Charlottesville Schools folks are spittin’ mad at University of Virginia folks for stealing the $20 million Federal Executive Institute property from them.
An alternative perspective is floating around out there that takes some mental gymnastics to buy into.
The idea is that has the Trump administration colluding with UVA to keep the property from going to Charlottesville City Schools, because the school system hasn’t renounced DEI, and from a local evangelical K-9 school, Community Christian Academy.
I can see the first part of the above making sense.
The second part? Not so much.
But that’s where the local MAGA community is right now with this story.
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To be clear, the part of the story that has UVA actively working to keep the Christian school from getting its hands on the 13-acre property, which came available when the Trump administration decided in February to shut down the Federal Executive Institute, a training program for bureaucrats created in the LBJ years, is not at question.
UVA spokesperson Bethanie Glover made that point clear in an on-the-record statement to CBS19 last week:
“A key part of the reason why UVA submitted a proposal for the property — which included a letter of support for the City of Charlottesville’s proposal — was concern that the property might go to an entity without a public service mission, like a private school or a for-profit developer. If UVA were to withdraw its proposal, there’s no evidence that the property would revert back to the city,” Glover said.
OK, so, clear collusion there on the part of UVA and the City of Charlottesville, to keep the FEI property from falling into private hands, and there’s nothing nefarious about said collusion.
Buttressing that point: a second UVA spokesperson, Brian Coy, told VPN News last month that when the school was approached by the Trump administration about any interest it might have in acquiring the property, UVA asked about the “possibility of submitting a joint application with the City of Charlottesville.”
Only when the General Services Administration indicated that it would not accept a joint UVA-Charlottesville City Schools proposal did UVA submit its own application, or so the story from the UVA folks goes.
UVA, according to Coy, echoing Glover, was motivated by the “recognition that, if we didn’t submit, the property may go to a third party (neither city nor the University),” said Coy, who claimed in his comment to VPN News that the university had also sent a letter in support of the school division’s application.
“We recognize the benefits their proposal would provide to the City, and we are eager to work alongside them if either proposal is accepted. We remain optimistic that it will serve the needs of the region either through adult education programs and ROTC and/or local K-12,” Coy said.
UVA, then, has been clear and consistent in its public statements on the Federal Executive Institute property, that it would prefer the property to go to Charlottesville City Schools, but if the Trump administration doesn’t want the property to go to the school system, UVA would take on ownership of the property to keep it from going to a private entity.
This is where Community Christian Academy comes into the story.
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Kimberly Moore, the private school’s executive director, appeared on “The Rob Schilling Show,” a MAGA radio show that airs on WINA-1070AM – conservative talk by day, UVA Athletics flagship station by night – last week to lay out CCA’s side of the story.
In a guest commentary posted on the radio show’s blog, Moore wrote:
“We were quite surprised last Friday, then, to read the news that the Department of Education had re-evaluated CCS and UVA’s applications and decided to remove the property from CCS and to give it to UVA.
“This led to some questions. Was CCA’s application re-evaluated, and if not, why not? If the application process worked as we understood the written policies and procedures to indicate, shouldn’t CCA have been given the property as a K-12 school with a demonstrated need over a postsecondary school with no clear need for the property?
“The decisions, the reversal, and the obvious omission of CCA’s application in government communications regarding a reported re-evaluation caused confusion.”
I’ll note here, Moore describes Community Christian Academy in the post as a “K-12 school,” while above, I described CCA as a “K-9 school.”
The school’s website refers to Community Christian Academy as “a non-denominational K–9 school, dedicated to providing a strong academic and Biblically-based education to a diverse student population from Charlottesville and the surrounding areas.”
The discrepancy is that the school’s leadership is working on plans for “a multi-pathway high school offering a standard program of study, dual-enrollment classes (college classes offered in high school), and vocational and technical education,” which is where CCA’s interest in the Federal Executive Institute property lies.
“There is plenty of space to add additional students and programs. Our school has been at maximum capacity of about 110 students for three years,” Moore wrote in the guest commentary, also noting that “(m)ost of the buildings and property would not need to be changed because they are already differentiated for various school purposes.”
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The plans from CCA for the property appear to be a good use, with the caveat that the benefit would go to a tiny segment of the local population – notably, though, the tiny segment of the local population that is aligned with the Trump administration.
Charlottesville City Schools, for its part, has laid out plans for the property that would include a centralized preschool and division administration offices on the campus, which, in turn, would make the Walker Upper Elementary School site available for an expansion of the school division’s alternative-education and special-needs programming.
CCS Superintendent Royal Gurley Jr. called the opportunity “a once-in-a-generation moment,” writing in an April 23 statement about the school system’s plans that the FEI property “would allow us to expand our educational footprint in ways that are otherwise impossible given the space constraints in Charlottesville.”
Obviously, good uses there, as well.
The UVA plans for the property are more, meh – UVA would expand its School of Continuing and Professional Studies, which offers adult education programs to the local community, as well as its ROTC programs.
Charlottesville City Schools should rank first in the accounting, with Community Christian Academy a somewhat distant second, and UVA third by a Secretariat-wins-The Belmont margin.
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So, how did things get to where they are?
Local progressives are hitting hard at UVA with the assumption that the monolith is saying one thing publicly, that it would prefer the city school system to get the property, while, behind the scenes, it has been colluding with the Trump administration to get the property all for itself.
The local MAGA set, meanwhile, thinks there’s a quid-pro-quo going on between the Trump administration and UVA – basically, the Trumpers have been using the FEI property as a carrot to get UVA to get out of the DEI business.
And actually, that idea is gaining steam with local progressives as well.
“It is not a coincidence that UVA decided to cancel all DEI programming in accordance with the Trump administration’s orders and was then granted this property,” Charlottesville Education Association President Shannon Gillikin said in a May 10 statement, in which she called on the city school system to “boycott hosting UVA practicum and student teachers for the next school year,” as if punishing UVA students who have nothing to do with any of this is somehow going to help.
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What I’ll throw out here: I don’t get why the Trump administration would use the Federal Executive Institute to coax UVA into gutting its DEI programs when Trump is very publicly going after other schools, like, notably, Harvard and Columbia.
Not to mention: it’s not like the UVA Board of Visitors, with a 13-4 MAGA majority, needed coaxing to get rid of the school’s DEI programs.
The MAGAs on the BOV were just waiting to get a supermajority on the Board to be able to burn the DEI program that they’ve been targeting for the past three years to the ground.
I’m still working on how to get UVA to release internal discussions on the property through the FOIA process without having to sell a kidney to pay the bill, but for now, I’m leaning toward, UVA is being on the up-and-up here, until proven otherwise.
The thing that doesn’t make sense to me: why the Trumpers didn’t go out of their way to just give the property to the private Christian school in the first place.
Doing that would seem to achieve so many aims: placating evangelicals, kicking another major university in the shins, and doing all of this in an 80 percent-plus liberal city.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see another reversal here, is what I’m getting at.
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Chris Graham
