Daily Archives: August 6, 2017

St. Andrew’s School Begins Its Semester This Week

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St. Andrew’s School has orientation for families tomorrow and first full day for students on Tuesday.

This a good reminder for motorists to slow down on Idlewood and look out for pedestrians.

From the St. Andrew’s School webpage:

Extended learning time in the form of a longer school day and a longer school year is shown to have many benefits, both for students and for their families. This year 75% of our students are enrolled in our Extended Day program, attending school until 5:30pm. Next year, our goal is for 100% of our students to participate.

10 Years of OregonHill.net and A Salute To John Murden

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10 years ago on this date, John Murden created the first post for this website, a mention of a YouTube profile of Pine Street resident, Nathan Motley.

Murden started OregonHill.net because he saw the potential of community news sites after doing his Church Hill People’s News site for a while and wanted to help create more sites for more neighborhoods. In turn, this also played into the aggregation of these sites for RVAnews.com and today, SmallRichmond.com

At the time, as President of the Oregon Hill Neighborhood Association, I was very interested in this because I was dealing with a very public controversy regarding VCU’s plans to encroach further into Oregon Hill. While the neighborhood had its own email discussion list (still going, by the way) and a rudimentary website for the neighborhood association, the new OregonHill.net allowed the neighborhood to have its own voice and respond to some of VCU-slanted media coverage. My own first post on this site was August 18, 2007 about Oregon Hill Home Improvement Council volunteers.

Anyway, part of the reason to mention all this is that John Murden has announced that he is planning to step down as editor of the Church Hill People’s News site at the end of the year. Of course, we wish him the best and salute him for all he has done for Church Hill and Richmond in general.

As for the future of OregonHill.net, we shall see. After writing over 4,000 posts, I would welcome new contributors or even assistant editors for the website. I have had a few in the past, but as Murden knows, not everyone sticks with it. More community advertising support would also be welcome.