Tag: New York

For Soldiers Enduring Seemingly Endless Recoveries, This Organization Provides Free Beach Vacations

Posted on by robbie

With a giant crowd lining the street, fire companies saluting and bagpipes blaring, you’d think it was July 4th or Memorial Day. But the cause for celebration on this balmy July Sunday wasn’t a national holiday. It was to honor the wounded U.S. soldiers and their families who were being treated to an all-expenses-paid vacation to Long Beach, N.Y., courtesy of the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors (LBWW).
Amid all the bad publicity surrounding scheduling discrepancies at VA hospitals nationwide and the plight of our returning troops in general, there’s another issue that’s seldom mentioned: the hardships borne by injured service members who require long-term hospital care.
Soldiers with debilitating injuries — both mental and physical—may never receive the warm hometown welcome depicted in car commercials. Instead, they go to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., to receive treatment and rehabilitation until their doctors classify them as non-medical assist (meaning they no longer need to be at the hospital or require doctors and nurses to be nearby day to day). Depending upon the extent of their injuries, some soldiers are stuck at the hospital for indefinite periods of time.
So in 2009, John McLoughlin, a retired New York City fireman, decided to do something special for those service members by founding the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors. He modeled LBWW on The Graybeards, a civic organization in the Rockaways, N.Y., that runs an adaptive sports festival for the disabled. McLoughlin took this idea a step further, extending it to a weeklong summer vacation and paying for the entire trip and accommodations, as well as providing specialized activities.
This past summer, LBWW flew in 22 injured vets and 46 of their family members to the seashore community.
A few days after the parade, Luke, a Marine from the Midwest who had both legs amputated above the knees after sustaining catastrophic blast wounds in Afghanistan, sits on the beach with his parents and kid sister and talks about the more than 50 surgeries he’s endured in the past two and a half years.
“I was hoping to have my prosthetics for this [week], but…” Luke says with a shrug, referring to the never-ending succession of infections that snag his rehab and timeline for leaving the hospital. Through the Wounded Warrior Project, Luke is one of eight vets in a cyber security training program that upon completion should land him a job with NASA.
Luke’s wife and two kids are also with him in Long Beach (staying at the Allegria Hotel, which has partnered with LBWW for years), where he’s actually able to spend a rare week living with them. That’s because, while his family is able to live in on-base housing, he and the other inpatients on medical-hold stay in barracks on Walter Reed’s campus.
He doesn’t dwell on the subject and instead smiles, recalling the fishing charter he went on that morning. “It was rough out there,” he says. “We were like five miles out, and I got a little nervous for a minute in my wheelchair.” Luke caught the boat’s only keeper of the day, a 24-incher.
Luke and another double-amputee, Jose, are able to participate in perhaps LBWW’s most unlikely activity: surfing lessons. A team of instructors shows up in the early afternoon with boards specially designed to accommodate surfers with disabilities. Both are catching waves in no time.
Jose was enjoying the LBWW vacation with his wife and brother. He also lives at Walter Reed, and his family is burdened by the same circumstances as Luke’s. Fortunately, however, Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit that builds specially designed housing for disabled vets, recently broke ground on a new house for Jose and his wife on Long Island, not far from his family in Queens.
Historically, LBWW tries to help the most severely injured and those that have recently returned from deployment overseas. In fact, sometimes the families are being reunited for the first time. But as the role of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan has wound down, the organization has also reached out to vets who’ve been in the hospital for an extended period of time — years or even decades.

Veterans and their families enjoy the beach at a LBWW event, July 29, 2014.

Also lounging on the beach that day are 42 Vietnam veterans from the local Northport VA Medical Center. Most are afflicted with some combination of mental and physical illnesses. Ned, a potbellied volunteer with long gray hair and beard, nods to Ralph, a barrel-chested vet with no toes, and explains how much this day means to Ralph. “When he got up this morning, there was a big ‘0’ on the wall in his room. Tomorrow it’ll say ‘365.’ He counts down the days until we come out again next year.”
Just then, four teenage volunteer boys and Jerry, a retired fireman and boisterous volunteer with LBWW since its inception, lift Ralph into a specially designed beach wheelchair and roll him on the sand and into the surf, 10 hands securely on the handles as he bobs and smiles through the waves during his second dip of the afternoon.
The severity of Northport Vets’ disabilities made day trips a huge challenge for the VA’s staff. But with the enthusiasm and organization that LBWW has built over the years, it’s now safe and practical for the group to bring the Vietnam vets out as well. LBWW keeps a team of volunteer nurses from Long Island’s North Shore University Hospital on hand at all times during the week’s activities, led by Nurse Patty, a mainstay with the group.
Jerry explains that LBWW’s success is reliant on its relatively small size, and that repeating their model is best done at the local level. He says that large programs like the “Wounded Warriors Project have great resources” that can help LBWW get off the ground, “but they also have a huge infrastructure, which creates a lot of overhead.” With LBWW’s web of tight, local functionaries, every dollar raised goes directly to their cause. Aside from the considerable cost of plane tickets and accommodations, LBWW has also raised funds for a private tour of Ground Zero and Rockefeller Center, the weekend parade and BBQ, a 5K race, a Mets game and the fishing trip, not to mention three beach days packed with food, drinks, surfing and even a massage tent.
LBWW’s success has already inspired another group, the West Palm Beach Waterfront Warriors, who’ve been bringing wounded vets and their families to the Florida coast since 2011.
Which shorefront community will be next?

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The names and identifying information of the veterans in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.

When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process

Posted on by robbie

Professor Carolyn Boyes-Watson remembers getting a call from distressed administrators at a Boston high school: “We have so many girls fighting,” they said, “we’re picking up clumps of hair in the hallways.”

Students were yanking each other’s hair out while brawling in the school’s corridors and cafeteria, and administrators couldn’t figure out how to make the violence stop.

So they called in Boyes-Watson, a sociology professor at Suffolk University in Boston, to train students and teachers in a conflict-resolution practice known as restorative justice. Drawing from Native American traditions, the concept uses ritualized dialogue to try to mend broken communities. Participants gather in circles to try to resolve problems through discussion, rather than retribution.

Across the country, more and more schools are turning to restorative justice as they realize that traditional disciplinary measures — suspensions and expulsions — often don’t deter misbehavior, but can instead set troubled students up for failure by further disengaging them from school.

While traditional justice systems are based on punishing perpetrators (usually by ostracizing or isolating them), restorative justice focuses on healing the harm that has been inflicted — personally and community-wide. Restorative justice programs in schools seek to establish cultures of openness, communication and respect.

Boyes-Watson helped the Boston school set up a practice in which groups of students and teachers met regularly to discuss problems while sitting in a circle. “The kids absolutely take to the circle immediately,” Boyes-Watson says. “They treat each other better. They’re kinder to one another. They feel a sense of belonging and connection. It’s really quite simple. … It’s a small intervention that makes such a powerful difference.”

The effect was transformative. By the following year, the school had solved the problem of girls fighting — no more brawls in the halls.

With similar results being reproduced in other schools, restorative justice is catching on nationwide: Schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota are using the practice. Even the federal government is getting on board.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration released new school discipline guidelines asking administrators to move away from zero-tolerance discipline and begin using alternative measures like restorative justice. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that suspensions often lead to additional disciplinary action, repeating grades, dropping out and ending up in the juvenile justice system. Restorative justice seeks to change that trajectory, known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

DIVERTING THE PIPELINE

The growth of restorative justice in schools comes in response to the failure of zero-tolerance discipline, which uses removal from school as a punishment. During the 1990s, suspensions and expulsions became increasingly popular, paralleling a dramatic increase in the country’s prison population as a result of the War on Drugs.

Initially, zero-tolerance discipline was focused on the most extreme offenses: guns and drugs in school. “But what happened over the years was that morphed into including more and more things into what were zero-tolerance offenses,“ says Dr. Martha Schiff, a restorative justice expert at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., including bringing nail clippers or butter knives to school.

Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and expulsions has nearly doubled since 1974.

Disproportionately, students of color have been the recipients of those punishments. Nationwide, while 17 percent of school-age children are black, African-American students comprise 37 percent of suspensions and 35 percent of expulsions. Additionally, black students are suspended or expelled at a rate three times that of white students.

“Kids who should have been in school were being systematically kicked out and winding up in the justice system,” says Schiff. A name for this dynamic emerged — the school-to-prison pipeline — highlighting the parallel failures of school discipline and the justice system, in which African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.

Now, as restorative justice takes root in schools, studies are showing that it does reduce suspensions and expulsions — often quite dramatically. Whether the practice addresses the racial disparities in school discipline is a question that requires further study, says Schiff.

Not everyone is sold on restorative justice. Annalise Acorn, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has written a book-length critique, arguing that the practice can traumatize victims and allow unrepentant offenders to fake their way out of trouble. And Dr. Hilary Cremin, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, warns that restorative justice is not a panacea and must be implemented carefully in order to avoid causing more harm than good.

At the moment, however, critical voices are in the minority. “I’ve never seen the momentum and groundswell around it quite like it is now,” says Schiff.

MAKING IT RIGHT

In Oakland, Calif., the entire school district has adopted restorative justice practices, after seeing dramatic results at a single troubled middle school.

In 2005, Cole Middle School was in crisis. Student behavior at the school — located in West Oakland, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood — was out of control despite aggressive disciplinary tactics. The school had a suspension rate nearly five times higher than the district average and was expelling four times as many students.

Fania Davis, head of the organization Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, helped the school implement restorative justice circles. In a single year, suspensions dropped by 87 percent and not a single student was expelled.

“In our first pilot, we were able to completely eliminate violence,” says Davis. Principals took notice, and by 2011 the Oakland Unified School District had hired a district-wide program manager to help administrators and teachers bring restorative justice into their schools.

According to David Yusem, Restorative Justice’s program manager, schools first establish dialogue circles as a regular practice in classrooms. Students sit with their teachers and establish group values, creating a space to connect and speak personally about events in school or in their lives. Circle members talk one at a time — without interruption — passing a “talking piece,” an object indicating whose turn it is to speak.

On their own, dialogue circles have a dramatic impact, says Ina Bendich, of the Restorative Justice Training Institute in Berkeley, Calif. “Eighty-five percent of your problems will be taken care of when you really focus on community building,” she says.

For the other 15 percent of problems, schools use response-to-harm circles, designed to address the aftermath of specific conflicts, like two students fighting, or a student yelling at a teacher. With these, the affected parties talk about what happened and what they were feeling at the time.

“It gives the person who did the harm a chance to make it right, rather than pushing them out of school,” explains Yusem.

Taking responsibility for one’s actions can include things like public apologies or community service, or a modified form of a traditional punishment, such as in-school suspension instead of removal.

Kris Miner, executive director of St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice in River Falls, Wis., says she helped facilitate a healing circle that included parents, students and school staff after a white 11th-grader used the N-word and nearly got into a fistfight with a black student.

As the talking piece went around the circle, one father, a corrections officer, spoke about how damaging racial slurs can be and how, in prison, they can get you killed. A Latina guidance counselor talked about being called a “wetback” and a “spic.”

The circle created an opportunity for reconciliation for all parties involved — a moment that never would have occurred if the offending student had simply been removed from school.

The student who had used the racial slur became more and more emotional as people spoke. “I am so sorry that I said that,” he said, tearing up. “I will never say that word again.”

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Being Severely Burned Didn’t Stop This Veteran From Hitting the Links

Posted on by robbie

Before enlisting in the Army, Rick Yarosh of Windsor, N.Y., had taken up golf and was getting good at it. He planned to continue his pursuit of the sport when he returned from deployment.
But in 2006, while Yarosh served as a sergeant in Iraq, an I.E.D. exploded, burning 60 percent of his body and causing him to lose his nose, ears, a leg and several fingers. Since then, Yarosh has been continuing his physical therapy while also working at Sitrin Health Care Center, helping with its military rehabilitation program.
Yarosh was eager to try golf again, but he couldn’t find an adaptive club that worked with his disabilities. Luckily, two students from SUNY-Polytechnic Institute (near Utica, N.Y.) stepped in to help.
Nicholas Arbour and Adam Peters had a class assignment to solve a real-world problem and started meeting with Yarosh in January to design a golf club that would accommodate his needs. Arbour and Peters studied professional golfers’ swings and created three prototypes on a 3-D printer to develop their final design, which includes a wrist guard and a handle that Yarosh can hold while he swings the club.
On October 28, Arbour and Peters presented Yarosh with his new golf club at a ceremony at Sitrin Health Care Center. “I’m so happy,” Yarosh tells Syracuse.com. “I tried the club and I could hit the ball with it quite a distance. Now I can go out with my friends again and play golf. It’s an incredible feeling…I used to wrestle and play football, and I like to be competitive. It was another piece of my life that I lost, and these two helped me get that back.”
Arbour and Peters earned top grades from their professor for their project. “I would have written to their professor and protested if they didn’t get an A,” Yarosh says. “They worked really hard at this, and it means a lot to me.”
MORE: These Engineering Students Turned a Simple Assignment Into Two Years of Hard Work, Innovation, and Kindness

The New York Town Putting Roofs Over 60 Vets Heads

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Long Island took a big step forward toward its goal of eliminating veteran homelessness when Liberty Village, a brand new housing complex in Amityville, N.Y., welcomed its first residents on Sept. 29.
According to the Long Island Report, 152,000 veterans live on Long Island and 5,500 of them are homeless, says John Jarvis of the nonprofit Mental Health Association. With all the apartments occupied, Liberty Village reduces the number of homeless vets by 60.
The Medford, N.Y.-based nonprofit Concern for Independent Living raised $25 million in five months to bring Liberty Village to fruition. The complex features green lawns and white picket fences, and each unit contains four apartments that come complete with granite countertops, furniture and kitchen supplies.
The housing complex has been a lifesaver for several of the vets who moved in about a month ago.
Robert Veney, a 54-year-old Marine Corps veteran suffering PTSD, fell into homelessness when his mother died and he could no longer afford to pay the $2,200 monthly mortgage on her house. He slept in his car or on a friend’s couch and hid his homelessness from his children. But now he can welcome them at his new apartment.
Nat Conigiliaro, an 83-year-old Korean War veteran, was moved to tears when he spoke to the Long Island Report at the grand opening. “I want to dig a deep hole and I want to throw in all the horrors of homelessness, all the depression, all the hurt, and I want to bury it, never to be resurrected again,” he says. “[The apartment] It’s the Garden of Eden, and best of all, it’s home. Can’t thank them enough.”
Ralph Fasano, the executive director of Concern for Independent Living, says, “The opening of Amityville has to be one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. To see people who were going to die homeless, and at the end of their life, to have some joy and some peace.”
In cities across the country, nonprofits and government agencies are making bold moves to alleviate veteran homelessness — bringing the prospect for eradicating it closer than ever.
MORE: Buy A T-Shirt, Help A Veteran

When Low-Income People Can’t Afford Solar Energy, This Organization Helps Out

Posted on by robbie

What nonprofit asks low-income people to don hard hats and safety harnesses and scramble up on roofs?
GRID Alternatives does.
The organization not only provides solar energy to low-income neighborhoods, it also teaches residents how to install the panels themselves — helping them gain experience for potential jobs in the solar industry.
Low-income people are more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods, and they definitely can use the break on energy bills that solar panels provide — but most can’t afford to have them installed. That’s where GRID Alternatives steps in. According to the nonprofit’s website, its solar installation efforts have prevented “the release of 340,000 tons of greenhouse gasses over the systems’ lifetimes and provid[ed] more than $110 million in energy cost savings.”
One hundred and fifty volunteers turned up recently to help install solar panels on 10 Habitat for Humanity homes in a low-income Washington D.C. neighborhood, according to Katherine Ling of E&E. The installation celebrated the grand opening of the Oakland-based nonprofit’s D.C. office, which joins branches in California, Colorado, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
The D.C. installation event also gave 10 “solar trainees” from a local organization for at-risk youth the chance to gain some valuable job skills and learn about an industry that might eventually provide them with a career.
GRID Alternatives has been able to expand its mission recently due to a $2 million grant from Wells Fargo, as well as equipment donations from Enphase Energy Inc., Sun Edison LLC and SunPower Corp.
The group also sponsors SolarCorps Fellowships, a one-year volunteer training period that qualifies participants for employment in the solar industry. The nonprofit is especially interested in providing jobs to low-income people, minorities and women. To that end, it hosts “women builds” as a part of its National Women in Solar initiative.
Ling visited a woman-only solar installation project in Los Angeles, where SolarCorps construction fellow Ilana Feingold declared, “We love power tools!”
We’re sure they love the energy savings and the jobs that come along with it, too.
MORE: For Those Most In Need of Low Utility Bills, There’s Solar Energy
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How the Garden State Plans to Grow Energy Infrastructure

Posted on by robbie

Following the costly devastation of Superstorm Sandy, the eastern seaboard has spent the last two years picking up the pieces and developing new strategies for disaster preparedness.
The damage serves as a reminder of what natural disaster can do, and the United Nations’s warning that climate change could cost trillions is forcing some states to rethink their plan for infrastructure and energy.
New Jersey joins Connecticut and New York in creating a green bank “to fund projects that will help prevent a reoccurrence of the energy disruptions and build energy resilience.” Both Connecticut (which became the first state to create such a bank in 2011) and New York fund microgrid projects, but New Jersey’s green bank will focus strictly on energy resilience for infrastructure — including water and wastewater plants, hospitals, transit systems and schools, according to Governing.
In New York and New Jersey, 75 percent of power generation is located in flood plains, which have a 1 percent chance of flooding each year, according to United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). An energy resilience bank will support new efforts to create eco-friendly, clean sources of energy that will prove to be more reliable over time. The bank plans to dole out loans and grants to fund projects such as smart grid technology, microgrids and distributed generation, which produce electricity through a variety of smaller energy sources such as solar panels.
The state plans to use $200 million from its Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery allocation from HUD, according to Greg Reinart, director of communications for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. To sustain the bank, the state hopes to attract private-sector financing to invest in new energy technologies and renewable energy.
MORE: Here’s What Happens When Communities Demand Green Energy

Name the Most Pedestrian-Friendly City in America

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Pedestrian life is picking up speed across the country, with an estimated five percent more Americans walking to work now compared to 2000, Bloomberg reports. But with more than 4,700 pedestrian deaths in 2012, city planners are recognizing the importance of improving pathways and policies to protect citizens on their feet.
In a study of the safest cities for pedestrians by insurer Liberty Mutual Holding Co., Seattle topped the list. The Pacific Northwest city had fewer than 10 annual pedestrian deaths in 2012 and was noted for its investment in infrastructure to improve the walking safety of more than 108,000 commuters each day. That same year, the city ordered more than 500 crosswalks and also improved walking routes for students.
Boston and Washington, D.C. came in second and third, respectively. San Francisco notched fourth and New York City grabbed the fifth spot on the list of of 25 cities analyzed for pedestrians. The most dangerous for walkers? Detroit. The report ranks cities by traffic data, infrastructure and local attitude on public safety among 2,500 residents across the observed cities.
Dave Melton, Liberty Mutual’s managing director of global safety, attributes well-planned pedestrian safety to countdown lights and flashers at crosswalks that help drivers focus on the road and direct attention from pedestrians. But pesky cellphone usage still remains an issue. 

“The human brain doesn’t multitask,” Melton says. “It switches back and forth.”

It’s tricky to try to control phone distraction, but ensuring every other component of protecting pedestrians is a step in the right direction.

MORE: These Kids Are Powering Their School Just By Walking

Children Can’t Learn When There Are Problems At Home. That’s Where Community Schools Come In

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Walking down a hallway of Chicago’s South Loop Elementary School, Melissa Mitchell heard a first grader unleash a string of profanities inside a classroom.
“I hear this little voice screaming every curse word I’ve ever heard,” Mitchell says. She looked inside and saw “teeny, teeny” Brianne, standing on top of a desk.
“I’m not going to do this — every word you can think of — spelling test!” the little girl screamed, Mitchell recalls.
At most schools, Brianne would’ve ended up in the principal’s office for discipline. But South Loop is a community school that includes a variety of social services for kids and parents — from medical care and counseling to food pantries and adult GED classes. These facilities, which are gaining in popularity, are based on the idea that no matter how great a teacher is or how many high-tech gadgets a classroom has, kids can’t learn if they’re struggling with challenges at home (think: unemployed parents, a lack of food, the threat of eviction).
Instead of being sent to the principal, Brianne ended up in Mitchell’s office. At the time, Mitchell served as the school’s resource coordinator and was in charge of determining what social supports the South Loop community needs and finding ways to meet them.
Mitchell learned that Brianne wasn’t simply being a brat. The little girl’s parents were going through an acrimonious separation, creating an unstable environment at home. At six years of age, Brianne didn’t understand everything that was happening; nevertheless, it was upsetting her and spilling over into the school day.
After identifying the source of the behavior problem, Mitchell worked with Brianne’s family to address some of the trouble at home. She helped the mother find stable housing and childcare subsidies and connected Brianne and her family to a counselor.
While the community school model that helped Brianne and her family has been around for years — maybe over a century — it’s recently been gathering steam as more and more educators and elected officials see the value of a holistic approach to education reform.
Advocates currently estimate that as many as 5,000 community schools exist in the U.S., with more on the way.
Last year, Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder expanded a program placing social workers in schools — a step toward community schools. In June, Democratic Mayor Bill De Blasio announced plans to spend $52 million to open 40 community schools in New York City. And in July, Maryland U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer and Illinois U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock introduced a bipartisan bill that would establish a grant program to create more community schools nationwide.
A strategy, not a program
Each of the community schools created by these efforts will look different. That’s because their underlying philosophy holds that each one should grow and develop in response to the needs of the community it’s in, not according to some pre-ordained plan.
“It’s a strategy, not a program,” says Jane Quinn, Director of the National Center for Community Schools, part of the Children’s Aid Society.
Community schools each do a comprehensive needs assessment to determine what supports are most needed and often end up with school-based health clinics to address student’s physical, mental and dental health needs, including vision-correction to make sure kids that can see the lessons on the chalkboard.
There’s a lot of evidence that wealthy kids succeed partly because they can take advantage of “out of school enrichment,” Quinn says. Community schools can level the playing field with an extended school day and more academic and extra-curricular offerings outside of the traditional school day.
At Earle STEM Academy in Chicago’s impoverished Englewood neighborhood, program supervisor Quintella Rodgers says that after-school activities include a job club that teaches financial literacy, a power group that focuses on social and emotional health and individual academic help, plus photography, karate, Pilates, volleyball, basketball and DJing classes.
For the whole family
In community schools, “the primary allegiance is to the kids in the schools,” said Sarah Zeller-Berkman, who works for Youth Development Institute, which runs Beacon Community Schools in New York City. “But they still need and want to serve the broader community.” One way they accomplish this is by offering programs for parents and finding ways to integrate them into the school.
Community schools offer extra programming by creating partnerships with existing organizations, like colleges offering classes or not-for-profits running mentoring programs. The social services offered in community schools don’t usually duplicate ongoing efforts, but seek to bring them together under one roof.
At Salomé Ureña de Henríquez, a Children’s Aid Society community school in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, for example, the additional services offered include a variety of classes and programs for parents.
On a recent tour of the building, Director Migdalia Cortes-Torres pointed out photographs depicting some recent grads, resplendent in caps and gowns, on a bulletin board outside the school’s health clinic. But they weren’t pictures of students who had finished high school or junior high; they were pictures of students’ parents who had received their GEDs through a program at the school.
In addition to the GED program, Cortes-Torres said the school, which serves a largely Dominican population, offers classes for parents in nutrition and cooking, child development, English language and computer skills. They can learn art history, go on poetry retreats and even travel internationally with other parents.
Lidia Aguasanta, the school’s parent coordinator, says that she’s been helping parents to not only get their high-school diplomas, but to go for college degrees as well. “I do trips with them” to local universities because, she says, “they’re scared to leave the community” and are intimated by the complicated process of enrolling in college since many don’t speak English.
In community schools, support for parents help students achieve success, too. Aguasanta recalls a struggling mom that she convinced to enroll at Boricua College in New York City. The woman is now thriving and the simple fact that she’s now pursuing higher ed makes it more likely that her daughter, a 7th grader at the school, will too, Aguasanta says.
Studies indicate success
Beyond anecdotes like this one, research studies are pointing to hard evidence that community schools can reduce absenteeism and dropout levels and improve grades and test scores.
Not everybody is sold on community schools, however. Jason Bedrick, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, tells the Wall Street Journal that the model needs more study before people invest in it on a large scale. And the New York Times reported last year that while the creation of community schools in Cincinnati has led to some improvements, many of the schools “are still in dire academic straits.”
Nevertheless, staunch opposition to the model is rare. “Community schools have no natural enemies,” says Quinn, quoting Martin Blank, head of the Coalition for Community Schools. Instructors, including those that belong to the American Federation of Teachers, like community schools because they can focus on teaching, not on whether their students are hungry or in trouble at home.
There are, however, “rival hypotheses” about where school resources should go, Quinn says. Some people believe, for instance, that the key to improving education is high-quality teaching and that anything else is just a distraction.
Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, has dedicated decades to putting new young teachers in schools, based partly on the idea that better teaching is central to better education. But, she also voices support for the principals of community schools.
“All the successful schools … are taking a community approach,” she said at a recent NationSwell event. It’s important that schools are responsive to people on the ground, not to theorists with big fix-all theories. “You need to empower people at the local level.”
At South Loop Elementary, where locals can address education holistically, Melissa Mitchell’s response to Brianne’s profanity-laced tantrum worked.
“It wasn’t a perfect rainbows and butterflies outcome,” says Mitchell, who’s now the head of Illinois’ Federation For Community Schools. But Brianne did settle down and “the father and mother came to a reasonable custody agreement.”
Leaving Brianne with a little less on her mind and giving her the ability to focus on what she was really in school for: Learning.
 
 

New York City Taxis Go Pink

Posted on by robbie

On the busy streets of New York City, hailing a taxi can be impossible at times. And if you’re looking for one with a female driver? Well, the odds of finding that can be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
That’s because fewer than three percent of the 115,000 licensed taxi, livery and limousine drivers in New York City are female. So for women who may not be comfortable with a male driver due to safety, religious or social reasons, the options are severely limited.
Which is why Stella Mateo invented SheRides – an app that quickly locates and orders a cab driven by a woman. (Stella is the wife of Fernando Mateo, the founder of the New York State Federation of Taxis.)
So, how does the app work? Once it’s downloaded, the user can search for a female driver nearby throughout New York City, Westchester County, N.Y. and Long Island, N.Y. Requested drivers are easy to spot curbside because they’re outfitted with a pink scarf.
Not only is the app making riders feel secure, but it’s also encouraging female drivers to get back into the taxi business, like 64-year-old Dinorah Decruz, who is coming out of a year of retirement. After being almost robbed by a male customer, the ability to focus on female clients makes Decruz feel safer.
Currently, about 100 female drivers have registered with the app, and while Mateo planned to launch it this month, she’s decided to wait until she has 500 drivers enrolled to help ensure its success.
Right now, though, she hopes that it will inspire more women to join the profession. After all, the app offers a safe and comfortable atmosphere — for both driver and passenger — which is exactly how 66 year-old Bronya Shaffer feels. “It’s having one more opportunity in our whole world, in all of our interactions everywhere, to know that I can choose to have a woman if I want,” she tells Times Union. “It’s kind of nice.”
MORE: Despite a Major Setback, This Young Woman Continues to Fight for At-Risk Youth

Inside the Company That Recognized the Importance of Corporate Diversity 50 Years Ago

Posted on by robbie

When you think of Xerox, you probably think of copy machines. But what really should come to mind is diversity.
Back in 2009, Ursula Burns assumed the role of CEO — marking the first time that a Fortune 500 company not only hired an African-American female for the position, but also hired two female CEOs in a row. With women holding only 4.8 percent of CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies, and black CEOs in these companies numbering only six, Xerox’s diverse leadership is remarkable.
But it didn’t happen overnight.
The seeds for Burns’s rise were planted 50 years ago through an innovative, company-wide effort to enhance diversity that continues to bear fruit to this day.
According to Paul Solman of PBS NewsHour, during the summer of 1964, race riots broke out near Xerox’s headquarters in Rochester, N.Y. Company founder Joe Wilson decided to meet with black community leaders to find out what could make their situation better.
Damika Arnold, Xerox’s Global Diversity and Inclusion Manager, tells Solman that Wilson “found out that the reason why they were rioting is because they didn’t have access to jobs. So he pledged that the black people of the community would be able to get jobs at Xerox.”
Wilson kept his word and then some. Xerox launched a summer minority internship program — which is how now-CEO Burns first joined the company in 1980. By 1991, nine percent of Xerox’s managers were black, compared to just half a percent at other companies.
But Xerox wasn’t content to rest with just this achievement. Leaders in the company saw that women weren’t making the same gains as men were, and when they analyzed the discrepancy, they found it was due to the fact that women with children couldn’t rise through the ranks because of the strict work schedules imposed on plant managers. So Xerox implemented job-sharing programs. As a result, women (even those with young children) began rising up the ranks.
Burns tells Solman, women are “not dumb in manufacturing. We just — we need a lot more flexibility than you’re allowing us to have.”
Additionally, Xerox encouraged the formation of supportive groups among its workforce, such as the Women’s Alliance, the Black Women’s Leadership Council and a gay and lesbian group. These gave employees of all backgrounds a myriad of opportunities for mentorship and guidance.
Burns believes Xerox’s groundbreaking emphasis on diversity has allowed it to weather decades of change in the business technology industry. The best idea, she says, “is to engage as much difference, as much breadth as you can, because that gives you little peeks into where some of the big opportunities will be.”
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