With the new school year set to begin in under two weeks, on Aug.24, there goes the month of August from our traditional calendars. Football season will be well underway and all the trappings of what historically has been a post-Labor Day era will be proceeding. The School Board’s first meeting of the new year was held this week, characterized by a lengthy closed session and usual platitudes to the process by existing board members.

While snapshot numbers will be available from opening day, official student enrollment numbers for the new school year will not be counted until the last day of September and we call await what they will show about new trends in this region. We know that rental unit costs are tilting downward, though home prices remain at record highs for now. As supplementary income sources dry up for the thousands who have been laid off from government jobs due to Trump administration politics, forced involuntary evictions are on the rise throughout the region.

This portends a period of great uncertainty, and we can only hope our public officials are geared up for it. There are not the cushions needed to weather this transition and we fear that more people than usual, including of course, our kids, are going to be hurt.

We hope we are wrong. A robust growth of the health care sector in the region may offset some of the cuts in government spending and the retail markets must certainly be prepared  for adjustments. Not all the wonderful new restaurants in Falls Church are going to survive this period, even as we remain hopeful that government-organized initiatives, like the upcoming summer restaurant week, will help.

Our citizens are challenged with high tax rates and surging real estate values and can respond only by trying to keep money local as much as possible. As for vacations, we do not yet have data to suggest whether those numbers are up for not, not yet anyway.

A lot of pool parties and summer season barbecues may be substituting for expensive travel abroad, which would not be a bad thing from our point of view.

We need to make sure our most needy citizens have enough to get by and that a generosity of spirit is maintained through tough times. These are factors over which we do have control and we call on this community in particular to maintain that spirit as the school year gets underway and demands for results begin to encroach.

There are enough investments  in schools and private entities here to pick up slack from economic stumbles, at least as long as they don’t snowball into something more serious. So please may the watchword of this season be generosity. It’s something we all need and can do after all.