Good morning, Blacksburg.

Three days to kickoff. Before the tailgates start, the school board had a long night on Tuesday reviewing six grant proposals that add up to about two million dollars.

One of them buys a robot dog. We'll get there.

In today's Blacksburg Connect:

Let's get to it.

Last night’s Montgomery County School Board meeting discussed six grant proposals worth about $1.99 million.

Already awarded: $1,248,520 from the state's School Construction Assistance Program, covering 20% of $6.24 million in capital work — rooftop HVAC ($4,086,600) and a generator ($69,000) at Auburn Elementary, and electrical panel and switch gear replacement at Shawsville Middle ($2,087,000). The county puts up the other $4,994,080. These are long-deferred building systems, not upgrades.

Still pending:

🔐 $250,000 for upgraded emergency voice communication systems at Blacksburg Middle and Christiansburg Middle, through VDOE's school security equipment program. Requires a 25% local match ($62,500) out of existing capital improvement funding.

📚 $400,000 for a summer pilot at Eastern Montgomery Elementary — up to 300 at-risk K-5 students getting intensive math and reading alongside arts and science workshops, with meals, transportation, and childcare for staff fully funded. No local match. It starts summer 2027 and is grounded in JLARC research and the Virginia Literacy Act.

💻 $72,000 for the Southwest Virginia Physical Computing Pipeline, spanning Blacksburg, Christiansburg and Shawsville schools. It partners with FRC Team 401 — Copperhead Robotics — to link school-year CTE courses with Camp Copperhead, equipping workspaces with mobile coding stations, vision sensors, and an AI quadruped robot dog. High schoolers peer-mentor younger students through the BHS Computer Science Honor Society.

🥐 $13,789 for Breakfast After the Bell — state per-meal reimbursements for grab-and-go kiosks or in-classroom breakfast at eligible schools division-wide.

🔧 $5,000 from Northrop Grumman for STEM at Shawsville Middle, the second consecutive year. Students, particularly Title I students, use digital design and engineering tools to manufacture and market products through FBLA's "Make It Your Business."

In June, both the school board and the Board of Supervisors learned that Montgomery County Public Schools had spent roughly $4 million past its legal authority, against a $158 million appropriation, as WDBJ7 reported at the time. Tuesday night the division the board reviewed a plan to rewrite the rules that are supposed to prevent exactly that.

The presentation posted to the board's agenda is titled "Modernizing Section 3: A Strategic Blueprint for Financial Policy." Section 3 is the money section, budget notices, purchasing thresholds, accounting, activity funds, insurance.

The approach is a hybrid: adopt some Virginia School Boards Association model policies as written, merge others with existing local language, rewrite five from scratch, and move a handful of items that aren't really about finance out to other sections entirely.

One slide states the purpose directly: the new set of interlocking internal controls is designed to prevent issues like exceeding appropriation. In other words, the board would find out where it stands every month instead of learning about a shortfall after the fact.

It was an information item, so no vote was taken. The last slide lays out the sequence: the board approves the architecture, a committee drafts the merged language, the administration writes the procurement and grant manuals, and the whole package goes to legal review before adoption.

There is a tree growing wild along the creeks around here that produces the largest edible fruit native to North America. The flesh is yellow and custardy and tastes like some combination of banana, mango and pineapple. It’s name sounds like what I call my grandpa and it is ripening this week. If you don’t know what I’m describing, let me introduce you to the pawpaw.

The pawpaw is the only member of the custard apple family, an otherwise tropical group that includes cherimoya and soursop, that made it this far north. It grows as an understory tree in moist bottomland, which describes most of the creek edges in Montgomery County. Fruit ripens late August through September.

It’s rarely sold in stores becuase it doesn’t keep very well. the skin bruises like a mango's, the pulp browns within minutes of being cut, and the fruit goes from perfect to fermented in a matter of days. Commercial produce is built around fruit that survives a truck. Pawpaws don't. The only ways to get one are to find a tree, know somebody who has, or go to a festival.

Which brings us to the festival. New River PawpawFest is Saturday, Sept. 19, from 11 a.m. at Rising Silo, 2351 Glade Rd. Free admission, free fresh tastings. Nursery Natives — a Radford nonprofit that grows and gives away native plants — is putting it on with Rising Silo. Rising Silo's Mountain Mango, a pawpaw Berliner Weisse, will be on tap, along with pawpaw ice cream from Big Lick Ice Cream Co. Music runs through the day: Lillian Hackett, The Red Ferns, Father Sun, The Deer Run Drifters, Breakfast at Noon, and Amelia Empson.

If you want your own tree, read this part. Second-year saplings are $15, or two for $25, with pickup at the Silo that day. Pawpaws are self-sterile, meaning a tree can't pollinate itself and won't set fruit alone. You need two genetically unrelated trees near each other or you get a nice-looking plant and nothing to eat. A few other things worth knowing before you plant: they want moist, rich soil and do fine in partial shade. Deer leave them alone. They send up root suckers and spread into colonies over time.