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Breia Dobson, a 10th-grader at James River High School, was so excited seeing the large snakes on stage that she refused to take a seat. She came close to the auditorium’s stage to take pictures of the slithering reptiles. Students cheered when Mike Easingwood of Scales and Tails Exotic Pets from Hopewell told them they would have a chance to pet the pythons wrapped around his colleagues.

Evaluating 10 years of SOLs Missy Lonce was a brand-new teacher in the fall of 1998 when the revised Standards of Learning began taking shape in classrooms like hers all across Virginia. The first SOL tests had been given to students that spring. All of the state’s school were provisionally accredited—a new label that came with the SOL accountability system—going into the 1998-99 school year.

Hampton and Newport News are among 38 school systems receiving grants from the Virginia Department of Education for 21st-century Community Learning Center programs. The programs provide tutoring assistance, enrichment activities and counseling for students and families in low-income communities with schools that have historically have had low achievement.

Floyd County teachers will receive more training on handling technology in the wake of an incident in which pornographic images on a school-issued computer were displayed to students. Superintendent Terry Arbogast said the pornography was downloaded to the laptop off school grounds during the summer. The computer was issued to Floyd County High School history teacher Stan Hawkins, the adviser of Students Against Destructive Decisions. The porn was displayed briefly during the club’s meeting Tuesday when a DVD on drunken driving malfunctioned and another program played the images by default.

If you like to dabble in the silver market and you can’t find enough information, there’s a new Web site for you, courtesy of a Hampden-Sydney College student. Adam Doolittle, a 21-year-old junior from the town of Pulaski, has created silvermonthly.com, a resource for silver investors that grew out of Doolittle’s fascination with the shimmering metal.

The Richmond Education Association withdrew its endorsement of 8th district Richmond School Board candidate Charles D. Willis today after learning that Willis was once convicted of assaulting a student in a Richmond school. “We are rescinding our endorsement and funding,“ REA president Wade C. Ellegood said in a phone message left with the Richmond Times-Dispatch today.