FRIDAY, APRIL 1 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 B3
VIRGINIARichmond-area officer
fatally injured in crashA new Henrico County police
officer was killed and two others
in his patrol car were critically
injured Wednesday night when
their car was struck by a pickup
truck while crossing an
intersection in Henrico, police
said.
Officer Trey Marshall Sutton,
24, had just graduated from the
police academy in February,
Henrico police officials said, and
was driving a patrol car along
with his field training officer and
a person they had just arrested.
Henrico Chief Eric D. English said
in a news conference Thursday
that the two officers were taking
their passenger to the county
sheriff’s office to be booked.
About 8:30 p.m., as Sutton
drove the cruiser west on
Wilkinson Road in the
Chamberlayne area north of
Richmond, the cruiser collided
with a Dodge pickup truck
headed south on Chamberlayne
Road. The driver of the pickup
truck was taken to the hospital,
treated and released. Sutton, the
other officer and their passenger
all were hospitalized in critical
condition, and Sutton later died.
No one had been charged in the
crash as of Thursday evening and
the name of the pickup truck
driver was not released. English
said that investigators did not
think drugs or alcohol were
involved, and he declined to
provide specifics on how the
crash occurred.
— Tom JackmanLOCAL DIGESTResults from March 31
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For late drawings and other results, check
washingtonpost.com/local/lotteryLOTTERIESBY PETER HERMANND.C. police arrested a teen-
ager in connection with a
smash-and-grab robbery that
occurred Wednesday in down-
town Washington and said it
might be related to a similar
“flash” robbery of a store in
Georgetown.
Authorities said they are look-
ing for others in the two robber-
ies and are trying to determine
whether there are links to simi-
lar recent incidents in the
D istrict, Maryland and Virginia.
The flash robberies have in-
volved groups of people quickly
running in and swarming a store
while it is open for business. In
some cases, they take clothing
off the racks or items off shelves;
other times they smash display
cases to access merchandise.
Police did not identify the
teenager who was arrested be-
cause he is 17 and was charged as
a juvenile with robbery.
Cmdr. Duncan Bedlion, who
heads D.C. police’s Second Dis-
trict, said the arrest occurred
shortly after an 11 a.m. robbery
Wednesday at a store in the 1000
block of H Street NW, near
Metro Center.
Bedlion said four young menentered the store, with one hold-
ing his waistband, as if he had a
weapon, in an attempt “to intim-
idate people.” Police said that no
weapon was shown but that the
four people “gathered every-
thing they could grab” and es-
caped in a vehicle.
Police saw the vehicle a short
time later and tried to stop it,
Bedlion said, but the driver sped
off. Bedlion said that officers did
not pursue the vehicle but that
the driver crashed in the 700
block of K Street NW.
The teenager was arrested,
police said, while the other three
people escaped. Bedlion saidpolice recovered most of the
stolen clothing.
Police said they think the
same people robbed a store
Monday in Georgetown, taking
$19,500 worth of jackets and
jeans. In that case, a police
report says, eight people “began
grabbing several items from the
racks” and escaped in two vehi-
cles.
Earlier this year, authorities
were investigating at least six
other “flash” or smash-and-grab
thefts of eyeglass stores over a
three-week period in the D.C.
area. At one eyeglass store in
Alexandria, a man used a ham-mer to smash glass display cases
and a group escaped with Gucci
products and a tray of sunglass-
es worth more than $17,000.
More robberies of shops o c-
curred in the District in March,
including at a shop in the Navy
Yard area that was hit on consec-
utive days, with police saying
nearly $20,000 in clothing was
taken.
On March 7, police said two
people stole $102,000 worth of
sunglasses from an optical store
in Georgetown. Police said one
person “motioned he had a
weapon” but did not display it,
according to a report.THE DISTRICT
Police arrest teen in connection with smash-and-grab robbery
BY HANNAH NATANSONFairfax County Public Schools
can keep using its controversial
admissions system for prestigious
magnet school Thomas Jefferson
High School for Science and Tech-
nology as a lawsuit challenging
that system proceeds, according
to the latest court ruling.
The decision, issued Thursday
in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
4th Circuit, means the 2,500 stu-
dents who already applied for
spots in the Thomas Jefferson
Class of 2026 will continue
through the remainder of the
school’s “holistic review” system,
which takes into account factors
such as applicants’ socioeconomic
status. The parent group, the Co-
alition for TJ, that sued over the
admissions system has charged
that the school’s admissions proc-
ess discriminates against Asian
Americans, allegations school of-
ficials have repeatedly denied.
In its order, the court also sig-
naled that it would probably de-
cide the suit in the school system’s
favor. Two members of the court —
Judges Toby Heytens, who wrote
the order, and Robert King — vot-
ed for granting the stay, allowing
for the current policy to stay in
place temporarily. One judge, Alli-
son Jones Rushing, voted against
the stay and penned a dissenting
opinion.
Heytens wrote: “I think the
public interest favors a stay given
the timing and logistical con-
straints associated with scrapping
the current admissions policy and
creating a new one so close to the
end of the current admissions cy-
cle. If the district court’s order is
not stayed, thousands of students
and their families will be thrown
into disarray for the next several
months.”
He added, “In my view, appel-
lant Fairfax County School Board
is likely to succeed” in the case.
In a statement Thursday, the
Fairfax board’s chair, Stella Pekar-
sky, said that “we are pleased with
the ruling from the Fourth Cir-
cuit.”
But the Coalition for TJ called
the court’s decision “a grave error.”
Members wrote in a statement
Thursday that they are convening
with legal counsel to ponder next
steps.
“If the judges’ decision stands,
we would see Fairfax County Pub-
lic Schools usher in a second class
of students to America’s No. 1 pub-
lic high school through an uncon-
stitutional race-based admissions
process,” coalition members
wrote. “Justice delayed is justice
denied.”
The court’s granting of the stay
is the latest twist in a legal fightthat has sent Fairfax County Pub-
lic Schools into overdrive working
to defend the recently revised ad-
missions system at TJ, as the high-
ly sought-after school is known.
TJ, which is frequently ranked
the No. 1 public high school in the
nation and is seen as a stepping-
stone to an Ivy League education,
has historically enrolled single-
digit percentages of Black and
Hispanic students. Hoping to
boost diversity — and spurred by
the nationwide reckoning with
racism that followed George
Floyd’s killing — top Fairfax
school officials altered the admis-
sions program in 2020 by elimi-
nating a notoriously difficult test
and a $100 application fee.
Instead, officials implemented
a “holistic review” process that
requires students to prove high
grade-point averages and a diffi-
cult course load, as well as write a
“problem-solving essay” focused
on a question in math or science.
It also asks admissions officials to
consider four “experience factors”
for each applicant, including the
applicant’s socioeconomic status,
whether the applicant speaks
English at home, whether the ap-
plicant has a disability and wheth-
er the applicant’s middle school
has historically sent few students
to TJ.
Last year, the first year in which
the admissions cycle took effect,
Fairfax admitted the most diverse
class of TJ freshmen in recent
memory. The TJ Class of 2025 hasmore Black, Hispanic and low-in-
come students than previous
classes, while the proportion of
White students receiving offers —
22 percent — was about the same
as in the past four years. The
percentage of Asian students re-
ceiving offers, however, dropped
from a typical 70 percent to rough-
ly 50 percent.
The Coalition for TJ sued to
reverse the changes to the school’s
admissions system in March 2021.
The parents are being represented
pro bono by conservative legal
advocacy group — and known af-
firmative action opponent — the
Pacific Legal Foundation. In their
suit, the parents argue that the
admissions changes are racially
discriminatory and were designed
to reduce the number of Asian
students, charges that Fairfax offi-
cials have repeatedly denied.
In a late February ruling, U.S.
District Judge Claude Hilton sid-
ed with the parents on almost
every point. He concluded that the
admissions system constitutes an
illegal act of “racial balancing”
and that emails and text messages
between Fairfax board members,
which emerged during the law-
suit, “leave no material dispute
that ... the purpose of the Board’s
admissions overhaul was to
change the racial makeup of TJ to
the detriment of Asian Ameri-
cans.”
He ordered Fairfax to cease us-
ing the revised TJ admissions sys-
tem. Fairfax officials at first re-quested a stay of the order — so
they could finish processing appli-
cations for the 2,500 prospective
members of the Class of 2026 who
had already applied — but Hilton
denied their request in mid-
March.
On March 14, the Fairfax school
board filed an appeal of Hilton’s
ruling with the 4th Circuit Court.
In the order Thursday, Heytens
wrote that he finds the coalition’s
arguments unpersuasive and Hil-
ton’s reasoning and findings deep-
ly flawed, as well as at odds with
previous Supreme Court rulings.
In particular, he took issue with
the idea that the TJ admissions
process amounts to racial balanc-
ing, which is illegal.
“The Coalition appears to have
identified no evidence that TJ’s
current race neutral policy is in-
tended to achieve a certain per-
centage of Black, Hispanic, or
Asian American students,”
Heytens wrote.
In a dissenting opinion,
though, Rushing took the oppo-
site view.
“The Board acted with an im-
permissible racial purpose when
it sought to decrease enrollment
of ‘overrepresented’ Asian Ameri-
can students at TJ to better ‘reflect
the racial composition” of the sur-
rounding area,’” she wrote. “Board
member discussions were per-
meated with racial balancing, as
were its stated aims and its use of
racial data to model proposed out-
comes.”VIRGINIA
Court keeps Fairfax high school’s ‘ holistic review’ admissions
Controversial process
will temporarily remain
while case continuessame things that people around
the country are doing.”
Good plan, adults. For the
future.
But kids need help now.
“Many students don’t realize
that their stress levels are rising
until they have a panic attack,”
said Abatan, a student at
McKinley Tech High School.
“They need to know what to do
in the moment before they are
overwhelmed to the point of
adding more mental harm to
themselves.”
The students proposed a
$5 million initiative to create
after-school mental health
programs in 125 schools.
And they explained that while
many schools do have resources,
kids don’t know about them, are
disconnected from them or are
embarrassed to use them.
“At my school, you usually
have to go to a teacher first to
get help from a therapist,”
Canales, a student at Columbia
Heights Educational Campus,
said in her testimony. “This
presents a problem because
students have to share why they
need to see a therapist and may
not feel comfortable sharing that
with a teacher.”
Canales’s goal of becoming a
therapist one day is a good one.
Let’s hope we can get it right
sooner, though.serve in various capacities,” the
agency’s director, Barbara J.
Bazron, told The Washington
Post’s Perry Stein. “We are also
working closely at getting more
people in our pipeline through
our internship programs and so
forth. We are doing some of theHealth are on all 216 public
school campuses.
Staffing up isn’t going to be
easy.
“Everybody knows that,
around the country, there are
really not sufficient numbers of
[licensed social workers] torelationship and eventual
breakup led to destructive
burnout and situational
depression for most of my 10th-
grade year,” she said. But she has
parents with the money and
means to get her help. Therapy
pulled her out of her depression,
she said. When she returned to
school, she saw the same issues
in peers all around her who
didn’t know how to get help.
No surprise: She wants to
study psychology.
She’ll have no trouble finding
work — there’s a startling
shortage of mental health
workers in America right now.
And that doesn’t bode well for
the plan that D.C. Public Schools
proposed to help students.
The proposed budget for the
2023 fiscal year is big, up to
$2.2 billion from last year’s
$2 billion. And mental health
services have a starring role,
making sure that licensed
therapists or psychologists from
the Department of BehavioralA few days later, the Centers
for Disease Control and
Prevention released a report
that confirmed to Americans
what they had known all along
in their classrooms, at their
dinner tables and in their heads:
Our children are in serious
trouble. In the grips of the
pandemic last year, 1 out of
every 5 American teens that the
CDC spoke to had considered
suicide. Forty percent said they
felt “persistently sad or
hopeless.”
“These data echo a cry for
help,” said Debra Houry, a
deputy director at the CDC. “The
covid-19 pandemic has created
traumatic stressors that have the
potential to further erode
students’ mental well-being.”
It’s “a national emergency,”
the American Academy of
Pediatrics declared last fall.
That’s what the kids in D.C.
said on Monday, too, in the
middle of an annual budget
process for the public school
system that had nearly 250
witnesses submitting testimony
on behalf of their passion, their
profession or their pet projects:
more baseball fields, a food-
education program, fixing the
filthy bathrooms in one of the
biggest high schools in the city.
And students from across the
city who work with the Young
Women’s Project, a nonprofit
that helps kids find power in
their voices, wrote impassioned
arguments for more robust and
effective mental health
programs in all D.C. schools.
“My school doesn’t provide
many mental health resources
and does not share much
information about what they do
have,” said Noemie Durand, 17, a
junior at BASIS. “It’s baffling
and incredibly frustrating that
the current health and school
systems create so many
obstacles to receiving that help.”
Durand said she, like many of
her peers, suffered during the
pandemic.
“The combination of stress
from school, isolation from
friends, and an extremely toxic
DVORAK FROM B1
PETULA DVORAK
D.C. teens bypass adults to address mental health
D.C. COUNCIL
Clockwise from top left, Alynah King, Noemie Durand and Elizabeth Abatan testify before the D.C. Council advocating more mental health
services in D.C. schools. The budget for fiscal 2023 ensures licensed therapists or psychologists are on all 216 public school campuses.“It’s baffling and incredibly frustrating that the current health and schoolsystems create so many obstacles to receiving that help.”
Noemie Durand, a 1 7-year-old student at BASISWashington
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