City Limits toured New York City, Yonkers and Newburgh with Community Voices Heard, to see where the stimulus money went and hear where advocates for low-income families believe it should go.
Two city agencies are working to reform the city’s juvenile justice system, partly by putting more troubled kids into community-based programs and counseling.
Service providers like that the city is moving away from group homes and institutional foster care. But they wonder if the money and policies are in place to make the changes work.
State budget cuts have dug deep into an important avenue for getting kids into the job market, the summer youth employment program. Hear from some of teens who might miss out.
The Administration for Children’s Services is calling for a “do-over” of the process it undertook last year to implement a sea-change in child welfare policy.
In the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement earlier this month that his office had launched a citywide campaign to combat chronic school absenteeism and truancy, some parents and education advocates are waiting to learn details of the city’s plan.The task force driving the initiative doesn’t contain parents, religious leaders or other grassroots community members, noted Victoria Bousquet, a parent leader with Coalition for Educational Justice.”At what point do you intend to involve the community?” she asked during an interview with City Limits. “Is it going to be once the horse is out of the barn? Are you going to have any town hall meetings? How are these decisions going to be made?”She and others said they fear the initiative might rely too heavily on interventions that are punitive, such as arresting students and launching child welfare investigations that could ultimately lead to the termination of parental rights.
Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council are aiming to strike a handshake agreement on a city budget by Friday, three days before the state’s self-imposed deadline to complete its long overdue spending plan, according to people with knowledge of the budget process.The rapidly approaching deadline had advocates crowding the steps of City Hall and lobbying councilmembers on Wednesday. At around noon, as the Council’s budget negotiating committee was set to meet, advocates for after-school programs sat on the sidelines as supporters of immigrant assistance programs packed the steps. A lobbyist for day care workers chatted with reporters. Said Greg Faulkner, chief of staff to freshman Bronx Councilman Fernando Cabrera, in a phone interview: “You can’t walk through the hallway without people pouncing, which is what they should do.”Click here for a list of Council members.Gov. Paterson has set a deadline of Monday, June 28 to complete the state budget that was supposed to be done by April 1. The lack of a firm state budget means the city must guess at how much state aid will come its way.
The woman sweeping floors at the McDonald’s on 204th Street had gray hair tracing her temples, and her colleague at the register looked to be at least 50. Down at the Micky-Ds on Fordham Road, the woman making french fries could have been a grandmother, and she was not the oldest one behind the counter. At the restaurant on East 170th, the employee on break had a wrinkled face; those on duty were younger, but few could pass for 30. The man taking orders on East 167th Street looked to be pushing 50. On Jerome Avenue, the entire staff—at the registers and the grill—seemed to be beyond their 20s.If there’s a typical teenage job in America, its pushing Happy Meals and Big Macs under the golden arches.
When the New York Times delivered its all-important endorsement to then-City Councilman Bill de Blasio in last year’s race for public advocate, the paper noted that the winner’s chief task would be “demonstrating whether this position truly serves New Yorkers.” If the subtext wasn’t clear then, it was brought into sharp focus when the mayor’s charter revision commission announced that its agenda for this year would include the possible elimination of the public advocate position. A little-understood office that was itself created in a 1993 charter revision (out of the wreckage of the title of City Council president, which had been stripped of most of its power by a Supreme Court ruling), the public advocate is supposed to act as an independently elected “ombudsman” to keep watch over the mayor and City Council. That means the future of the office could rest in the hands of de Blasio, the former councilmember, federal housing official, and Hillary Clinton campaign manager who won the job after a tight four-way primary race and subsequent runoff against former public advocate Mark Green last fall. As chair of the Council’s General Welfare Committee, de Blasio had been a vocal critic of many of Mayor Bloomberg’s policies, particularly his refusal to allow able-bodied single adults to receive food stamps unless they’re working, and what de Blasio considered an insufficiently robust approach to reducing poverty.
Black joblessness has defied solution for decades. But organizations in the trenches are making a dent.
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