Words, music, images and more from Jim Barnes
“Sports and recreation are the heartbeat of Ashburn Village, a 5,500-unit planned community in eastern Loudoun County, Va., about 30 miles from Washington.
With 16 miles of trails, three community centers with outdoor pools, eight playgrounds and a multitude of courts and fields for tennis, basketball, baseball and soccer, Ashburn Village is built for outdoor activity.”
When developer Ken Thompson conceived the Lake Ridge community in the 1960s, he envisioned a place where suburban homes would coexist with nature, where active individuals and families would enjoy spending time outdoors.
—The Washington Post, November 14, 2019
Turning to art, Gertrude Evans continues her vigil for civil rights
Loudouner, Fall 2017
Over the past few weeks, Douglass School has taken the lead in a relief effort to help students in a Florida community that was devastated by Hurricane Irma last month. The project has given the students an opportunity to look past their own struggles, imagine what it would be like to lose everything and consider what they can do to help.
The Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2017
Renée Dawson, a 16-year veteran of Loudoun County public schools, will be at the helm when the newest one, Brambleton Middle School in Ashburn, opens Thursday with 1,124 students.
The Washington Post, Aug. 20, 2017
When visitors enter the Children’s Science Center, they are greeted by two distinct sides of the small museum.
To the left is the Experiment Bar, where children conduct science experiments, assisted by family members, staff members and volunteers. To the right, mounted on the wall, is an enormous periodic table of elements showing the names of the museum’s major benefactors.
The Experiment Bar is one of the most popular features of the center, which offers interactive scientific activities for children and their families. The element wall honors the donors who helped open the center, marketing director Dorothy Ready said.
The Washington Post, July 9, 2017
Less than nine months after vandals defaced the Ashburn Colored School by spray-painting it with racist graffiti, a Virginia historical marker has been installed near the front entrance of the gleaming white building.
The marker came about through the efforts of a group of seventh-grade students at Farmwell Station Middle School who selected it as a project for their social studies class in the fall. They cleared hurdles at local and state levels to obtain grant funding for the marker and win approval from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, which installed the marker Monday.
The Washington Post, June 11, 2017
Thousands of trees adorn the property of The Hill School in Middleburg, providing a peaceful, natural landscape for the school campus and an outdoor learning laboratory for the students.
Some of the trees at The Hill School Arboretum look as though they could have been there for a century. But less than three decades ago, the school was surrounded by hayfields and cornfields. A gift of land and the vision of a dedicated volunteer led to the establishment of the arboretum, school officials said.
The arboretum was recently selected by the Smithsonian Institution and the Garden Club of America for inclusion in the Archives of American Gardens. The school announced in February that the arboretum was one of 51 properties across the country that were added to the archives last year.
The Washington Post, May 7, 2017
When the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors adopted a budget for fiscal 2018 on April 4, it handed the school board the task of trimming its expenditures by $5.5 million.
On Monday, the school board completed the budget reconciliation process by approving a list of reductions recommended by Schools Superintendent Eric Williams. That list avoided cuts to the school board’s key initiatives, such as expanding full-day kindergarten, boosting employee salaries and buying new school buses.
The Washington Post, April 30, 2017
In between the usual Saturday activities — soccer, ballet, taekwondo — a group of 9- and 10-year-olds from Loudoun Country Day School are learning to “crack the code” of William Shakespeare.
About a dozen fourth- and fifth-graders attend voluntary Saturday morning classes at the Leesburg-area private school to learn how to understand and perform Shakespeare’s works. The school’s headmaster, Randy Hollister, leads the classes.
The Washington Post, April 16, 2017
