The City of Alexandria has awarded two contracts to local nonprofits to provide services to the homeless. New Hope Housing, Inc., an innovative, award-winning non-profit agency that has provided emergency shelter, transitional and permanent housing in Northern Virginia since 1977, received a contract to operate the Alexandria Community Shelter on Mill Road.

Natosha P. Moore, 26, of Fort Washington, Md., pled guilty today to stealing at least $342,000 from her former employer based in Alexandria, Va.

Since June, new T. C. Williams High School Principal Suzanne Maxey has planned for the 2010-11 school year. With the opening of school less than a week away, she is ready for the students to return and looking forward to transforming the school from a Persistently Lowest Achieving school into a place where students achieve at the highest level and one where pride, school spirit and discipline are core values.

As they pack their bags for their last planned holiday weekend getaway of the summer, Washingtonians are keeping a wary eye on the eye of the hurricane and a tropical storm following in its path. Nearly 790,000 Washingtonians are planning to travel 50 miles or more from home during the Labor Day holiday weekend, according to AAA Mid-Atlantic’s travel forecast.

During recent weeks, Alexandria has experienced violent thunderstorms, which have often wreaked havoc on our neighborhoods. The loss of hundreds of trees and extensive damage resulted in City employees working overtime to make sure trees, trash, and debris were removed from streets and neighborhoods. These efforts were recently recognized by the Del Ray Civic Association.

The Virginia Information Technologies Agency continues to make progress in returning all state agencies to normal operating conditions in the wake of the recent disruption in service caused by the failure of a major data storage system. The initial failure affected 26 of the Commonwealth’s 89 agencies and caused 13 percent of the Commonwealth’s storage servers to stop working.

We certainly were guilty of sitting a long time this past weekend, for the School Board’s annual summer retreat. Yet I am confident no one minded –because we navigated interesting discussions about raising the bar for student achievement.