Power outage forces cancellation of tonight's ACPS school board meeting

A power outage at the Alexandria City Public Schools Central Office has forced the cancellation of tonight's school board meeting.

School Board Chair Dr. Michelle Rief announced the cancellation in a notice posted to the ACPS website Thursday. The meeting had been scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. at 1340 Braddock Place.

Dominion Energy's outage tracker confirms an active outage affecting 23 customers in Alexandria as of 5:46 p.m. Thursday — part of a broader Northern Virginia outage affecting 79 customers across the region. No estimated restoration time was listed for the Alexandria customers.

The meeting's centerpiece was set to be a mid-year monitoring report on the ACPS 2030 Strategic Plan, which showed broad progress across most goal areas but a sharp deterioration in the division's effort to recruit, develop, and retain staff. The share of "stuck" action steps in that goal area jumped from 2 percent to 21 percent between the first and second quarters.

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The update would have landed one day after a joint City Council-School Board work session and just weeks into budget negotiations that have already turned contentious. The school board adopted a $408 million budget on Feb. 19 requesting a 3.5% city appropriation increase; City Manager James Parajon's proposed budget, released Feb. 24, fell $5.6 million short of that request.

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Also on tonight's delayed agenda: a Legislative Update monitoring item, committee reports, and a consent calendar covering personnel actions and advisory committee appointments.

All items will be rescheduled to a future meeting, according to Rief's notice. No new date was announced.

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