Poor Kids Are Being Priced Out of Youth Sports: Here’s One Solution, Washington Post
Low-income parents often can’t afford to buy their children a $300 baseball bat or $250 hockey skates; they may struggle to scrounge up even the $50 fee to join a youth sports league. In Gaithersburg, Md., an outlying D.C. suburb, officials simplified the fee-waiver process — from an explanation why parents couldn’t afford the entry price to a simple checkbox — and participation shot up by 80 percent in high-poverty schools.
Veterans in the Ivy League: Students Seek to Up Their Ranks, Associated Press
Only three Harvard undergrads served in the military; at Princeton, only one. A new intercollegiate student organization, the Ivy League Veterans Council, is advocating that the elite schools’ administrations should do more to bring former service members into their colleges by recruiting soldiers as if they were athletes, establishing a veterans’ office on campus or accepting transfer credits.
King County Tries Counseling, Self-Reflection Instead of Jail for Teens, The Seattle Times
Which juvenile justice system seems preferable: one where kids leave hardened by disruptive prison sentences or one where teens emerge with a better understanding of themselves and their crimes? In a first attempt at restorative justice, the top juvenile prosecutor in King County, Wash., put one defiant, 15-year-old robber through 108 hours of hearings to see if self-reflection could change his attitude where prison cells had failed.