A front-page story in a recent Gazette Packet recalled that T.C. Williams High School, the multi-million-dollar citadel of learning on upper King Street, has been described as a “persistently lower achieving school.” An ad in the same edition urged readers to protest the city’s decision to bleed its library budget in order to fund Bikeshare. It is irresistible to conclude that the performance of the city’s main high school and the frailty of its commitment to a vibrant library system are somehow connected.
After all, Alexandria is a community where no bookseller can survive, where the main library is an expensive architectural eyesore starved of books, and the riverfront and its long history have been handed over to developers, whose priorities are well known. In such a community, one would expect that building calves and thighs would be more important than building minds. Strong is good, of course, but so is smart.
If the city, in the form of the council, really believes Bikeshare is worth doing, it should find a way to do it without gaffing a struggling, but essential, library system.
Carl A. Posey
Alexandria