February 11, 2014 – RI Future

February 11, 2014February 12, 2014

Jorge Elorza: School transportation ‘a matter of priorities, not cash’

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Housing Court Judge Jorge Elorza, who is running for mayor of Providence, said the city has to find the money to offer transportation to students who live more than two miles from school.

“We need to dramatically decrease the minimum distance for students to receive bus passes,” Elorza said in a detailed statement released this afternoon. “With a total city budget of $662 million, we must make it a priority to find the $1.35 million to fund passes for the 2,100 students who live between 2 and 3 miles from school. $1.35 million is only 0.2% of the total budget. This is a matter of priorities, not cash.”

A new report and the Providence Student Union have called attention to Providence as a regional outlier in that it doesn’t provide transportation to high school unless the student lives more than 3 miles away. Most districts in Rhode Island and other cities in the region provide transportation at two miles.

He wrote: “As a community, we have to do everything in our power to make sure our students are in their classrooms and learning. Our students face too many challenges for us to be creating additional institutional barriers for them. Denying students who live between 2-3 miles away from school bus passes impacts learning, impacts health, and impacts safety, and our low-income communities are disproportionately affected.

When I was a child growing up on Cranston Street, my Mother acted as the school bus for many kids in the neighborhood. Although we were lucky to have her there to bring us to school, not every student is as lucky as we were.”

February 11, 2014

How Building Futures is building both RI and the inner city economy

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Evidence that apprenticeship programs help the community and its people can be found all over Providence, in both the projects and the people Building Futures has helped bring together.

There’s Brian Pack who said he’s always worked “dead-end jobs” before Building Futures helped him learn a trade and join a union. Or Hassan Brown, of South Providence, who got his first decent construction job on a project at Brown University through Building Futures. Or Varsana Sihavong, whose career as a carpenter he owes to a Building Futures apprenticeship helping to build a CVS in northern Rhode Island.

“There just aren’t many programs out there that target my age group,” he said. “There are programs for teens, but very few for adults. It’s been a great opportunity.”

Building Futures, a partnership between the Prov Plan and organized labor, helps the construction industry in the Ocean State find new talent from inner city Rhode Island.

According to its website, “Building Futures is both a program that helps prepare low income men and women in urban areas for rewarding careers in the commercial construction and an initiative that partners to expand entry-level training opportunities in the trades through proven apprenticeship programs.”

Started in 2007, Building Futures and has trained more than 150 inner city adults to work in the construction industry. And according to members of Rhode Island’s congressional delegation, it’s the kind of program that needs to be expanded if the skills gap is to be eradicated and Rhode Island rebuilt for success.

“Building Futures is a terrific program that helps young people, especially those in low-income, urban communities, build the foundation for a career in commercial construction,” said Senator Jack Reed. “It is helping to close the skills gap by creating opportunities in the building trades through established apprenticeship programs.”

Congressman Jim Langevin said, “The skills gap has had a particularly significant impact on our state, preventing many individuals, especially those from underserved communities, from getting back to work. This partnership provides an excellent model to create employment opportunities and develop a qualified workforce to take advantage of them.”

February 11, 2014February 11, 2014

Peoples’ Pledge update: ‘went well’ campaigns still ‘far apart on scope’

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Clay Pell, Gina Raimondo and Angel Taveras have so far largely agreed with one another as they stake out their campaigns to win the Democratic primary for governor. But not so much when it comes to a potential Peoples’ Pledge, according to John Marion, the executive director of Common Cause RI, who oversaw the two hour conversation the three candidates had about it on Monday.

“The sides are pretty far apart on the scope,” said Marion, “but once they present some language I hope things will move along quickly. Everyone indicated a desire to get this done.”

Here’s the statement Marion sent to me when I asked him to comment:

It went well. We got through the ground rules discussion pretty quickly and had a long (2 hr.) conversation about the substance of a possible Pledge. The parties agreed to draft language and circulate it to the group by Monday. By Tuesday I’m going to touch base with everyone and try to set up the next meeting. The sides are pretty far apart on the scope, but once they present some language I hope things will move along quickly. Everyone indicated a desire to get this done.

February 11, 2014

Today is the day to fight back against the NSA

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All across America today – and in Providence at 1pm – Americans will fight back against the National Security Agency and remember Aaron Swartz, the internet activist who took his own life last year and fought alongside Rhode Island’s own David Segal to keep the NSA off of random American hard drives.

Segal, a former RI state rep who ran for Congress in 2010, and Swartz together created Demand Progress, a progressive organization that fights for net neutrality and against domestic internet spying by the US government.

Today that organization is leading some of the biggest names on the web in a national day of action to draw attention to the NSA proactively searching everyone’s computer for evidence of wrongdoing. Occupy Providence helped organize the action at Kennedy Plaza at 1pm today.

“Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency’s mass spying regime,” Segal said in a press release. “If Aaron were alive he’d be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings.”

Demand Progress is joined by the ACLU, Upworthy, the Progressive Democrats of America, Reddit, Tumblr, Mozilla, Greenpeace and Amnesty International in sponsoring this day of action. And the National Journal reports that Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL and Microsoft also joined the cause Monday.

According to National Journal:

“organizers are promising that banners will be prominently displayed on websites across the Internet urging users to engage in viral activity expressing their opposition to the NSA. Additionally, those banners will ask readers to flood the telephone lines and email in-boxes of congressional offices to voice their support of the Freedom Act, a bill in Congress that aims to restrict the government’s surveillance authority. It remains unclear to what extent Facebook, Google, and the others will participate, or whether they will host such banners on their individual sites [Ed note: no doodle today].

And if you don’t yet understand why you should care about the mass surveillance sweeps the NSA is doing to every American, watch this video: