Quit Your Job and Go to Work
This spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in her Google Express jacket, fresh off...
This spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in her Google Express jacket, fresh off delivering a mirror. Her van beckoned at the curb. It was branded in Google’s playful primary colors and logo, and on the side was the image of a package getting dropped from a parachute, easy-peasy. Michanne’s job was to make same-day, seamless deliveries of bottled water and kitty litter for Google Express, but she doesn’t actually work for Google Express — not directly, anyway. If you looked carefully, just below the van door, a few small, gray letters spelled out something most people didn’t realize: this vehicle wasn’t Google’s after all. It belonged to a company called 1–800Courier.
That day had actually been a good one. Michanne, who is 27, had worked the full eight hour shift that she’d been scheduled by 1–800Courier — one of several companies that delivers for Google Express in the Bay Area, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York City. But full days like that were becoming rare. (She didn’t want to use her last name for privacy reasons.)
When I called her back a month later and asked her to rate her job from 1 to 10, she was more upfront about her level of annoyance: “If 1 is a nightmare, I’m like a 1.5.” In fact, she’d quit.
Her complaint came down to this: she says 1–800Courier had verbally assured her full-time work when she started with the company back in October. It was a paycheck the new mother was counting on, one that didn’t leave her time to work another job. And in the company’s scheduling app she was technically scheduled for 40 hours a week for weeks in advance.
Yet, increasingly, her actual hours were decided the day of work. Michanne had to check her email an hour and a half before her first shift started to see if she would actually get to work the hours she’d been allotted. Many times she did not. She was a supposedly full-time employee who was, effectively, on-call. She’d put aside the day so she could work, but when it turned out they didn’t need her, that meant no work — and no pay.
In April, an email plunked into Michanne’s inbox, describing what she says was business as usual:
Even when she got the go-ahead to turn up for the day, Michanne’s shifts would often be cut once she was already at work. Around 5 p.m., as she ate in her van during an hour-long meal break, she would frequently get a call from the dispatcher, telling her to go home early without working her scheduled second shift. She’d still get paid something— California law mandates payment of between two hour and four hours of “reporting time” depending on the length of a cancelled shift. But it was still a huge issue: Although she was expected to be on-call for 40 hours a week, shift changes meant she was regularly dipping down to 25 hours of paid work, and even once as low as 17 hours, she recalls. At $13 an hour, she was hoping for $520 of work each week — but 17 hours is just $221.
Google pointed questions towards its contractor, which manages all scheduling for its deliveries. 1–800Courier’s California Director of Operations David Finney said that across the industry, the delivery business slows down after the holidays. “I personally empathize with that,” he said about employees whose hours get cut. “But at the same time, look at any industry in the state of California — especially in the service industry — and some days it’s just like ‘Hey, we’re sorry, we don’t need you to come in.’”
Another employee of 1–800Courier, who asked to remain anonymous so as to not irk the company, says the scheduling problems were sometimes bad for the company, too. Back in January and February, when business seemed especially slow, this worker would clock in and sit in the delivery car near the hub for hours, waiting to be dispatched. “I’d have movies picked out to watch, I got a pillow and took naps, and had stuff I wanted to read and write. I’m getting paid to do nothing. But I wouldn’t call
[dispatch] and say, ‘I need a route.’ It didn’t bother me at all.”
What did bother the Netflix-watching worker was this: more than 10 times during seven months on the job, their first shift was cut while it was already happening. But the worker was booked on to a second shift, and was made to wait around until that started. Since driving the vehicle back to the parking lot in Silicon Valley from the San Francisco dispatch hub would eat up most of the time, the worker would often drive to the movies or the mall in the city to kill time until the second shift. (The worker once got written up for taking the vehicle to Safeway during that time — saying they expected employees to just wait in the vehicle for the next shift, or drive it back to the Silicon Valley lot.)
The complaint is echoed by another former 1–800Courier worker who recently quit: “I was really getting irritated. They said ‘it’s not as high demand right now, we don’t have a lot of orders coming through, so we’re cutting the hours.’” A couple times, while the worker was in a carpool on the way to work, the dispatcher would call and say, “Oh, we removed you from the 12–5 window, you can just work for 5:30 to 10. I’d just go home and say ‘Remove me from the last window.’” The current driver says things have picked up lately, especially after a major lay-off of drivers in March that has given those who remain more work to do. 1-800's David Finney wouldn’t confirm a layoff, but said drivers are now regularly working overtime hours.
The whole idea behind the on-demand economy — touch-of-a-button delivery, often guaranteed within minutes — creates the potential for a sudden rush or dearth of customers at any moment. So how does a company make sure that the right amount of workers are around at the moment it needs them to be?
You’d think that this is something that Google, the emperor of analytics, might be able to figure out. But the company it had chosen to organize the deliveries, 1–800Courier, had not. Sometimes workers lucked out and watched movies in their cars, but more often they suffered for their employer’s failure. There may have been an abundance of employees scheduled for shifts, but ultimately the people were just as on-demand as the Costco kitty litter they delivered.
Outside of Silicon Valley, American labor is looking a lot like this already. The old, sanctified status of “employee” is getting egged in the face. The days of blue-collar job, suburban tract home, Disney vacay, and pension awaiting at the end of the 9–5 rainbow looks like a curious blip on the way to a more profit-maximized, capitalist future. It’s the age of the precariat: unions are nearly kaput, many will only know pensions from history books, and most “at will” workers can be fired as easily as Uber can kick its drivers off the app. Now many old titans of industry have latched onto this idea of on-call shift work — which many call “just-in-time scheduling,” — a grayish labor abuse tailored for the age of the text message that has lawmakers hustling to curb it.
Since the recession, millions of workers have taken part-time gigs when they’d prefer to have full-time ones — especially in hospitality and retail. And those part-time jobs increasingly jerk the workers around: In a University of Chicago study of young workers in hourly jobs, 41 percent said they got their shifts a week or less in advance. It gets worse from there: as a recent story in Harper’s Magazine laid out, companies use software to track customer flow down to the minute; resulting in managers who ask workers to be on call for work shifts, or clock out while on the job and hang around without pay during slow times to see if the workflow will pick up. Sarah Leberstein is a senior staff attorney from the National Employment Law Project, which has been monitoring the hellish scheduling practices. “The companies want to unload all the flexibility onto the workers, but workers can’t afford to live in such a state of flux.”
This spring, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to 13 national retailers including Urban Outfitters to Target to Gap to Sears, questioning them about using software tracking systems and whether they made employees get the go-ahead for work less than a day before a shift:
Re: Request for Information Regarding “on call shifts”
Our office has received reports that a growing number of employers, particularly in the retail industry, require their hourly workers to work what are sometimes known as “on call shifts” — that is, requiring their employees to call in to work just a few hours in advance, or the night before, to determine whether the worker needs to appear for work that day or the next. If the employee is told that his or her services are not needed, the employee will receive no pay for that day, despite being required to be available to appear on the job site the next day or even just a few hours later on the same day. For many workers, that is too little time to make arrangements for family needs, let alone to find an alternative source of income to compensate for the lost pay.
If “just-in-time scheduling” sounds a whole lot like on-demand work, that’s because it is.
It’s not just in America that this practice is increasing. In Europe, it’s called the “zero hour” job — you’re promised work, but guaranteed nothing. And these contracts have been causing controversy in Britain ever since the financial crisis, which saw a dramatic rise in the number of just-in-time jobs as employers offloaded their risks onto the workforce. Today, almost 2 million jobs in the U.K. are now on-call. In some cases, workers are denied the benefits of full-time employees, or are prevented from finding other paying gigs without the permission of their employer — even if that employer cancels all of their shifts.
And it’s not just service industry jobs: zero hours have spread into other areas of the British economy, too. Recent figures suggest 13 percent of all healthcare workers and 10 percent of all education jobs are now in the same kind of hole that Michanne found herself in. (Finney from 1–800 said he does not consider the company’s scheduling to fall into the “just-in-time” trend.)
“The writing on the wall is we’re going to see more of an Uber and Lyft approach to workforce management in more industries,” says Carrie Gleason from the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based labor and social justice nonprofit. “You can see that in the just-in-time scheduling — you only want to pay for people when they’re doing the most productive work. The cost of doing business is put on the worker, so any time they’re not producing a car fare or a retail sale, it’s the worker paying for that time, not the company.”
On-demand companies pitch themselves as ultimate disrupters, breaking free of stuffy, old-world straitjackets of work. For many companies in this exploding area, there are no zero hour jobs — because the jobs have no set hours at all. The workers are independent contractors, not employees, and, at many companies, can log into work when they choose. In fact, Silicon Valley’s Chief Optimism Officer, Marc Andreessen — the venture capitalist who is funding Lyft and Instacart to build our app-based freelancer future —recently waved away a reporter’s comment about the precarious app workers in the New Yorker:“Maybe there’s an alternate way of living,” he said. “A free-form life where you press the button and get work when you want to.”
It also saves companies payroll taxes, wages, benefits — and the headache of scheduling workers. (“What other job out there can you just turn it on when you want to start and off when you want to stop — whenever you feel like it?” asked Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in his five-year company anniversaryspeech last week.)
“Uber doesn’t care if 100 or 200 are reporting to work because Uber will get the same percentage of the fare” says Leberstein, the National Employment Law Project attorney. “They’re shifting the burden of deciding whether there’s enough work onto the workers.” Many companies go so far as to give drivers a weekly breakdown on the most high-earning hours — in fact, there are entire apps dedicated to helping workers track that for themselves.
Companies claim these freedom-loving toilers will flee the moment they’re pinned down by shifts or bureaucracy. Their own internal studies suggest this is true: one Uber-commissioned poll of drivers showed more than 70 percent preferred to be their own boss rather than work a 9-to-5. About 50 percent of Lyft’s drivers drive five hours a week or less. A survey by the Freelancer’s Union found 42 percent went freelance to have more flexibility in their schedule.
“If everybody has to work a certain amount of hours, then it would put the model at risk because then it would be a very rigid model,” says Pascal Levy-Garboua, the head of business at Checkr, and organizer of a conference about the on-demand economy held in San Francisco last month. He has driven for Lyft in the past anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week to see how it works for himself — then goes months without driving at all. “That would be the opposite of on-demand. Demand and supply are elastic, and the model works because there’s an equilibrium. If supply” — the industry’s term for what the rest of the world usually calls “workers” — “is not elastic, the model breaks.”
Yet a survey of more than 1,000 workers released last month by Requests for Startups, a tech-booster newsletter, popped a hole in what had been the great selling point of contract work in the new economy:
Work hours are demand-dependent despite the touted schedule flexibility. Although schedule flexibility is the #1 stated reason for joining a company as a contractor, ‘Peak hours / demand’ ranked highest amongst influencers of their work schedules, with nearly 50% selecting it as a very important influencer (‘My Family’ was the 2nd highest at 35%). This influence is particularly glaring when comparing current vs. ideal hours of ridesharing respondents, whose responses suggest that their ideal working hours aren’t too far off from the traditional 9–5.
Among the top reasons for leaving the job were insufficient pay (43 percent) and — spoiler alert for industry cheerleaders — insufficient flexibility (26 percent). In short, while the apps may be good for people who have another job and merely want to pad their income, if workers want to make a living on these apps, they actually have little flexibility — they need to work full-time or more, and they better be signed into work during the peak times.
The on-demand workplace is not one-size-fits-all: while complete flexibility works well for driving services with a 24-hour demand and a ready stable of drivers, companies dependent on burritos and Thai take-out reaching hungry customers have to be a bit more organized about who is on hand at meal times.
To get around this problem, many companies have started doing to their independent contractors exactly what 1-800Courier does to its employees: schedule them onto shifts.
At Postmates, an on-demand food delivery company, contractors sign up the week before for shifts in down-to-the-hour increments — those who confirm their availability are offered potential jobs first, meaning they can end up making substantially more than those hopping on the app to work spontaneously. As further motivation, Postmates also guarantees couriers who sign up for shifts a minimum of $15 an hour on weekends — if their jobs don’t add up to that, Postmates will pay them directly.
Scheduling contractors is a legally gray thing to do — since shifts are one of the IRS’ criteria in determining that a worker is an employee. (Indeed, Postmates, like many companies, is currently facing a lawsuit over classifying the couriers as contractors.)
Postmates says they aren’t shifts, exactly: workers aren’t bound to the hours they pre-select — they could just not sign into the app during the shift. Yet there are consequences. If they miss five of their allotted hours in a week, they’ll be suspended from work for 48 hours, as this email forwarded by one courier warns:
In order to avoid banishment, Postmates contractors ask for swaps on the app, much like employees have to do when they can’t make a shift.
And, like ridesharing companies, Postmates has another mechanism to get unscheduled contractors out on the road during peak times: its own surge-pricing model called “blitzes.” While the courier’s take of the delivery fee always stays the same —80 percent — blitzes increase that fee two or even three times the usual amount.
Postmates also polices the workers once signed in: one courier in New York City who asked not to be named (he didn’t want to get kicked off the app) showed me texts from the company: sometimes Postmates asks him why he’s not accepting more jobs, sometimes it commands him to stop only accepting jobs that he determines will be worth his time, and sometimes it suspends him temporarily from the app entirely. A Postmates spokeswoman says the real-time texts are aimed at getting feedback on why certain jobs aren’t attractive to couriers.
The take-away: as traditional jobs are looking more on-demand, on-demand contractor ones aren’t looking as flexible as they claim.
So where does that leave us? Employment and contractor labor models already seem to be converging at some sort of semi-flexible purgatory.
In the eyes of those who cry that companies like Uber or Lyft or Postmates are getting rich off exploiting a labor loophole — blithely skipping out of paying wages, benefits, and expenses like gas because they classify workers as freelancers—companies like 1–800Courier are actually playing the good guy. (Or at least the less evil guy.) The company has official employees which it pays $12.50 to $13 an hour, plus worker’s comp, overtime, and expenses, including gas and the occasional parking ticket.
“I do want to go on the record to say we try really hard to do right by our employees,” Finney from 1–800Courier says. “We’re not going to pass that cost onto someone else so we can save a buck… We’re practically one of the only companies in the state of California that uses the employee model. It’s the right thing to do, and, in the long run, it will be the best solution because we’ll be able to provide the best service because we have employees. With independent contractors, there’s a lot of control you give up because you can’t tell independent contractors what to do.”
Still, 1–800Courier's own problems show that employers in the on-demand economy have to be adept at managing their workflow. Otherwise they’ll lose money on wasted labor when there’s low demand, or be caught short when there’s a sudden surge.
This is not impossible. Already some on-demand companies claim to have figured it out.
One vocal proponent of employees in the industry is Managed by Q’s CEO Dan Teran, who has written about the decision to employ its workers to clean and manage offices in New York City. Their workers get to choose their work days and receive a steady schedule, and the company books them at worksites that are on convenient subway routes from their home or other job sites. Still, the company gets off easy since most of the workflow is pre-determined and consistent week to week.
The San Francisco food service Munchery has been also held up as one of the good guys in the new push-button delivery business — one of a short list that employs its couriers. One San Francisco bike messenger named Jennifer told me Munchery pays $18-an-hour plus tips from a collective tip pool — much higher than minimum wage. Still, Munchery experienced its own trip-ups. Jennifer told me that after she started working for them at the beginning of the year, there were too many messengers working the four-and-a-half hour dinner delivery window. “They were just sitting around waiting. I was told that it had been really slow for many months,” she says.
Around the end of January, Jennifer says Munchery laid off 11 bike messengers. (CEO Tri Tran would not give details of the company’s staffing, but says the layoffs were not a huge correction considering the size of his payroll: “Ten people we need to shift around — that’s a very small number for the workforce we have.”) Munchery also gets out ahead of its demand by putting parameters on how instantaneously “on-demand” it can be: outside of San Francisco’s city limits, you have to have ordered dinner by 2:00 in the afternoon, and choose an hour-long delivery window.
The workflow problems seem to be resolved for now. Since the layoffs, Jennifer says she’s delivered a steady flow of meals with little loafing.
Still, Munchery has a strong advantage: people generally eat dinner at a predictable time. Consistency is a harder promise in truly in-the-moment businesses, like Uber and Lyft, Postmates, or Google Express. How can employees ever be scheduled with perfect accuracy in those businesses? Does an hourly employee have to work rigid shifts?
Shannon Liss-Riordan is a Boston-based labor attorney suing many on-demand companies over their attempts to classify workers as contractors. She says flexible shifts aren’t incompatible with employee status: “That’s total BS. Employees can have flexible work schedules, employers are doing that all the time. All of these arguments being made are real red herrings that they’re trying to throw out there. It’s part of the whole ‘Oh, the workers love this, because they love the flexibility.’ You can give them flexibility, andpay their worker’s comp. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.” She cites one precedent-setting California case about cucumber growers who were found in California Supreme Court to be employees, even though they could set their own hours.
Of course, salaried, white-collar workers — who can call their own shots and rarely earn overtime — often have a great deal in flexibility at work. That’s harder for employees getting paid by the hour. Could part-time employees log in and out of work willy nilly, paid by the hours they actually work? Highly unlikely. If companies have to pony up for the workers, there’s little benefit to them for allowing workers to come and go as they please. Shelby Clark, executive director of Peers, which helps on-demand workers find and manage their workload, has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the base cost of having employees. Companies only start recovering their employee costs if workers are putting in a baseline of hours, but not overtime, “so you’d probably have a floor and a cap [on hours], and then not more than eight hours a day. You’d start to see a lot of constraints that defeat why people work in the sharing economy.”
That’s exactly what the disgruntled New York City Postmates courier told me. Despite getting pestered by texts to accept more jobs and bad tips, he explained why he stayed: “The only thing I like about this job is the freedom and flexibility.” Take away that, and he’d do what companies fear the most, especially as the competition for these workers grows: he’d never sign in for work again.
Which was exactly what Michanne at 1-800Courier did, after being forced to be flexible when she wanted stable work. In late April, she quit. Ironically, even though she was an employee, her reasons for leaving were the same as all those on-demand workers who were surveyed: lack of flexibility and low pay. She now works at a car dealership, 9-to-6.
It appears 1–800, on the other hand, is only ramping up. In the last month, the company has blanketed Craigslist with job ads for Google Express drivers to deliver for a “new upscale concierge service,” “a really cool company” to deliver retail items to homes and businesses around Silicon Valley. “It makes me wonder why they fired all those people, if they’re just going turn around and hire more,” the current employee told me while sitting in her van waiting
for a second shift to begin last week. “Just so you can fire everyone again?”
Among the listed perks in the ad? “Stable schedules” and “multiple shift choices.”
Source: Mic
Hispanos afrontan barreras de idioma en NY, según informe
El Diario – August 5, 2013, by Ruth E. Hernández - Las agencias del Gobierno estatal de Nueva York tienen importantes...
El Diario – August 5, 2013, by Ruth E. Hernández - Las agencias del Gobierno estatal de Nueva York tienen importantes carencias a la hora de facilitar el acceso a sus servicios a los más de $2 millones de personas y familias que no dominan el inglés, según un estudio presentado hoy.
“Todavía queda mucho por hacer para romper las barreras del idioma y asegurar que reciban una competente y consistente asistencia”, señala el “Informe de Acceso a Lenguaje”, que destaca que esta situación dificulta a estas personas el poder obtener servicios básicos como el carné de conducir o denunciar un crimen.
El estudio, de la organización Se Hace Camino Nueva York, es el primer informe que se publica luego de que, en 2011, el gobernador de Nueva York, Andrew Cuomo, firmara una orden ejecutiva para garantizar que inmigrantes reciban, en los seis idiomas más hablados, los servicios de agencias estatales que brindan ayuda directa a la comunidad.
“Con esta orden la administración del gobernador Cuomo no sólo tomó un paso importante para garantizar el acceso a servicios del gobierno a los que aún no dominan el inglés, sino que demostró liderazgo a nivel nacional en este asunto”, indica el informe de la entidad sobre las agencias que más en contacto están con el público.
Sin embargo, reveló que, un año después de entrar en vigor esta medida, los inmigrantes afrontan dificultades para tener acceso a servicios importantes como puede ser un carné de conducir, recibir los cupones de alimentos porque los formularios no han sido traducidos en su idioma o solicitar el desempleo, entre otros trámites, dijo a Efe Theo Oshiro, codirector de la organización.
Entre los hallazgos destaca, que pese a los esfuerzos de las agencias gubernamentales, la mayoría de los inmigrantes no están recibiendo documentos importantes traducidos en su idioma, tal y como estipula la orden ejecutiva.
Cita como ejemplo que en Buffalo sólo el 11 % de los hispanos afirma recibir la documentación en su idioma, mientras que en los pueblos de la región central del estado la cifra fue del 45 %.
Igualmente el estudio mostró que a través del estado sólo el 45 % de las agencias están brindando servicios de interpretación.
En específico, señala que en el Departamento de Vehículos de Motor, una de las agencias que más público atiende, sólo se ofreció información en los idiomas establecidos en el 32 % de los casos, mientras que en el Departamento del Trabajo esta cifra aumenta al 61 %.
También indica que en aquellas agencias en las que se brindó esta posibilidad, el público estuvo complacido con la calidad del mismo.
En cuanto a la Policía estatal, Oshiro explicó que aquellas personas que acuden en busca de ayuda tienen que esperar mucho tiempo y que “no tiene ni siquiera puesto en su página que puede brindar servicios” en varios idiomas.
Durante la evaluación, los autores descubrieron que el estado contrata a agencias locales en varios de sus condados para suplir servicios, y que éstas están exentas de cumplir la orden ejecutiva.
“Eso no es aceptable. No entendemos por qué no les cubre la orden ejecutiva”, dijo Oshiro.
Indicó además que, aunque las agencias del estado con sedes en la Ciudad de Nueva York, mejoraron en un 15 % los servicios que brindan, desde que entró en vigor la orden ejecutiva, “el estudio muestra que les está tomando tiempo” cumplir con ella, lo que, según Oshiro, no es aceptable porque tuvieron tiempo para prepararse.
Entre las recomendaciones que aporta el reporte figura mejorar el acceso de interpretación y la traducción, desarrollar y distribuir una guía de cómo mejorar los servicios y establecer colaboraciones con organizaciones que estén en contacto con la comunidad que no domina el inglés.
El informe se realizó en cooperación con la oficina del gobernador y, de acuerdo con Oshiro, los autores se reunirán con sus representantes para saber qué pasos van a tomar para cumplir con la orden ejecutiva.
“El estudio es una herramienta para que la oficina del gobernador haga lo que deben hacer”, afirmó.
Source
Five takeaways from Colorado's campaign finance reports
Five takeaways from Colorado's campaign finance reports
KUSA - Candidates and campaigns had to file their latest round of finance reports to the Secretary of State’s office...
KUSA - Candidates and campaigns had to file their latest round of finance reports to the Secretary of State’s office Monday.
Here’s what we learned from reading those reports.
1) Tobacco companies have deep pockets.
The No Blank Checks in the Constitution committee has raised about $5 million to keep the tobacco tax in Amendment 72 from passing.
That’s more money than any other campaign has raised so far this cycle, and it all comes from one source: Altria Client Services.
The company is a subsidiary of Altria (formerly Phillip Morris) -- one of the world’s largest tobacco companies.
2) ColoradoCareYES is struggling.
The group pushing universal health care through Amendment 69 raised just $10,000 during the last filing period.
That brings their total to about $320,000. In contrast, Coloradans for Coloradans, has raised nearly $4 million this cycle.
In addition to its fundraising woes, the campaign has also suffered from some surprising opposition. Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Michael Bennet both oppose the amendment. And so does the liberal group Progress Now.
3) Most of the minimum wage money is coming from out of state.
The group Colorado Families for a Fair Wage wants you to vote to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.
But the majority of the $2.3 million it's raised comes from groups in New York and California.
The campaigns biggest donors are Civic Participation Action Fund, The Fairness Project and The Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund.
The campaign against raising the minimum wage is called Keep Colorado Working.
Most of its money comes from industry groups like the Hospitality Issue PAC, which had a Denver address.
That might make you think it’s local money fighting the minimum wage campaign, but the PAC’s funded by national companies like McDonald’s and the National Restaurant Association.
4) The physician assisted suicide campaign is raising and spending some serious cash
Yes on Colorado End of Life Options has raised about $4.8 million to pass Proposition 106, which would let terminally ill patients purchase medications to end their lives.
The campaign’s biggest expenditure is $2.9 million to Blue West Media for advertising. That means we’re likely to see a lot of ads about the proposition between now and Nov. 8.
5) Democrats are outraising Republicans in three key Colorado Senate races.
The winners of Colorado Senate districts 19, 25 and 26 will determine whether Republicans retain control of the chamber.
If Republicans lose all three races, the Democrats will likely gain control of the entire legislature.
All the Democratic candidates are ahead of their opponents when it comes to dollars raised so far.
The biggest gap is in Senate District 19. Incumbent Republican Sen. Laura Woods is $70,000 behind her challenger, Rachel Zenzinger.
We will have to wait and see whether more money translates into more votes
By 2016 KUSA
Source
Woman who confronted Flake 'relieved' he called for delaying Kavanaugh vote
Woman who confronted Flake 'relieved' he called for delaying Kavanaugh vote
Maria Gallagher, who on Friday confronted Sen. Jeff Flake with her story of sexual assault, said she was "relieved"...
Maria Gallagher, who on Friday confronted Sen. Jeff Flake with her story of sexual assault, said she was "relieved" when the Arizona Republican called for an FBI investigation into allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Gallagher, a resident of New York, stood next to Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, earlier Friday as the two held open the doors of an elevator Flake was taking on his way to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Soon after, Flake said he would vote to advance Kavanaugh's nomination to the Senate floor, but he said he wanted a vote in the full body delayed for one week while the FBI investigated the allegations.
Read the full article here.
No indictment in Eric Garner police killing
Reports indicate that a grand jury has decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner,...
Reports indicate that a grand jury has decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man. Garner died in July in Staten Island of neck compression, combined with asphyxia as a result of a chokehold applied while police officers were arresting him for the suspected sale of untaxed cigarettes. The incident was captured on cellphone video by Ramsey Orta who was a bystander. Garner had broken up a fight when officers attempted to arrest him. Pantaleo put Garner on the ground by the use of force, which included the use of a headlock resulting in Garner’s death. The city’s medical examiner later ruled the death a homicide. The NYPD is banned from using chokeholds, however, chokeholds are not illegal.
At a press conference Wednesday night, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Garner's family spoke about the grand jury's decision. Sharpton announced plans for a national march in Washington, D.C. on December 13 to urge the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the string of recent police killings of unarmed Blacks.
"We are dealing with a national crisis," he said. "We are not advocating violence, we are asking that police violence stop. Now you have a man chocked to death on videotape and says 11 times 'I can't breathe.'" Garner's wife, Esaw, said she did not accept the apology give by Pantaleo on Wednesday after the grand jury didn't indict him. She said she plans to move forward to get justice for her late husband.
"I'm determined to get justice for my husband," she said. "He should be here celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving and he can't. My husband's death will not be in vain. As long as I have breath in my body I will fight the fight."
Several Black and Latino congressional members, including Gregory Meeks and Yvette Clark, held a press conference in Washington, D.C. after the grand jury's decision was announced. The legislatures called for the Justice Department to step into the case. The U.S. Department of Justice is going to investigate Garner's death, according to reports. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that a federal civil rights investigation would be opened in the case.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, Public Advocate Leticia James and several city council members held a press conference in Staten Island on Wednesday to address the issue. De Blasio said that frustration over the grand jury's decision is understandable. "It's a very emotional day for our city. It's a very painful day for so many New Yorkers," he said. "We're grieving – again – over the loss of Eric Garner, who was a father, a husband, a good man – who should be with us."
The decision in the Garner killing by a grand jury comes just over a week after a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo. decided to not indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown. Peaceful demonstrations along with rioting followed the announcement of that decision. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton met with several elected officials in Staten Island before the decision was announced anticipating the reaction to the decision. Demonstrations were being announced via social media on Wednesday and took place Times Square, Grand Central and Union Square. A gathering was also planned for the nationally televised Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting set to take place in the evening.
Several groups including Communities United for Police Reform Justice Committee, Make the Road NY, VOCAL-NY, Center for Popular Democracy, Color of Change, Million Hoodies and Freedom Side announced they are organizing demonstration.
Source: Amsterdam News
Fed Up group plans counter Jackson Hole conference
The Fed Up coalition, made up of community activist groups, has rented a conference room in the same hotel where the...
The Fed Up coalition, made up of community activist groups, has rented a conference room in the same hotel where the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank will be holding its annual Jackson Hole conference starting Thursday.
The group said Monday it will bring in low-wage workers from around the country who are struggling to make ends meet to emphasize the need for the Fed to do more to attack income inequality.
"Our life is a constant struggle. We know we have to pay the rent, buy food and pay the utilities on a very limited budget," Dawn O'Neal, a teaching assistant at a day care center in Atlanta, told reporters on a conference call Monday.
The mother of four said she made $8.50 an hour at her job and her husband, who is currently unemployed, has been trying to earn money by lining up early in the morning to compete for part-time construction jobs.
Ady Barkan with the Center for Popular Democracy and campaign director for Fed Up said that before Fed officials "can have a real discussion of raising interest rates and slowing the economy, they should understand firsthand who it would effect."
Barkan joked that while the Kansas City Fed charges $1,000 per person for its conference, participation in the teach-in will be free. In addition to arguing that raising rates now would be premature, the group will hold discussions on ways to reform the Fed's current selection process for the presidents of the Fed's 12 regional banks.
The group has protested the recent selection of Robert Kaplan, a former top executive at Goldman Sachs and currently associate dean at the Harvard Business School, as the new president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, saying the selection process shut out input from community groups.
While the Fed announced in May that Yellen would not be attending this year's conference, Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer is scheduled to deliver comments on inflation during a panel discussion at Jackson Hole on Saturday.
Financial markets will be closely examining those comments for any hints about whether the Fed is still likely to boost interest rates at its Sept. 16-17 meeting despite a huge sell-off in recent days in stocks that saw the Dow Jones industrial average fall another 588.47 points or 3.6 percent on Monday.
Source: CNBC
Time for an accountable Fed
Time for an accountable Fed
Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke...
Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and then-Vice Chair Janet Yellen, released a proposal for reform of the Federal Reserve Board's governing structure in a press call sponsored by the Fed Up campaign. The proposal has a number of important features, but the main point is to make the Fed more accountable to democratically elected officials and to reduce the power of the banking industry in monetary policy.
Under its current structure, the banks largely control the 12 Federal Reserve district banks. This matters because the presidents of these banks are part of the Federal Reserve Board's Open Market Committee (FOMC) which determines monetary policy. At any point in time, five of 12 district bank presidents will be voting members of the FOMC, but all 12 take part in the discussion. The voting presidents will typically be outnumbered by the seven Federal Reserve Board governors, who are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, although there have been just five sitting governors for the last two years, as the Senate has refused to consider President Obama's nominees.
There is no obvious reason why the banking industry should have special input into the country's monetary policy. This would be comparable to reserving seats on the Federal Communications Commission's board for the cable television industry. While there is no way to prevent an industry group from trying to influence a government regulatory body, in all other cases, they at least must do so from the outside. It is only the Fed where we allow the most directly affected industry group to actually have a direct voice in the policies determined by its regulatory agency.
This is an especially important issue because the Fed's policies are so central to the health of the economy. If the Fed's fears over inflation lead it to raise interest rates to slow the economy and reduce the rate of job creation, there is little that Congress will be able to do to counteract the Fed's actions. For example, if the Fed wants to prevent the unemployment rate from getting below 4.5 percent unemployment, there will be little that Congress and the president can do to get unemployment lower. In that case, the Fed may have needlessly be keeping millions of people out work — disproportionately affecting minorities and less-educated workers — because of a possibly mistaken view of the economy's limits. Furthermore, by deliberately weakening the labor market, the Fed will be keeping tens of millions of workers from having the bargaining power they need to secure wage gains.
While governors who are appointed by democratically elected officials are likely to recognize the importance of reducing unemployment and balance it against the risk of inflation, the district bank presidents are likely to be less concerned about unemployment. It is worth noting that all the dissenting votes calling for more a hawkish stance since the start of the Great Recession have been cast by bank presidents. It is likely that the need to maintain the support of the bank presidents on the FOMC has prevented the Fed from being more aggressive in trying to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment.
It would be good to see the presidential candidates address the proposal put forward by Levin and the Fed Up campaign. There are very few areas of government that are more important in people's daily lives than the Fed's monetary policy. It literally determines how many people will hold jobs and has a huge effect on workers' wages.
While it would not be appropriate for the president or other politicians to try to micromanage monetary policy, they certainly should be setting its general course. This is analogous to the relationship with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). No one expects Congress or the president to decide which drugs get approved; however, if the FDA were to allow two years to pass in which it approved no new drugs, it would be entirely appropriate for Congress and the president to question its conduct. The same would apply if the FDA were found to regularly approve drugs that turned out to be harmful.
In the case of the Fed, it is appropriate for the presidential candidates to be telling voters what sort of people they would appoint to the Fed. It is also appropriate for them to comment on its governance structure, which can only be changed by an Act of Congress, which would have to be signed by the president.
Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
By Dean Baker, contributor
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Here’s Where You Can Donate To Those Affected By The Earthquakes In Mexico And Hurricanes In Puerto Rico
Here’s Where You Can Donate To Those Affected By The Earthquakes In Mexico And Hurricanes In Puerto Rico
After the recent earthquakes in Mexico and hurricanes in Puerto Rico, it can be heartbreaking to see, from afar, all...
After the recent earthquakes in Mexico and hurricanes in Puerto Rico, it can be heartbreaking to see, from afar, all the devastation people in affected areas are currently enduring. While we might be at a loss about how to help our family and friends in Latin America during these trying times, there are ways to help. Here’s a list of charities, fundraising campaigns and other organizations helping those affected in Mexico and Puerto Rico.
Read the full article here.
Black Unemployment Rate 2015: In Better Economy, African-Americans See Minimal Gains
International Business Times - March 8, 2014, by Aaron Morrison - Cyril Darensbourg has been unemployed for 10 years....
International Business Times - March 8, 2014, by Aaron Morrison - Cyril Darensbourg has been unemployed for 10 years. As shocking as he knows that sounds to those who don’t know him personally, the 48-year-old native of New Orleans had enjoyed a 15-year career managing restaurants in Chicago and New York, after taking a chance on a dream and ending his third year of studying electrical engineering in Louisiana. Years of job-application submissions and temporary work here and there has persisted for far too long. Darensbourg is one of close to 2 million African-Americans in the U.S. who are currently unemployed and looking for work.
Across the American economy, the dominant story during the past several months has been a sustained recovery that resuscitated a dormant job market and the accompanying unemployment rate that has plunged below pre-Great Recession levels. But if better days are here for many workers, this feeling is shared to a lesser degree by African-Americans, whose unemployment rate is still considered high and has long been double the rate for whites. Among black working-age people, however, the unemployment rate since February 2014 has dropped more quickly than among nonblack workers.
On the surface, that improvement should signal a triumph, but it is accompanied by an asterisk, given the fact that nonblack workers’ unemployment rates fell much earlier and faster during the recovery. Government data indicates recent job creation has been less beneficial to African-American workers when compared with whites, Asians and Hispanics: Basically, blacks had more ground to make up and their labor-force representation is skewed toward lower-wage industries in which there are higher turnover rates, one study found.
These clear-cut differences mean that for people such as Darensbourg, who have been out of work for periods of several months or several years, other factors exaggerate the length of their unemployment. Many African-Americans find it hard to dismiss completely the role that race plays in their difficulty finding work, even with federal laws making discrimination illegal. Studies have found that even when black applicants possess qualifications that are on par with white applicants, variables as simple as their names or as complex as the breadth of their professional networks can many times hold them back.
“I’ve never felt secure, in my entire adult life working,” said Darensbourg, who is now married with two kids and living with his family in a New York apartment. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 eliminated his management-level job at a restaurant located within the no-traffic zone, he was forced to look for work in other restaurants, which he said wouldn’t pay him at his previous annual salary of nearly six figures.
“I’ve been in disbelief,” said Darensbourg, a 6-foot-5-inch, 220-pound man who is often told his presence is at worst intimidating and at best unforgettable. During an interview for a job he was certain he would get, he recalled feeling his younger, white, female interviewer was put off by his size and confidence. “Over time, I didn’t know what to do,” he said of the experience.
“People in my situation are giving up. They are just adapting their lives to where they are. I’m not thinking about trying to buy a home or going on vacation. I don’t know how retirement is going to work,” Darensbourg said.
Unemployment Among Blacks Still High
In February, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 10.4 percent, while the comparable rates for whites, Hispanics and Asians were 4.7 percent, 6.6 percent and 4.0 percent, in that order, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday. The national unemployment rate was 5.5 percent last month. Last year, 23.7 percent of those who are black and unemployed had attended some college, 15.4 percent had bachelor’s degrees and 4.5 percent had advanced degrees.
A 2014 study by the Young Invincibles, a nonpartisan education and economic opportunity advocacy group, found an African-American college graduate has the same job prospects as a white high-school dropout or a white person with a prison record. The study attributed the gap to racial discrimination.
The experience of joblessness for African-Americans can have a lasting effect on their economic mobility, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal think tank in New York that released a report on black unemployment this week. It was prepared with the technical assistance of the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute in Washington. On an hourly basis during the past 15 years, black workers’ wages have fallen by 44 cents, while Hispanic and white workers’ wages have risen by 48 cents and 45 cents, respectively, according to the report. Black wealth has also shrunk, while Hispanic and white wealth has stabilized.
Since March 2010, black employment climbed by about 2.3 million jobs, a 15.0 percent increase, and the black employment-population ratio rose to 54.8 percent from 52.0 percent, according to government data. Over the same period, white employment climbed by about 3.8 million jobs, a 3.4 percent increase, and the employment-population ratio rose to 60.1 percent from 59.5 percent. Because whites had less ground to make up, the increase for blacks, while statistically significant, still wasn’t large enough to suggest that they reaped more than a modest share of the gains in the economic recovery.
Most jobs that came back during the recovery, close to 45 percent, were lower-wage jobs, such as those in the retail and service industries, according to the Center for Popular Democracy’s report. Those industries employ 1.85 million more workers today than they did at the beginning of the recession. The data indicate African-American representation is skewed toward the lower-wage end, rather than toward either the mid-wage range or higher-wage end, where fewer jobs came back.
The center said the U.S. Federal Reserve’s recovery initiative to stimulate job creation through its monetary policies has been most beneficial to workers in higher-wage industries and to workers in regions of the U.S. where those jobs exist, such as on Wall Street. Even with the apparently gloomy outlook, economists say things are improving for black job seekers. “The economic recovery is finally beginning to take hold,” said Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. “The rate of growth that we’re seeing now, this has only been happening for a year.”
Economists have stressed the Fed’s focus should be on genuine full employment. That’s been President Barack Obama’s argument for addressing joblessness among all Americans. But critics have said this approach ignores structural reasons -- lower educational attainment and higher rates of criminal convictions -- for African-American joblessness that is more prone to fluctuation than whites. “Assuming that monetary policy continues to function in a way that allows the recovery to proceed, the prospects for finding a job should improve for African-Americans,” Wilson said.
Education Can Make A Difference (Usually)
African-Americans who have achieved higher-education degrees -- a key investment leading to the middle class -- still find themselves more likely to face long-term unemployment than their white, Hispanic and Asian counterparts. According to the Center for Popular Democracy’s study, the only proven solution to this problem are those Fed programs that ideally stimulate job creation for workers of all experience and skill levels. But that still has not been robust enough to help the broadest swath of African-American workers.
Tamica Thompson said she could use preferential hiring consideration, although she didn’t believe she needed it before her long-term unemployment set in. Thompson’s difficulty in finding a job puzzles her. A 30-year-old born to Jamaican immigrants in New York, Thompson joined the U.S. Army in 2002, right after she graduated from high school. She was stationed in South Korea, and left active duty four years later to earn a bachelor’s degree in health-service management from Berkeley College in New York. She later obtained a master’s degree in public administration from Pace University in New York.
But even with those credentials and her military experience, Thompson has struggled to find a job that values her skill set. When she did interview for a promising job at a nonprofit development corporation -- for which the hiring manager told her she was the sole applicant -- she later discovered the position was given to someone else. She also worried that the formatting of her paper resume, which received a harsh critique from a job-placement counselor, was a factor in the length of her unemployment.
“I was unemployed for a good eight months until I found myself here,” Thompson said, referring to a stipend-supported internship for Operation: GoodJobs, a work-placement program run by the Goodwill Industries for Greater New York and Northern New Jersey, an initiative that helps military veterans and their families find jobs and training opportunities. The irony of her current situation is not lost on Thompson, who works to help other veterans find jobs while she scrapes by on the stipend. “Because I was not working, I was getting behind on my rent. I couldn’t do even the simple things anymore. Money was so limited for me. That caused me to be depressed, sad and angry. It’s a little better now, but I’m still struggling,” she said.
Race And Class Are Factors In Unemployment
Despite federal laws protecting women and racial minorities from discrimination by employers, several studies point to racial prejudices and favoritism as big contributors to how blacks fare in the job market. A 2004 study by the American Economic Review found job seekers with resumes that had so-called white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Names such as Jamal or Lakisha or others that are perceived as black-sounding names, received fewer callbacks. That racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry and employer size, researchers found.
Another study, conducted by the business school at Rutgers University in New Jersey, found that favoritism, or the race of the hiring manager, was a contributing factor to racial disparity in the workplace as well. The prevalence of a mind-set in the U.S. that the rich worked hard for everything they have and poor haven’t toiled enough certainly doesn’t help matters, said Sam Brooke, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that tracks racial disparity and hatred. “There’s a deep, fierce resistance to setting aside that idea,” Brooke said. “That’s an incredibly valuable part of the story that we tell about America. If you view it just through that lens, it’s hard to see how we’ll overcome” the disparities, he said.
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 made changes to a law passed in the 1960s that protected workers from intentional employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion and national origin. It also provided monetary damages in cases of proved discrimination. But few cases are won in U.S. courts, and a comparatively small proportion are resolved by settlements, according to federal data.
Darensbourg, the unemployed former restaurant manager, hasn’t considered a lawsuit against a prospective employer, even when he suspected that there was something more to its rejection of him than his qualifications. “I’m pushing my kids to do way better than I did in school,” he said. “I can’t pay for them to go to school. I don’t know how that would happen unless they got a scholarship. I tell my daughter that she is not just competing with the kids at her school; she’s competing with the whole world. I try to have them see stuff that my parents didn’t show me.”
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Family Resource Centers celebrate 25 years of removing barriers to learning
Family Resource Centers celebrate 25 years of removing barriers to learning
No two days at school are the same for Geri Willis. One day she’s finding hats and gloves for students, the next she’s...
No two days at school are the same for Geri Willis. One day she’s finding hats and gloves for students, the next she’s helping a grandmother navigate the court system to gain guardianship.
Some of her days are spent searching Ashland’s hotels for a student who hasn’t come to school for several days, others are filled with calls to social service agencies to find a student’s family a place to stay.
No task is too big or too small for Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, which serves two Ashland Independent elementary schools.
“We’ve even gone so far as to buy alarm clocks,” she said. “You do what you can to help your students.”
Geri Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, reviews shapes with students at Hager Elementary in preparation for a math-based quilting project. The center serves Hager and Crabbe elementary schools in the Ashland Independent district. (Photo by Kerri Keener)
Geri Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, reviews shapes with students at Hager Elementary in preparation for a math-based quilting project. The center serves Hager and Crabbe elementary schools in the Ashland Independent district. (Photo by Kerri Keener)
Kentucky’s system of school-based Family Resource and Youth Service Centers (FRYSCs), was created as part of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 as a way to remove nonacademic barriers to learning. Now in its 25th year, there are 816 centers across the state serving 626,696 students and their families.
“When we first came on board, it was the whole selling of myself as a coordinator, just begging people to let us be involved,” said Mike Flynn, youth services center coordinator for Estill County Middle School. ”Parents didn’t know what we were, schools didn’t know what we were. We had to break those barriers down.”
But 25 years later the centers are an integral part of most schools, he said.
“It’s a complete cultural shift. People automatically expect us to be involved with things,” Flynn said. ”They bring issues and problems to us. We are now really ingrained into the schools as a whole.”
Though they are part of schools, FRYSCs are run by the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
Schools in which 20 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch are eligible for a center. The center is then funded based on the number of students who qualify for free lunch, said Flynn, who is also past president of the Family Resource and Youth Services Coalition of Kentucky a statewide professional organization.
“Even though we are based on the free lunch numbers, we serve every student regardless of financial status,” he said.
Though centers are most known for helping students and their families in difficult situations or supplying food or clothing, that service isn’t required under state law.
Many people don’t realize all the other services the centers provide, which are required under state law– such as referring families and students to mental health and substance abuse counseling, offering career training, summer job placement for high school students and promoting family literacy. The centers also serve as a bridge between school, homes and the community.
In July, coordinators at attended the annual Victory over Violence conference where they received training on helping children from families of substance abuse, bullying prevention and how to involve families in students’ success.
Many centers also provide programs to bolster the learning going on in the classroom. Flynn has worked with teachers to plan math nights for parents. In the summer, many centers provide programing based around the free summer meals program.
“We provide workshops and activities for the kids, so you’re not just getting food but a little be extra instruction,” Flynn said.
Several national education groups have recently taken notice of Kentucky’s system of support centers. Doug Jones, manager of FRYSC Region 7 – which covers northeastern Kentucky led a group of 15 educators from six states last fall as they visited Kentucky to see how FRYSCs work.
The group, which included representatives from National Education Association, the Center for Popular Democracy and Communities in Schools, visited three centers in eastern Kentucky and two centers in Lexington.
“They are looking at Kentucky as a template for trying to legislate FRYSC-model programs across the United States,” Jones said.
The group brought more educators in December and conducted 35 videotaped interviews with students, teachers, legislators and coordinators.
“We are planning educational and motivational materials, legislative pushes and more,” Evie Frankl, organizer of education justice campaigns for the Center for Popular Democracy said in a release. “We are thankful for the Kentucky program for leading the way for so many years and for generously sharing their knowledge with us.”
The idea of resource centers in schools was new to Kentucky 26 years ago as KERA was being drafted. Some opposed their creation, but Harry J. Cowherd, the secretary of the Cabinet for Human Resources in 1990, championed the creation the FRSYC network.
The annual center of excellence award is now named for Cowherd. In November, Wilis and her center received the award for their work with homeless students.
Willis applied for and received a McKinney-Vento grant, which allowed the elementary schools to hire three home/school liaisons to help families get immunizations, physicals and other screenings and provided tutoring for 43 students living in a domestic violence shelter.
“A lot of our student population is from hotels, motels, shelters and public housing,” she said. ”We also have a lot of kids being raised by relatives.”
In addition to the McKinney-Vento grant, she received a $58,000 grant from BBT Bank for homeless students. Part of the money will pay for a nine-passenger van that will let Willis pick up parents who don’t have transportation so they can attend parent/teacher conferences. It also will be used take homeless high school students to co-op sites. Part of the money will pay those co-op students’ equipment for medical classes, she said.
Willis’ center serves Hager Elementary, where more than half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, Crabbe Elementary, where all students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch and a preschool/Headstart program. She works closely with administrators, teachers and staff to make sure she her students’ needs are being met and that teachers know what’s going on with their students.
“This staff is probably the most compassionate group of people I’ve ever met in my life,” she said. “They know and understand the situations that our students come from.”
Crabbe Elementary Principal Jamie Campbell, estimates that about 60 percent of his students will go through some kind of change that requires the resource center’s assistance.
“I am firm believer in the fact we have to make sure that their basic needs are met,” he said. “Because if you’re hungry, if you’re freezing, if you’re worried about safety where you’re going to be at home, if you are worried about that, I cannot teach you reading, writing and math.
“Geri and her team take care of that need for the teachers, it translates into students being able to come here and learn.”
Brenna R. Kelly writes for Kentucky Teacher, a publication of the Kentucky Department of Education
By Brenna R. Kelly
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