Today is the last day for Virginians to comment on the policy, which will be a model for local school boards drafting their own guidelines this fall.

School mask mandates could end with the likely passage of a bill in the General Assembly.

For about as long as we can remember, the District has been run by Congress. Sure, we were granted Home Rule in 1973, but even that move forward came with a glaring caveat — Congress can always overrule what local officials want to do or just force them to do things they wouldn’t otherwise want to.

We read all the local columnists, so you don’t have to. This week we find meat-eaters being compared to Michael Vick, a lot of bum opinions on city schools and District residents being called “granola.” Courtland Milloy: According to Milloy’s Wednesday column in the Post, your choice to eat a hamburger isn’t all that different than Michael Vick’s decision to brutally fight, torture and kill dogs for money. “We’ll kill a duck, deer, turkey –…

Registered voters in Wards 1 and 2 received a postcard in the mail a few weeks back announcing the special election scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 21 — but in the off chance you quickly tossed in the garbage, allow us to fill you in: In April, D.C. Board of Education member Jeff Smith resigned his seat in protest immediately after the D.C. Council gave preliminary approval to Mayor Adrian Fenty’s school takeover plan, so now…

In case you missed the news yesterday, the Washington Post has devoted an extraordinary amount of front page column inches to the record breaking temperatures D.C. saw yesterday. At 12:05 p.m. on Wednesday, the temperature hit 102 degrees at Reagan National Airport, according to the National Weather Service, breaking the previous all time high record for Aug. 8, of 101 degrees, set in 1930. The oppressive heat also had a number of other newsworthy…

The D.C. Council is meeting for the final day of its summer session as we speak, and as we mentioned in this morning’s roundup, a confirmation vote for deputy mayor for education Victor Reinoso has been postponed until at least September. But other key Fenty school takeover appointments are expected to be confirmed today, including Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Allen Lew, acting director of the new Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization. Yesterday, Lew…

Maybe we just have a short memory, but yesterday was the first day of the summer that felt oppressively awful in that distinctly D.C.-ish way. Apparently we weren’t the only ones — NBC4 says that a bunch of kids from the National Student Leadership Council who were visiting Capitol Hill became sick from the heat, requiring treatment in a Senate office building (they’re all fine). Today promises to be two degrees hotter. Md. Teacher Sentenced…

We do hope you had a pleasant, relaxing, not too horribly hot weekend, Washington. Even if you didn’t, chances are your Monday morning is shaping up to be less of a hassle than it is for the staff of Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA). Webb finally admitted over the weekend that he owns the gun that his aide, Phillip Thompson, was arrested for carrying into the Capitol in March. What kept him from clearing up…

The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics changed its tune yesterday and reversed an earlier decision by stating that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s school takeover plan cannot be the subject of a referendum. Once again, it comes down to the Home Rule Charter: attorneys for the election board said in papers filed yesterday that because Congress and President Bush have approved an amendment to the city’s Home Rule Charter that gives the mayor direct control…