Monday, May 6th, 2013
Bronx kids who want play ball in a new league would have to abide by the No. 1 rule: Give back to the community.
The proposed Community Board Athletic Leadership League – C-BALL – would require participants, boys and girls ages seven to 17, to regularly attend community board meetings. Abdul “Sleep” Johnson, the founder of C-BALL, brought together community board officials from the around the borough March 15th to launch a campaign aimed at starting the league by next year.
“This is a league like no other,” said Johnson, a Community Board 3 member and founder of Yo! Magazine, a publication produced by children in after-school programs.
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Friday, May 3rd, 2013
In less than a decade, the number of same-sex couples adopting a child has almost doubled to 19% in the United States. Meanwhile, same-sex marriage has been legalized in ten states, including New York, which changed its law in 2011. Joint adoption, which allows two people of the same sex to adopt a child together, has been legalized in several states, while it remains a case-by-case decision in others.
Brian Esser and Kevin O’Leary, a couple from Brooklyn who married in 2009, adopted their son Keith two years ago. It took Esser and O’Leary 16 months of paperwork – and $40,000 – to start their family.
Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
Five classrooms at a Head Start center in Woodside are filled with young children learning to read, write and count.
In one classroom, students sing in English, Spanish and Bengali and dance to “La Bamba.”
The coming months could see fewer low-income families in the area receive childcare and early childhood education services because of federal budget reductions. Many of the families include immigrants from Latin America and South Asia.
The cuts are part of sweeping federal budget reductions known as the sequester.
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Thursday, April 18th, 2013
A shy teenager held the microphone tight in his hand, his St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His voice cracked and he stumbled over his words as he thanked everyone for coming to the show. It was the first time the boy, Mathew Searles,16, had ever performed in front of a formal audience. The drummer kicked the drum pedal and in an instant the auditorium was awash in blue and pink lights.
They illuminated Searles as he stood in the center of the stage.
Behind him a full band complete with back-up singers swayed to the music and began to sing “Never, never, stop.”
Searles began nodding his head in time with the rhythm and started to rap the lyrics he wrote only two months earlier with the aid of professional musicians. He got the opportunity to create his song through a new collaboration between Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute and the Department of Probation in New York City.
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NY Bureau Probation Concert from JJIE Multimedia on Vimeo.
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