Top Stories
Town Notice: Severe winter weather preparedness
The Town of Front Royal is closely monitoring the winter weather forecast for mixed precipitation, high winds, and low temperatures and the potential impacts on our community. Be assured that the Town has emergency response plans in place and is prepared to act quickly in the event of Power Outages and other possible issues.
- If you experience a loss of power: report it online HERE or call the Non-Emergency Police line at (540)635-2111.
- To report all other utility or town-related issues: call the Non-Emergency Police line at (540)635-2111.
- We also recommend staying up to date on widespread power outages and other utility-related issues by signing up HERE to receive text or email alerts directly.
SNOW REMOVAL – During snow events, the Town’s priority is to provide emergency vehicle access; therefore, arterial roads (Royal Ave, Commerce Ave, South St, and Shenandoah Ave) will be cleared first. To clear the roads effectively and efficiently, we ask citizens to please assist the Town by:
- Parking off the street if possible.
- Refraining from driving. Removing snow/ice from sidewalks adjacent to your property. Town Code (142 – 4.1) allows property owners 24 hours after the ice has formed or snow has ceased to fall.
- Waiting until after plows have cleared your street to complete your driveway and mailbox shoveling. Trucks cannot pick up plows for every driveway or mailbox, and it is possible your driveway or mailbox could unintentionally get blocked back in with snow.
- Refraining from pushing snow in the street. This will create slick areas in the road when the snow begins to melt and re-freeze. Snow events can be frustrating for you and your family, and the Town makes every effort to clear the streets as quickly and efficiently as possible. As with any situation, if you have an emergency, please call 9-1-1.
Safe, warm & happy holidays to all!
Town of Front Royal
Local Government
Joint Public Schools Budget hearing Sees Critique of Schools Admin’s Detail and Past Performance Accountability
The Warren County Board of Supervisors and School Board joint budget work session of April 30th turned into a somewhat accusatory analysis of an absence of detail, a developing lack of trust, and perceived absence of accountability aimed at public schools administrators and financial staff. The most lengthy and critical comments came from North River District Supervisor Richard Jamieson, who noted that while homeschooling his own children, had himself attended public schools as a youth. He asserted that his home schooling preference for his children did not impact his current negative analysis of Warren County Public Schools.
However, following North River School Board member Melanie Salins earlier comments on being unable to have questions she has been asking about budget allocations for four vacant positions responded to in a timely manner by school system staff, Jamieson later launched a 24-minute critique of what he believes are misplaced budgetary priorities contributing to ongoing operational failures educationally and administratively at Warren County Public Schools.
But more on that later. First, we’ll summarize portions of what led up to Jamieson’s negative appraisal of the county’s public school system and its evolving Fiscal Year-2025 budget proposal. It might be noted there was one elected official absence from the full boards’ joint meeting. That was Shenandoah District School Board member Tom McFadden Jr.
Schools Finance Officer Rob Ballentine opened the work session with a presentation of the evolving public schools Fiscal Year-2025 budget, explaining that the State revenue portion of the equation remains in flux, leaving a certain amount of guess work on necessary local funding involved until State officials finalize their FY-2025 budget numbers and that key portion of the anticipated revenue stream to the county’s public school system.
With some updated numbers the projected State contribution was cited at $43,514,552 of what is currently projected as a $78,790,969 total WC Public Schools FY-2025 budget-supporting revenue stream. That number includes a requested County contribution of $31,119,702, an increase of $2,469,702 over the last Fiscal Year County share of the Public Schools budget. Ballentine observed that the $2,469,702 local revenue increase was less than cited at the previous joint budget work session. Other anticipated revenue streams include Federal revenue of $3.55 million, and Miscellaneous revenue of $605,708.
Ballentine noted that the changes in submitted State revenue added about $43,000 to what had been projected previously. “The problem with that is the State sill hasn’t adopted a budget,” Ballentine said, noting a scheduled budget Special Session of the State General Assembly targeted for May 13, with a subsequent final vote on the State budget hopefully by May 15.
“Once they do finalize their budget we’ll get the exact numbers that will go in that column for the State. So, those numbers probably will change, hopefully not much. And if they change, hopefully they’ll get larger — but that remains to be seen,” Ballentine observed.
The question and answer that followed began innocently enough as, first School Board member Melanie Salins asked what had propelled the reduction in the local revenue request, removal of some items or the increase in the projected State contribution. “There were things that we adjusted in the budget,” Ballentine responded, citing a $100,000 reduction from elimination of a testing program that was being deferred to FY-2026, as well as the positive impact of the projected increase in State revenue.
“Jay” Butler sought information on what was driving school budgetary changes upward, including how staffing needs were being met to fill unfilled positions. During discussion of that latter item, School Superintendent Dr. Chris Ballenger observed that it was not generally advisable to wait until the next budgetary year cycle to fill unanticipated staff vacancies because qualified available applicants would be quickly grabbed up by other school systems also looking to fill vacant positions. In response to a question, Dr. Ballenger said that of 33 current staff vacancies, 16 are teaching positions.
Later, Ballenger observed that what students need educationally, as well as socially and economically, were the primary consideration in establishing annual public schools budgetary priorities. The staffing priorities discussion led County Board and joint work session Chairman Cheryl Cullers to express her hope that an Agricultural Program teaching position would be included in and approved as part of the schools FY-2025 budgetary request.
Money well spent?
Prefacing comments beginning at the 2:02:15 mark of the linked County video, Supervisor Jamieson said he felt line-item schools budget questions had been adequately covered, leading him toward another perspective he described as coming “from 40,000 feet or so”. His overview from that altitude was not complimentary:
“I’ve already made a few comments about a kind of crisis of confidence in terms of transparency and what’s visible. My primary concern as a supervisor charged with the responsibility for using taxpayer money is whether accountability is sufficient for the money being spent by the school system. And asking the question is more money being spent correlated to better educational outcomes,” Jamieson began.
And while admitting there were differing opinions on answers to those questions, Jamieson said he believed: “That’s not the preponderance of the evidence. That it depends on how the additional money is spent.” Jamieson asserted that he agreed that an excellent public educational system is a benefit to an entire community. However, he continued to note that recent annual statistics indicated that attendance at Warren County Public Schools had peaked, and was staying level, if not decreasing in some areas.
He did cite educational options, including home schooling and private schooling, in this community to public schools. However, he acknowledged that public schools educated the “vast majority” of students in the community. And he did not address whether shifting population and countywide age variables might impact those public school population trends. He did cite constituents he was aware of he said had withdrawn their children from the county’s public schools due to discipline or violence issues within some schools.
To make his point that public school appropriations were not being well spent, Jamieson pointed to four schools in the system that were ranked below federal standards of performance. “The elephant in the room that has been brought up, is that we do have four out of 10 schools that are not meeting federal standards. That’s 40%,” Jamieson pointed out, adding that 40% of the five-person School Board had voted against the submitted public schools budget proposal. As we understand it, that 40% was Salins and the absent Tom McFadden Jr., both of whom appear to have direct or indirect ties to the home or private schooling community here.
Jamieson said that instituting across-the-board raises in a system with a 40% failing standard of its schools, as opposed to identifying and replacing staff that could be tied to those failing standards, was a failed status quo he could not support. As to federal involvement in public education, Chairman Cullers, who was a school nurse in the public school system for years, at another point in the discussion suggested the school system should drop the federal and state implemented SOLs (Standards Of Learning) as a dysfunctional educational measurement tool. However, Jamieson noted that would amount to crossing the people with their hands on the purse strings of the educational system. — Well, at least two-thirds of those purse strings, the third being the local County appropriation he was asserting should be cut.
How may Jamieson’s negative analysis overview impact the supervisor majority’s perspective on the submitted, if not yet finalized FY-2025 Warren County Public Schools budget currently seeking $31,119,702 in local County funding, as noted above, an increase of $2,469,702 from the current Fiscal Year-2024?
Stay tuned as this crucial municipal governmental funding decision approaches a conclusion that may reverberate throughout this community for more than just the Fiscal Year to come.
Local News
Congratulations to Warren County High School Seniors – Class of 2024
Royal Examiner presents the Warren County High School Class of 2024. Congratulations to these wonderful seniors on their hard work and deserved accomplishments! We wish you the best in your next big endeavors. Photos courtesy of Victor O’Neill Studios and Tolliver Studios, LLC.
If your Warren County senior is not listed, please send in their Name and Senior Picture to news@royalexaminer.com.
Local Government
Town Council and Planning Commission Meet for Much-Needed Discussion at Special Joint Work Session
On Monday, April 29, at 7 p.m. in the Front Royal Town Hall on 102 East Main Street, the Front Royal Town Council and the Planning Commission met to discuss vape shops, Planned Neighborhood Development District (PND) zoning, and short-term rentals. Planning Director and Zoning Administrator Lauren Kopishke supported the mayor in guiding the discussion.
While vape shops and short-term rentals drew similar sentiments from everyone in the room, the more contentious item and perhaps the driving force behind the gathering was PND zoning. This type of zoning allows for mixed-use development in higher densities, on parcels rezoned to PND, and it is in many ways an improvement on by-right development as it potentially offers affordable housing for those in Front Royal who are struggling to cope with inflation and the cost of living in general. The challenge to PND zoning, which Planning Commissioner Chair Connie Marshner sees clearly, is the scarcity of lots large enough within Town limits to meet the acreage requirement for a planned neighborhood development district, as it is currently regulated by the Town Ordinance. This may explain why, in an application from a developer for PND rezoning that involved a proposed amendment to the ordinance reducing the acreage threshold for PND from twenty-five acres to two, the planning commission passed the application to the council, recommending a reduction to five acres in the case that the council felt uncomfortable with two. In the words of Councilwoman Amber Morris, the two-acre prospect was “offensive.” Indeed, the council denied any amendment to the ordinance and the application.
To do justice to Morris’s position, it is offensive because it would open a “floodgate” to untrammeled development that may neither respect the Town’s rustic charm nor be sensitive to the needs of its infrastructure and the way of life that its natives have built here. At the same time, Kopishke has emphasized that there are so many other stipulations in the rezoning to PND that the floodgate would never be opened. Having provided the council and the commission with extensive reading in their agenda packet that highlighted how other localities are handling this type of development, localities from which she is actively gathering information in staff’s ongoing PND enterprise, Kopishke urged those present to discuss what they like about the current ordinance and what they do not like. After a somewhat tangential conversation, most of the council members said they would like to leave the ordinance the way it is, with a threshold of twenty-five acres for PND mixed residential and fifty for PND commercial.
Morris said it is not the government’s job to provide affordable housing. Also, there is nothing wrong, in her opinion, with preservation. Just because a parcel is undeveloped does not mean it needs to be developed. The evening ended with the sense that things were as much as before. There is only one PND zone in Front Royal, and it is undeveloped. The Comprehensive Plan does indeed call for higher density development, but what that looks like seems to be a matter of degrees in which some are prepared to be more extreme than others. Consensus between these two bodies would be a very rare diamond.
Local News
As Opening of Youth Center Draws Near, the Reaching Out Now Family Looks to the Past for Inspiration
As Samantha Barber and Toby Hire sat, side by side, holding hands on April 26 in a yet-to-be-furnished room of the Raymond E. Santmyers Student Union and Activity Center in Front Royal, Virginia, there was a very real sense of water, which is stopped by nothing. “Water is my serenity,” Samantha said in this conversation with the Royal Examiner. It maneuvers its way around any obstacle in its path, if not eroding the obstacle altogether, and that is precisely what the Reaching Out Now (RON) family, of which Samantha is the president, has done in its endeavor to provide Front Royal and the wider Warren County region with a youth center, opening soon, where students can come to play, relax, have fun, develop strong bonds of friendship, and explore what they want to do with their futures.
The youth center is necessary, and the stakes are life and death. The brilliant lives and tragic early departures of Harlee Hire and Nathan Jenkins, the first to suicide and the second to a boating accident, inform the RON family of their mission to reach young people. There is this awareness that life is incredibly fragile, and the only way to face it is through community. It is as simple as asking: “Are you okay?” That is precisely what RON intends to do through the youth center so that young people in Harlee’s position do not fall through the cracks.
Harlee loved water. And by all appearances, she could overcome any obstacle. Through tears, “She was a great friend,” her mother Toby said as Samantha gripped her hand. Harlee practiced radical encouragement. It was not uncommon to hear her yelling shameless compliments like: “Your butt is looking fine today!” And even in the early months of 2022, after her friend Nathan’s boating accident in January and before she attempted suicide on May 10 and officially passed on May 11 and the Honor Walk donation of her organs on May 13 at UVA, she clung tenaciously to life. “I am going to do this, Miss Sam,” she told Samantha at a fashion show RON was hosting. And she walked down the runway.
“It is a sacrificial gift,” Samantha said of the youth center. “Nathan would have loved this,” Susan Jenkins said, standing outside the Santmyers building in May of 2023, and as soon as she said it, it began to rain. Indeed, a little fall of rain can hardly hurt me now, to quote the musical production of Les Miserables. There is a very real sense that both Harlee and Nathan continue to live through the youth center as the RON family remembers them and strives to reach young people in their position. Especially Harlee’s. While it is impossible to predict an accident like the one that occurred for Nathan, Samantha, and Toby both feel strongly that intervention is possible in the case of young people who are struggling with mental health issues.
In fact, May will be Mental Health Awareness Month for RON as they host three different athletic events in memory of Harlee and Nathan through their Safe at Home program. On May 9, a varsity girls’ softball game will be held at Skyline High School at 6 p.m. They will host a community baseball day on May 11, between 10:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. at the Bing Crosby Stadium. And on May 25 at Skyline High School from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., they will host a community softball day. In order to get tickets, go to reachingoutnow.org
There is no need to be perfect. Samantha is frank about the impact this trauma has had on her health. “You have rheumatoid arthritis,” a doctor told her. He explained that she had internalized so much psychological pain that it had a very real manifestation in her physical health. But this is just one more obstacle that can be overcome through the support of friends offering real, physical comfort. You can be broken, Toby said. It is okay. It is the broken kids that RON wants to reach. If you are in trouble at school, we understand, Samantha emphasized. If you have weed in your backpack, we understand. This is not a matter of selecting the crème de la crème of students who are already gifted and exceptionally motivated. It is a matter of reaching all the kids and helping them understand their potential.
In the unfurnished room at the youth center, a room named in honor of Nathan and intended to be a game room, the Nate (DAWG) Game Room, Samantha, and Toby agree wholeheartedly that there is nothing wrong with just playing games if you are not playing them alone. Toby said this is the most connected yet disconnected age. The goal of the youth center is to help young people connect authentically.
Community Events
Updated: ‘Phony Ponies’ Give a Competitive Edge to FR Rotary Downtown Pub Crawl Fundraiser
On Friday, April 26, the Front Royal Rotary sponsored a downtown Front Royal “Pub Crawl” featuring a Phony Ponies “horse race” ticket holders could bet on to add to the Rotary fundraiser, and a little reward for their knowledge of the relative prowess and breeding of the involved Phony Ponies. Or as one pre-race announcer informed the crowd, “We’ve got three stallions and two old mares in this race,” which was met by some boos from the filly-supporting contingent.
And it was one of those two filly mares that led the five-horse field across the finish line after three laps around the Gazebo in the in the Main Street Downs Raceway shortly after 7:30 p.m. — that was “Blazin’ Botox” (Warren County Sheriff Crystal Cline), followed in order by “Money for Nothing” (Front Royal Rotary President Ken Evans), “Closing Real Fast” (Front Royal Police Chief Kahle Magalis), “Bullseye” (Warren County Rotary President Michael Williams), and “The Old Gray Mare” or was that “Mayor” (Front Royal Mayor Lori Cockrell).
It was a highly competitive race with some post finish line challenges offered by runner up Money for Nothing, whose jockey Evans noted an unapproved by the Racing Commission pre-race change into borrowed running shoes by the winner, as well as some out-of-my-lane territorial elbow-bumping by Blazin’ Botox to keep him in his 2nd place position. WAIT, do horses have elbows? I guess phony ones do.
Jockey Cockrell explained her disappointing 5th place finish, noting she had locked in behind Bullseye/Williams early in the running. However, it ended up being a bad spot to draft, as Bullseye appeared to be having an equipment break-down in front of her, as in a drooping “saddle” threatening that stallions stability and which she had to pull back from for caution’s sake.
On the more serious side, the second annual Talk Derby To Me Pub Crawl fundraiser was in support of Rotary International’s eradicate polio worldwide effort. More information about Rotary’s efforts to end polio can be found at this website: https://www.rotary.org/en/our-causes/ending-polio
Involved and supporting downtown businesses included Vibrissa, the On Cue Sports Bar & Grill, Buckle & Belle Boutique, sponsor of the “Phony Ponies” race, C&C Frozen Treats, Pavemint Smoking Taphouse, Honey & Hops, Catamount Lounge, and Garcia & Gavino. Hope we didn’t miss anyone, and we’ll update as necessary if we did.
And in a late update, individual sponsoring of the Phony Ponies was provided by: Ken Evans, ReMax Reality sponsoring Evans on “Money For Nothing”; CSM Aesthetics sponsored “Blazin’ Botox” and jockey Cline; Clint Pierpoint, Next Home Reality Select sponsored “Closing Real Fast” with Chief Magalis on the saddle; Lori Cockrell for Mayor sponsored “The Old Grey Mare” with the mayor riding; and Shenandoah Valley Axe Throwing Co. sponsored the saddle-failing “Bullseye” with Williams keeping his stallion upright.
And if you missed the fun and excitement, here are a few more shots.
Crime/Court
McDonald Criminal Convictions Sentencing Hearing, Part 2, Set for Late May
In the wake of the April 9, Part One Sentencing Hearing of former Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority Executive Director Jennifer McDonald, the website court calendar of the 10th Western District of Virginia has finally posted a date for Part Two of that hearing. That date is Wednesday, May 29, 2024, on the 10 a.m. docket in the Harrisonburg federal courthouse where McDonald was convicted of 30 criminal counts related to the FR-WC EDA “financial scandal” circa 2014 to 2018. Those who have followed that story since it began unraveling, including on these pages from the fall of 2016 to late 2018, will recall an estimated $26-million in EDA assets was moved to unauthorized or what is now believed to be fraudulently presented uses. Trial testimony indicated McDonald moving about $6.5 million to her personal use unauthorized by the then EDA Board of Directors.
As reported in our coverage of that April 9 hearing, Part Two will hear Judge Elizabeth K. Dillon’s rulings on a number of objections filed by both the prosecution and defense counsels to the precedence of evidence submitted by the other side in written summaries to the court leading up to the April 9th start of McDonald’s sentencing hearing. Also argued on April 9 were “Forfeiture” of defendant McDonald assets, “Restitution”, and “Special Conditions” being sought at sentencing from both the prosecution and defense. While Judge Dillon ruled on a number of these objections on April 9, she took some under advisement, seeking written support from both sides to their motions arguments.
In addition to those rulings, prosecution and defense counsel are expected to make final arguments in support of their sentencing proposals, and Judge Dillon will set a date for Part Three of the Sentencing Hearing. Part Three is when the 47-year-old McDonald is anticipated to find out the court’s ruling on arguments for relative leniency to prison sentencing guidelines, six years, by her legal team versus the prosecution’s high-end request. The prosecution is seeking a 22-year sentence with 24 months sought for an Aggravated Identity Theft conviction of McDonald regarding the use of Truc “Curt” Tran’s name in one involved “financial scandal” real estate transaction, tacked on to a total of 240 months (20 years) being sought on McDonald’s other 29 convictions on fraud and money laundering counts.