices of where

to work, where they want their

career to go,” said Wendy Jolly,

Inova’s vice president for human

resources. “We want them to feel

like they have a competitive set of

pay and benefit programs to

match the excellence we expect.”

Employers are heeding the call

of younger workers for help with

their education debt, and taking

advantage of a new tax break

born out of the pandemic. Still,

there are more firms considering

the perk than actually imple-

menting it, a reluctance experts

say is rooted in uncertainty about

federal policies on debt cancella-

tion and repayment.

Before the pandemic, student

loan repayment benefits were

becoming one of the most popu-

lar perks taking hold in corporate

America. The percentage of em-

ployers offering student loan re-

payment assistance doubled to 8

percent between 2016 and 2019,

according to the Society for Hu-

man Resource Management.

A 2021 survey by the Employee

Benefit Research Institute found

priorities shifted in the wake of

SEE LOANS ON C14

Emerging

job perk:

Student

loan help

BY ANTONIO OLIVO

In 2008, Fairfax County

launched an ambitious “Plan to

Prevent and End Homelessness,”

with the goal of ending home-

lessness in the Northern Virginia

suburb within 10 years.

While homelessness is down

by more than a third since that

deadline was set, tent encamp-

ments in the woods, including

one a short walk from the satel-

lite country government center

in Reston, show the goal of

reducing the number to zero is

still far from reach.

The county Board of Supervi-

sors recently ordered a review of

the Fairfax homelessness -

prevention efforts, joining other

localities in the region that have

been struggling with a problem

that, while diminishing, has be-

come more visible during the

coronavirus pandemic.

Some supervisors expressed

frustration over the limited prog-

ress after several hundred people

returned to the streets earlier

this spring, prompted by the

closure of seasonal hypothermia

shelters that operate between

December and April, and the end

of a pandemic program in March

SEE HOMELESS ON C6

Fairfax

revisits

homeless

problem

2 008 PLAN’S GOAL OF

ZERO STILL DISTANT

Tents near government

building point to issue

Next to mass shootings,

small horrors go unseen

By now, you might

have seen the

video.

Not the one of

the Uvalde fourth-

grader who

described “hiding

hard” and then

hearing a

classmate, at the prompting of an

officer, yell for help before getting

shot.

Not the one of the dad who

spoke of buying his daughter a

phone for her 10th birthday and

learning she tried to use it to call

911 in her final moments.

Not the one of the 10-year-old

who talked about how she

survived and then later realized

“all the people I knew were dead.”

Those are all heartbreaking

and haunting. They were also

created after those children had

already been failed. The video

that keeps playing on loop in my

mind is one that shows the

moments before, during and after

shots were fired in the direction

of a group of children. That video

was taken on the same day as the

Uvalde shooting and leaves the

viewer wanting to reach in and

tell those kids, “Run!”

The footage — which was

captured by a security camera and

posted on social media and, in

edited form, by news outlets —

shows five young children playing

on a sidewalk in a Northern

Virginia neighborhood. Across the

parking lot, four people in dark

clothing can be seen walking. One

SEE VARGAS ON C6

Theresa

Vargas

BY GREGORY S. SCHNEIDER

pound, va. — Leabern Kennedy lit a

Virginia Slims and opened a Mountain

Dew Zero. It was almost 10 p.m. She’d

started work on her day job about 14

hours ago, sat through a long town

council training session and now was

on the phone with a lawyer from across

the state.

Kennedy, newly installed as vice

mayor, knew her town was dying. Like

other places in Appalachia, its coal-

based economy is gone, its tiny popula-

tion aging and declining. But that is

just the start of Pound’s problems.

Last fall, most of Pound’s remaining

business owners decided to stop pay-

ing taxes because the town’s finances

are in chaos. Every town employee quit

or was fired. The cashier was convicted

of embezzling from the public account.

When the police department disband-

ed, the local prosecutor dismissed all

31 pending criminal cases because

evidence was so mishandled.

Now Pound is literally facing a death

sentence. After so much dysfunction,

the General Assembly more than 350

miles away in Richmond has taken the

unusual step of voting to revoke the

town’s charter over the objections of its

residents.

The move has shocked local government

advocates around Virginia. “The risks of

the things that have gone wrong in Pound

— those same risks exist for every town,”

said Steve Trivett, mayor of the town of

Ashland in Hanover County. If the General

Assembly can simply step in and make

troublesome towns vanish, he said, “this

could set a precedent... [of] short-circuit-

ing the citizens right out of it.”

State lawmakers insist Pound is a special

situation — s o profoundly troubled that

there is almost nothing left to save. But just

in case, they pledged to reconsider the

charter — set to expire Nov. 1, 2023 — if the

town shows signs of getting its act back

together.

For Pound’s roughly 900 residents, that

presents a dilemma: Take a stand, or let it

go?

In a national climate of political division

and loss of faith in institutions, Pound is

pretty much a worst-case scenario of

government gone wrong. Yet it also shows

what is at stake when public systems are

truly, literally threatened. For some, this is

home, and working to defend the common

good is worth a little risk and sacrifice. So

Kennedy, 55, and a handful of others have

decided to take a crack at rebuilding the

SEE POUND ON C7

With lawmakers ready to end dying town,

residents debate whether it’s worth saving

GREGORY S. SCHNEIDER/THE WASHINGTON POST

TOP: Pound is struggling with the same economic problems that

beset several Southwest Virginia towns, plus several scandals

and bad blood on the town council. A BOVE: Pound Vice Mayor

Leabern Kennedy talks with an attorney who has volunteered to

train council members on the basics of town government.