Cover Stories: Surviving on Instinct, youth service agencies shift focus from providing alternatives for urban children to policies of austerity and self-help by Kierna Dawsey; Chained Reaction, are increased juvenile arrests boosting New York public safety or sowing seeds of hate and resentment? by Kim Nauer.
Other stories include Nettie Mayersohn in a political corrective to Terry McGovern’s anti-HIV testing for infants piece; Lise Funderburg on the Students in the Media Works program’s anti-racism public service video; Andrew White’s Q & A with community organizer Charles Barron; Winton Pitcoff on the awful state of Eastern District High School in Bushwick; Rob Polner on ways to improve the child welfare system despite significant cuts brought on by Giuliani; James Bradley on public schools giving fewer classes to failing students; Kevin Heldman on Zandra Myers of the Claddagh Inn; Moises Perez's book review of "Crews," by Maria Hinojosa with photographs by German Perez; Theodore W. Kheel on the need to reframe the drug debate; Nick Chiles on the preference of Fort Greene residents to contact the Fire Department over the police for various non-fire emergencies.
Cover Stories: Surviving on Instinct, youth service agencies shift focus from providing alternatives for urban children to policies of austerity and self-help by Kierna Dawsey; Chained Reaction, are increased juvenile arrests boosting New York public safety or sowing seeds of hate and resentment? by Kim Nauer.
Other stories include Nettie Mayersohn in a political corrective to Terry McGovern’s anti-HIV testing for infants piece; Lise Funderburg on the Students in the Media Works program’s anti-racism public service video; Andrew White’s Q & A with community organizer Charles Barron; Winton Pitcoff on the awful state of Eastern District High School in Bushwick; Rob Polner on ways to improve the child welfare system despite significant cuts brought on by Giuliani; James Bradley on public schools giving fewer classes to failing students; Kevin Heldman on Zandra Myers of the Claddagh Inn; Moises Perez's book review of "Crews," by Maria Hinojosa with photographs by German Perez; Theodore W. Kheel on the need to reframe the drug debate; Nick Chiles on the preference of Fort Greene residents to contact the Fire Department over the police for various non-fire emergencies.
Cover Stories: Surviving on Instinct, youth service agencies shift focus from providing alternatives for urban children to policies of austerity and self-help by Kierna Dawsey; Chained Reaction, are increased juvenile arrests boosting New York public safety or sowing seeds of hate and resentment? by Kim Nauer.
Other stories include Nettie Mayersohn in a political corrective to Terry McGovern’s anti-HIV testing for infants piece; Lise Funderburg on the Students in the Media Works program’s anti-racism public service video; Andrew White’s Q & A with community organizer Charles Barron; Winton Pitcoff on the awful state of Eastern District High School in Bushwick; Rob Polner on ways to improve the child welfare system despite significant cuts brought on by Giuliani; James Bradley on public schools giving fewer classes to failing students; Kevin Heldman on Zandra Myers of the Claddagh Inn; Moises Perez's book review of "Crews," by Maria Hinojosa with photographs by German Perez; Theodore W. Kheel on the need to reframe the drug debate; Nick Chiles on the preference of Fort Greene residents to contact the Fire Department over the police for various non-fire emergencies.
A SPECIAL ISSUE ON NEW YORK YOUTH Raised in the City s o you heard someone on a soapbox say young people are the future of America? That 's nothing new. In and of itself, it's a pretty valid statement. When Rudy Giuliani said it and made a big cam- paign item out of how important Boys and Girls Clubs are, he probably meant it. Then he was elected and focused nearly all his attention on crime statistics and budget figures. Aside from stating the obvious-the fact that just about every recent budget reduction in social welfare has hit programs for families with low income children-we try this month to illuminate where we are going as a city of people who presumably care about kids. We examine the many .............. _.,.., ...... - sides of government's commitment to children (or its lack thereof) in school, after school, at home--and in the
EDITORIAL streets where the police jacked up juvenile arrests by 30 percent last year. We are not seeking to promote despair. There are so many good people out there stabilizing youth programs, organizing for better schools, promoting solutions to the crisis at the Child Welfare Administration, all working like mad to do the right thing. What we want is for people to acknowledge the problems and take note of the struggle. On a different note, this month City Limits welcomes a new associ- ate editor, Kevin Heldman. You may have seen his byline on features in Rolling Stone and Vibe, among other places. Last month's rollout of our new design wasn't without a few screw- ups. Number one: The letters page jumped to oblivion, thanks to an inex- plicable late night computer glitch. If you reverse pages 38 and 39, all the letters are there and make sense. Number two: The caption to a pho- tograph accompanying "Whisper to a Roar," last month's article about the Community Library Information Collaborative in Flatbush, Brooklyn, misidentified one of its subjects. The man is Jim Braxton, president of the Friends of Flatbush Library. Finally, Senior Editor Kim Nauer has won the prestigious 1995 Emery A. Brownell Award, presented by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, for her November 1994 cover feature on Family Court. The previous winner of the 33-year-old award, interestingly enough, was the editorial board of The New York Times. Congratulations, Kim! Editor Cover photo by Jason Goltz lity Limits Volume XX Number 9 City Limits is published ten times per year. monthly except bi-monthly issues in June/July and August/September. by the City Limits Community Infonmation Service. Inc .. a non- profit organization devoted to disseminating information concerning neighborhood revitalization. Editor: Andrew White Senior Editor: Kim Nauer Special Projects Editor: Kierna Mayo Dawsey Associate Editor: Kevin Heldman Contributing Editors: James Bradley. Rob Polner Design Director: David Huang Advertising Representative: Faith Wiggins Proofreader: Sandy Socolar Photographers: Ana Asian. Jim Downs. Steven Fish. Jason Goltz Intern: Julian Camilo Pozzi Sponsors: Association for Neighborhood and HOUSing Development. Inc. Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development Urban Homesteading Assistance Board Board of Directors' : Eddie Bautista, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest Beverly Cheuvront, City Harvest Francine Justa. Neighborhood Housing Services Errol Louis, Central Brooklyn Partnership Rima McCoy, Action for Community Empowerment Rebecca Reich, Low Income Housing Fund Andrew Reicher, UHAB Tom Robbins, Journalist Jay Small, ANHD Doug Turetsky, former City Limits Editor Pete Williams, National Urban League Affiliations for identification only. Subscription rates are: for individuals and community groups, $25/0ne Year, $35/Two Years; for businesses, foundations, banks, government agencies and libraries, $35/0ne Year, $50/Two Years. Low income, unemployed, $1O/0ne Year. City Limits welcomes comments and article contributions. Please include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for return manuscripts. Material in City Limits does not neces- sarily reflect the opinion of the sponsoring organizations. Send correspondence to: City Limits, 40 Prince St., New York, NY 10012. Postmaster: Send address changes to City Limits, 40 Prince St., NYC 10012. Second class postage paid New York, NY 10001 City Limits IISSN 0199-03301 (2121925-9820 FAX (2121966-3407 Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved. No portion or portions of this journal may be reprinted with- out the express permission of the publishers. City Limits is indexed in the Alternative Press Index and the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals and is available on microfilm from University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. CITY LIMITS THE GRID , NOVEMBER 1995 s FEATURES Surviving on Instinct How do you spell survival? Children sometimes need a helping hand, but in this era of government austerity, youth agencies are maneuvering desperately to stay afloat City kids are doing much the same thing. By Kiema Mayo Dawsey Chained Reaction Copping an attitude. The NYPD wants kids off the streets, by any means necessary. Arrest rates are soaring. By Kim Nauer PROFILE Station Identification The revolution will not only be televised, it'll be edited. Scott Rosenberg's Media Works course shows students how to flip the script. By Lise Funderburg PIPELINES Bruised and Battered Eastern District High School in Bushwick is troubled by crime, low test scores and low graduation rates. Now parents are pUshing for a state takeover. By Winton PiJcojJ Order to Resuscitate Part Two of our series on child welfare. Yes, Rudy, you could save a dying department- and the children who depend on it. By Rob Polntr Wasted Days m1III School's out early for students who don't make the grade. By James Bradley
Spark the Fire He's been with the Panthers, alongside AI Sharpton and under the Rainbow (Coalition). Now organizer Charles Barron is focused on his home turf. By Andrew White NOTORIOUS No Simple Charity Zandra Meyers has learned what it takes to help hold her community together. By Kevin Heldnum
Review 128 Fighting Words By Moises Perez Cityview 129 Reframe the Drug Debate By Theodore W. Kheel Spare Change 134 Guns and Hoses By Nick Chiles
Briefs 6,7 Editorial 2 Shameless Letters 4,31 Long Road Home Professional 32 Cuts Both Ways Directory Harlem Impatience Job Ads 33
-..... ~ - ' . . ''''.- LETTERS Political CorrKtlv. The Cityview by Terry McGovern of the HIY Law Project ("Scarlet Letters," August/September 1995) on mandatory HIY testing of infants is so replete with inaccuracies and untruths that it is difficult to know where to begin. But let me try. McGovern states that the "Baby AIDS" legislation I introduced in the state legisla- ture in 1993 "would have mandated HIV testing for all pregnant woman in New York." This is completely untrue. The legis- lation offered counseling and voluntary testing to all pregnant woman-but it fur- ther required that mothers be informed when their babies test positive for HIV anti- bodies in the blind screening test now per- formed on all newborns in New York State. Can we continue a policy which makes it impossible for HIV-positive infants to access early medical treatment? Consider the facts. Every baby born in New York State is currently tested for the HIY anti- body, and each year we find that anywhere between 1,600 to 1,900 infants test posi- tive. But those infants are sent home, and no one, not the mother, not the doctor, not the agency responsible for the baby's care, is informed that these babies have tested positive for a deadly disease. We test infants for seven differ- ent diseases, including syphilis and hepatitis B. In every case, the results are given to the parents and the children are brought into treatment, except for the unfortu- nate infants who test positive for the HIV antibody. Those babies --- are sent home undiagnosed and untreated, some to return to the hospital months later, too late to benefit from treat- ment. The reason for this insane policy is simply this: a positive test of the baby means the mother is infected, and AIDS activists, who have a stranglehold on AIDS policy, have determined that revealing the infant's status is a violation of the woman's privacy and her right "not to know." Can you imagine any caring, responsi- ble parent who would not want to know I' I I II \ \ I II I< () I, I I{ \ (, I I '\ ( When it comes to insurance ... We've got you covered. !S.... F or over 40 years, PeLham Brokerage Inc. has responded to the needs of our clients with creative, low-cost insurance programs. We represent all major insurance carri ers specializing in coverages for Social ervice organ- izations. Our programs are approved by City, State and Federal fWlding agellcies. we work closely with our customers to insure compliance on insurance requirements throughout the develop- ment process. Thereaf1.er, we will tailor a permanent insurance program to meet the specilic needs of your organization. Our clients include many of the leading organizations in the New York City area providing social services. Let us be part of your management team. As specialists in the area of new construction and rehabilitation of existing multiple unit properties, For information call: Steven Potolsky, President 111 Greal Neck Road, Great Neck, New York 11021 Phone (516) 4825765 Fax (516) 4825837 I '\ \ I I{ \ '\ ( I that her newborn is at risk for a deadly disease and that there are steps she must take to protect and care for her baby? Since 1987, when we started the anonymous screening program, over 12,000 infants have tested positive in New York State alone. Particularly tragic is the fact that 75 percent of the infants do not have the virus, only the mother's antibod- ies; yet the mother, who is herself infected, must be wamed not to breast-feed in order to avoid transmitting the virus. For the 25 percent who do have the virus, there is now life-prolonging treatment. McGovern raises the specter of women suffering discrimination if the information is disclosed. But the "Baby AIDS" bill requires that the information be made avail- able only to the parents, or, if the infant has been abandoned, to the caregiver. In the past, in dealing with sexually communica- ble diseases, we have managed to provide treatment and still protect the confidentiali- ty of the victims of the disease. In any event, the health of the infant must take pri- ority over any other consideration. McGovern assures us that the "solution is to make effective counseling and good medical treatment mandatory." This is hardly a new idea. The Department of Health, aware of the public health disaster they were facing, invested millions of dol- lars in counseling programs designed to persuade mothers to be tested in 24 hospi- tals in New York State where high risk women give birth. Those programs were an abysmal failure; only 16 percent agreed to testing, 24 percent knew their status when they entered the hospital and 60 per cent of the infants left the hospital undiag- nosed and untreated. Nowhere does [Continued on page 31] CITVLlMITS ~ I ADX Ccxnpony 773 S. Cota Rd. Queens.. NY 11360 19_ ii'S10 , ________________________________________________ ~ I $ ! Using our new Small Business Credit Line is as easy as writing a check. Because that's all you have to do. Now you can take advantage of pre-payment discount opportunities, buy a new copier or computer, cover a temporary cash flow need - just by writing a check on your Small Business Credit Line. * Once the line is *Based upon credit approval. IoCOVEMBER 1995 established no additional approvals are required to use it. Paying back your loan automatically restores your available credit line for future needs. EAB's Small Business Credit Line. 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BRIEFS, Resources SHAMELESS Some things never change. Three years ago, City Limits visited 116-118 West 112th Street a six-story apart- ment building owned by Benjamin Sneed. At the time, Sneed's building had 600 housing code violations, with cracked ceilings and exposed wires in many of the apart- ments. The elevator was bro- ken; windows were shattered. Sneed himself was on trial for failing to' make city-ordered repairs and City Limits named him as one of the New York's worst landlords in its "Shame of the City" series. Sneed ended up spending just one day in jail for his mis- .. FPOOR ..... ......... 1'IIIIouIIy, they would seldom be poor for long in the first place," claims NYU professor Lawrence Mead. Yep, it's obviously got nothing to do with economics, education, bureaucracies. racism. Must be those poor dummies' lad of good sense. For a stellar rebuttal of this painfully prevalent point of view, see the freshest wort of Jonathan Kozol, released last month: "Amazing 6raa," published by Crown. HALF apia as IMIIJ JOUIIC ........ in poverty today as in 1976. One in three juvenile M deeds. Today, despite owing the court more than $25,000 in fines and the city more than $154,000 in back taxes and fees, he still owns the building. Conditions, residents say, are worse than ever. "So many things need to be fixed; says tenant association President Glenda Credle, a for- mer city worker who has lived in Sneed's building for eight years. "The windows are cracked, the heaters don't work. the kitchen ceiling has collapsed. I can't even use two rooms. Minnie Williams, 96, has lived in Sneed's building for 20 years. She requires round- the-clock care because of her diabetes. Yet the city's Human Resources Administration has threatened to stop sending her night attendant if the detainees were on drugs when they were arrested. If current trends continue, juvenile arrests for violent crime will double by 2010. Want more? Read the recently released "Juvenile Offenders and Victims: A National Report" Call the Juvenile Justice Oearing- house at (BOO) 638-8736. apartment's heating system isn't fixed. Williams says she has been asking Sneed for a new radiator for 17 years. This year, Credle reports, Sneed told her "to find another apartment. Most of all, it is the struc- tural integrity of Sneed's building that alarms the ten- ants. Many of the walls bulge. All of the apartments are infested by rodents and insects. Water leaks have damaged the building's upper units. Residents fear that some of the 18 children living there could be injured by one of the loosely fastened elec- trical sockets. Hopes weren't always so dim for residents here. In February 1993, the city took this building and another owned by Sneed at 157 West 129th Street into in-rem tax foreclosure. The city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) still owns the 129th Street property. However, Sneed was able to reclaim the 112th Street building in late 1993 after paying back taxes. At the time, housing offi- cials ordered him to make repairs. It appears Sneed flouted the order. HPD Spokeswoman Deborah Boatwright says the building now has 805 recorded housing code violations. Sneed, however, is unre- pentant "I've made $53,000 in repairs; he says. "I've correct- ed 90 percent of the housing code violations. The problem is the tenants. They're lazy and they don't work. All they want is to sit around and wait for their social security checks: Ben Howe LONG ROAD HOME The Urban Justice Center is launching a new project, the Underground Railroad, giving a new name to a move- ment that has been going on for years: poor and homeless people entering city-owned abandoned buildings, making repairs and claiming them as their homes. The Underground Railroad has identified three aban- doned buildings-in Bedford Stuyvesant, Harlem and Park Slope-that the city obtained through tax foreclosures, and is asking officials to turn them over for sweat equity rehabili- tation by mostly homeless men and women. The project coordinators, Lisa Daugaard and Cameron Levin, hope that eventually the buildings could become tenant owned coop- eratives. They are challenging the city to acknowledge and legalize sweat equity housing for some of the 1,661 vacant buildings (17,000 vacant units) controlled by the department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). The project was devel- oped through regular meet- ings with a core group of 25 to 30 shelter residents and tenuously housed people involved in leadership train- ing, housing and welfare issues who wanted to call attention to the fact that there isn't an adequate sys- tem for providing permanent housing for people in or seek- ing to leave shelters. Daugaard says that the city's "general rhetorical claim that the city is going to house homeless people; is basically "a massive fraud." Mara Neville, spokesper- son for HPD, disagrees. "It's absolutely ridiculous to think the city is letting vacant build- ings sit idle; she says, adding that HPD has the resources to rehabilitate all city-controlled abandoned buildings. She calls homesteading U an appealing and romantic idea; but says her agency's Urban Homesteading project, aban- doned in the mid-1980s, was inefficient. Underground Railroad wants to identify abandoned buildings not yet slated for city-funded rehabilitation and allow shelter residents, through an already existing network of homesteaders, building suppliers, archi- tects, plumbers and electri- cians, to make these build- ings habitable. Kevin Heldman ClTVUMITS CUTS BOTH WAYS Are the poor being input? Or putout? The question is at the heart of the debate over city efforts to improve computer systems tracking everything from taxes to child care benefits. City Hall says that improved computer systems will allow the government to do more with less. But detrac- tors nota that the most impres- sive technology gains so far have been reserved for initia- tives like electronic finger- printing of welfare recipi- ents-e relatively ineffective attempt to cut the welfare rolls by eliminating fraud-and other efforts aimed at stream- lining benefits to the poor. Moreover. at least one sys- tem designed to ferret out scofflaws in the broader popu- lation has fallen victim to bureaucratic ineptitude. A recent audit by city Comptroller Alan Hevesi found that development of the Department of Finance's FAlR- TAX system, meant to consoli- date tax collections. is more than three years behind sched- ule and wiH cost nearly $160 million-seven times the origi- nal S22.6 miHion estimate. IU. a joint haaring for the City Councifs Committee of Generel Welfare and the city's Task Force on Technology in Government. Councilman Stephen DiBrienza observed thet many of the Giuliani administration's most effactive technological advances have been about denying services, not improving them. Critics charged that the city has done little to improve com- puterization for case managers and other city e,,!ployees whose productivity could be witty improved. Officials, however, main- tain that the city is merely doing what any good business has alreedy done. Says Gino Menchini, director for citywide information systems in the mayor's office: 'We're using technology to increase busi- ness and reduce cost JIIliIm CtImiJo PoW NOVEMBER 1"5 HARLEM IMPATIENCE Governor Pataki, was instru- mental in brokering an agree- ment After months of political jockeying and backroom nego- tiations, the New York City Empowerment Zone may finally get off the ground. Governor George Pataki announced in late October that the state will provide its share of empowerment zone financ- ing. This money was expected last spring, but Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have been feuding over who will appoint the chair of the empowerment zone's govern- ing board. Pataki wants a say, while Giuliani is insisting on complete control as stipulated in the original plan. The Clinton administration initiative is slated to pump $300 million in federal, state and city funds into Northern Manhattan and a small part of the South Bronx during the next 10 years. However, the feds have refused to cut the first check Short Shots SAY WMI'? Just ...,. ...... exCOlWing tile MIA board for spending too much on exerutive pay, Mayor 6iuliani was publidy defending a proposed 27 peKent pay hike for-guess who?-himself and his until the mayor and governor iron out their differences. Other cities have long since been barreling ahead with their own zone projects. Apparently, the stalemate here is nearly resolved, although details were not available as cay Limits went to press. -I think they've both come to terms and realized that they have a larger good at stake here,- says Esther Fuchs, a Columbia University professor who was involved in the draft- ing of the plan. -New York State can't do well unless New York City does well, and I think Pataki has come to recognize that- Sources say Richard Parsons, chairman of the Upper Manhattan Empower- ment Zone Development Corporation and a close ally of both Mayor Giuliani and It's about time, as far as the scores of people who helped plan the project are con- cerned. That is, if the governor actually delivers. -It's frustrating from the community point of view, because we want to get start- ed, - says Denise Scott, coordi- nator of UMEZDC. -Both com- munities-Manhattan and the Bronx"--have been patient, and to some degree, that patience is running out-James Bradley commissioners. See how that plays in tile neighbor- hoods. SEXUAL ............ may ...... easy when the target is a newcomer to tile country and dependent on her employer. But cleaning woman luz Ruiz. whose we we reported in February, has finally seen justice win out The company that employed her-and whose supervisor harassed her- has agreed to a settlement The city's Commission on Human Rights had already affirmed a decision to award Ruiz $450,000. BRIEFS ~
PROFILE ( 1 Students in the Media Works program pro- duced a public service video on racism. - Station Identification A course in media literacy teaches young people that the medium is the message. By Lise Funde'rburg F r high school senior Lani Parrilla, taking a media literacy course has had an unexpected result: he now needs a watch. "I used to turn on the TV and tell you what time it is," he says. "I had this whole thing laid out." "You, too?" asks fellow student Rebecca Sinclair. "I could listen to Montel and from where he is in his conversation, tell you exactly what time it is, down to the minute." Parrilla and Sinclair say they rarely watch TV these days. Since they've learned how to decode images and ques- tion their purpose, they are put off by the sameness they see. "I used to really like going to the movies," Sinclair says. Now she gets bored. "I went to go see 'Desperado' and the only thing 1 could think was: This is a Mexican 'Rambo.'" Scott Rosenberg, the zealous founder of the four-year-old nonprofit group Art Start-the parent organization for Media Works-couldn't ask for better results. A visual artist himself (be describes his work as minimalist mixed-media), the 32-year- old transplant from Washington, D.C., launched Media Works in early 1994. Art Start's main project, staffed by vol- unteers, brings a rotation of visiting artists and dancers to the city's homeless shelters (see City limits, January 1994). While the program offers flashes of creativity and fun to people living in a typically bleak sit- uation, its impact is vastly constrained by the turbulence around it. Rosenberg real- ized that to explore material more deeply, he needed to find an environment with less turnover and where participants were roughly at the same level; in the shelters, a class could consist of four-year-olds, their parents, and every age in between. Teaching a high school course, Rosenberg hoped, would allow him to use popular media and hip hop culture as a springboard to critical thinking. He found a school willing to let him in: the New York ' City Public School Repertory Company, a so-called "last- chance" high school for students who have an interest in the arts but who have had problems in mainstream high schools. Principal Ellen Kirschbaum welcomed Rosenberg because his approach mirrored her own. "In a society that does not neces- sarily even value the arts," Kirschbaum says, "we're one ofthefew 'right brain-left brain' places that says the arts are an intel- lectual pursuit." Media Works is perfect for her students, who, she notes, have been bombarded by electronic images from the day they were born. "They probably rarely sit in a house that doesn't have something on. For them it's background to life, but they're not always critical." TooCnatlve As soon as Rosenberg got into the classroom, he realized that talking about the material wasn't enough. The students were too creative. "They were itching to do something." "Most of these students come from really dramatically difficult circumstances, economically and personally," he says. "I think that [with these 1 young people, espe- cially when .they've had to struggle and stick with it and survive and persevere as opposed to folding or being tossed by the wayside or becoming a statistic, there's an intellectual development and strength of character that emerges. In some ways, they're more advanced than kids who come from better economic backgrounds." After three semesters, Rosenberg found he was spending more time on school paperwork than with his students. So he decided to move the project into a work- shop-still for credit, but now held after school and off the premises. Media Works now meets every Wednesday afternoon at FilmNideo Arts, a media education center. In the workshop, students are asked to analyze media and then create it. Rosenberg has them view everything from public service ads for prenatal care to the opening credits for the movie, "Menace II Society." All of it is dissected for meaning: sounds, images, lighting, typeface, In one exercise, students bleak down a television commercial's audio track. They identify five separate background noises, make a script of the voice-over narration, and ana- lyze how the components come together. Then, with one student acting as director, each of the others takes responsibility for a piece of the soundtrack and recreates the commercial with the TV volume turned off, The summer before last, armed with a $3,500 Board of Education grant, students ClTYUIo4I1S filmed their own public service video, "Protect Your Child Against Racism," which is now in the final stages of editing. Rosenberg would like to pursue similar productions, but money is scarce. Art Start is working on becoming an independent nonprofit, but in the meantime Rosenberg must rely largely on material contributions from media organizations and the dedica- tion of a handful of artists. Social Comm.ntary Media Works veterans Parrilla and Sinclair will now mentor incoming stu- dents. In a recent workshop, the two demonstrated their new analytical skills. Rosenberg held up a print ad from the Benetton clothing company. Like the rest of the company's controversial ad cam- paign, this image has little to do with fash- ion but plenty of social commentary. The ad is simply a photograph of a nude bot- tom stamped with the letters "H.I.V." and "POSITIVE." Off to the side of the image is a tiny reproduction of the company logo. ''What do you see?" Rosenberg asks. "It's a butt," Sinclair exclaims. Rosenberg begins a volley of questions: What do you see? What are the connections? What are the links? Using the Socratic method, he tries to force his students to take their own intellectual journeys. They reply that dra- matic lighting gives the butt depth. It's a "pretty butt" that attracts them, yet the "H.I.Y. POSITIVE" puts them off. They say the words look like a cattle brand or maybe a tattoo. The purpose could be to isolate people. Maybe, someone else sug- gests, to bring a positive association to the message. "Why did they make this?" Rosenberg asks. "Let's push this a little further." "Benetton often takes people's preju- dice and people's own assumptions and makes it visual," Sinclair says. "You may think something and feel something. But to actually see it is unnerving." Another artist helping to teach the class, 24-year-old photographer Simon Fulford, takes his turn in the questioning: "When you see Benetton, what do you think of?" "I think of it as a cool company that just wants everybody together," Parrilla responds. "1 mean, yeah, everybody together wearing their stuff." Sinclair chimes in. "Yeah. Let's unite ... wearing Benetton." NOV.EMBER '"5 Focus and Follow Up For both students, Media Works has been a welcome relief from past educa- tional experiences. Lani Parrilla says he ended up at Repertory High after, as he puts it, "I was invited to leave my school." The medical honors program he was in at his last school was overbooked, carrying as many as 37 students in a class, he says. If half were absent, he remembers teachers would repeat the entire lesson the next day. "I found the classes boring," he says, admitting that he ended up cutting many and going to the library where there were computers to explore. "I built a very close relationship with the librarian," he says. Repertory was a big improvement, he adds. It is a smaller school-teachers can pay more attention to the students-and it offers the media literacy program. Rebecca Sinclair says Rosenberg has taught her how to focus and follow up. Now, if she calls a college for information and gets no answer the first time, she' ll call back until she does. Sinclair came to Repertory after getting "distracted" at another alternative school. "I was cutting and going to parties. That's it, plain and simple. I just got caught up in the trouble." Their lives may not have completely turned around: Parrilla still considers him- self a goof-off, and Sinclair claims she's lazy. But clearly they're both inspired to think more critically, and they like it. When asked to tell the best parts of this experience, one might expect them to choose the glamorous moments that Rosenberg provided: discussions with directors Jonathan Demme and Robert Townsend; bit parts in a television ad; vis- its to movie sets and museums. But that's not it, Sinclair says. "It's not so much meeting the people or going to places, but actually learning the things that you don't know. And learning them the way Scott teaches them, you go: I gave myself the answer. I wasn't given the answer. You feel proud and you feel like you've actually accom'plished something." Parrilla agrees. ''You give a kid a new tool, a toy, and he's going to go off and run with it And when it becomes second nature, then he's going to come back for more." .,.". ... La ..... For Rosenberg, "more" is a plan to teach the students how much they know by making them teachers themselves. He's negotiating with two other high schools to offer the program this spring. One is another last-chance high school, like Repertory, but the other is a school for the "gifted and talented." As teaching assis- tants, Sinclair and Parrilla will have a chance to defy the labels of who's smart and who's not. At times, Rosenberg is saddened by how available the students make them- selves for his field trips and late night pro- duction sessions. "It shows how hungry these kids are," he says. "It's heartbreaking because this project is so small." Yet their attendance tells him something else as well. "It says to me that this is working. This is definitely working." Lise Funderburg is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. s RlblCCI Sincleir end Leni Plrrilll now PlY clo.e Ittention to hidden medii millege . -
VERBATIM ~ , Spark the Fire Organizer Charles Barron talks about environmental justice and the politics of Brooklyn. By Andrew White W hen a Long Island-based company, Atlas Bioenergy Corp., announced a plan last spring to build a wood-burn- ing incinerator in East New York. a buzz went around the Brooklyn community. Politically, the economically deprived neighborhood has long been split into fac- tions, undermining residents' ability to fight abuses by both the private and public sector. This time, something clicked. Block associations, community housing groups, churches and others joined together and, with technical help from a few citywide organizations, won a stunning success: last month, city environmental regulators ruled that the proposed incinerator was illegal. Charles Barron, a former Black Panther; longtime organizer and political ally of activist ministers Jesse Jackson, Herbert Daughtry and Al Sharpton, is chair of the East New York Community Committee Against the Incinerator. Members of the group credit Barron and Rachel Godsil of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund with an unusually effective tactic: instead of challenging the health impact of the proposed incinerator; the pair found a little-noticed clause in the city's administrative code that outlaws most privately sponsored refuse-burning plants. It appears to have been a fatal blow to the Atlas project. AW: What did it take to bring together a neighborhood where people have been divided for so long? CD: In East New York you have so many camps and so many people who are in so many folks' pockets, be they politi- cians or people who are connected to money, or people who have been given a job or a program. People are very mis- trustful, they always think there's a hidden agenda, a hidden motive, that there's some political ambition to remove somebody from office or get somebody from the other camp elected to the school board. When you look at the school board, it's a battle between Congressmen [Edolphus) Towns and City Councilwoman Priscilla Wooten, the district leader, Borough President [Howard) Golden, Community Board 5 .... Our success was that we carne in independently, not tied to anybody. It enabled us to stand up to anyone who would try to manipulate our process. And believe me, quite a few people tried. AW: For instance? CD: We had some real serious battles with ACORN, we had some battles with the borough president's office, and we were concerned about the [city) Department of Environmental Protection and its inability to deal with us because Commissioner [Marilyn) Gelber was a for- mer chief of staff to the borough president. She wanted to make sure, I believe, that the issue stayed in the control of the bor- ough president's office. AW: What was it that struck you, that said to you this is the time to take this on? CD: I've been traveling allover the country organizing other communities around the same issues that were affecting my community. I just said to myself, how many times are you gonna walk out of your neighborhood and do for other neigh- borhoods what you're not doing for yours. After that, I became the chairperson of the coalition. We had a demonstration on 7 July IS, a 100 degree-plus day. Over 300 people came out. We had the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, the Cleveland Street Block Association, churches, other com- munity groups started to come out. And 30 or 40 people turned out every week to reg- ular meetings. AW: You decided to challenge the entire environmental impact statement (EIS) process by saying the incinerator application itself was not legal. CD: At one meeting some guy was saying, "How do we know this application is even legal?" I don't even know who he was. Just a community person. But that stuck with me. This EIS thing would have taken a long time. That's how they beat community efforts, by putting us through a long, drawn out process where community meetings die down and peter out. Our lawyers found where the city administra- tive code says that privately sponsored refuse burning incinerators are prohibited in New York City. The only exceptions are medical wastes and the departments of sanitation and transportation. AW: In more general terms, how much can be resolved in East New York by local people trying to change things internally? CD: I think the internal organization of community people will influence the external. Externally, East New York does- n't get the respect it ought to receive because it needs new leadership with a new vision and a new kind of commitment to our community. We need an emergence of elected representatives that goes beyond the clubhouse mentality, beyond the polit- ical patronage mentality. AW: In this city, not just in communi- ties of color, accountability of public offi- cials has often been lacking. People have talked about changing that for years and years and nothing has come of it. CD: I'm very optimistic. The way you hold people accountable is by doing exact- ly what we are doing. You get active. You get numbers of people moving. Right now they are wondering, what do I want, what am I running for. They figure I have to want a job. When I tell them I don't, and that at this present moment I am not seek- ing any political office, they can't believe it. It's principle. We can surely take 30 or 40 people a week and change East New York. I believe in a protracted struggle. Nothing happens overnight. CITVLlMITS J NOVEMBER 1995 ~ ... ... , CHASE Community Development Corporation The Chase Community Development Corporation Finances Housing and Economic Development Projects, including: New Construction Rehabilitation Special Needs Housing Homeless Shelters Home Mortgages Small Business Loans Loan Consortia For information, call the Community-Based Development Unit (212) 552-9737 We Look Forward to Your Call! -,
Bruised and Battered Eastern District is about as bad as high schools get. With restructuring at a dead end, parents say they might be happier if the school were shut down. By Winton Pitcoff Eastern District parent association vice president Carmen Gines (leftl and presi- dent Maria Deleon want the state to ta ke over the school. f. E ven Maria Deleon admits to try- ing to avoid sending her children to Eastern District High School in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She told school officials she had moved, giving them her sister's address, so her children could go to a different school. She didn't get away with it, but Deleon, who is pres- ident of the school's parent association, says she knows of many parents who have. DeLeon's daughter graduated from Eastern District two years ago, but her son is struggling through his program there even though he never struggled in junior high school. Deleon's niece also graduat- ed from Eastern District, but found herself ill-prepared for life after school; she says she couldn't even score well enough on the math portion of the military entrance examination to join the U.S. Army. Three years after staging a boycott of Eastern District in order to draw attention to the rising number of violent incidents at the school, the parent association is back on the offensive. Its members are charging that school officials are doing nothing about a failing academic program and still- inadequate security. They also say the administration has systematically ignored the concerns of parents, students, and com- munity members. This time the stakes are higher, however: parents are asking the New York State Department of Education to decertify Eastern District and take the school out of the city's hands-or possibly even shut it down. Low Enrollment Eastern District was built in 1981 to accommodate 2,974 students; current enrollment is 2,032, down from 3,195 in 1993. At a time when other city high schools are bursting at their seams, Deleon sees the low enrollment as an indication of neighborhood parents' refusal to send their children to the school. Academically, Eastern District ranks at or near the bottom of city high schools. Only about 13 percent of the students are reading at their grade level, and last June ......... ---. ....... - PIPELINE only four graduates received Regent's diplomas. Of the 528 students who entered the ninth grade in 1990, only one-quarter graduated in 1994, another quarter dropped out, and most of the rest were still enrolled after the end of their fourth year of high school. Close to two-thirds of the students in the school in that year were considered over-age for their grade. School safety and chronic absenteeism are concerns as well. Eastern District's 232 violent incident reports in 1995 rate second only to one other high school in the entire city, and more than 350 of the school's students have been absent for 20 or more consecutive days this year. All of this might be more tolerable, say parents, if school administrators and city Board of Education officials were doing something to resolve the problems. Deleon is particularly frustrated, she says, because the administration has shut the parents and community out of important decision-making processes. When the school needed a new principal last year, parents and officials interviewed five can- didates. She says her association felt Louis La Bosco was the least qualified of the five, but Assistant Superintendent Noel Kriftcher him nonetheless. 'The Board of Education has been insensitive and arrogant to any kind of real input and change," agrees State Assemblyman Vito Lopez, who has worked with the parents for the past three years. 'The Board's High School Division has failed this community," he says. "Nobody is holding Kriftcher respon- sible for continuous failure under his administration," says Marty Needleman, attorney for the parent association and Project Director for Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation. He and others in the neighborhood say the problem is not just one of inaction. They charge that school officials have effectively written off Eastern District. 'The school serves as a dumping gJ:ound for teachers and adminis- trators rejected from other schools," Needleman says. "Legally, if there was an investigation, you would find that it's not a school, it's a job factory," says Gil Vega, a member of Brooklyn Community School Board 14, who has also been working with the parent association to get some answers from the city. "It's a place to send staff who have ClTVUMITS J .. done something wrong, or friends of the administration who don' t want to work but need a paycheck." Kriftcher and La Bosco say these charges are false. They blame their stu- dents' lack of academic success on the fail- ings of the junior high schools that feed into Eastern District and they say the high number of reported criminal incidents is the result of the school's more vigilant security mea ures. They also point to efforts during the last three years by administrators and school staff to work with parents on devising a plan to restruc- ture Eastern District into several smaller, independent, specialized, and more man- ageable schools. But this project, too, has engendered anger and distrust. When the top candi- dates for coordinator of the restructuring program dropped out, Kriftcher unilateral- ly appointed a person from within the school administration without consulting the committee assembled for that purpose. Though Kriftcher insisted he had every right to make the appointment, the parents disagreed. They promptly dropped out of the planning process. HOVEMBER 1995 Soon after, the parent association called upon New York State to take control of Eastern District away from Kriftcher and the Board of Education. "We love Eastern district," says Carmen Gines, vice president of the parent association. "But the way kids are learning here, it would be better to close it down and send them to another schooL" Turn up the HNt The state Department of Education, in fact, first took notice of Eastern District's situation in 1989, when it placed the school on review after a three-year down- ward academic spiral. The slate asked that a school planning committee develop a plan to address the school's problems. But Eastern District has not shown improve- ment, according to Associate Commissioner of Education Sheila Evans-Tranumn. She has recommended to her boss, newly-appointed State Commissioner Education Richard Mills, that he tum up the heat on Eastern District and sixteen other New York City schools. At press time, Commi sioner Mills was expected to make a final decision as to whether or not the 17 schools shou Id move to a more intense level of state oversight. No New York City school has ever been so censured, and that action would place a more immediate burden on the city's new chancellor and the Board of Education to implement a plan for corrective action. Principal La Bosco, when asked to com- ment, says he has no knowledge of the state's plans. All the while, hanging over the school is the threat of decertification-and the closing of its doors. State officials say they have no intention of taking control of the school and running it; they would rather leaves it up to the central board to figure out how to radically rebuild the school's academic program and meet the state's certification standards. After working with the parents associ- ation since 1989, Deleon says this is her last year with the organization. She is dis- couraged about the last six years of work. "I don' t see any progress. Right now I'm just pushing for the state to take over." Winton Pitcojf is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.
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Order to Resuscitate There are many ways to improve the child welfare system, if the mayor would just give them a chance. By Rob Polner N ew York City's Child Welfare Administration is one agency over which Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a self -described rein- ventor of government, has absolute author- ity. There is no need for him to wrangle with Albany for mayoral control of its nearly $1 billion budget. Nor is there an independent chancellor of child welfare whom the mayor could chase out of town with a barrage of venomous criticism. In other words, Kathryn Croft, the deputy commissioner for child welfare, is no Ramon Cortines, the for- mer schools chancellor. She serves pretty much at the mayor's pleasure, and is a voice rarely heard are crying out for top-to-bottom reform. If children are to be protected, the agency must get its act together. And it can. hpl.e.d Ranks Here, for starters, are just a few ways a truly hands-on mayor might begin to fix CWA, which annually investigates 50,000 allegations of neglect and abuse involving 77,000 children. The agency is also the ultimate guardian of those children pulled from their homes and placed in foster care. Each of the following suggestions has been proposed by men and women who are engaged with the CWA system in their everyday work, some from the inside where they toil as caseworkers and super- visors, and some from the outside world of ~ ~ W e don't have a system to track 47,000 kids, to know where they are, .. _---_ .. ' ... - PIPELINE where caseloads stand at double and triple the professional standard, is a scan- dal waiting to erupt. Beef up caseworker training. A good way to begin has been introduced by Councilman Stephen DiBrienza, the chair- man of the City Council's General Welfare Committee. The bill, endorsed by City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, author of an audit revealing sagging test scores for probationary case- workers, would require a form of profes- sional certification for these undervalued city caseworkers who are required to have a bachelor's degree but no social work experience. For many years (though not this past year, despite a continued dilution of training efforts) CWA's own Child Fatality Review Board has recornmended expanding training opportunities. And, CWA can, but doesn't, assume leadership in developing a strong cadre of professionally trained social workers who can help instruct and oversee the growing, lopsided number of inexperienced case- workers who assist and investigate families splintered by poverty and addiction. A well thought out response to staffing needs, backed by the mayor, would boost from within an umbrella agency-the Human Resources Administration-best known these days for spending millions on technology and staff to track down welfare fraud. who they are with, where they are going. That's just scary. " - For all his campaign promises to revive CWA, people both inside and outside the agency describe it as dismal and deterio- rated. Rounds of city and state cuts over the past 22 months have stripped it of $200 million in funding and 275 caseworkers- JO percent of the front-line staff-along with 1,700 clerical employees. Scores of city-funded preventive Services for trou- bled families have also been eliminated, leaving more children at high risk of mis- treatment and of placement in foster care. It is a safety net tom. No single child welfare agency can be expected to prevent every child death in a city as bedeviled by poverty as New York. But the promise of the Giuliani candidacy was an end to crisis-by-crisis management at CWA. With the agency looking more dismantled than reinvented, and with workers, former and current managers and child care professionals describing unprecedented levels of dysfunction, many advocates and nonprofit contractors. In general, the cost of measures that require an up-front investment would be offset by the likely productivity gains and assured quality: Restock the depleted ranks of child protective caseworkers and loosen up on overtime restrictions, especially for night- time staff. Child care professionals, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the Child Welfare League of America all make persuasive arguments about the short- and long-term costs-including legal and medical expenses-of a system that fails in its mission to protect chil- dren. The need for staff restorations at CWA is obvious, the cost minimal. These are relatively low-paid city employees who conduct complex investigations of troubled homes where children are threatened. Any significant lessening of this effort, as has occurred in a city morale and help stabilize the agency-just as Giuliani likes to point out that such an effort at the police department has embold- ened cops on the beat. NASW puts it this way: "CWA should stand, as it did twenty years ago, as an exemplary social service delivery organization." Restore preventive services to full strength, including homemaking assis- tance to overwhelmed mothers and drug treatment and family counseling to those whose infants who test positive at birth for cocaine. A small investment in $6.50 an hour homemakers-a program slashed by the Giuliani administration-has been shown to hold together stressed families and prevent foster care placements. Each child placed in foster care costs taxpayers a minimum of $16,000 a year. Computerize Install personal computers tied to the statewide child protection comppter sys- ClTYUMITS tern in every field office where casework- ers are headquartered. The confidential history of children in the "continuum of care"-from the initial child abuse investi- gation to foster homes to permanent place- ment-should be at the fingertips of case- workers and supervisors. Sadly, it is not, and never has been: with case files not computerized, copies of essential forms sent to state regulators in Albany for even- tual entry into a database are not accessible in the city. This has resulted in hundreds of cases simply disappearing off CWA's radar and expensive delays, according to admis- sions by the city in a legal scuffle over staffing levels with the Legal Aid Society. For now, Governor George Pataki agrees that computerization is needed. The state has issued a request for corpo- rate proposals for installing a $100 mil- lion computer system for CWA, just in time to qualify for 60 percent federal funding. But a similar effort during the Koch administration collapsed under bureaucratic wrangling. Gail Nayowith, executive director of the Citizens Committee for Children, sees the project as overdue. 'The Gap clothing store knows how many millions of jeans and tops they sell and in what sizes and styles they come. But we don't have a sys- tem to track 47,000 to 50,000 kids, just to know where they are, who they're with, where they are going. That's just scary," she says. Install a voice mail telephone system, too. Every client and service provider speaks of the frustration of not being able to leave phone messages for agency staff. And make use of inexpensive soft- ware for keeping track of complaints to the agency's understaffed ombudsman's office. The Accountability Project, Inc., a small, privately financed effort operated by Public Advocate Mark Green, has been able to troubleshoot effectively for hun- dreds of individual clients, though it can't hope to assist all of CWA's clients. Encourage small, community-based foster care programs, so the endangered child wrested from his natural parents remains in his own neighborhood and in a healthy mix of child and family social ser- vices with which local caseworkers are familiar. An acclaimed model for this approach is the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Barbara Blum, president of the respected Foundation for Child Development, says that such ser- vices must be emphasized in a climate in NOVEMBER 1"5 which resources are scarce. Finally, open up a dialogue with the people on the front lines of child welfare, from case workers to service providers and older teens who have spent much of their lives in the system. ''I'm wondering why child advocates who have been dealing with these issues for many decades have not been consult- ed on the mayor's agenda for children," says Dr. Vincent Fontana, head of pedi- atrics at the Foundling Hospital, which runs a 24-hour crisis center for drug- addicted mothers and their children. He says he doesn't see any kind of direction for the agency from the mayor's office except orders to downsize. "If we have all this rhetoric about chil- dren as our future, it's all rhetoric, not real- ity. The reality is, children suffer." Housing and Services, Inc. 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- ........ -..-: . .. " .... . ---.... ----------.. - - - - - - ~ .-- Wasted Days High school students on the dropout track get an extra push toward failure from a new, legally questionable policy. By James Bradley ROXine Ind Bridget Rodriguez Ire sisters whose school schedules were reduced to four cllSses IdlY. i. A t Adlai E. Stevenson High School in the Sound view sec- tion of the Bronx, school secu- rity is so tight students have to take off their belts to pass through the metal detector. Those who can't pass the detector have to be frisked with a scanner. Security guards are everywhere, patrolling the hallways, talking into walkie-talkies. These are some of the measures the school is using to increase student safety. Last year, Stevenson began another "get tough" measure, this one articulated succinctly in flyers posted throughout the school: "FAIL 4, GET 4." The caption underneath reads: "If you fail four sub- jects this term, you will only get four sub- jects next term." Stevenson is hardly the only school with such a policy. Faced with shrinking budgets and increasing attendance rolls, many New York City public high schools have reduced the number of daily classes assigned to some students, primarily those who have had academic problems. The practice is in blatant violation of state law, and educators and activists fear it creates an incentive for academic under- achievers to drop out of school. Some schools claim to be using the tactic as a way of lightening the load for students in academic difficulty-an idea whose validity experts in dropout pre- vention adamantly oppose. Others, meanwhile, are clipping schedules as a means of coping with budget problems. Either way, critics say the revelation punctures a hole in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's contention that cuts to the Board of Education affect bureaucrats, not students. "High schools have adopted a policy of triage, there's no question about it," says Jon Moscow of the Parents' Coalition for Education, a group of public scliool parents. "Some of the high schools are giving kids the bare minimum of classes, if that. We thought originally that it was one or two schools, but we now know that it's much more than that. It's very prevalent." PIPELINE DHmecll Mot Worthy The majority of students given shortened school days, observers say, appear to be those in academic difficulty-the very kids who need more help and attention, not less. Public school activists say officials seem to be pushing out "undesirable" students deemed not worthy of school resources in these financially-strapped times. "It's a very terrible practice," says Noreen Connell, executive director of the Educational Priorities Panel, a nonprofit advocacy group with more than 50 mem- ber organizations. "In the zoned high schools, where all applicants must be accepted, they take a look at students who are lower-achieving and they don't just give them one study hall, but two or three, sometimes more." Study halls are essen- tially free time. New York State law mandates that high school students receive a minimum of five and a half hours in the classroom each day-roughly the equivalent of seven peri- ods, excluding lunch. There are excep- tions. Students who have already accumu- lated enough credits to graduate, for exam- ple, are exempt from this rule, as are those above the compulsory school age and those who must take double sessions because of overcrowded classrooms. But even under those circumstances, a special waiver must be acquired from the State Department of Education. Few of the students receiving shortened days fall in these categories, however. Manhattan State Assemblyman Steven Sanders, chair of the Assembly's Education Committee, is investigating the matter. ''For the most part, in terms of the shorter hours, it's absolutely contrary to state regulations," he says. "If a school is not adhering to the number of hours required to provide instruction, they jeop- ardize being reimbursed by the state. Regulations must be adhered to." Still, the law seems open to interpreta- tion. At least that's how some high school principals look at it. Alan Weiner, the prin- cipal at Stevenson High School, says shortened school days are a logical way of dealing with students having trouble with their grades. ''A student who is faiIing classes will be best served by a shortened school day," he says. "To give a faiIing stu- dent a full day's worth of classes is educa- tionally unsound." When questioned whether this procedure violates state law, aTYUMllS s Weiner responds: 'That's something you can research. I have to do what I think is best for these students." get them into a meaningful post-high school career, anything that serves to frustrate them further-which this policy does-is going IIJf you get only four classes, it's going Earlier this year, John J. Ferrandino, the Board of Education's High Schools Superintendent, wrote a letter to Diana Autin of Advocates for Children saying that "shortening a student's program is not a disciplinary action; it is frequently an appropriate guidance intervention. When combined with support services, it may be the most appropriate guidance strate'- gy .... To require that students be given an inappropriately long program is self- defeating educationally and counter to the goals we share." But educators and experts in dropout prevention say students denied classes are often offered nothing constructive as an alternative. Carol Allen runs Pius xn, a youth counseling service at Stevenson and four other Bronx high schools that specializes in dropout prevention. A soft-spoken yet stem woman, Allen helps students cope with outside social problems that affect schoolwork. She says she believes a er schedule may be necessary for some dents with serious academic problelDS/oflI only if counseling, tutoring and vices are offered in place of classes. to be a deterrent" Students themselves attest to how the policy can go badly wrong. Anne Cancel, a sophomore at Stevenson, failed four class- es in 1994 and was assigned only four classes the following semester. "I said, 'Why? I need these classes.'" she recalls. "Instead, they volunteered me for an internship program. I was working in pedi- to take you forever to graduate. " atric nursing at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital." mulate enough credits to graduate after But Cancel received no credit for this work four years, at an annual cost of $150 to and has now fallen back two grades. "If I $200 million in additional class time. could have taken those four classes along Figures recently released by the Board of with independent studies or something like Education indicate that of all the students that, I would not have been in the grade I who entered high school in the fall of 1990, am now." 51 percent graduated in four years, 30 per- Some of Cancel's friends at Stevenson cent were continuing into a fifth year of were pleased with their shortened sched- high school, and 18 percent dropped out ules. 'They like leaving early and every- Many of those now in their fifth thing. They 'Oh, I got four classes, I high school are to drop tthe Meanwhile,
She says the "Fail 4, Get 4" provides none of this. "It's a way of 01'",n"''''--1111111... rid of students," she says bluntly. "If you get only four classes, it's going to take you forever to graduate. Also, your self-esteem is lessened, because the school is saying they don't have faith in you at all. So what happens?" she continues. "You fall behind in your classes. Next thing you know, you're over-age. You have to take classes over again with kids who are three years younger than you. well be out of the school. And pushes them out." Dropout Prey_ntlon Pius xn is one of 270 funded through the Board of EdU(:allolrt.:.'> state-funded, $14 million dropout preven- tion program, administered by the United Way. The program serves 35,(0) students in 129 elementary, middle and high schools. Alex Bettencourt, the program's director, says truncating students' school days great- 1y hinders dropout prevention efforts. "To a large degree it sets us back," he says. "If we're really looking to get kids on track and NOVEMBER 189' it has been taking for the city's public high school students to graduate. According to a 1990 report prepared by the Educational Priorities Panel, one infour public high school students does not accu- cuts, but "I know many school adIllIDlstrators who have done everything possible to maintain a full acad- ernic program" in spite of the cuts, says Alex Bettencourt '1'0 some degree, it's the i ingenuity and creativity of a good school administrator. It also has to do with will." - by Kierna Mayo Dawsey photos by Jason Goltz t was a bittersweet evening," recalls Bonnie Genevich. "Young people gave some of their best perfonnances ever because they understood that this was rea1ly it. Toward the end of the night there were long moments of silence and then tears from young women and young men and from all of us who worked with them." Genevich was once a director of The Leadership Organization for Teenagers (The LOFT) in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She can hardly believe it, but it's been almost a year now since the closing ceremonies for the cen- ter that once provided a viable alternative to the streets for young people for close to 17 years. The LOFT "was kind of like the last open community center [in the neighborhood] where kids could walk in off the streets, no questions asked," she says. The LOFT's good works were not enough to save it, however. The organization-like at least 114 other youth service agencies that depended on funding from the City's Department of Youth Services (DYS) and other city agencies-could simply no longer stay alive after massive budget cuts by the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani during the city's 1995 fiscal year, which ended in June. That year alone, approximately 740 DYS contracts were scaled back and 146 eliminated. A survey last spring by the City Project, a budget watchdog group, examined only 20 percent of the affected youth service agencies and found that, as a result of the cuts, at least 1,059 staff members of various nonprofit groups have been laid off and 640 others have had their hours reduced. "Now when you walk outside, you still see youth from The LOFT. They have nothing better to do but hang in the streets," says Martha Vargas, who lives near the former youth center. "You know, that's how arguments and trouble starts." The defunding of youth organizations has many citizens, youth advocates and service providers gravely concerned. Communities ClTVUMITS MOVE ... SER 1995 are experiencing pangs of loss as young people are turned away from locked doors and shuttered programs. More than $20 mil- lion, fully one-third of the city's youth services budget for com- munity groups, has been cut out of the current year's budget. Last March, DYS Commissioner Alfred Curtis acknowledged to the City Council that as many as a half-million fewer young people would be served by his agency in 1996. The fate of those youth agencies that remain open for business is unclear. Many are resilient. They are struggling, maneuvering with their own ingenuity and creative, cobbled-together strategies to provide necessary services to a significant portion of the city's 1.7 million children. Many of them are also absorbing cuts in their other social services programs, such as day care, mental health, foster care prevention and drug counseling. They are find- ing fewer places to refer children and parents in crisis situations. And they are weathering the turmoil that has beleaguered DYS, with contracts cut and restored, delays in payment and inconsis- tent oversight, ever since Giuliani's first youth commissioner resigned under a cloud of alleged tax fraud. "Programs have been totally destabilized by this ebb and flow of funding. You cannot ride these roller coasters and maintain sta- bility," says Jean Thomases of the Neighborhood Family Services Coalition. What is left is a city department meeting fewer and fewer of the needs of the young people it is supposed to help most-"at risk" youth. Those young people who, if someone isn't looking, slip quick:\y through the cracks. hen Paul Wilson, an employee of the Crown Heights Youth Collective, says he would "rather be here than out there," consider that the best for everyone. In part because he is so polite and perhaps even a touch soft-spoken, you might never know that the 22-year-old is a former "stick -up kid." "I was robbing a little bit of everyone, people in the neighborhood and out of the neighbor- hood," he says simply. He was eventually caught and imprisoned, but life is much different' now for Wilson. Something meaningful to do with his days was about all he needed, he says. A new man stands in place of his former, cold self. He is engaged to be mar- ried and even works some evenings at the Collective handing out bags of food to needy families. Wilson also supervises the Collective's "basement crew." He works full days for a small stipend, overseeing the shop class where students learn to build everything from cabinets to dry walls. He is also responsible for keeping up with the garbage cans the organization has placed thro\jghout the neighborhood, and for the frequent "sweep downs" of surrounding blocks. "I don' t have time for the streets anymore. The Collective has opened my eyes to many things," Wilson acknowledges with evi- dent pride. "I slowed down a whole lot. I guess if I hadn' t come here I might be dead or way upstate somewhere in the mountains for probably like 15 or 20 years. That's the way I was going. I was going like a madman." Richard Green, the Collective's slightly graying cofounder and director, knew better than to fear Wilson. Sixteen years after he started the organization by opening his own living room to the young people of Crown Heights, Green still prides himself in that type of wisdom, in that kind of love and passion for young people regardless of their past. "How you gonna stand and what you gonna stand for?" he asks rhetorically. Perhaps an interesting question coming from a man who has taken steady fire from the black community for what he terms "coalition building" with the Hasidic Jews of Crown Heights following the 1991 riots there. While he is often ques- -4 Paul Wilson. 22. turned his life around with the help of a Crown Height. youth group. He stands beside a box painted with the names of some of his murdered friend - bottom with plaques, awards and statements of recognition, but that is not what he sees. Instead he holds up a Baggie completely stuffed with obituaries and funeral programs-memories of young people who died too soon. "I look at this every single morning," Green says. "This is my motivation. "Youth services change lives, I'm telling you," he says. "Sometimes it saves them." he current DYS budget is on a par with that of 1991, before the administration of former Mayor David Dinkins trumpeted a new, proactive philosophy in working with the city's youth. Dinkins more than dou- bled youth services funding, boosting programs focused on street outreach, organizing, leadership, and after-school educational opportunities. As Mayor Giuliani boasts about declining crime rates, few who work in the youth sector believe police work is the only factor. "It was the huge investment made in youth services," says the director of one Manhattan youth agency that has lost nearly half its budget. "We will now see the crime numbers going back up. Juvenile arrests are already skyrocketing." Tuootby Whelan, general counsel for DYS, insists the city still bas a vested interest in youth programs but is simply too belea- guered by a budget deficit to maintain the level of funding Dinkins achieved in 1993. "It wasn't that agencies were shut down, it's just that they were scaled down due to mid-year modi- fications," be says. "Programs received less money but enough money to operate with. Naturally, it created some level of disrup- tion in service." Many youth service providers insist that the defunding of pro- grams bas been politically motivated, a charge officials deny. '1ames BaM used W say the wo.rst persoft ift the w.,rld t., deal these yo.q,.g people do.fI't hare aftJthiag wire f(Jr - They haag .,ut tioned about where his real interests lie. one look inside the Collective makes the answer clear. On a Thursday evening at the multiservice center on Franklin Avenue, he stands like a shepherd in a sea of children, many of them very young. "Hey, Mr. Green. What's up?" they say. "Check this out, Brother Green." The Collective is a holistic learning center and at any given time you can find young people of all ages doing a host of differ- ent things, from baking to debating. They have even established a charter school, The Collective Fellowship and Peace Academy. Since the budget cuts came down, the organization has lost more than 60 percent of its city dollars, totaling about $250,000. But Green says the numbers of youth who come here seeking ser- vices has dramatically increased, partly because other neighbor- hood groups have shut their doors. "Everyday there are more young people looking for jobs, young people looking for counsel- ing, young people just looking," he says. Directly outside of the Collective's door is a wooden box painted with the names of some of the young men from the com- munity who have died violently. The ironic thing about being inside of a place as alive as the Crown Heights Youth Collective is that you absolutely know death has touched the lives of every young person there. Inside his cluttered office, Green could merely glance over at anyone of his walls for inspiration. They are covered from top to What they cannot deny is the deeply felt fear that most directors of youth agencies have of speaking out publicly about the demise of DYS. Most will speak only under a guarantee of anonymity out of fear of losing what is left of their city contracts. They are all afraid of what could happen in next year's budget. "I have tried in a very positive way to build relationships and offer constructive criticism," says one Manhattan agency director. "But every time I appeal in the news, we get cut.. .. There is no dia- logue. This has been a government that's not inclusive or interac- tive. It is tightly sealed." The view is echoed in interview after interview: "Retribution from this administration is like nothing I've ever seen," says one organizer. "Under the Giuliani administration, nobody wants to talk. It's the one administration I've seen where punishment is really doled out to people who speak against it," says another. 'This is a politically tempestuous climate. We don't want to open ourselves up to more problems. We have a lot at stake and don't want to jeopardize it," says yet another. Youth services providers have found an alternative to frozen silence, however. Collective rather than individual efforts to lobby for City Council support and public recognition can be effective and relatively safe. In an attempt to ensure that specific centers are not singled out and "punished" for speaking too candidly about the cuts and the Giuliani administration, youth providers have formed coalitions. Michelle Yanche of the Neighborhood Family Services ClTYUwrrs Coalition agrees that the bottom line to saving dollars is "massive collective organizing, advocacy and outcry." Leading the efforts today are the Emergency Campaign to Restore Youth Funding, a coalition of nine groups, and Youth Agenda, a youth-run collective of more than 120 organizations. These groups have had some successes, winning the support of the City Council and the restoration of several million dollars in cuts last year. But Councilman Victor Robles, chairman of the Youth Services Committee, believes the fear and intimidation are taking a toll. He says popular outrage has begun to dwindle. "Community-based organizations and young people cannot be silent," he says. "I'm disappointed that [in the spring] the council didn' t receive the letters of protest we did last year. No one can better represent young people than themselves. Of course, com- munity organizations have to be more vocal and aggressive and not just worry about whether or not they get their contracts renewed. The squeaky wheel gets the oil." .. fier 15 years of providing an after-school peer- iI tutoring program for teens at a local elementary school, Howard Knoll finally had to tum kids away. Knoll is director of the Stanley Isaacs Center, an Upper East Side-based comprehensive family center that serves hundreds of low income families. In the weeks and months following the after-school pr0- gram's closing, his former students continued to show up, hoping for a miracle. "In the beginning they would come back day after day," he says. But he simply couldn't staff the program. "Fundamentally, these programs contribute to the quality of life in the community just like churches, schools and other insti- tutions do. We should naturally support them," Knoll insists. with is ODe who dOesD't hare IlIyttHg to. Ire fo.r. Will abo.ut that at the ChiDese restaurallit the brOthers sit " to.p of .sters." 'There are places for senior citizens to go and we clearly need that same thing for young people. Children have developmental needs that have got to be met. The city needs to develop a sense of vision of what it wants for its children. Right now there is none." It's a passion to be found across the board among the city's youth providers, whether or not they feel secure speaking out pub- licly. 'The city could find dollars if it wanted to," says Richard Green. 'They found over $6 million in overtime for the cops in ten days when Crown Heights crashed. If you took that same money and put it in youth programs, it would have a tremendous impact. Consider what it takes me to provide for Paul [Wllson] for a year--$3,000. When you lock him in Rikers for nine months, you spend $30,000. If you send him upstate to one of the peniten- tiaries, it's up to $80,000. ''It's a matter of, 'Where are your priorities? Prevention or cure?' '' He adds. "James Baldwin used to say the worst person in the world to deal with is one who doesn't have anything to live for. Think about that; these young people don't have anything to live for .... "You look outside, take a walk down the block, there's noth- ing. They hang out at the Chinese restaurant, the brothers sit on top of dumpsters. It's disheartening. I'll be honest with you. To me it's like catching water in a basket. Because I know we could change this whole thing. These youth out here, they want to change right now. Just want someone to show them how. Nobody is saying, 'This is what we want to do for the youth of New York City.' Everybody talks about the budget, about who's going to save MOVE ... BER 1"5 the mayor's money. Nobody says, 'We have a straight, strict vision for the youth of New York City." he Door, A Center of Alternatives, is a 24-year-old agency that offers a vast amy of services to young pe0- ple from bealtb care to legal help. "BasicaJ]y, we have to do a lot of resbaping and a lot of reconfiguring," says Sabrina Evans, a development associate at the organi- zation's four-floor complex near Canal Street. 'The becC)lDlIlg very disruptive." After school, young Door members come in to take advantage of their free access to physical and creative activities, or to seek professional, one-on-one counseling. About half of The Door's funding comes from the government, both city and state. When the cuts came down, they lost about $400,000. Though the agency has tried to avoid scaling back programs by cutting administrative costs, The Door has undergone two recent rounds of employee layoffs and is in the process of planning a complete internal reorganization. Remaining staff have heavier workloads and more responsibility. Try as they might to lessen the blow to services for young people, some change& are inevitable. "We cannot replace counselors or teachers as they leave;' Evans concedes. 'The biggest impact on the quality of service to young people is the amount of time you can spend with them." Evans projects that in the near future some entire programs Richlrd Grlln stertld thl Crown Heights Youth Collective 19 yeers Igo in his living room. HI believes only sllf-sufficiency will keep the group elive. - - within the agency will have to go. Because they were forced to layoff both their music and their basic skills instructor, those pr0- grams will likely crumble. Even though, Evans admits, they were popular progrims kids depended on. Social service cuts by both the stale and city have bad a DOOe- too-subtle impact as well. For young people who aren't on Medicaid, for instance, there is no longer any access to the free mental health services that were available only one year ago. SeveraJ programs for pregnant teens have disappeared as well. The Door could once refer their members to whatever services they needed when a crisis struck. Now the agency's pared-down staff bas to deal with crises every day; the referrals are corning to them rather than from them, because there are few other places for troubled teens to go. "Kids are getting hit by the cuts from all angles. Just about every social service they depend on is disap- pearing," Evans says. "We are seeing an increasing number of runaway and homeless youths," adds Maria Nicolaidis, who supervises The Door's coun- seling services. "We are seeing a lot more with emotional and psy- chological trouble. A lot more crises." Is it changing the nature of The Door? "Of course," she says. The same holds true for many other agencies as well. There is an interdependence among social service agencies from day care, to welfare, to shelters for the homeless. The Valley, a multiservice agency for youth based in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, has lost roughly $2 million in funding for its various programs. Its $420,000 drug treatment program for adolescents has been com- pletely defunded, and its nine-year-old employment opportunity program for young people who have dropped out of school is gone as well. Neither of those were DYS programs. Indeed, the sum total of closed youth services once funded by other agencies out- weighs the total cuts in DYS. aying off employees, doubling up responsibilities, shortening staff hours and, sometimes, cutting pro- grams are only some of the tactics groups are using to survive. At The Valley, teens who need drug counsel- ing are being funneled into other programs within the agency and staff give whatever help they can. Not long ago, members each contributed a few days of their work without pay, saving the organization $60,000. It takes nothing short of an undying commitment from the folks who run the community-based groups to keep them going. "I literally took out a second mortgage on my home to keep this program running. We needed immediate money when contracts were held up in December," says Green at the Crown Heights Youth Collective. He didn't get his money back until the City Council restored a portion of his funding last spring. Green's survival plan for his cherished collective is rather ambitious but it is also what folks in black nationalist circles have been talking about for years: self-sufficiency. "You can't depend on city dollars anymore." Green concedes, although until this year the group depended on the city for close to 80 percent of its fund- ing. "It's incumbent upon us to be able to survive no matter what they throw at us. We've got to start building from inside." So far, Green is putting his money where his mouth is; earlier this year he invested in a 20-acre apple orchard in upstate New York to serve both as a source of revenue and a place to take kids when they need to get out of the city. Young people will be farm- ing and harvesting and selling apple products. The Collective has even purchased trucks and hopes to begin a small construction business. Older teens trained in the Collective's basement shop will contract out their services. Other agencies are using similar survival tactics. "Tbese cuts are extreme," says Wendell Ramsey, assistant director of the Valley's Beacon School community center at Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem. 'They've affected us so severely that our already short staff has had to spread themselves thinner. It's gotten so tight that security personnel has had to become tutors and recreational aids," he says. "People have to wear many hats. Specialization has gone completely out the win- dow. When we hire, we look for a background that is diversified. You basically have to be able and willing to do it all. Hey, I sweep, mop and tie up trash bags." From where does the motivation come? The kids, naturally. In this Harlem community where drugs and delinquency are in over- whelming abundance, so is talent. In the school's lunchroom, which tonight is doubling as a gym, Ramsey stands back and proudly watches two ll-year-old girls spar in karate. They are yel- low belts. "These are our children. We must take care of them." he says. "Sure, the budget cuts have limited our abilities to equip each program with things that would greatly aid us, but we make a shift. We get parents involved. We struggle." Ramsey speaks to what may be all of the surviving agencies toughest assignment finding the will to keep struggling. "Staying alive is an uneasy task," admits Richard Green, again peering over the sea of young faces. But on his wall is a quote from Frederick Douglass. It reads simply: "Without struggle, there is no progress." ClTVUMITS R Stick Together.
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In addition we make contributions to community-based organizations which provide vital human services, educational and cultural programs, and housing and economic development opportunities to New York's many diverse communities. CHEMICAL BANK -helping individuals flourish, businesses grow and neighborhoods revitalize. For more information please contact us at: CHEMICAL BANK, COMMUNTIY DEVELOPMENT GROUP, 270 Park Avenue, 44th floor, New York, NY 10017. Community Development Group NOVEMBER 1995 ... By Kim Nau'f fVfIItm-Y.ir-oI4 1m JOhllSOll, Jr. is not .uily put off. Hollering above the screech of the uptown Number 6 train, the Vanguard High School senior beseeches two of his friends to take an interest in the subway fare hike, and the fact that the city might eliminate student transit passes. They just smile, slightly embarrassed. Disembarking in East Harlem, he con- tinues the tirade, ticking off injustices committed by the mayor, the governor and the president. This is everybody's fault, he says pointedly. People deserve what they get because they didn't vote. But the subject of the police is a different matter. For kids in his neighborhood, mostly blacks and Latinos, facing down arrest y@ar Giuliani bKaJD@ mayor. With l10 young p@opl@ pla(@d in handcuffs @v@ry day, aff N@w York's poli(@ boosting publi( saf@ty-or sowing s@@ds of hat@ and f@S@ntm@nt? has just become part of the daily routine. Nothing, it seems, can be done about that. "You're black. You're six-foot. It's what you got to expect," Johnson says. Apparently so. According to crime statistics just released by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, juvenile arrests jumped by almost 30 percent in the first year of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's term. In 1994, police arrested 98,413 children and teenagers on everything from loitering to murder. Youths who were arrested more than once that year, would be counted repeat- edly in these statistics. Still, the figure represents more than IO percent of the city's teenage population. Importantly, four out of five of these arrests were for nonvio- lent crimes. More than 41,000 were for violations known as "non- CITY LIMITS fingerprintable offenses" such as drinking and disorderly conduct. The statistics show that Police Commissioner William Bratton, true to his word, has turned up the heat on low-level street crime, often committed by children and teenagers. But the numbers also show that police are present to a greater degree than ever before in the lives of inner-city kids. Backed by the thinking of an influential new school of crimi- nologists, Commissioner Bratton has argued that catching kids doing small things, like turnstile jumping, will avert them from commiting more serious crimes, like subway robberies. Moreover, the strategy provides police with an excuse to search more teenagers, and to catch those carrying weapons or drugs. Finally, there's the generally held belief that increased police presence will make everyone feel safer and more willing to report crimes they see. The result, say students citywide, is that more youths than ever are being handcuffed and hauled into station houses. Often the charges are dropped or are too minor to be adjudicated. (Officials in Family Court and the District Attorney's offices say their caseload, while ris- ing, does not reflect a 30 percent increase in arrests.) Community activists warn that new officers, rarely residents of the neighborhoods they patrol, are often ill-trained and incapable of distinguishing which young men are the real street criminals. They say that sweeping arrest policies are, at best, insensitive and, at worst, an invitation for kids to lash back, getting themselves into even deeper trouble with the law. "It's a whole cycle," says Joyce Hall, executive director of the Greater Brownsville Youth Council. "Having no place to go, kids are hanging out on street corners. The police want to move them along and some of them get caught up. The police don't talk to the kids respectfully-and the kids react." At different times over the last year, Hall reports, all 10 of her male staffers and peer counselors have been stopped for police questioning; some have been stood up against a wall and frisked. Such reports have become so frequent in East New York, Hall says, that she is planning to teach a course this winter on how kids should handle the police. "We're going to go to the kids and saying, if you get caught up in the sweep, just do what they ask. Keep your head. Don't react if they call you 'nigger.' Just try not to react at all. "But that," she adds dolefully, "is one of the most difficult things for a young person to do." H ili iIId COIIIIIIUIIity Idivists 1ft not ~ tINt tilt poIkt department ignore youth crime. Gang and drug-related vio- lence have long plagued neighborhoods like East New York, Washington Heights and the South Bronx and their problems now mirror national trends. While overall crime rates have been going down in cities nationwide, juvenile arrest numbers have kept climbing. In August, the U.S. Justice Department released a study tracking youth crime. The authors reported that juvenile violent crime arrests jumped 47 percent between 1987 and 1992. Noting that the nation's teenage population is expected to increase another 20 percent during the next decade, they predicted that violent youth crimes could double in frequency by the year 2010 if cur- rent trends continue. The number of murders, they added, could increase by as much 145 percent. Other researchers caution that these statistics-which make for glaring headlines--<:reate the perception that the young com- NOVEMBER 1995 mit most inner-city crime. Nothing could be further from the truth, says Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a respected Washington-based think tank. Fewer than one-fifth of all vio- lent crimes are committed by juveniles, he notes. Still, this minority, committing increasingly high-profile crimes like mur- der and armed robbery, are setting the juvenile justice agenda for police depart- ments nationwide. ''There's a feeling going around in the media, and the public to a certain extent, that a lot of 14, 15 and 16 year olds are just beyond any hope. They're completely irre- deemable," he says. "Yet the number that fit that description are a relatively small frac- tion of what's going on. For many, it's the whole circumstance of their lives, the impact of drug policy and addiction. If there were some constructive intervention, a lot of these kids could be turned around- they're not just crazed psychopaths." The mayor and police commissioner, pointing to the fact that overall crime rates are declining, have repeatedly asserted that their crime strategy is working just fine. While neither Bratton nor Giuliani's spokespeople would talk specifically about the administration's juvenile justice policy, a police manual outlining Bratton's youth crime strategy shows that the department is relying almost exclusively on increased police presence and the use of force. Published last year, the manual includes five law-and-order initiatives, most of which have already been implemented. They include designating truant officers to get kids back in school, reassigning detec- tives to strengthen cases against violent kids, setting up a citywide juvenile data- base to track youth crime, and tripling the number of youth officers to investigate all crimes, "serious and petty." The strategy manual also notes that police should enlist the help of families and school officials to find safe places where kids can spend time after school. Yet this goal, the only one that could be considered in the spirit of community policing, receives a mere two paragraphs at the end of Bratton's 32-page booklet. In the long run, this approach won't succeed, says Geoffrey Canada, president of the Rheed1en Centers for Children and Families and author of the recently pub- lished book, "Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America." High-crime neighborhoods need polic- ing-but they need fair policing, he says. -, "Most young people believe they are all treated the same," he says, regardless of whether they are honors students or thieves. That leads to a cynical view of the police, a sense that police officers can't be trusted. In tum, young people begin to believe that no one is there to protect them from real criminals, he says. "They begin to deal with their own issues. By looking for personal revenge. Or by simply not reporting acts of assault and other types of crimes they see." None of which, Canada notes, is terribly helpful when police are trying to solve youth crimes. I f IrIttH .'t Mlim c.Ni, lit shoulel ... with SOIIIf school chikIrtn. A lot of young people, including many who have never had run-ins with the police, say they distrust their local officers now more than ever. "Sometimes I worry, because the police are murderers," says Adiana Molina, a 13- year-old girl from Washington Heights. ''They're killing people who are innocent, especially Latin people. And you know what? Because they are the police, they don't do nothing about it.... It's very bad. It's not fair." When asked if she would ever ask the police for help, Adiana replies that she would like to, "but I'm afraid" Her friend Roxanne Maria, also 13, chimes in that she would be willing to talk to the police. But she has only one pointed question: "I want to ask them, 'What do you think your job is all about?'" Commissioner Bratton and Mayor Giuliani would do well to think about this, criminologists say. While both can be just- ly praised for getting police back into the streets of high-crime neighborhoods, such strategies only increase the level of "for- mal" social control, says Mark Moore, a professor of criminal justice policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He says many of his colleagues believe any successful long- term effort must somehow foster "infor- mal" social controls, the kind that families, pastors and youth leaders provide. Such work is labor-intensive, he adds, but it has been proven to work in smaller cities throughout the country. "That is what community policing and community courts are all about." Bratton's shotgun approach is also mis- guided, says David Kennedy, a senior researcher at Harvard. He believes police work can be targeted more effectively, explaining that much of the worst violence and bloodshed can be traced to just 2 or 3 percent of the kids in a neighborhood. Using more refined police techniques, which he and others at Harvard are devel- oping, officers can track the activities of these juveniles, get them off the streets and into secure programs designed specifically to help them. Young people who do not show the same propensity toward violence, Kennedy adds, can be better helped out- side of the juvenile justice system, free of their most intimidating peers. Above all, youth advocates say, it shouldn't be the police department's job to keep teenagers off the streets. That's the responsibility of parents, schools and com- munity-run programs, says Lonny Shockley, a coordinator at Friends of Island Academy, a youth group that works with older teens released from Rikers Island. Mayor Giuliani should be supporting youth programs with this goal in mind, he says. "I have a four-year-old daughter," says Shockley. "If I tell her she can't do some- thing, I try to have another option. I don't just say, 'Don't do it' and leave it at that. The same is true of these kids. There have to be alternatives instead of just saying, 'No, no, no, no, no.' Don't take drugs. Don't hustle. The next question is, 'What am I going to do? How are you going to help meT To me, it's a very legitimate question." Rich McClain, who, having been sent to Rikers Island three times himself and now counsels young men through Shockley's program, says that despite their hardened image, the young people in these neighborhoods are impressionable and can be reached. "At fouf!een, fifteen years old, it's easy to put anything into their heads. The drug dealers know that. The cops should know that too." _ Crossland Providing assistance to community development projects in the New York City metropolitan area. Please contact Crossland regarding your financing needs. Andrew D. Kelman, Vice President Community Reinvestment Officer 211 Montague Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 (718) 780-0448 Crossland is a subsidiary of Brooklyn Bancorp. Inc. CITVLlMITS :J:' -!! Z andra Myers has been working at the Claddagh Inn, a soup kitchen in Far Rockaway, for seven years. She remembers being in church in 1988, literally praying to God for a job, when the minister asked for volunteers. She showed up. Today her title is executive director and when she talks about working as a volunteer on a soup line, she mentions how impor- tant it is to talk, listen, allow people their humanity. That last speaks to much of what is wrong and right with the industry with its executive titles, its career tracks in charity, and Myers' real- ization that every policy, organization and service plan is only as good as where worker's eyes are focused when a crackhead, homeless vet or alcoholic is telling the story of his day. The Claddagh Inn serves 400 to 500 plates of food Monday through Saturday, offers free clothes and serves as an informal referral and counseling service for this depressed neighborhood dotted with rundown seaside bungalows and public housing projects. .. - . - - - ~ ....... - NOTORIOUS Why care about Zandra Myers? Another profile touting the human interest party line and eliciting the predictable response: She helps these poor souls; Yeah, that's really nice; Must be religious. Consider: Zandra Myers lived for years in the Edgemere housing projects where she heard gunshots every night. She had a serious drug problem, she comes from pover- ty, she was pregnant at 16---all the prerequisites for a career of apathy and bitterness. But instead she works every day in a small, crowded building, with people constantly wandering in after hours seeking help, donors dropping off clothes asking too demandingly for a receipt for tax purposes. Everybody wanti- ng too much and leaving her drained. She tells a story of sitting at the window of her apartment in the projects and spotting someone walking by wearing a shirt No Simple Charity with Breezy Point Lumber written on it, another with an Inwood Volunteer windbreaker-and she started crying then, half laughing now, at the tragi- comic phenomenon of very poor men and women walking around with the labels and symbols of the By Kevin Heldman stable and the working class, and in the simple realization that she was clothing her neigh- borhood. She's a member of the local community board, vice-presi- dent of the Kiwanis, co-chair of the housing task force, director of a youth ministry. Her civic resume, however, doesn't list another mother coming into Claddagh who's son has been murdered, organizing another "Stop the Violence" rally, with another flyer listing boys and girls killed. Or Zandra and the mother commiserating on the humiliations of going to C- Town to beg for food to feed the people who come out to mourn, and the carelessness of the printer who misspelled a dead boy's name on the flyer. It's difficult to sustain char- ity work on platitudes or the constant gratitude of the peo- ple you're helping. What if they're angry, what if they resent your charity and still need it? Zandra Myers does it nonetheless, and in doing so holds herself and a good num- ber of people together . ~ L - ____________________________________________________________________________ ~ NOVEMBER 1995 - ......... ---,..., ... ".- REV I EW "Crews" by Maria Hinojosa with photographs by Gerrnan Perez. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995, 168 pages, $17 hwdcover, $9 paperback. I n the fall of 1990, Topo, a 19-year-old immigrant was gunned down by Pee Wee on 175th street and Amsterdam Avenue over a tenitorial dispute. Gasping in disbelief as he was falling, Topo begged for mercy. His last words were "A mi?! Ami?!" For those of us who had known the two teenagers, it was hard to accept and understand the horror of it all because Pee Wee was Tapa's best friend. They had grown up together, lived in the same building, one apartment above the other. Pee Wee was even engaged to Topo's youngest sister at the time of the shooting. We asked ourselves, why? How could someone with so much history shared with another detach himself so completely Fighting Words By Moises Perez and end the life of his best friend? In "Crews," journalist Maria Hinojosa poses similar questions to eleven young New Yorkers and attempts to shed some light on why youth violence has become so perva- sive. The book, a collection of inter- views done for an award-winning series aired on National Public Radio, offers a rare view of youths involved in what are commonly believed to be gangs, but what the teenagers them- selves call "posses" or "crews." The book was devel- oped in conjunction with German Perez, a multimedia artist from the Dominican Republic. His photographs are highly expressive and add significantly to the presentation of the material. Llst. n and LHrn During the course of Hinojosa's interviews, we learn much about the experiences, background, ways and values of these young men and women-all of it from their own perspective. When she speaks with these youths, she may as well be speak- ing with young people throughout New York City. Hinojosa's interviews were inspired by the well-publicized 1990 death of Brian Watkins, a young tourist stabbed to death by a Queens teenager as he tried to defend his family from a subway mugging. The killer, it turned out, had wanted money to go dancing. ''To go dancing?" writes the author. "I had a hard time understanding this, just as lots of people did." So she set out to ask, listen, and learn. We hear from the young men and women about the value of "respect." Without respect from peers and adults, growing up is hard and dangerous. Without respect, you are a "no-body." Respect is perhaps the most sacrosanct of values. Like sharks in their watery domain, these youth are tenitor- ial. "You gotta protect your neighborhood," they tell us. But unlike sharks, the wellspring of this violence, they tell us, is anger. They tell us they are trapped in a vicious cycle of vio- lence that began early in their childhood with parents that did not want them. "How would you like to be eight years old and thrown out of your house on Christmas night?" we are asked. While many of these lessons are timeless, readers should remember that the New York street scene is vibrant and con- stantly changing. Already much of Hinojosa's material is dated. Her posses and crews have been largely replaced by more sophisticated organizations. They operate like fast-food fran- chises competing to open chapters and achieve a citywide pres- ence. They respond to names like the Netas, Zulu Nation and Latin Kings. MlsSM Opportunity In several respects, "Crews" represents a missed opportunity. There is no attempt at analysis, so the presentation of the prob- lem of youth violence is shallow. It is important for readers to know that, unlike ever before in American history (for this is truly an American phenomenon) we are producing a generation of young men and women completely disengaged from family, school, community, work, church and God, their peers-and, finally, from themselves. All of Hinojosa's young people are products of families that have abused and neglected them. They speak about dropping out of school. They speak about tenitoriality, not community, where people in their neighborhoods only fear them. Lacking the most basic of skills, none are truly engaged in work. They speak about social injustice and anger towards society. Most of all, they speak about their crews as being the most important dimension of their lives. But this peer group is clear- ly a major source of their problems. "Seeing your own friend hitting you" one youth complains, "it makes you feel bad, like you can't be totally friends." Finally, they seem incapable of achieving even the most basic goals. Hinojosa points out in the final chapter that many of the young people she interviewed "seemed to believe that where they were ... was where they were going to be for a long time." The time that they had to speak to Hinojosa, to hear from someone who expressed an interest in their lives, was, in Hinojosa's words, "one of the few chances they had for self- reflection." Overall, Hinojosa and Perez are to be commended for bring- ing us these voices. We must listen if we are to play any serious role as responsible adults in the difficult task of re-engaging young people. Otherwise, the Topos and the Brians will only continue to make the news, in the very worst way. Moises Perez is executive director of Alianza Dominicana, a youth and social services organization based in Washington Heights. CITY LIMITS W e live in a society where complex and con- tentious national issues are debated with catch phrases designed to fit neatly into sound bites and headlines. The aim is to attract attention and to score political points. But catch phrases confuse and mis- lead, and they rarely help us devise solutions. Drug legalization, a euphemism for ending drug prohibition and the so-called War on Drugs, is a provocative idea. Its sup- porters have an overwhelming wealth of evidence to describe just how destructive current drug policies have been to our criminal justice system, our cities and our country. Yet legal- ization's advocates have been losing the public debate because they have failed to propose a sensible regulatory alternative to assume that, by ending prohibition, such drugs as cocaine, heroin and crack would become freely available without even a doctor's pre- scription, that drug use would rapidly increase and that vast social damage would follow in legalization's wake. CITYVIEW, . , People have been encouraged to make such wild assump- tions by the pronouncements of prominent individuals such as A. M. Rosenthal, former editor of The New York TImes, who now enjoys the privilege of regularly disclosing whatever is on his mind on the op-ed pages of that paper. In some 21 columns he has written during the last seven years, Rosenthal has repeatedly denounced legalization with unsubstantiated assumptions about its meaning and the dire consequences it would occasion. Earlier this year, Rosenthal characterized legalization as "one of the most cruel and selfish movements in America" and freely predicted that it would "create more addicts, more abused children, more victims of muggings and robbery, millions Reframe the Drug Debate more every sin- gle year." At no time during the course By Theodore W Kheel Theodore W. Kheel is a lawyer who has been engaged in the practice of conflict preven- tion and resolu- tion for more than 50 years. NOVEMBER 1995 prohibition. With the issue framed today as legalization versus war, war easily prevails. Americans like the idea of a war against something evil. This is unfortunate because the facts belie the rhetoric. In 1991, New York State spent more than $8.6 billion on its judicial and legal systems, according to a recent report by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Between 1983 and 1992, the state built 29 prisons and almost doubled its prison capacity. Nearly half of the state's inmate population has been incarcerated for drug offenses; 15 years ago that number was only one in 10. Meanwhile, black males constitute almost half of the prison population nationwide, thanks, the Bar Association reports, to selective enforcement that targets the urban poor "while rich and middle class drug users are permitted to indulge without serious fear of legal consequences." This so-called war has demanded more time, more dollars and more prison space, year after year. The cost is tremendous. Something has to be done. Wild Assumptions The advocates of a drug war will prevail, so long as sup- porters of legalization fail to propose an alternative defining exactly how government might regulate the sale and distribu- tion of drugs. In the absence of such a plan, many people of his campaign has Rosenthal been called upon to evaluate any specific regula- tory regime that could take the place of prohibition, because no such regime has been offered by pro-legalization forces. No wonder he has felt comfortable in claiming, without benefit of statistical support, that the vast majority of Americans including politicians are against legalization. If people assume, as I believe they do, that under legalization drugs would become freely available to anyone, then Rosenthal is probably right in his estimation of America's views. Two months ago, the anti-legalization Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University issued a white paper in which the authors provided their own list of "policy options" that would follow legalization, including the establishment of "an open and free market for drugs." They then proceeded to denounce these options. The center's white paper cannot be lightly disregarded. The credentials of its offi- cers and directors, including such luminaries as Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Betty Ford, Douglas A. Fraser, Barbara C. Jordan and Nancy Reagan, compare favorably with those of A.M. Rosenthal. Not one of the supposed policies described by CASA, it is worth noting, contains any significant recommendation on reg- ulation. In sum, for the purposes of its attack on legalization, the center identifies the forms of regulation being proposed as consisting simply of a ban on the use of drugs by minors and restrictions on advertising, dosage and place of consumption. Needless to say, with this description the center had little dif- ficulty convincing itself that ending prohibition would dramati- cally increase drug usage. Rosenthal immediately seized upon the CASA white paper to write stilI another column denouncing legalization. Again, he included no mention of any regulatory [Continued on page 30] -
[Continued from page 29] regime to replace prohibition. CIT Y V lEW Do legalization advocates of how far on the spectrum a given drug should be moved, or how to accomplish such a movement." The article was pub- lished in 1990. The same observations are equally applicable today. - believe that you or I should be able to buy heroin or cocaine without at least a prescription? Of course not. Nobody in their right would want that. I think it is fair to con- clude that legalization advocates favor some form of regulatory regime to replace prohibition. InadequacY But you wouldn't know this from reading most pro-legalization studies and reports. A Hofstra Law Review article by Mark A.R. Kleiman and Aaron 1. Saiger, entitled "Drug Legalization: The Importance of Answering the Right Question;' observed that "[p]erbaps the most prominent inade- quacy of current legalization arguments is their failure to specify what is meant by 'legalization.'" They also noted that "while legalization advocates do not deny that some sort of controls will be required, their proposals rarely address the question As long as proponents of the War on Drugs are allowed to set up and attack their own straw-man versions of a post- legalization future, they will win the pub- lic's favor. I know enough l!bout conflict resolution to understand that the phrase "legalize drugs" is not going to fly by itself. It will strengthen the other side. There's no way the public will buy legal- ization unless they understand its limits before it is introduced. Successful resolution of any conflict demands a clear definition of the issue and careful assortment of relevant facts. This is especially necessary in any highly emo- tional conflict. For those of us who under- stand that the costs of drug prohibition are exorbitant and its benefits negligible, a sharper and clearer discussion is urgently required . of NEW YORK INCORPORATED For 20Years We've Been There ForYou. Your Neighborhood Housing Insurance Specialist R&F OF NEW YORK, INC. has a special department obtaining and servicing insurance for tenants, low-income co-ops and not-far-profit community groups. We have developed competitive insurance programs based on a careful evaluation of the special needs of our customers. We have been a leader from the start and are dedicated to the people of New York City. For Information call: Ingrid Kaminski, Senior Vice President R&F of New York One Wall Street Court New York, NY 10005-3302 212 269-8080 800 635-6002 212 269-8112 (fax) s ........ of o...nIIl" M .......... 1ItII Cln.llIII .. Required 39 U.s.c. 3685 Tille of Publicalion: Cily limils. Publicalian No. 498890. Dole of Filing 9/29/95. Frequency of issue: Monlhly excepl bimonlhly in June/July, AugusilSeplember. No. of issues published annually: 10. Annual subscriplian price: $25 indiVidual, $35 ins," luIion. Complele moiling address of known office of pub- licalion: 40 Prince Streel, NY NY 100 12. Editor: Andrew White. Publisher: Cily limits Communily Information Service, Inc. 40 Prince Streel, NY NY 100 12. Known bondholders, mortgagees or other secII' rities: none. The purpose, function and nonprofit status of this organizalion and the exempl status for federal income tax purposes has not changed during preceding 12 months. Extent ond nature of circulation: Total overage no. of copies: 3250 13700 clasestto filing dote). Paid and/or requested Circulalion: Sales through dealers and carri- ers, street vendors and counter sales 1571172). Mail subscriplion 255913051). Free distribution by Moil, Carrier or Other Means Samples, Complimentary, and Other Free Copies 80 (120). Total distribution 3073 13540). Copies Not Dislributed: Office use, lek over, unaccounted, spoiled aker printing 50 132). Retum from News Agents 127 (128) . Total 3250 137(0). I certify thai the statements made by me above are correct and complete. Andrew While, Editor. Music and Politics In the Subways of New Yorll SUSIE J. TANENBAUM "[This book] has much to offer the general reader. . . . [Tanenbaum's] familiarity with the musi- cians, with their backgrounds and aspirations, satisfactions and setbacks, .. . gi ves the book its greatest value."-JAMES R. OESTREICH, The New York Times "Anyone who has been touched by music in the subways [will] be fascinated by Tanenbaum's insights into the history, politics, law and human relationships that shape music underneath New York."-GENE RUSSIANOFF, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign 27 b&w photos. $37.50 cloth, $14.95 paper At bookstores, or call (607) 277-2211 Cornell UN lVERSI TY PRESS Sage House' 512 East Slate SI Ithaca NY 14850
[Continuedfrom page 4] McGovern even contemplate the enonnity of the tragedy from the point of view of the infant whose right to protection and to basic medical treatment has been cruelly violated. McGovern would like us to believe that she and the mv LAW Project are "pro- tecting" the interest of women. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women need to know about their condition and that of their babies so they can make important health care decisions; they need to know that they themselves are infected in order to avoid infecting others; they need to know so that they can make deci- sions on future pregnancies; they need to know so that they can make arrangements for the care of their children when they can no longer care for them themselves. Denying women this information is dis- crimination in its worst form. McGovern and the mv Law Project are part of the politically correct chorus who are determined that the wall of secre- cy around AIDS be protected at all costs- even if it means sacrificing the lives of helpless infants. Nevertheless, there is now a tremendous groundswell of support from the public, the mass media, and the over- whelming majority of legislators who are determined to end a policy that has been a death sentence for the most innocent and helpless victims of the epidemic. Nettie Mayersohn Member of the State Assembly Flushing, Queens E-mail Awak ... lng I've been a subscriber for the past few years and look forward to your insightful articles and reporting. I am glad you are moving into the 21st Century! Thanks. Marcia H. Lemnwn via pipeline. com We love City Limits! Seth A. Miller & Elizabeth L Faraone via allvn. com Congrats on the new look. We think it suits you well. BrallLmuier Fifth Avenue Committee via igc.apc.org I just received the new issue and I'm very impressed with the new logo and format. I NOVEMBER 165 think the expansion and the growing up (growing old!) idea is super! Having been both a state and city housing official (recently dumped by the Pataki adminis- tration) and long-time City Limits sub- scriber, I look forward the new adventure. Regards to you all. Nancy Travers via ids. net You are insightful and inspirational. Keep up the thought-provoking work. Greg Trupiano viaaol.com U"and.,..h Thank you so much for your October 1995 feature on child welfare. It is a real credit to you and your publication that you have provided a forum for the considerable tal- ents of Rob PoIner, Rita Giordano and Michael Powell. The sudden demise of New York Newsday was a grave loss to the city on many levels. In particular, no other daily matched NewsdtJy's concern for and understanding of child welfare issues. s _ .......... - .. ". Recent budget cuts and their accompanying rhetoric have been very punishing to child and family service clients, providers, LET T E R S and advocates. One of the most demoralizing aspects of the relentless assaults we've withstood is the deafening media silence which has too often greeted our protests. Thank you for giving this often-overlooked area of public policy the front-page status and quality of coverage it merits. The conSequences are life and death. The values at issue are defin- ing values of our society. Sincerely, Michael Arsham Director for Social Service Policy Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies Send your letters to: The Editor, City LImIts 40 PrInee Sa., NYC 10012 or bye-mail to: HN4368 @ bandsnet.OI'l CO TRO VI RSIAL? Where else will you hear: Yeah, usually. a courageous Registered Nurse Rred from her job for exposing the barbarity of circumcision? Dick Gregory telling it like it is about milk: "Milk, it's one of the #1 killers on the planet!" Dr. Samuel Epstein of the University of Chicago accusing the US government of secretly irradiating its own citizens? Dr. Koren Davis describing the danger of eating suffering-on-a-plote called chicken? Always stirring up the waters W ....... '. POlItI ~ . W1A199.5 F. Thur., tl P. 212-864-4206 Call for list of available topes Paid for by Friends of Wolden's pond a prolect of the lawyers Alliance for New York, a nonprofit orgonizafion Real Estate, Corporate and Tax Legal Representation to Organizations Tax Syndications Mutual Housing Associations Homeless Housing Economic Development HDFC's Not-for-profit corporations Community Development Credit Unions and loan Funds 99 Hudson Street, 14th FI, NYC, 10013 (212) 2191800 W\l n n n n ffi]]]l JrCITlIfIr Attorney at Law Specializing in Tenant and Real Estate Law. 50 East 42nd Street, 18th Fl, New York, NY 10017 212-687-9455 SPECIALIZING IN REAL ESTATE J-51 Tax Abatement/Exemption. 421A and 421B Applications. 501 (c) (3) Federal Tax Exemptions. All forms of government -assisted housing including LISC/Enterprise, Section 202, Turnkey, and NYC Partnership Homes KOURAKOS & KOURAKOS Attorneys at Law Bronx, N.Y. New York, N.Y. 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Providing legal services in the areas of General Real Estate, Business, Trust & Estates, and Elder Law. 217 Broadway, Suite 610 New York, NY 10007 (212) 513-0981 DEBRA BECHTEL - Attorney Concentrating in Real Estate & Non-Profit Law Title and loan closings 0 All city housing programs Mutual housing associations 0 Cooperative conversions Advice to low income co-op boards of directors 100 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201, (718) 624-6850 Twenty-seven years experience ready for you CALVERT ASSOCIATES, INC Consultants to the Inner City Housing Movement George E. Calvert, President 165 East 104th Street, Suite 2-C, NYC 10029 Call 212 427 0362 or Fax 212 427 0218 , William .Jacobs l'Vl"tiliv,1 I'lIhli, .\, l llllIlt.lI1t Over 25 y .. ,. experience in nonprofit hou.ing HDFC Neighborhood Preservation CorporetioM Certified Annual Audits. Compilation and Review Service Management Advisory Service To: Con.ultlltion and Preparation CIIII .... ,., A ".. ConS&lllt.w ..... 274 White Plain. Road E .. tcheater. N.Y. 10707 914-771-9902 Fax 914-771-9698 IRWIN NESOFF ASSOCIATIONS management consulting for non-profits P,o"idi., " "'''-,,,.g. 01 ."."g e.t "'PIIO,t s""ices 10' """.",olit o""";z"tio,,s o Strategic and management development plans o Board and staff development and training o Program design and implementation 0 Proposal and report writing o Fund development plans 0 Program evaluation 20 5 J.5 Place, BrooklyR. New York 11217 (718) 636-6087 aTYUMITS LOAN OFfICER for nonprofit lender. Underwrite complex real estate loans, package financing, structure and negotiate transactions with non-profit borrowers and third party lenders. Requires strong skills in financial analysis, excellent communication/presentation ability, high levels of initiative and creativity. Candidates with experience and/or knowledge of community lending, and/or housing development pre- ferred. Salary commensurate with experience. Benefit package includes individual health and dental. Send Letter of interest and resume to UHF/SLO, 29 John Street, Suite 803, New York, NY 10038. UHF is an equal opportunity employer. URBAN HOUSING SPECIAUST. Responsibilities: counsel residents (ten- ants & owners) regarding housing rights and responsibilities and hous- ing stabilization resources and advocate for code compliance; provide technical assistance to tenant and block associations in order to increase organizational development and effectiveness; plan, publicize and conduct workshops; research housing issues and develop articles for publication in BNIA's newsletter; provide leadership training and pro- vide assistance in strategic planning. Requirements: candidate must have a demonstrated commitment to empowerment and self-help and be available to work evenings. A bachelors degree and a minimum of one year experience in housing, community organizing, social services, urban planning or related field or high school graduation and 5 years experience, or satisfactory equivalent combination of education and experience. Central Brooklyn resident preferred. Salary: 24K. Send resume to: Brooklyn Neighborhood Improvement Association, 648 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11238, Attention: Personnel Department. COMMUNITY DEVnOPMENT SENIOR PlANNER. Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED) seeks an experi- enced planner to direct our HU[)'funded program in developing and implementing comprehensive/integrative neighborhood revitalization plans; provide project-specific technical assistance and training in plan- ning, real estate & housing to nonprofit community-based development organizations in Brooklyn, NYC and vicinity; conduct occasional research on urban policy issues affecting low-income neighborhoods, both locally and nationally. MS in planning and 5 to 7 years experience in hands-<>n low-income community development and related policy issues (or equivalent combo of education & experience); facility with planning and development computer applications (e.g. Lotus, Dbase, WordPerfect, Mapinfo, etc.) required. Spanish speaking plus. Salary $40,000 plus benefits for this grant-funded position. Review of resumes to begin immediately and continue until position is filled. Send to: Dept. SP, 379 DeKaib Ave., 2nd R., Brooklyn, NY 11205. An AA/EOE. Women & minorities strongly encouraged to apply. Friends House in Rosehill, a new 5().unit residential community for peo- ple with AIDS, seeks a DIRECTOR, a CHIEF RESIDENCE MANAGER, and a CUNICAl. SERVICES COORDINATOR. This three person team will be cho- sen on the basis of commitment to the organization's housing and sup- portive services mission, background in personally serving people with AIDS or histories of mental illness and homelessness, and experience in organizational development and community building. Friends House will be operated in accord with Friends' convictions about individual divinity, dignity, self-<letermination, and group determination. Women and members of minority groups are encouraged to apply. The DlREC- TOR will be responsible for the overall operation of Friends House, ensuring that all residents receive appropriate and professional care in keeping with Friends House's Mission. She/he will be responsible for all administrative functions, including fiscal affairs, development, per- sonnel, contract and regulatory compliance, and for the quality of the physical facility and social The CHIEF RESIDENCE MAlI .. will be responsible for the physical environment of the Friends House building and the provision of housing, food services and security for the residents. She/he will establish and oversee house rules holding meet-
ing to promote communication and mediate grievances. She/he will manage response to medical, personal and building emergencies. The ClINICAl. SERVICES COORDINATOR will be responsible for the provision of social and health services including the assessment and monitOring of each resident's individual social service needs and the social interac- tion of the entire community. She/he will be responsible for all individ- ual and group counseling and referrals. Education and experience in a related field is preferred for all positions. Qualified professionals should send a resume and letter of interest to: James D. Morgan, President, Friends Quarters HDFC, 15 Rutherford Place, New York NY 10003 SOCIAl. SERVICE DIRECTOR to oversee program planning and administra- tion of social service program. The individual should have strong man- agerial skill and at least two years experience in the areas of housing and employment and at least three years of experience working with homeless and low-income populations. Salary will range in the high twenties to low thirties. Send resumes to: Bushwick Information, Coordinating and Action Committee, 1639 Broadway, Brooklyn NY 11207. Attn: Dunbry Development Associates. HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVnOPMENT SPECIAUST. Affordable Housing Network, New Jersey seeks highly qualified housing/community devel- opment speCialist. Responsibilities include assessing nonprofit devel- opment organizations' technical assistance needs and providing in- depth, on-site assistance in organization development, community plan- ning, project development, property management. Requirements: sub- stantial experience working in community-based organizations on real estate development projects and in community planning/organizing. Statewide travel, flexible work hours. Competitive salary, excellent ben- efits. Minority candidates encouraged to apply. Send resume to Martha Lamar, Affordable Housing Network, PO Box 1746, Tenton NJ 08607 CREDIT UNION MANGER. The Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union is a 9-year-<>ld, $2.6 million community development credit union with 2,500 members, serving a predominantly low-income, multi-ethnic community. The Manager oversees all daily operations, reports direct- ly to the Board of Directors and has fiscal responsibility for the entire credit union. Required qualifications: A proven commitment to commu- nity development; A minimum 2 years credit union or banking manage- ment experience; Excellent written and verbal communication skills; A Bachelor's degree. Preferred qualifications: Spanish/English proficien- cy; Lower East Side resident. Responsibilities include: Bookkeeping and financial planning, funds management, lending, loan servicing, supervision of staff, oversight of collections, and policy implementa- tion. Salary: $30,00 with fringe benefits. Women and Minority appli- cants encouraged to apply. Send resume and cover letter to Ana Rosenblum, LESPFCU, 37 Avenue B, New York, NY 10009. EOE COMMUNITY HOUSING COORDINATOR. Sinergia. Inc. is a citywide nonprof- it which provides housing and services to individuals with developmen- tal disabilities and their families. Its Community Housing Department provides home-finding assistance and advocacy to low-income families. Responsibilities: The Coordinator will serve some families directly, and will coordinate the work of two Housing Specialists. Qualifications: Knowledge of welfare issues and subsidized housing programs, com- puter literacy, good organizational skills and basic writing proficiency required. Bilingual (Spanish) a plus. Salary. $28 K-$31K. Reply to: Singeria, Inc. 120 West 105th Street #Ll New York, NY 10025 (212) Fax: (212) 749-5021 Attention: Donald A. Lash. Columba Kavanagh House. Inc., a nonprofit corporation which spon- sored supportive SROs in the Harlem area, has received a grant which provides for these five positions: MICA COUNSELOR, IIV COUNSELOR, OIIWGER, INTAKE PERSON ... JOB DEVD.OPEIL Experience in field is necessary. Send resume to: P.O. Box 6385, New York, NY 10128{)()()4 .-mlFi3I __ _ Cuns d Hoses i ~ By Nick Chiles he fire box sits exactly at the intersection of Cumberland and Park avenues and the sprawling concrete land- scape of the Walt Whitman Houses of the New York City Housing Authority, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The box is a grungy red, its sparkle long ago dimmed by the black exhaust of the overhead traffic on the Brooklyn- Queens Expressway. Though popularly referred to as a "fire box," it actually has two buttons, one for the New York City Fire Department and another for the police. Confronted with an emergency, you get to take your pick: the squad car or the big red truck? Guns or hoses? The crime fighters or the fire fighters? Simple, right? Wrong. Ask the fire fighters at Engine Company 20. Increasingly in recent years, they say, they have been called from their headquarters at Carlton and Myrtle avenues to respond to all varieties of non-fire emergencies: car accidents, gunshots, assaults, bullet wounds, stab wounds, a machete attack. You might expect locals to demand a law enforcement response, not fire trucks. The residents of Whitman Houses see things a bit differently, however. "I think they're afraid of speaking to the police," says Joe Scararnuzzino, a fire fighter who lives in Howard Beach. ''There are two buttons on that thing. When a brother and sister were shot in the projects, they pressed us." In this neighborhood, when the big red trucks rumble through the streets, the fire fighters are keenly aware of the waves and kindly nods of their public. It's not affection, exact- ly, but an acknowledgment of their status as life preservers. About the only public flak the fire department ever gets is for the remarkable uniformity of its crew: white and male. The cops are another matter entirely. When they cruise around in their squad cars, they throw off enough hostile stares to pave the streets with enmity. And the screaming headlines year after year announcing police corruption scandals tell us all we need to know about many cops' ciVility in encounters with the public. They can't be trusted. "Without a doubt, it's more acceptable to come to us," con- tinues Scararnuzzino, leaning on a truck just inside the station's huge red door. "When cops are there, they have to enforce the law. People might not agree with the way they enforce it. We're there to help. Always. ''That doesn't mean the cops are wrong," Scaramuzzino quickly adds. "But people don't always agree." There's a beauty to this. Call it civic justice. The police have engendered so much ill will over the years that residents of Whitman Houses are striking back. Sure, the fire fighters usu- ally end up calling the cops anyway, but the message still comes through at eardrum-piercing decibels. New York's Finest are not wanted here. Though unorganized and unoffi- cial, it's a boycott of sorts. Steve Giuffrida, a nine-year fire department veteran from Staten Island, says the fire house has long been a refuge for youngsters and residents seeking help. "Somebody's always knocking on the door." he says. "Last night, a homeless guy knocked. He had been attacked and was afraid to go to the cops. He was embarrassed to go to the precinct." Some skeptics may suggest that in Whitman Houses, dragged down by heavy drug trafficking and its attendant vio- lence, there are those with underhanded reasons for calling the big red truck rather than the squad car. The street just around the comer from the fire house is a well-used drug market. Fire fighters concede their presence is less menacing to wrongdoers. But fire fighter Ernie Medaglia, an eight-year veteran who lives in Rockland County, knows the residents of Fort Greene. "Most of the people around here are good people," he says. "I lived around here for a year .... It's just a small percentage of people who cause the trouble." Sylvia Roman, 32, who has lived in Whitman Houses all her life, has seen and heard enough over the years to know that her neighbors aren't fire fighter groupies, not by a long shot. They've just got some common sense. Roman lives about 50 feet away from the fire box at Park and Cumberland. She sweeps her hand around, gesturing at the expanse of the only home she has known, and where she is raising her own family, and says she would press the red button, too, not the blue. ''These days, the police are as bad as the criminals around here," she says. "I feel more comfortable with the firemen." Nick Chiles is a reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger ~ ~ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~ - ClTYUMITS NOVEMBER 1995 mBankers1rust Company Community Development Group A resource for the non-profit development community
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