CPD IN THE NEWS

COMMERCE CITY — On a recent Saturday morning, about a dozen teachers from the Adams 14 School District walked through a trailer park asking parents how they could do their jobs better.

Christina Zavala, a parent of three students, had a list. At the top: stop the rampant bullying and pay more attention to her son, who has a learning disability.

“In my experience,” she said, “it doesn’t really feel like the teachers care.”

The cadre of teachers hope what they heard — good or bad — can help reshape their schools to better meet the needs of the mostly poor and Latino families that call Commerce City home. The teachers are advocating for a “community school model,” which in part calls for more partnerships with nonprofit groups to help curb the effects of poverty on the classroom.

“The only way we can make a difference with the families in our district is if we get involved,” said Barb McDowell, the Adams 14 teachers union president. “There are a lot of disenfranchised people. We’re not talking to the community.”

Relations between the Commerce City community and the 7,000-student school district have long been strained. Voters consistently have rejected pleas to increase local taxes to repair or replace aging schools and support educational programs. And in 2014, the U.S. Department of Education found the district had discriminated against Hispanic students and teachers.

The district’s response included more culturally responsive training for teachers and the creation of a committee of students to regularly talk about race issues.

Facing state sanctions for chronic poor performance on state English and math tests, the Adams 14 school district, just north of Denver, is overhauling many of its schools. The teachers union believes this provides an opening to put into practice some of the elements of the community school model. Schools are still finalizing their innovation plans, which are expected to be made public later this fall.

Teachers across Colorado are engaged in similar work. It’s all part of a statewide campaign organized by the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, called “The Schools Our Kids Deserve.”

The community school model can be traced back to the 1880s. Modern-day community schools have popped up in Chicago, Baltimore and Lincoln, Neb. Perhaps the most famous community school model is the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City.

In Colorado, the Edgewater Collective in Jefferson County and Blocks of Hope in neighboring Westminster Public Schools are two efforts to create something like a community school.

While supporters of the community schools model have long said that no two community schools should look the same because the needs of communities vary, there is a growing effort to identify common themes that apply everywhere, said Reuben Jacobson, deputy director for the Coalition of Community Schools.

The Colorado teachers union, working with the Alliance to Reclaim our Schools and the Center For Popular Democracy, has created its own list which includes strong and proven curriculum, community support services, and positive discipline practices.

Community engagement, like the work the teachers in Adams 14 are doing, is also a must.

Trish Ramsey, a teacher at Adams City Middle School, put it simply: “This is the first step to rebuild trust.”

By Nicholas Garcia

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Last weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a historic bill making California the second state in the country to automatically register voters. The new legislation will give 6.6 million eligible but unregistered voters an opportunity to exercise their citizenship right.

The bill, which registers voters who show up at the Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain a driver’s license or an identification card, follows record low turnout in last year’s midterm elections, for which only 42 percent of those eligible to vote in California went to the polls. California’s low turnout is a snapshot of what’s happening across the country.

Beset with long lines on Election Day, strict voter ID laws and teetering piles of paper records full of errors, the country’s voter registration system is fundamentally broken—leaving nearly a third of all eligible Americans unregistered to vote. By comparison, 93 percent of eligible voters are on the rolls in our neighboring country of Canada.

In the United States, we take pride in our democracy and freedom, and voting should serve as the cornerstone of that proud democracy. Automatic voter registration is critical to that democratic process.

Imagine if all 50 states implemented automatic voter registration. The Center for Popular Democracy did, crunched the numbers and found that a voter registration system collecting data from not just the DMV but also revenue agencies, the Postal Service and others could result in the registration of 56 million more voters. This is assuming that automatic voter registration systems would capture approximately 90 percent of the total electorate.

Right now, our state of democracy is far from what it should be. In the 2012 presidential election, a mere 133 million out of 215 million Americans eligible to vote exercised their right to do so. The U.S. ranks 120 out of 162 countries in electoral participation.

Our current outmoded paper-based voter registration system makes the process of registering to vote unnecessarily cumbersome, disproportionately disenfranchising low-income communities, blacks, Latinos and young people.

Roughly 62 million eligible voters are currently unregistered, either because they never registered or their registration information is incorrect. In a 2008 Current Population Survey, blacks and Latinos cited “difficulties with the registration process” as their reason for not registering to vote, while whites disproportionately reported not registering because they were “not interested in elections or politics.”

Automatic voter registration could change this scenario, and the tide is right now turning toward building a stronger democracy. Political leaders and grassroots movements across the nation are succeeding in pushing universal voter registration forward.

A strong democracy with easy access to voter registration would give power to communities frequently marginalized by the system. Universal automatic voter registration would provide power to push for causes such as affordable high-quality child care, better wages, job security and quality public education.

A truly democratic America doesn’t make its citizens jump through hoops to gain access to a basic entitlement: the right to vote. It’s time for automatic voter registration.

Source: Newsweek

Pittsburgh could easily become the next Dallas as frustrations in poor black neighborhoods continue to mount over perceived economic inequalities and mistreatment by police officers, black community members said Friday.

They condemned the attacks in Dallas that left five officers dead and seven officers and two civilians wounded.

They attributed the shootings to escalating frustration over socio-economic conditions in poor neighborhoods and repeated incidents across the nation in which officers were caught on video using deadly force to subdue minorities.

“These things will fester and grow and grow and grow,” said Connie Parker, president of the Pittsburgh branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “It's Texas right now, but it can be Pittsburgh next week.”

T. Rashad Byrdsong, president and founder of Community Empowerment Association, a Homewood-based nonprofit, said police officers have become a whipping post for deep-rooted problems beyond their control.

“The real problem is the inability of our public officials to sit down and come up with some comprehensive plan on how to include everybody in this democratic process,” Byrdsong said.

Pittsburgh has had its share of high-profile incidents. The most recent in January — the fatal shooting by Port Authority police of Tyrone Kelly Jr., a 37-year-old homeless man who fatally stabbed a police K-9 dog — drew protests. Police killed Kelly while attempting to arrest him for drinking beer on Port Authority property after he stabbed the dog.

In April 2009, Officers Eric G. Kelly, Stephen J. Mayhle and Paul J. Sciullo II were killed by Richard Poplawski while responding to a 911 call about a domestic disturbance at his Stanton Heights home

Pittsburgh police Chief Cameron McLay was in Washington for a conference when news of the Dallas shootings broke Thursday night. He and his command staff returned to Pittsburgh immediately to begin reaching out to community leaders. He said he was worried about the mood he'd find when he returned to the city Friday morning.

“I expected to find the atmosphere more tense,” he said, adding that city officers remain positive. “I'm really, really proud of them.”

Officers across Allegheny County said that it was impossible not to react emotionally to the massacre in Dallas. A Pittsburgh officer directing traffic Downtown called the mood somber but professional.

Malik Bankston, executive director of the Kingsley Center in Larimer, praised McLay and Mayor Bill Peduto for initiatives to improve relations between police and residents.

“To me, that's sort of the heart of the challenges we have right now, this whole idea of building trust,” Bankston said. “That's very unglamorous, thankless work that's only going to be realized over time, but there has to be a commitment from the highest level.”

Tim Stevens, chairman of the Black Political Empowerment Project in the Hill District, said Dallas is a pivotal moment for the nation to begin bridging a racial divide.

He said the majority of black people are horrified by violence directed toward police, but they also feel the justice system is weighted against them. He called on political and community leaders and residents to unite in an effort to find solutions.

“We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

Greensburg police on its Facebook page said that “no police officer wakes up in the morning wandering who they can shoot today. Realize that none of us are perfect, but we certainly strive to be the best that we can.”

 By Bob Bauder  & Megan Guza

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch - March 31, 2015, by Jim Gallagher -Fast-food labor organizers in St. Louis are calling for a tax day strike by low-paid workers on April 15, part of a national day of protest.

Organizers say they'll have rallies in Forest Park in St. Louis and in Ferguson. They are demanding minimum pay of $15 per hour. 

In St. Louis and nationally, organizers say they are expanding their demands for higher wages to include home health care workers and adjunct faculty members, including those at Washington University who voted in January to join a union.

Kendall Fells, organizing director for Fight for $15, said Tuesday the April 15 protests will include actions on about 170 college campuses, as well as cities around the country and abroad.

At an event announcing the actions in front of a McDonald's in New York City's Times Square, organizers said home health care aides, airport workers, adjunct professors, child care workers and Wal-Mart workers will be among those turning out in April.

Terrence Wise, a Burger King worker from Kansas City, Missouri, and a national leader for the Fight for $15 push, said more than 2,000 groups including Jobs With Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy will show their support as well.

"This will be the biggest mobilization America has seen in decades," Wise said at the rally as pedestrians walked past on the busy street.

In St. Louis, and around the country, fast food workers have been calling one-day walkouts and mass protests for the past two years to demand higher wages.

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