In the evening, when students are supposed to be at home toiling over their homework, the school buses that carry them to school usually sit idle in a lot. But one school district in Salton City, Calif., is putting these vehicles’ downtime to good use.
How so?
By installing Wi-Fi routers inside the school buses and parking them in neighborhoods where many low-income students lack Internet access. For as long as the battery on the bus lasts, the community can use the free Wi-Fi — something that could have huge outcomes, considering that about half of the low-income students in the U.S. lack home Internet access, according to Nichole Dobo of the Hechinger Report.
The only other choice for these kids is to stay at school and use the Wi-Fi there to complete their homework. Darryl Adams, superintendent of schools of the Coachella Valley Unified District, tells Dobo, “I had kids sitting outside my office yesterday because they want to connect to the Internet at, like, 6 o’clock at night.”
When low-income students stay after hours to hop online — missing the school bus home — it creates difficulties for the parents who must come fetch them, as many of them live an hour’s drive or more away.
Thirteen-year-old Jasmine Jimenez says that she’s looking forward to the day when the district might enable Wi-Fi on the bus during its route. “It won’t be a big bug to ask your parents to pick you up,” she said.
School district officials haven’t completely worked out the kinks of the system. So far they’ve only been able to install routers in two buses out of their fleet of 90. Drivers park the two buses on lots in trailer parks and must obtain permission from the owners to do so. But the biggest problem is that the battery tends to die after only one hour of use, an energy crunch which some have suggested might be solved by installing solar panels on the buses.
Still, the Coachella district is determined to try to make the program work. “Come on. We can do better than that as a nation, especially for our low-income families and our disadvantaged families,’’ superintendent Darryl Adams says.
MORE: Every Kid Needs An Internet Connection to Thrive In School. This District Has A Plan to Make it Happen
Tag: the American West
Why Does This Housing Complex Have Seniors Reaching for a Paintbrush?
For some seniors — especially those who’ve engaged in the arts all their lives — watching TV or playing shuffleboard or bingo simply doesn’t qualify as stimulating entertainment.
That’s why the nonprofit EngAGE is bringing all kinds of high-quality arts activities, from painting to theater, to affordable senior housing complexes in southern California. The group even spurred the creation of several unique arts colonies just for seniors: the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, the NoHo Senior Arts Colony and the Long Beach Senior Arts Colony. These housing complexes ensure that residents’ lives are enriched with arts through such activities as theater groups, a fine arts collective, music programming, an indie film company and an intergenerational arts program that brings in the kids in from the Burbank Unified School District to create art with the seniors.
EnGAGE founder Tim Carpenter worked in the healthcare industry when he teamed up with housing developer John Huskey to build this new type of senior living community. To start, they offered a creative writing class at one housing complex. From there, the reach of their services expanded, touching people who don’t live in the retirement communities, but are attracted to the arts programming that they offer.
“You have this great synergy of the physical amenities with the intellectual ones,” Carpenter tells NEA Arts Magazine. “And so that tends to be powerful within the community itself. It also becomes an attractor to people from the outside community…to have a place where people want to go to learn because it’s a beautiful building and there are interesting people living there.”
Caroline McElroy is an artist “in permanent residence” at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony in North Hollywood. She teaches a weekly collage class that’s scheduled to run 90 minutes, but often ends up lasting for hours as seniors get lost in their creations.
McElroy says that the Colony “is a place of possibilities. My son-in-law goes, ‘So how long do you plan on living here?’ and I said, ‘Honey, they’re going to have to carry me out of here.’”
MORE: These Startups Offer Sleek Technological Innovations for the Elderly
After Enduring Homelessness Herself, This Veteran Helps Other Soldiers Find Opportunity
Looking to take advantage of the educational benefits that the military offered, Anita Pascual joined the National Guard when she was just 19 years old.
Just as she was set to deploy to Iraq, however, she found out she was pregnant, so she left the Guard only to join the Army three years later and serve in Afghanistan.
After active duty, Pascual returned home to her three kids in Fresno, Calif. and hit a bumpy road. “One day I was me, a soldier, and the next day I’m mom again,” she tells Valley Public Radio. “Mom, and sister, and daughter and I had to do all that buckle up and it was just exhausting and overwhelming sometimes.”
Pascual couldn’t pay her bills and soon received an eviction notice. She turned to the nonprofit WestCare Foundation’s housing complex for homeless vets: HomeFront. The organization welcomed her and gave her an apartment to stay in while she got back on her feet; about four years ago, she was able to leave and move into her own home.
Now Pascual works for HomeFront, helping other female vets facing homelessness find jobs, education opportunities and support.
Elle, a veteran that Pascual is helping, appreciates the extra touches HomeFront provides to help homeless service members. “It’s not just a room and that’s it. You have all the capabilities of what can help you to move forward,” Elle says. “It doesn’t make you feel like you’re sitting under a park bench anymore.”
Elle credits Pascual with helping to put her life back in order. “I’m going to get my college benefits, she put me up with a good position with being able to get a job. Seven or eight years of back and forth it took seven weeks just for Anita to help me out.”
MORE: For Female Veterans Experiencing Employment Woes, This Organization Offers Strong Advice
How to Bridge the Digital Divide
While many claim that devices are causing people to interact less, here’s a great example of technology bringing people together.
Once a week, 16-year-old Mikinly Sullivan travels to the Frasier Meadows retirement home in Boulder, Colo., to visit her friend, 89-year-old Kevin Bunnell. The two were connected through Cyber Seniors, a program that pairs high school volunteers with elderly individuals that need help navigating new-fangled technology.
The program wants to ensure that seniors are learning to use computers — not just letting the young people figure things out for them — so as a rule, the elder person’s fingers must be on the keyboard the whole time, while the teenager coaches them through maneuvers.
Bunnell is a poet, and Sullivan has been helping him organize the many poems he’s written over his lifetime. “I love listening to the stories from when he was young,” Sullivan says to PBS News Hour. In exchange, Bunnell wrote a poem in honor of the Cyber Seniors program.
Another senior benefitting from the program is Bruce Mackenzie. “I’m taking a class at the university called Hip-Hop 101,” he says, “And I didn’t know how to listen to the rap songs that are on hip-hop. And Ryan [a teen participant] showed me how to go to YouTube, which I never knew anything about. So I go to YouTube now and I can listen to all these rap songs for my class.”
While the program’s ultimate mission is to help seniors get online, Jack Williamson, who runs Cyber Seniors, says that it “helps build relationships between young people and seniors, which is rare in this culture today.”
As one student volunteer tells PBS News Hour, “I’m learning a lot from them and they’re learning from me. I have actually found through this that I think I like older people more than I like younger people.”
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Ancient Native American Ceremonies Help Soldiers Overcome PTSD
You’re probably not aware, but about 1 percent of veterans are of American Indian or Native Alaskan descent.
While this group is just a tiny percentage of our Armed Forces, Native American veterans are two to three times as likely to experience PTSD as white veterans, says Dr. Spero Manson, Ph.D., who leads the Centers for American Indian and Native Alaskan Health at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health.
Why does this group suffer mental anguish more than others? Manson, who is a member of the Pembina-Chippewa tribe, thinks it’s because Native Americans are more likely to spend more time in combat than soldiers of other ethnicities. “The greatest predictor of trauma among veterans is, in fact, exposure to combat,” he tells Colorado Matters.
Although the issues faced by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are unique, Manson believes this problem isn’t new, extending back for as long as there have been warriors. “The returning warriors of that time came back to their local villages and communities exhibiting many of the same symptoms that veterans today, who have seen combat, do,” he says. “They’re irritable, quick to fight, they distance themselves from others. They’re very difficult to reintegrate into their communities.”
Manson believes the ancient ceremonies tribes developed to address these problems can be helpful to today’s soldiers. He cites the Lakota Wiping of Tears, “where tears are symbolically brushed from the cheeks,” as being helpful.
Manson’s own son returned troubled after serving in the Marine Corps and finally got back on his feet through a mixture of tribal and traditional medical interventions. “We just have to figure out how to…support them in the process,” Manson says.
MORE: Can Ancient Native American Traditions Heal Today’s Vets?
Wanted: A Few Good Veterans to Keep the Roads Clear of Snow
Every year, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has to hire dozens of seasonal workers to drive plows and operate heavy machinery to keep the roads clear once the snow starts flying. This winter, they have a special group of people in mind to fill 60 vacant positions: veterans.
“Veterans often finish their military service with the types of skills we’re looking for,” CDOT deputy executive director Scot Cuthbertson tells CBS Denver in a statement. “We encourage veterans to make appointments and talk to us about our seasonal openings. We think we may have some good matches out there.”
CDOT held three open houses just for veterans to answer questions and make hires — including snowplow drivers, heavy equipment mechanics and communications experts — before Colorado’s heavy snow season hits.
This winter, you may have an extra reason to thank a veteran.
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Could This Be the Next ALS Ice Bucket Challenge?
Last month, a burglar broke into veteran Andrew Myers’s Seattle house. But as the security camera footage in the YouTube video “Mr. Wrong House – Robber Meets Paratrooper” shows, Myers tackled the robber, punched him and held him until police arrived. The story spread across the country, and the video has been viewed almost 4 million times.
“Part of the reason it became a national story is, gratuitously thanking veterans makes people feel good about themselves,” Myers tells KIRO Radio. “That’s my opinion as a soldier watching civilians. It makes people feel patriotic. It’s like warm apple pie to see veteran justice. Another element to it is, people love instant karma. It really seems like these low-level home invasions are a much bigger deal than I realized. So many of these comments are people with similar experiences.”
When some suggested Myers should try to profit from his new fame, he rejected the idea. But then he got to thinking about a grave problem facing veterans — the suicide rate of 22 deaths a day — and decided his video might be able to help. After all, he knew what it was like to have long lasting effects from military service.
Myers served in Afghanistan as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. When he returned home, he began to experience symptoms of PTSD. He soon contacted Paws and Stripes, an organization that provides service dogs to veterans with PTSD, and was matched with Hunter, an Australian shepherd. Myers instantly felt better with Hunter by his side. “I was 100 percent different person within two days of having the dog. I was like, ‘I need you.'”
So Myers set up a website, MrWrongHouse.com, where he invites people to take a donation challenge which involves uploading a black-and-white photo of themselves with their arms extended in a “come at me, bro” gesture that he makes in the security camera footage, making a donation to Paws and Stripes and nominating three other individuals to participate.
“Go on the porch, do the wingspan pose, take a black and white picture, and challenge your friends to do the same,” he says. “Keep the challenge going long enough to hit that viral-ity that will raise enough money to make a difference.”
After viewing the “Mr. Wrong House” video, our guess is many people will be inclined to do what Myers tells them to do.
MORE: After Losing Her Marine Son to PTSD, This Mom’s Mission is to Save Other Veterans
For Kids Afraid of Broccoli, This Center Helps Squash Their Fear
You’ve heard about the importance of literacy for reading, for finances (“financial literacy”), and maybe even for math — aka, numeracy — but what about food literacy?
The Food Literacy Center, a nonprofit in Sacramento, Calif., is inspiring kids to become knowledgeable about food in the hopes that they’ll develop life long healthy eating habits.
It opened its doors three years ago, offering classes on cooking and all-around vegetable know-how to children and has become so popular that now, dozens of volunteers work alongside its four full-time employees — reaching 2,400 kids at public libraries, after-school programs and other nonprofits. It specializes in reaching low-income kids and those who qualify for free and reduced lunch. These families often can’t afford fresh produce, leaving their kids inexperienced in everything from carrots to kohlrabi.
At the Food Literacy Center, they learn such facts as how to distinguish fruits — including the frequently misidentified bell pepper — and why whole fruits are better for them than juices and jellies.
The founder of the center, Amber Stott, tells the Sacramento Bee, “Because kids’ eating habits haven’t been firmly formed yet, we have a great opportunity to create healthy eaters, to help these kids become food adventurers and build habits that will last a lifetime.”
The effect of fruit and veggie literacy often extends to the kids’ parents. Evonne Fisher, the mother of a seven-year-old participating in the program, says that before her daughter’s food lessons, neither of them were culinary adventurers. “Before Food Literacy, if I was scared of how a certain food looked, I wouldn’t try it,” she says. “But this has really opened me up. I never would have tried a persimmon before, and now? I love them.”
MORE: This Innovative Idea Brings Produce Directly to Low-Income Neighborhoods
The Harry Potter Producer That Gave Up The Movie Business to Help Families with Sick Children
While working as an associate producer on the film “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” Paula DuPré Pesman received a phone call from an organization that grants wishes to critically ill kids. The child’s wish? To see the movie about the boy wizard before she died.
Presman’s initial reaction was that it was impossible. But in part because her own husband, Curt, was struggling with colon cancer at the time, she was determined to make it happen.
“We figured out a way to do a rough cut,” Pesman tells the Denver Post. “We got a screening room in San Francisco. We did a screening for this little girl, Gillian. Her picture hangs over my desk…She shot me out of a cannon, basically. It became my reason to go to work.”
After granting that wish, Pesman couldn’t stop there. She continued to make the dreams of sick kids come true with visits to the Harry Potter film set and screenings. Once, she mentioned to a sick child’s father that he must have a lot of friends helping him out. “He said, ‘Are you kidding?'” Pesman recalls. “We’re living a parent’s worst nightmare. People don’t know what to say or do, so they don’t do anything.”
So Pesman made helping such kids and their families her full-time mission. “I was walking away from something I loved. I loved working on films. I loved supporting the team. And I worked 16 years for the nicest company. You don’t walk away from a perfect job.”
But Pesman did, leaving the film industry to start There With Care out of her home in Boulder, Colo. The nonprofit takes care of every conceivable need that families of critically-ill children struggle with.
Volunteers make sure these families’ refrigerators are stocked and that they don’t run out of toilet paper. They deep-clean homes for kids coming home from the hospital with weakened immune systems, and they drive families to doctors’ appointments so the parents can provide comfort during the ride. Most importantly, the volunteers listen at a time when friends can turn away out of fear and shock about the situation.
Pesman runs the nonprofit full time — but she hasn’t completely stayed away from movie-making. She’s worked with Colorado filmmakers on such projects as “The Cove,” the 2009 Oscar nominee for best feature documentary, and last year’s Emmy-winning “Chasing Ice.”
“I was a control freak as a producer,” Pesman says. “I had to get everything done, everything perfect. I don’t do that anymore. I think Curt being sick changed all of that for me. I didn’t have a choice anymore. I saw how quickly things could change and be taken from you. That’s probably why I love documentary so much. You think you’re making this movie and you’re not. You’re making this one.”
MORE: Why Every American Should Read Harry Potter
This 85-Year-Old Knitter Churns Out Hats to Help Homeless Veterans
Seven years ago, 85-year-old Orville “Mark” Skattum, who served in the Army National Guard during the Korean conflict, took up a new hobby: knitting.
He got the idea after seeing a friend work on a loom. After getting one of his own, he started knitting hats to give to family and friends at Christmas. Then, he realized that homeless veterans could use some extra warmth.
“I feel sorry for the ones that have a hard time. They’re homeless and out of work,” he tells Kevin Simpson of the Denver Post. “The least I can do is help out a little.”
Skattum began knitting about five hats a week, each with a tag that reads, “Made by a Vet, for a Vet…God bless.” Whenever he has completed 50 hats, he donates them either to his church or to the Denver V.A. hospital to be given to needy vets. He estimates he’s knitted 1,200 hats.
Last year, his daughter Karla Tillapaugh joked with her father about getting a booth at Holiday ManCraft, a hipster-delighting fair that has been showcasing the wares of crafty men — many of them professional artisans — since 2000. She didn’t realize he’d taken her seriously until several months later, when he told her that he’d knitted 150 caps for his booth. Tillapaugh quickly contacted the craft fair organizers to see if her dad could join.
ManCraft founder Stu Alden immediately accepted him. “How can you say no to that?” he tells the Denver Post. “There was something really touching that he got excited about it.”
Skattum will be selling his specialty hat, called Orville’s Bucket, when Holiday ManCraft takes over a Denver VFW Post on December 5 and a Boulder, Colo., American Legion on December 6.
Not surprisingly, Skattum plans to donate any proceeds to charity.
MORE: How One Veteran Discovered the Healing Power of Art and Made it His Mission to Share with Others