Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools

SHEVILLE, N.C. — In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C’s she got last spring — a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends’ houses and a motel.

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.

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A Medical School in Florida is Pairing Students With Low-Income Families

Miami - At the start of the new school year, a dream is finally coming true for Hanadys Ale.

She has wanted a career in medicine since girlhood, when she saw how compassionately a doctor treated her grandmother at their home in Cuba. But she interrupted her medical studies to move to Miami with her family. Now, having mastered English, she's back on track as one of 43 students in the inaugural class of the new medical school at Florida International University (FIU).

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The price is right

When San Diego got the go-ahead two years ago to withdraw from the federal government's long-standing public housing program, it came with the proviso that the city create a relatively modest 350 new housing units for low-income households.

The feds would be happy to learn that the city's housing agency intends to nearly triple that, thanks to a battered economy that has greatly depressed housing values.

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Prison dads try to break cycle

CHESHIRE, Conn.—When prison inmate Jordan Rambert, 19, contemplates his 2-year-old son's future, he imagines they are close and his son doesn't get into trouble.

Rambert, who is from New Haven, is serving 3 1/2 years at Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire for drug possession. At the prison, he has been taking a course on how to be a good parent.

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Momentum grows for national jobs march in Pittsburgh

With the Sept. 4 announcement that unemployment in the U.S. has hit an official high of 9.7 percent, organizing for the National March for Jobs on Sept. 20 in Pittsburgh and the Tent City in Solidarity with the Unemployed has reached a critical stage. Unemployed workers and their allies will be in Pittsburgh at the same time the G-20 Group of major capitalist countries will be holding their summit in that city.

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Pax Christi NJ Helps Organize Statewide Vigils to Keep Families Together

EWARK, NJ (September 15, 2009) - Ten communities throughout New Jersey are holding "Children’s Vigils" today as a part of a coordinated campaign by Pax Christi NJ and NJ Advocates for Immigrant Detainees called "We Are One Human Family" in support of children at risk of family separation because of immigration detentions or deportations. Immigrant rights advocates and religious leaders will gather with families at churches, parks and town halls in Bridgeton, Dumont, Freehold, Hightstown, Jersey City, Highland Park, Keyport, Montclair, Morristown, and Newark in support of the rights of millions of children living in families in which at least one parent is an immigrant.

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Help for homeless on the way to S.A.

Sitting in a room at Motel 6 with his wife and two daughters who have little more than the clothes they are wearing, Jeffrey Ryan is in tears.

His wife, Deborah, and daughters, Brittany, 13, and Kaylan, 10, try to console him. This is no vacation.

As much as the girls like to swim in the motel pool, they know why they are there. Just days earlier, the family was at Miller’s Pond Park wondering where they would sleep. They know that if SAMMinistries hadn’t helped by paying for the motel room, they could be living in that park.

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A ‘Little Judge’ Who Rejects Foreclosures, Brooklyn Style

The judge waves you into his chambers in the State Supreme Court building in Brooklyn, past the caveat taped to his wall — “Be sure brain in gear before engaging mouth” — and into his inner office, where foreclosure motions are piled high enough to form a minor Alpine chain.

"I don't want to put a family on the street unless it's legitimate," Justice Arthur M. Schack said.

Every week, the nation’s mightiest banks come to his court seeking to take the homes of New Yorkers who cannot pay their mortgages. And nearly as often, the judge says, they file foreclosure papers speckled with errors.
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