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A last-minute School District plan to allow the Sustainability Workshop to take over West Philadelphia High School's automotive building has angered community members.
"If you are going to close 24 schools, why do you have to take one from West?" asks Philadelphia Student Union Director Hiram Rivera.
Principal Mary Sandra Dean, according to critics' accounts, was only told about the takeover between two weeks and one month ago. Dean did not respond to a request for comment. Rivera says that Deputy Superintendent for Career and Technical Education David M. Kipphut told Dean, almost as an aside, "Hey, you're going to lose your automotive building," as she was leaving a meeting.
Marcus Gary, chairman of the West Philly High School Advisory Council and parent of an auto academy student, complains that "this was an undercover deal already made."
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Republican Gov. Tom Corbett will nominate Superior Court Justice Correale F. Stevens, who in 2007 appeared at a rally against the illegal "alien invasion," to fill a temporary vacancy on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
"Something is a little bit bizarre here, backwards and upside down, and we need to turn that around," Stevens told the crowd. "The city of Hazleton tries to enforce the law, and they get taken to court."
Last month, Corbett drew unfavorable national media attention after he told a Philadelphia gathering that he could not find a single Latino to work in his administration.
Stevens, who joined state Rep. Daryl D. Metcalfe and then-Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta at the state Capitol rally in support of anti-immigrant legislation, was referring to a Hazelton law that bars hiring or renting to an undocumented immigrant, and makes English the city's official language. The law had been struck down by a federal court. The U.S. Supreme Court later overturned the ruling and remanded it to a federal appeals court after they partially upheld Arizona's controversial law.
The School District of Philadelphia last week made good on the dark promise of its doomsday budget, laying off 3,783 teachers, aides, administrators and other staff in the face of a $304 million shortfall.
The Teacher Action Group has put a name, face and story on those layoffs in the remarkable new website at http://facesofthelayoffs.org: Girls High School Counselors Sabina Sheriff and Amirh Lewis, Northeast High School History teacher Dave Sokoloff, Central High library assistant Rochelle Flowers, Julia De Burgos Elementary teacher Christina Neilson. And on and on.
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Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, disliked for deep cuts to education and social services among other things, has really low approval ratings. Ratings so low (Pennsylvanians disapprove 47-38 percent) that two former Democratic Secretaries of Environmental Protection think they can beat him in 2014 (who? exactly).
And though the governor had a rough news week (more on that below) he has received a soft landing on Philly.com. Today, he was named one of its "Voices of Philly.com" and will serve alongside other local notables who will also likely not be paid for their contributions, such as pot activist Chris Goldstein (Philly420!).
Luckily for Corbett, "Voices of Philly.com" is "the most popular news web site in Philadelphia."
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The national media has packed up its encampment at the Criminal Justice Center. Philadelphia will, once again, somehow make do without its fickle attention.
Out of-town reporters, of course, made this rare visit to America's fifth largest but most ignored big city after conservatives accused the mainstream media of failing to cover Dr. Kermit Gosnell's rogue abortion clinic on Lancaster Avenue.
The liberal media, conservatives alleged, were concealing Gosnell's horrors from the public because they reflected poorly on abortion. This was perhaps surprising to local reporters who had covered every step of the case from the grand jury indictment on. It was likely also a surprise to abortion rights supporters, like Drexel professor Rose Corrigan who told me in 2011 that "because of the Medicaid ban on abortion funding and state restrictions, poor women in the state and in Philadelphia really face horrific choices about what to do if they have an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy."
Abortion rights activists were from beginning eager to talk about the reproductive healthcare services denied to low-income women. The national press, however, was only interested in covering the trial once the right had successfully turned the entire episode into an extended version of those blow-up pictures of disfigured fetuses they carry around at protests.
Decarcerate PA rallied today near City Hall to announce a march to Harrisburg demanding that Gov. Tom Corbett and the legislature cut prison funding and invest in education and social services.
“A lot of legislators talk the talk about all the things they’re going to do," said Decarcerate PA’s Joshua Glenn, describing the 113-mile trek. "But when they’re in office, they never do it. We’re walking the walk to show legislators how serious we are about ending mass incarceration."
Advocates are particularly incensed about the Corbett Administration's construction of two new prisons in Montgomery County, set to replace SCI-Graterford in the Philly suburbs. Decarcerate PA, which received a 2012 City Paper Big Vision Award, is demanding that Corbett halt the $400 million-plus project.
Speakers at the rally included City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson and representatives from the ACLU of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Student Union, Human Rights Coalition, DreamActivist PA, Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools, and the office of state Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown.
The speakers, some of whom donned yellow construction hats to symbolically “break ground” on the campaign, charged that the upcoming closure of 23 Philadelphia public schools was evidence that Corbett prioritizes corrections funding over the public good.
“The annual cost to incarcerate an individual is about $32,000, while the annual cost to educate a child is about $11,000," said Councilman Johnson. "You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that there is far greater value in investing in education over incarceration.”
The march kicks off with a rally on Saturday, May 25th at noon in LOVE Park and will pick up supporters along the way, ending with a June 3rd rally at the Capitol building.
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In recent months suburban and typically white victims of mass shootings in Colorado, Connecticut and Arizona have galvanized the United States to think critically about gun violence, mental health, and gun control. As they should have.
But Sunday's broad-daylight shooting of a largely-black New Orleans second line parade, which left 19 people injured, including three critically, merited just a six-paragraph AP story tucked into the bottom corner of A11 in The New York Times. The Mother's Day bloodshed evidences a jarring disjuncture in how violence is treated in the media: Americans killed by Muslims or in white suburbia merit non-stop coverage while the victims of everyday bloodletting on the streets of New Orleans, Philadelphia and Chicago are typically rendered a footnote.
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Funding for SEPTA and other public transit is "subsidizing a minority of our population’s bus fare, which is just more welfare," said state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler), according to an e-mail discussion obtained by the Capitolwire news service (subscription only).
Metcalfe's comments were sparked by an e-mail sent out by Rep. Tom Killion (R-Delaware) citing "a new report [that] showed 27 percent of the state’s transportation funding went to southeastern Pennsylvania – Bucks, Philadelphia, Delaware, Chester and Montgomery counties – while that region had 32 percent of the state population and 40 percent of the state’s economic activity."
The Econsult report, Understanding SEPTA's Statewide Economic Value, comes as Gov. Corbett and the legislature attempt to find a long-term fix to transportation funding--and as SEPTA faces a potentially devastating budget shortfall. City Paper examined the roots of SEPTA's funding crisis last June.
Rep. Rick Saccone (R-Washington) joined Metcalfe in criticizing Killion, saying that "the core point is that opponents don't believe the taxpayers should be funding a mass transit operating fund in the first place...They are fed up with, as they most often say, ‘pouring money down a black hole of inefficiency, patronage and corruption.’ If these investments are necessary then the private sector should and will invest in them. I have had five town halls in the last two weeks and people are disgusted with mass transit funding."
Metcalfe and Saccone did not respond to the evidence presented that SEPTA, like roads and bridges, are critical to the state's economic health. Public transit investment can also save taxpayer money by curbing suburban sprawl that forces inefficient infrastructure and service spending.
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Two men from the Azerbaijan Embassy in Washington D.C. visited right-wing Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler) last week. And yes, this is a set up for a bad joke. But it has nothing to do with bars.
"The catalyst for the meeting was a resolution proposed by a Philadelphia Democrat legislator," Metcalfe wrote to his email list. "The two gentlemen asked to meet with me because the resolution had been referred to the State Government Committee. They explained that the resolution was offensive to an ally of the United States of America. It was an interesting and educational meeting and one not expected normally at the Pennsylvania State Capitol."
Metcalfe, the State Government Committee's chair, pledged to block the legislation and went on to discuss pension reform. He did not, however, say what the legislation was. I asked around, and it turns out that the Azeri Embassy was angry about a "non-controversial" resolution introduced by Rep. Michelle Brownlee (D-Phila) "supporting Nagorno-Karabakh's right to self-determination and efforts to develop its democracy."
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