Every day near 14th Street, students walking to class pass by a small percentage of Charlottesville’s homeless population. The group, usually consisting of all males, likes to lounge under the railroad tracks. They often ask passersby for some spare change, give them a high five, ask them how they’re doing — or a combination of the three. Sometimes, students stop and talk to them. Other times, if students are in a rush, listening to an iPod or simply not in the mood to chat, they keep walking.

The homeless have a stigma attached to their situation which at times can make people give them the cold shoulder. It is this stigma that Josh Bare of the HOPE Community Center is trying to eliminate.

“When a homeless person — a phrase we use sparingly here — is walking down the street, other people get out of the way,” Bare said. “They stay away from them. When you’re homeless, you’re alone and at an incredible low point in life. You have no courage or faith in yourself. We aim to restore that.”

The HOPE Community Center is a place where the homeless can find sanctuary — “a haven,” Bare said. Located in a struggling neighborhood at 11th Street, the community center was launched in 2006 and began offering after-school programs and summer camps for local children. The center has expanded to include HOPE 4 Refugees, which offers ESL help to foreign families new to Charlottesville, as well as HOPE Village, which aids the homeless. Bare heads up both programs.

“The most important function of the Village is restoring confidence and self-belief in these people,” Bare said, “so that they can get back up on their feet.”

Through the community center’s many offerings, this goal is becoming a possibility. HOPE opens its doors every weekday at 8 a.m., offering both breakfast and classes. The Villagers can take creative writing and art courses or get help with their résumés. Also available are a small kitchen, gym, lounge and computer room, where people can surf the Internet or look for job opportunities online. Then, at 1 p.m., the center becomes a soup kitchen.

Crucial to the center’s success as a refuge for the homeless is the dedication and hard work show by its volunteer staff, which includes students.  Third-year College student Garrett Trent, the founder of Hoos Helping the Homeless, said his student-run organization works very closely with the HOPE Community Center.

“We have a very flexible volunteer schedule,” Trent said. “There are people who come once a week and people who come every day. Everyone has a different specialty which they help pass on to the people staying at the center.” He added that most of the volunteers — as well as the Village’s clientele — hear about the center through word of mouth.

The HOPE Center’s clientele, meanwhile, is as diverse and varied as the organization’s types of volunteers. The HOPE Center has vans that pick up homeless men and women, as well as cards that volunteers hand out with a map on the back detailing directions to the center. As a result, a wide variety of individuals filter through the HOPE Community Center’s doors.

“There are people from the North and deep South, drug addicts … people who have grown up poor,” Trent said. “There are a couple high schoolers and then people in their 60s.”

One of the individuals at the center is a man named Bruce, who has spent the past 20 years in and out of prison. He has had his bouts with alcoholism and has struggled to keep a job.

Perhaps Bruce could learn a lesson from Normand Cartier.

Hoos in Recovery hosted Cartier, a once-homeless man featured in the documentary, “Lost in Woonsocket,” March 23. The movie follows Cartier and his companion Mark — who a film crew discovered living homeless in the woods of Woonsocket, R.I. — and their journey out of destitution. A beleaguered alcoholic out of touch with his family for years prior to “Woonsocket,” Cartier came to the University to share his story of revival and success.

“I struggle sometimes, especially when I travel,” he said. “When I was recently in Los Angeles, I was in a room surrounded by people drinking martinis. I told myself I couldn’t have one.”

Cartier saw too many friends ruin their sober records with just one drink. “A friend of mine had been clean for eight years,” Cartier recalled, pacing the Newcomb Hall Ballroom stage in front of the crowd. “Hours later, I got a call from him. He was in a Kentucky jail, charged with vehicular manslaughter. Thanks to that one beer, all of that good work went down the drain.”

Regardless of the tragic nature of these stories, Cartier emphasized that telling the stories can benefit others. “I can’t change the past,” he said. “I can’t change the fact that I have this addiction. But God granted me the courage to change myself and to help change others.”

For Bruce, the man at the HOPE Community Center, Cartier’s message of change is beginning to seem more attainable. Despite a story that includes jail time, poverty and the loss of his son to drugs, Bruce remains optimistic. A couple of weeks ago, Bruce was one of two dozen people that the HOPE Community Center took to a local job fair. He said he submitted 17 job applications and is hoping that the local transfer station or Pepsi will hire him as a truck delivery man.

During the past two weeks, Bruce said Bare and the many volunteers at the community center have given him more help than he has ever received in his life.

“If anybody needs help, this is the place,” Bruce said.

Because of positive responses like Bruce’s, the HOPE Community Center is excited about continuing its work.

“The HOPE Center is all about relationships,” Bare explained. “It takes these volunteers to help rebuild these people.”

In addition to promoting volunteerism and helping the homeless, Bare and students like Trent are working on initiatives for the future. Last December, HOPE donated bags full of clothing to nearly 1,600 of Charlottesville’s neediest residents and is planning more clothing drives soon. A street soccer league also is in the works, and Bare said the Meet Your Neighbor program, a compilation of 10 different projects in neighborhoods across the community, is getting off the ground.

If the HOPE Community Center continues in this direction, more of Charlottesville’s homeless could find safe havens of their own. Good will, though, should not just be left to the direction of the center, Cartier said.

“Instead of giving them your money, ask them to dinner,” Cartier said. “Or buy them a cup of coffee. That way, you know your money will be going to a good use, and not to fuel an addiction like I had.”

Small acts of kindness from individual people will go farther than most realize.

“[The homeless] can’t do it alone, and neither can you,” Cartier said. “We can all be better people and we can all help each other.”

I’ve gotten a number of notices from the University lately, informing me that I am, in fact, dangerously close to graduating. My reaction to this apparently inevitable prospect has thus far been both positive and negative.

On one hand, it’s a rather gratifying feeling of accomplishment. And I’ve been looking for something else to hang on my wall for months, so a diploma couldn’t be coming at a better time.

On the other hand, graduating means I will finally have to enter the “real world,” a prospect as horrifying as it is inevitable. “Pish, you’re silly,” people tell me. “There’s nothing at all scary about becoming an adult. Perhaps you’re just realizing that you’re too lazy to contribute to society.” — Or at least, that’s how people sound in my imagination, where everything somewhat resembles a Virginia Woolf novel.

There’s plenty to be scared about in joining this so-called “real world.” Don’t believe me? Well, consider this list of facts about that otherworldly realm, which I’ve culled from my various intelligence sources:

1. You have to get up early in the morning. This isn’t a huge problem for me; I enjoyed getting up early when I was a little kid. Nevertheless, one of the things I’ve realized, looking back on my college days, is that there’s something irrepressibly cool and poetic about being up really late at night. It’s almost awe-inspiring to look at the clock at 3 a.m. and realize, “I’m still awake! It is my duty to keep my silent vigil while the people of this city sleep snug in their beds.” It’s almost like being a superhero, and it’s the closest I’m likely to get without receiving some sort of radioactive animal bite.

2. You have to work on stuff for eight hours at a time. This is a challenge that, at first, didn’t seem too daunting. But considering that the longest class I’ve had to take in college was 2 1/2 hours long and generally followed by a nice episode of “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show,” I’m just not so sure I’m up to it. I might need my bosses to go easy on me during my first couple of months on the job. Maybe we could punctuate staff meetings with well-timed commercial breaks?

3. You have to cook for yourself. I understand that my more domestic-minded readers will not be able to relate to this one. But at this point in my life, my culinary repertoire consists mostly of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich and its associated variants, like the “peanut butter and lots of jelly” sandwich and the “peanut butter and no jelly” sandwich. I suppose there’s some truth to the statement that one can only learn to cook through trial and error. I’m just afraid that my first experiment is more likely to result in a fiery cataclysm than in anything edible. I’ll probably spend my last weeks here storing up to-go boxes from the dining halls in squirrel-like fashion, to get me through the first few months.

4. No more wearing comfortable clothes every day. This isn’t just the whining of another rebellious, nonconformist youth here. Being relaxed and loose can have a big impact on how one goes about one’s business. Every paper assignment in college that I’ve ever really nailed, I wrote in my pajamas. Sure, plenty of organizations observe Casual Fridays. But my suspicion is that if I really want to be on top of my game, I need to find a place that also has “Bermuda Shorts Thursdays” and “Whatever’s Clean Wednesdays.” These practices are, unfortunately, a good deal less widespread.

5. You have to deal with money. This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would go beyond the grasp of a college graduate. But we often take for granted how easy it is to make a budget in college. It’s a lot simpler to set financial priorities when you don’t have any money. It’ll be nice to have an income, but somewhere in the middle of trying to figure out what a Roth IRA is, I imagine I’ll think fondly of the days when my financial strategy was “never buy anything” — not to mention that doing your taxes becomes much harder. This year, my taxes probably took all of 10 minutes. You’ve never seen so many zeroes on one sheet of paper.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too worried about transitioning successfully to the real world. After all, a couple trillion people have managed so far in Earth’s history, and there’s no way I’m that far behind most of them. It will be a big change, though. So, underclassmen, take time to appreciate the time you have left. And fourth-years, take heart — turns out there’s a lot you can cook with peanut butter.

Matt’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. He can be reached at m.waring@cavalierdaily.com.

I wasn’t loved enough as a child, so I need a lot of attention. But sometimes writing columns that are 2,000 words long once a week just isn’t enough. [Editor’s Note: Steve not only cried to be this semester’s only weekly columnist, but when we try to cut his rants down to the normal 1,000 words, he makes fun of our clothes.] So like a new media-savvy egotist, I need a way to let everyone know my every thought and action at all times. No, I don’t update my Facebook status like an early ‘00s wannabe, but I tweet! Or twit, or twat, I don’t know … I use Twitter.

Remember that Facebook fiasco a few weeks ago when Zuckerberg went craycray with our News Feeds? That was ol’ Marky Mark trying to make Facebook more Twitter-y — after he tried to buy it for half a bil and got his friend request denied!

Twitter has all the class that Facebook once had back when it was a classicist socioeconomic divider that kept privileged college students separate from the uneducated hobos. Just kidding, hobos don’t Facebook. I am friends with a few elementary school-dropout prison inmates. They get computer lab time in between workout sessions and shiv fights.

Plus while Facebook has the fun shenanigans of denying friendship requests and mocking people’s posts via secretive messages — we all know Facebook messages are meant exclusively for the most ruthless of slander or the most drunken of love confessions — Twitter offers cruel fun, too! For instance, when someone follows you — Twitter doesn’t pretend to bring “friends” together; we all just want to follow/stalk each other — you have the option of following them back, or not — which I think is a nice way of saying, “I can understand that you want to know what I’m up to, because I’m interesting and fun and going places, but no, I don’t want to hear about what movie you’re watching by yourself tonight, so I’m not following you.” Yay, one-sided friendships!

“But Steve, what can Twitter do that Facebook can’t?” Oh wait … Nothing. Plus, Facebook also lets me post scandalous background check-ruining photos of you doing horrible things, and it lets me memorize your favorite shows to subtly bring them up in casual conversation, as in, “What do you mean you don’t understand that dirty Katie Couric reference? Facebook told me you love “Dawson’s Creek,” so I memorized all the obscene sexual lines — seriously Google Katie Couric and “Dawson’s Creek.”

Speaking of celebs, that’s where Twitter shines … Or becomes a horrible cesspool of me begging them to shut the tweet up! So on Facebook, you can friend a few celebrities, but only a few undesirables actually accept — obvi I have Heidi and Brody from “The Hills” and that fatty future Special Olympic athlete from “The Paper”… Hey, if Obama can say it, I can, too. But on Twitter, famous people actually post their random thoughts! Well, that’s debatable, because we all know Britney doesn’t know how to operate the Internet, but her PR person can handle it.

OK, I’m sick of explaining this stuff to you, you Web 2.0 pleb. Here’s my typical Twitter page, with the most recent wastes of time at the top! Oh, and if you follow any of the same celebs, you know I am not exaggerating these freaks:

Snarky Kid Always on Twitter: @Boring College Girl yes, you’re a cliché, FYL!

Boring College Girl: OMG the 2-for-1 Arch’s deal is cancelled!? FML! Wait, is FML getting too cliché?

Downer 20-Something Gen X’er Who Spends His Life on Gawker: Look at this link to this story! It proves I knew something before you! I’m the best!

Heidi Montag: @Spencer Pratt Luvz you. Ah, traffic is bad, gonna be so late. Thank Jesus I can tweet from my Blackberry!

Michael Ian Black: Overcast and rainy. Perfect day for cutting!

Perez Hilton: Look at me! Zac Efron sent me champagne for my birthday!

Boring College Girl: Tehehe, how do I still have this cough? I can’t believe I’m doing so bad this semester. FML FML FML … See you at The Virginian tonight!

Spencer Pratt: @Heidi Montag, you’re gonna be a star! Luvz you!

Boring College Boy: Look at this sweet music video. You can’t tell if I like it ironically or not, so even if you hate it, you might still think I’m cool!

The Cavalier Daily: We’re desperately trying to avoid becoming obsolete, please read our articles! Here are 20 links!

Boring College Girl: Who the eff is screaming in such a shrill voice in the Scholars’ Lab about his wardrobe? I have so many tests to study for! FML!

Diddy: Ah, I have a million followers. It’s so validating to me that you guys took the all the time and effort to click “follow.” Don’t forget to drink Ciroc!

Downer: This just in, print media is dying an agonizing death. Yay new media! Yay Twitter!

Heidi Montag: Gonna go to the studio to lay down some more tracks! So excited for you guys to hear the new album! I’ll just ignore the fact that all my “accidentally” released songs have been universally ridiculed!

Stevenaustin: @Allison Two days in a row!? False, I have a system! I see you on the other side of the Scholars’ Lab you two-faced …

Boring College Boy: wamp wamp Bojangles

Too Cool for School Recent Grad: I’m not here to Tweet, just to stalk you.

Diddy: A new episode of Diddy TV getting posted soon because I need you guys to read my posts and watch my vids and maybe we can ignore the fact all my bands fail.

Allison: @Stevenaustin Just saw Steve. He tried to make me read his stoopid column. And didn’t he wear that shirt yesterday?

Boring College Crackhead: The meth lab in GrandMarc got busted? Txt me if you know of a backup plan.

Stevenaustin: I’m so funny! Read all my columns. You can find the link here, here, or here or just txt me and I’ll e-mail them to you or read them to you through the phone no prob!

Steve’s column runs weekly Fridays. He can be reached at s.austin@cavalierdaily.com.

Around this time each year, I’m grateful I’m not a high school senior. I still wince at the memory of waiting for the bell to ring so I could go home and check the mailbox for that “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted and now actually have a future” envelope. To make matters worse, many schools release admissions decisions through the internet, so applicants are acutely aware, down to the minute, of when their fate is sealed. I can perfectly recall waiting until 5:00 p.m. to hear from the University, trying to take my mind off the situation by renting a heartwarming movie — “The Exorcism of Emily Rose.”

We all know how relieved some seniors are feeling right now; the University just notified its prospective class of 2013 last week. And for those that didn’t get in, they can at least be consoled by Blair Waldorf’s tumultuous struggle to be admitted to Yale, despite her alumni father and trust fund, which has made this predicament somewhat posh. I didn’t realize, however, that getting admitted was only half the battle. In retrospect, there are certain things I wish I had known before stepping foot on this utopia dubbed “Grounds.” The most useful advice can’t be acquired through Days on the Lawn or College Prowler.

It also can’t be learned from a guided tour. I know University Guides is prestigious and all — and basically guarantees members a coveted Lawn room — but do we really need to know about the Special Collections Library? Incoming first-year students instead should be familiar with places that they’ll actually go. I didn’t unearth a little treasure called West Range until the end of first year, and I’ve been there almost everyday since for my caffeine fix. Also, every first-year student should be aware of the convenient Castle; I wish I would’ve added extra Plus Dollars to fund those 1 a.m. Ben & Jerry’s runs. Slaughter Gym is another gem, just as close as the Aquatic & Fitness Center but without the crowds. There, you won’t have to wait in line at the elliptical while someone finishes four politics articles at a grandma’s — no, great-grandma’s — pace.  

We allegedly come here for an education, but I wish I had known a little more about the actual course scheduling process before orientation. When I was enrolling, I would’ve liked to know not to get my hopes up. A minimum of 80 backups is absolutely necessary for all first-year students. Furthermore, I was fooled by course names. I signed up for “Sociology of American Popular Culture” my first semester, envisioning a class of YouTube-watching and Britney Spears-ragging, but instead was doomed to reading lengthy articles about Marxism.

I also remember contemplating outfits for move-in day. I wish someone warned me that lugging boxes into an unconditioned dorm in August, I’d be sweating like Tony Soprano in no time. Further advice about U.Va. clothing would have also been helpful. No one should step foot on Grounds without topsiders, a North Face or Patagonia fleece, or Raybans … if he/she wants friends, that is. Girls should also buy Jack Rogers sandals — a pair for each day of the week — and several Longchamp bags. For football games, it’s essential to have an obnoxiously bright sundress or flamboyant tie. During game days, the Lawn is so colorful that it looks like a unicorn vomited up a king-sized bag of Skittles after downing the abundant cheap bourbon.

And while I’m on the subject of bourbon, I guess I should offer my two cents about the social scene here — and we all know how cool I am, so it’s probably more like a whole silver dollar’s worth. Not that I’ve ever seen this done or anything, but it isn’t wise to make a fake ID on a scanner and mount it on an expired debit card. This craft lost any hope of viability when Amigo’s left the Corner. Incoming first-year students should instead acclimate themselves to several years of Natty Light by sticking to frats for a while — or at least find a better fake.

I really feel like I could have used some of this advice before entering the halls of Bonnycastle a little less than three years ago. Maybe then I wouldn’t have run out of Plus Dollars in three weeks or embarrassed myself by wearing the prototypical “first-year uniform” of jean skirts and flip-flops for the annual Wertland block party. Clearly, orientation, tours and the numerous brochures sent to first-year students before starting here aren’t sufficient. Certain things — like your favorite tree to study under or the true liberation of streaking the Lawn — you can only learn yourself.

Abby’s column runs biweekly Fridays. She can be reached at a.coster@cavalierdaily.com.

The Board of Visitors listened to concerns about the underrepresentation of Asian-American faculty members at the University and also discussed statistics about Asian-American students during the Board’s Educational Policy session yesterday.

Overall, Asian-Americans are overrepresented within the University’s student population. Asian-Americans make up 11.4 percent of the undergraduate population, though they are only 4.4 percent of the United States’ population, said Sharon Hostler, interim vice provost for faculty advancement.

Admissions Dean Greg Roberts cited a dramatic increase in international applications from Asia as the reason for this overrepresentation, noting that applications from Chinese students increased from 400 to 800 this year.

The disproportionate number of Asian-Americans at the University, however, is limited to the student population, as Asian-American faculty actually are underrepresented, Hostler said.

The University ranks 58 out of 61 members of the American Association of Universities for its percentage of Asian-American faculty, Hostler said. She said 2007 data indicates that Asian-Americans comprise 6.5 percent of the tenure-track faculty at the University, whereas the median for the American Association of Universities is 9.9 percent. The University of California, Irvine has the highest percentage of Asian-American faculty, according to the statistics, as its overall population is 19 percent Asian-American.

Hostler also noted that Asian-Americans are highly underrepresented at the top levels of American higher education, adding that although 14 percent of the University’s tenure-track assistant professors are Asian-American, these assistant professors comprise only 5 percent of all tenure-track professors.

Bill Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity, said this discrepancy between higher and lower levels of the University faculty may be because of culture. He said Asian-Americans typically do not actively seek out leadership positions and instead may prefer to take a more supportive role. For example, Harvey said, they may appear more comfortable in roles as senior faculty members.

Among the University’s Asian-American faculty, there also is a disparity between male and female Asian-American professors, Hostler noted.

“[There are] three times as many Asian-American men on the faculty as there are women,” she said, noting that women make up only 11 percent of the tenure-track professors of Asian descent.

Board member Glynn Key explained that this underrepresentation of females may result from potential recruitment issues like dual career families, the need for day care and a perception that the University lacks a diverse faculty.

To increase the number of Asian-American faculty members, especially females, Key said the University should develop alliances with the private sector to provide alternative work arrangements for potential teachers’ spouses who hold non-academic jobs.

The University’s recent emphasis on the sciences also may help attract more Asian-American faculty members, Harvey said, noting that he is optimistic about the University faculty’s future diversity. As the University moves toward that more diverse faculty vision, Hostler recommended that the University continue persisting “to both recruit and retain faculty” with Asian backgrounds.

The Medical School’s Foundation for the National Institutes of Health recently received a $30 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to participate in a five-year study about the causes of malnutrition in developing countries and its effects on children.

Mortality rates in developing countries have subsided in recent years, but the problem of malnutrition still has not been resolved, said Richard Guerrant, director of the University’s Center for Global Health and the study’s lead researcher.

“Good water and sanitation is actually worth twice as much as we had ever calculated before,” Guerrant said.

Guerrant said though oral rehydration work has reduced the number of deaths from diarrhea in developing countries, many children still are experiencing repeated episodes of diarrhea. As a result, these children tend to have both stunted growth and cognitive development. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a treatment.

To find a treatment, scientists first must find the causes of malnutrition in some children and not others. To answer this question, the study funded by the new grant will test three hypotheses, said William Petri, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health at the Medical School.

The first hypothesis — which Guerrant proposed — is that children with more instances of diarrhea are likely to be stunted because diarrhea blocks absorption of food, Petri said.

The second hypothesis is that bacteria in the gut differ between the malnourished and well-nourished, Petri said. If true, this would mean that the bacteria in well-nourished children are more effective at digesting meals than the bacteria in malnourished children.

The third hypothesis is that malnourished children are genetically different from well-nourished children, Petri said.

He explained that these hypotheses will be tested through work in eight field sites around the world. Sites in Bangladesh, Brazil, Tanzania and South Africa will be run by University researchers, Petri said, while researchers from institutions like Johns Hopkins University and Washington University will run sites in India, Nepal, Peru and Pakistan.

Guerrant said the studies will benefit from new tools and technology.

“Diarrheal diseases will be detected by technology we did not have even a year ago,” Petri said. Recent technological innovations will also be used in the intestinal microbe study and the genome scans, Petri said.

The new technologies provide the researchers with an excellent opportunity to figure out solutions for malnutrition, Petri said.

“The expectation is that if you understand those [genetic] pathways … you can make drugs to modify [their effects],” Petri said. He also said he thinks that differences between the intestinal flora of malnourished and well-nourished children could be treated with probiotic cultures. By ingesting these cultures, malnourished children could develop an intestinal flora more similar to that of well-nourished children, Petri said.

“Forty percent of children in the developing world are malnourished, and probably at least half of all deaths of children under 5 can be attributed to malnutrition,” Petri said, adding that most deaths from diseases like malaria disproportionately affect malnourished children.

“It’s proven very difficult to treat malnutrition in Bangladesh and other countries … because giving additional food is not sufficient to prevent stunting,” Petri said. Studies have found that some children will suffer from malnutrition and others will not, regardless of similar childhoods.

“When you think about that, it’s completely counterintuitive,” Petri said. “What is different about that child who became stunted versus the one who was in the same environment and became healthy?”

Finding the reasons behind this situation may uncover previously unknown factors that may have a large influence on nutrition and childhood development, Guerrant and Petri said.

“That is what [is exciting],” Guerrant said, “… because if repeated intestinal infections are causing these long-term developmental consequences for children, then that becomes far more important than we realized.”

The unemployment rate in Charlottesville has doubled since last year, but it remains the second lowest in the state, the Virginia Employment Commission announced Wednesday in a press release.

The release shows that Northern Virginia, at 5.2 percent, is the only area in the state with a lower unemployment rate. The City’s seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate is slightly higher at 5.6 percent, up from 2.8 percent at this time last year.

“The basic reason is that universities have very stable employment,” said University Economics Dept. Chair William Johnson. “Contrast it with a construction company that’s going to lay people off when their number of contracts falls. Universities have pretty stable demand and they are not fluctuating their employment very much.”

Bill Mezger, the Commission’s chief economist, agreed with Johnson’s assessment, noting the University’s role in keeping Charlottesville’s unemployment rate lower than most cities’.

“Charlottesville is usually the second lowest metropolitan area on unemployment,” he said. “U.Va. and the Medical Center are about a fifth of employment in the Charlottesville area and then you’ve got the trade and service industries that serve those large institutions.” Mezger added that more federal workers also recently moved to Charlottesville, as some government agencies move out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Mezger noted that the commonwealth’s lack of manufacturing employment is a major reason for the low unemployment rate in Virginia, and, even more so, Charlottesville. The statewide unemployment rate is at 6.4 percent.

“Recessions used to be largely caused by manufacturing inventory problems,” he said. “This is less than 7 percent of employment [in Virginia], so we don’t have the big block of manufacturing employment like Michigan and Ohio to cause a lot of layoffs in recessions.”
The fact remains, however, that there are unemployed workers in the area. This mostly can be attributed to out-of-area construction workers living in Charlottesville during the off-season, Mezger said.

“Not many of those [workers] are working,” he said.

Mezger said he anticipates that Charlottesville’s unemployment rate will stay between 5 and 6 percent — below the state average — for the remainder of the year.

Local officials are working to inform University students that they will be considered Charlottesville residents for the 2010 census, Albemarle County spokesperson Lee Catlin said.

“We have kicked off an effort with the [City of Charlottesville] and University to encourage participation and ensure that accurate information about the census gets out to the whole community,” she said, noting that, for the purposes of the once per decade survey, students will not be considered residents of their hometowns.

City and County officials are emphasizing the education of students and other residents about the census because every locality in the nation receives federal funds based on the number of its residents, including students — though they may only be in the area for nine months of the year. These federal funds are important for the upkeep of local services, including the roads, police protection and hospital services regularly used by students and other local community members.

“If we’re undercounted because people aren’t willing to get involved, then we lose out on our community’s fair share of federal funding,” Catlin said, noting that many citizens, especially students, may not know about the upcoming census.  

“It’s extremely important for U.Va. students to be counted where they reside,” Charlottesville voter registrar Sherri Iachetta said.

Figuring out exactly where students reside — either in the County or the City — is more complicated than it may sound, however, Iachetta said. The Lawn, Iachetta explained, is a part of the County, whereas Newcomb Hall is located in the City. Memorial Gymnasium is on City property, but University Hall is in the County.

So as to ensure that every resident is accounted for, Iachetta said the City will let the Census Bureau know when the best dates are to reach students in their homes. For the 2000 census, federal representatives attempted to contact students during Spring Break, and officials are aiming to avoid a reoccurrence of this problem, she noted.

The actual census itself has also seen changes since 2000, Iachetta said. It is now significantly shorter, asking only 10 questions, whereas the 2000 survey was 10 pages long.

For students concerned about confidentiality or the nature of census data, Iachetta said officials will ask only for numbers from students and residents, rather than pressing for more personal information. All information also is completely confidential, Iachetta noted, adding that it is a felony to disclose the gathered data.

The 2010 census will be administered April 1.

Student Council announced a new off-Grounds housing scholarship Tuesday as the first of several intended initiatives aimed at “expanding opportunities for students of all socioeconomic backgrounds,” Student Council President John Nelson said.

Council will award $500 scholarships to six applicants based on academic performance, essay quality, financial need, extracurricular activities and reasons for choosing off-Grounds housing, Nelson said.

Off-Grounds Housing Manager Vicki Hawes said the scholarships will be funded by advertisements from Charlottesville landlords on the Off-Grounds Housing Web site, which Council sponsors. A committee will select scholarship recipients, said Nikhil Panda, Council vice president of administration, adding that all University students — including graduate students — are eligible for the scholarship.

Additionally, Panda noted that Council is currently working with Student Financial Services director Yvonne Hubbard to ensure that the grant will not affect financial aid packages of scholarship recipients.

“That’s one of our biggest concerns,” Panda said. “A $500 scholarship might set [recipients] off on a separate [financial aid] bracket.”
Applications for the new scholarship now are available through the Council Web site and must be submitted via e-mail by 5 p.m. Tuesday.

—compiled by Jane Ma

Radford University went on lockdown yesterday as police pursued a suspect involved in a 9 p.m. shooting near campus that claimed one victim, according to Radford University’s Web site.

Police asked that all Radford students stay indoors and lock their doors. The suspect, a young black male wearing no shirt and a camouflage jacket according to multiple media reports, was still considered armed and dangerous as of press time.

—compiled by Cavalier Daily staff