Pushing ‘OUR’ luck? Town poised to seek traditional graduations capped at 1,000 attendees

As initially reported in our overview story on the Front Royal Town Council Work Session of Monday, July 20, council appears on the edge of endorsing a draft letter to the Warren County School Board to be signed by Mayor Eugene Tewalt. Despite ongoing concerns as previously low Coronavirus-impact states that largely ignored initial reopening and continued social distancing guidelines sometimes see record-setting COVID-19 outbreaks, that letter if signed and sent, will seek traditional graduation ceremonies with a capped outdoor attendance of 1,000 at both the Warren County and Skyline High Schools football fields.

Mayor Tewalt leans forward for a hard look during Monday’s council work session. He might want to do the same before signing off on any council-endorsed letter citing numbers that do no appear to be in cited sources in the context the letter presents. Royal Examiner Photos/Roger Bianchini – Royal Examiner Video/Mark Williams

As noted in our companion story’s reference to the Town initiative on larger graduation ceremonies here, career local educator and Councilwoman Lori Cockrell expressed some reservation at endorsing the council initiative without having seen the draft letter, despite Councilman Jacob Meza’s assertion, “It’s a good one, Lori, trust me”.

However, after a first read-through of the draft letter and some background research, Cockrell’s caution from her employment perspective might be warranted. The draft council letter cites questionable numbers in setting two levels of state officials against each other in asserting which guidelines on graduation attendance should be adhered to locally.

Whose numbers, where?

The draft challenges Warren County School Board and Administration preliminary graduation planning based on State Health Commissioner and Superintendent of Public Instruction guidelines released July 6 limiting “large school gatherings” to 250 people.

Rather, the Town draft letter says that Governor Ralph Northam’s June 30 Phase Three Executive Order 67 reference to the State’s “Phase Three Guidelines” citing 50% occupancy or a cap of one-thousand people at “sports venues” (emphasis in context) should be adhered to for graduation ceremonies at the two high school football fields.

However, Executive Order 67’s own wording limits attendance at “sports played on a field” to “the lesser of 50% of the occupancy load” or “250 persons per field”. And an exploration of the 47-page “Phase Three Guidelines” led to the page 23 statement that “For sports played on a field, attendees are limited to 250 persons per field” with no reference in the one-and-a-third page section on “Indoor and Outdoor Recreational Activities” mentioning a thousand-person attendance limit.

Councilman Meza, masked at right, was enthusiastic in promoting a council-endorsed letter to the School Board seeking normal, large-scale, outside summer of 2020 public high school graduations.

So unless our online research is flawed, it would seem the author(s) of the draft Town letter have perhaps misread or misinterpreted relevant state documents on pandemic reopening guidelines to suit their own arguments. Attempts to reach the interim town manager and mayor for information on who worked on the draft letter were unsuccessful prior to publication.

The Town draft letter also points to Warren County’s thus far relatively low COVID-19 case, hospitalization and death count statistics, saying they are “incongruent with the restrictive approach to commencement for these students.”

The letter continues in support of “a traditional graduation” stating the town government’s “intention” is “to offer any support necessary to celebrate our graduates and their accomplishments in a meaningful way,” adding, “Based upon the aforementioned, the Front Royal Town Council is formally requesting and of the deepest desire that you adopt the original plan and have traditional graduations.”

Another numbers gamble?

But as alluded to in our lead to this story, is the town council’s “we’re not impacted like others are” stance a bit too reminiscent of government officials in states like Florida, Arizona, Texas, who ignored medically-based cautions against too early reopening, public mask mandates or continued public social distancing standards and saw a late, occasionally record-setting explosion in COVID-19 cases that is continuing to this day?

Could our own local elected officials be tempting fate by refusing to accept that we are in unprecedented times and that the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic threat that is recorded to have now claimed over 140,000 American lives in six months – about 25% of the world’s deaths and 25% (3,761,362) of world cases in a nation with 4% of the world’s population – is not a thing of the past, even in communities that initially appeared comparatively unaffected?

With a fixed private-sector 2.65%, 30-year interest rate on the table in 2017, New Market Tax Credit Program Administrator Brian Phipps echoed town staff in telling council NOT to gamble on competing for limited NMTC resources and a 30-year 1.5% interest rate to construct a new police station. They didn’t listen then either; and are now suing the EDA in an attempt to prove that ‘gamble’ wasn’t their fault, as weren’t other EDA oversight variables.

For while Warren County along with much of the Northern Shenandoah Valley-based Lord Fairfax Health District has been on the low end of cases statewide, our six-jurisdiction Health District as of July 20th stands at 2,344 total cases with 82 deaths and 205 hospitalizations; of which Warren County counts 334 cases, 8 deaths and 22 hospitalizations, ranking third in the district in deaths in front of Frederick County, Winchester and Clarke County, and fourth in cases.

For who?

Now this reporter’s experience of high school graduation was in the distant past in a galaxy far, far away. But I have talked to others with more recent memories who agree across several generations, as they said a great bulk of their high school friends would also, that they were anxiously counting the minutes for their graduations to be over, as opposed to soaking in a life experience. And they felt that the event’s significance on the high end was counted mostly among parents, grandparents, class valedictorians, and officers.

So, we all might ask a final, two-part question before moving to “storm” the Warren County and Skyline High football stadiums for “normal” summer of 2020 graduation ceremonies – Who is this graduation fight really for; and at what risk??

Speaking of ‘risk’ – Good thing we got the previous photo with then-Mayor Hollis Tharpe in it. His photo was absent from ‘Mayors Row’ in the second-floor Town Hall caucus-meeting room Monday. Several town staff noted it had recently fallen off the wall. Hope it wasn’t too badly damaged so as not to be able to be replaced in a timely manner.

See the work session in the linked Royal Examiner video: