Due to a schedule conflict, District 8 City Councilman Chris Taylor is unable to attend our February 16, 2023 meeting as was noted in our winter newsletter.  We are very pleased that newly elected District 8 School Board Member David Culpepper will be our guest. He has graciously stepped up on short notice and offered to make remarks and take our questions.  There is a lot of news involving the public schools in our region, and Virginia Beach is no exception.  Learning standards, course curricula, building security, student safety, library books, and teacher recruiting/retention are among the topics we regularly see in the news.  Whether you are a parent of school age children, a parent of grown children wondering what is going on, a supporter of our teachers, a taxpayer wondering where the money goes, or all of these; there should be something here for you.  Our meeting begins at 7:00 PM at King’s Grant Baptist Church.  Please enter the church building near the rear of the parking lot on the side that is opposite the Fire Station next door (the same lot where the farmers’ market sets up).  There will be some signs to direct you but they can be hard to see after dark.  Come join for a good session…maybe you can coax a TOPGUN story from him, too, because “he’s been there and done that”.

David Culpepper was elected to the Virginia Beach School Board in November 2022 and assumed office last month.  He represents District 8 which encompasses all of the Little Neck peninsula.  

Mr. Culpper spent most of the last 35 years wearing a Navy uniform.  He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and served as a Naval Aviator for most of his career.  He was stationed at NAS Oceana after initial flight training and flew the F-14 Tomcat.  Through subsequent duty assignments and deployments, Virginia Beach was home and the place where he would return with his family to live whenever duty assignments permitted.  His daughter is a senior in our city’s public schools.

He is a former TOPGUN instructor, a period he calls, “The single greatest flying experience of my career.”  Other notable experiences are command of an F/A-18 Hornet squadron in Japan, and later command of the Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.