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Archive: October, 2012
Without a doubt, the most poignant exhibition to open last week was not in any of the galleries on the Old City First Friday circuit. It was across Center City at Art Sanctuary, (628 S. 16th St.), where the 29-year-old Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia was holding its first exhibition of art therapy. The show runs through Oct. 18.
Rayne Parker-Jones was displaying a semi-abstract battle of darkness against light. At 16, she’s seen way too much of the dark stuff: her parents were both killed before she was 14, and she herself was shot in the leg while walking home from a park. But with a grin, the West Oak Lane resident and aspiring nurse says she can envision a day when it’s all sunshine.
Like Parker-Jones, all the artists have been affected by the surging violence that Philly, despite a variety of law-enforcement efforts, can’t see to curb. Deb Spungen, who founded the partnership in 1983, five years after her daughter was murdered, says that — unfortunately, and for the first time ever — the partnership now has a several-months-long waiting list for children’s therapy. Its major source of funding, a Victims of Crime Act grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, was cut by significantly this year with little advance notice, meaning the partnership has had to operate leaner than ever. So the therapists are mostly part-time, says executive director Julie Rausch. But that’s a good thing, actually, since “this is an area that’s susceptible to vicarious traumatization.” One therapist had to quit after suffering chronic nightmares.
The Partnership keeps staffers at the Medical Examiner’s office, where family members go to identify bodies; at the District Attorney’s office; and at the Criminal Justice Center, where they try to be there for families at preliminary hearings in every murder case in the city — a tall order this year. With the exhibition, they’re hoping to boost awareness. Art therapy isn’t the only means they use, says therapist Rebecca Selvin, but its helpful, especially for kids. “Trauma is stored on the right side of your brain,” she says. That’s also where pictures and emotions reside; words keep to the left. “Particularly for children who don’t have the means to create words, creating art gives them access to heal through the right side.”
The works, some hopeful and others heartbreaking, were created especially for the exhibit. Though board member Anthony Johnson considered it a success, he’s not sure it will be an annual thing. “It’s fun for the kids to create the art, but it can be really traumatic. So I’m not sure how often we can ask them to do that.”
Remember the City Council scuffle this spring over planned development in Eastwick, where more than 100 acres of undeveloped space was set to be divvied up between Korman, which wanted to put in more than 700 apartments, and the Philly airport, which wants to use the land for its impending expansion? That fight returns to Council tomorrow, in the form of hearings over flooding, which is already an annual concern in the neighborhood and which residents fear will only be exacerbated by the addition of more development on land that's been absorbing at least some of the runoff, however insufficiently. Dozens of Eastwick residents and Heinz National Wildlife Refuge supporters are planning to show up tomorrow morning, supported by the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition, which emerged from opposition to the development.
“The Eastwick community has been ignored for too long,” said Terrance “TJ” Johnson, president of the Eastwick Friends & Neighbors Coalition and lifelong Eastwick resident, in a statement. “It is time our city officials recognize the flooding problems in our neighborhood. We need to work together to come up with a solution that protects our community.
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The Pennsylvania Department of Education has made it easier for charter schools to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on standardized tests, in what seems like an effort to make them look better than traditional public schools.
Public schools are evaluated by whether they meet certain test score targets in each grade tested. Under the changes, implemented by Education Secretary Ron Tomalis without federal approval, charter schools would only have to meet those goals in one of three groupings of grades: 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. This means that a charter school's 3-5 and 6-8 graders could perform abysmally as long as high schoolers scored well.
An Allentown Morning Call investigation found that the new scoring method may provide a false impression that charters outperformed traditional public schools last year. A 2011 Stanford University study found that charters performed worse over all.
This isn't the first time the administration of Republican Governor Tom Corbett has been accused of giving charters special treatment, as City Paper reported last month. A new state law requiring that test scores be included in teacher evaluations only applies to teachers at traditional public schools--and excludes charters. So much for accountability.
The quiet changes made to charter school evaluation is particularly striking given that public school test scores plummeted last year. Secretary Tomalis credited his crackdown on standardized test cheating. But the cheating was most likely prompted not by lax rules, but by the increasingly high stakes of standardized tests. And others, including a member of his own advisory committee, contradicted his assertion that major budget cuts to education had not impact. Gov. Corbett's cuts fueled the elimination of 3,800 teacher and staff positions in districts statewide.
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The woman who was punched in the face by Philadelphia Police Lt. Jonathan Josey has a middling criminal record, according to Philadelphia Magazine's Victor Fiorillo: a DUI, theft and “drug charges.”
“Last weekend in North Philadelphia, Philadelphia Police Lieutenant Jonathan Josey struck 39-year-old Ida Guzman with a single punch that has now been seen around the world,” Fiorillo writes. “But it wasn’t the first time that Guzman had a run-in with the police.”
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Activists are organizing a protest against police brutality in the wake of a sensational Puerto Rican Day police beating: Friday, noon, at Philadelphia City Hall.
The protest, organized on Facebook with no group claiming responsibility, declares: "We, Puerto Rican women residents of Philadelphia repudiate the violent police attack against one of our sisters, Aida Guzmán, during the Puerto Rican Day Parade last Sunday, September 30."
Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey announced yesterday that he would fire Police Lt. Jonathan Josey, who was captured in a now-infamous YouTube video punching 39-year old Aida Guzmán in the face. The Facebook page urges protesters to bring signs and Puerto Rican flags.
The Fraternal Order of Police has spoken out against the firing.
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Lawyers for the poor and disabled have filed suit against Republican Gov. Tom Corbett's cuts to the society safety net, including the elimination of $205-a-month General Assistance payments that supported 68,000 Pennsylvanians who are disabled, recovering from addiction, and victims of domestic violence. They are also challenging a provision of the law, Act 80, that creates a pilot project rolling line-item social-service funds into block grants, which advocates charge will pit providers against one another ― especially since the block grants were initiated as part of a 10-percent overall cut to social service funding.
The plaintiffs argue that Act 80 violated the state constitution by making changes to seven separate state programs in a single omnibus bill; that the legislature did not spend the three days debating the changes as required by the constitution; that the block grant illegally allows counties to spend money on services other than what the legislature directed; and that it is being implemented without appropriate legislative oversight.
“All we are looking for is a fair and level playing field,” according to a statement from Michael Froehlich, an attorney with Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. “If Pennsylvania really wants to eliminate General Assistance, a last-resort safety-net program for nearly 70,000 people with disabilities who are unable to work, it ought to be done lawfully and consistent with our state Constitution.
Tomorrow, the U.S. Court of Appeals for The Third Circuit in Philadelphia will hear arguments from the ACLU and lawyers for the federal government and federal agents on the case of Nick George, a college student who was detained for five hours at the Philly airport back in 2009. The reason for what the ACLU says was unconstitutional treatment by TSA and local police? A set of English-Arabic flashcards George had on him, for his studies at a Pomona College.
The question before the court is whether to overturn the federal District Court's decision not to dismiss George's case, which alleges that the TSA, FBI agents and Philly cops violated his First Amendment free speech rights and Fourth Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable seizure. (The Philly police are not part of the appeal, so the portion of the case against them will continue separately.)
According to the ACLU:
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Whether you take a shot each time Obama utters “let me be clear” or Romney touts “job creators,” presidential debates are one of the few moments in national politics that inspire drinking for not purely depressive reasons. Sadly, Pennsylvania candidates running for U.S. Senate and Attorney General have yet to debate. It turns out that substantive discussion, much like third parties and independents, have little place in our state's democracy.
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Relentless and accurate media coverage was decisive in bringing about the judicial defeat of Pennsylvania's voter ID law. Civil rights and civic groups organized and highlighted how the poor, non-white and elderly would be disproportionately impacted by the controversial measure, which required the presentation of photo identification to vote. But the media, oftentimes hamstrung into he-said-she-said reporting by accusations of “liberal bias,” played a critical role by doing their jobs. And doing them well.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, reporters Bob Warner and Angela Couloumbis wrote what must have been dozens of stories on the subject. Columnists Annette John-Hall and Monica Yant Kinney chronicled the law's personal stories and political absurdities. Daily News and Inquirer editorials frequently hammered the measure. Dave Davies at WHYY skewered brazen state Republican efforts to willfully misinterpret Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt's report on “voter fraud.” Radio Times had (I believe) three six shows entirely dedicated to the subject.
Reporters covered community education efforts, the twists-and-turns of the legal challenge, the long-long waits and employee confusion at PennDOT, and the state's increasingly comical efforts to make the law seem less burdensome. For the record: the Secretary of State, desperately scrambling before a potent legal challenge, changed requirements for acquiring voter ID four separate times, ultimately only requiring that someone basically walk in and ask for one. The story received extensive coverage in the national media, from The Nation and Daily Show to the Washington Post and New York Times.
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena around Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Southwest corner of 17th and Vine streets -- You can gussy it up with all the trees and statues you want, but it's still a shitty surface parking lot. For the last 40 years, this lot, which had a perfectly good historical building on it, has been sitting empty, collecting dust (and cars). This lot needs a future ... and fast.
This lot started its development life in the mid 19th century as a row of five super-gigantic rowmansions. These huge fuckers, 36 feet wide, were half of a small group of such houses that flanked the long lost 1700 block of Summer Street. In 1872, the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital and Infirmary for Nervous Diseases moved into 1701 Summer St., the easternmost of the row.
This hospital was the only one in the region that served patients with physical deformities and worked as a discovery point for new kinds of human variation. Say you had a horn growing out of your ass: you would go there to get treatment while being looked over by the region's top Asshornologists. It was also one of the first hospitals to study neuroscience, something so new at the time that they might as well have been studying The Coming of Tan as far as anyone was concerned.
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