Today Erika Tindill, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, has an opinion piece in the Hartford Courant as it concludes a year-long project on the problem, including this blog and an editorial today.  A complementary piece is by Marc Ramia, a prosecutor whose work on behalf of domestic violence victims has been recognized in the New Haven region.

A couple of weeks ago, the New Haven Independent reported on New Haven-area implications of new laws on domestic violence in Connecticut, which include more funding for shelters and judicial and offender-monitoring progress, as well as efforts to counter teen dating violence in particular.

Posts to this blog on May 14, May 1, and many earlier occasions discussed related matters, including the "Stay at Home" Fundraiser of Domestic Violence Services of Greater New Haven.

An April 22 opinion article  argued, “No one should have to stay with an abusive partner or keep kids in a hazardous home because of a shortage of shelter space and staff. Much of the state’s safety, advocacy, counseling and preventive public awareness efforts come via underfunded regional nonprofit service centers. Public money and philanthropy must maintain a partnership to keep pace.”

The Partnership for Public Service and Thora Institute are two organizations whose websites have been mentioned previously on this blog, but not for some time.

Last night, a ConnPIRG canvasser came to my door.  It was not hard for her to persuade me to renew my membership.  As an April 12, 2009 post to this blog described, having canvassed for ConnPIRG several summers myself, I have an affinity for this consumer and environmental organization that engages college students and citizens in our state, as in other states with PIRGs.

Recently the Nightly Business Report on PBS featured news on credit cards; one source was Ed Mierzwinski, who was executive director of ConnPIRG the first three summers I was a canvasser.  He has now been at U.S. PIRG for more than two decades.  His blog is an excellent source on consumer issues.

According to this 2007 New York Times article, Barack Obama – reflecting on his early work with New York PIRG – told Ed Mierzwinski’s longtime colleague Gene Karpinski “I used to be a PIRG guy.  You guys trained me well.”

Here is news of Congressional legislation to create a grants program to establish Teachers Institutes in states throughout the nation.  The Senators’ and Representatives’ plan is modeled after the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute®.

As we mark 234 years since approval of the final draft of the Declaration of Independence, let’s remember Roger Sherman (1721-1793), the only man to sign the Declaration, the Constitution, the Articles of Association and the Articles of Confederation.  He was -- with John Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and Robert Livingston -- a member of the Committee of Five that helped review the drafting of the Declaration most closely associated with Jefferson.  Sherman also served as mayor of New Haven, among other roles. 

With some 15 million people officially unemployed – a record share of them, nearly half, for six months or more – the job market is profoundly affecting people of all ages.  Extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed is of concern not only to them but to a precarious economy.  Still, with summer underway, let us focus here on employment prospects for young people.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics , the proportion of young people who were employed in July 2009 was 51.4 percent, “the lowest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948.  (July is the traditional summertime peak for youth employment.)”  By last year, it was already apparent to what extent older and younger workers were competing for scarce jobs.

This year, a June 1 New York Times article reports, “Job Outlook for Teenagers Worsens ”  as “stimulus money that helped cushion some government job programs last summer is running out, and private employers are reluctant to hire.”  Already, the unemployment rate for those ages 16-24 “reached a record 19.6 percent in April, double the national average.”

Youth@Work is a public-private partnership that seeks to address related challenges for young people ages 14-19 in New Haven.  Beyond, Year Up is an example of a one-year program providing an older cohort (ages 18-24) technical and professional skills, college credits, an educational stipend and a corporate internship.  Public Allies works in New Haven among other cities in partnership with AmeriCorps and local organizations.

Already, more than two years ago, Andrew Sum et al. from Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies (which has also examined issues such as the consequences of dropping out of school, including in Connecticut specifically in an October 2009 presentation) decried in this April 2008 report “the continued collapse of the nation’s teen job market,” which peaked in 2000 with the broader economy.

 According to Sum et al., "Teen employment rates have been declining sharply since the fall of 2006, well before the national job market began to deteriorate, and the drop has accelerated in recent months. During the first three months of 2008, the teen employment/population ratio (E/P) averaged only 33.5%, implying that only 1 of every 3 teenagers (16-19 years old) was employed in any type of job during an average month over the January-March period. . . . Near the peak of the national labor market boom in 2000, the E/P ratio of the nation’s teens in the first quarter was 45.2% versus the 33.5% rate of 2008, a difference of 11.7 percentage points or 26% . The teen E/P ratio of 33.5% in the most recent quarter was the lowest ever recorded in the 60 year history of . . . data going back to 1948. If the nation’s teens had been employed at the same rate in 2008 that they had been in the first quarter of calendar year 2000, there would have been another 2 million teenagers working in the past three months. Job losses for teens over the past eight years have been quite severe for nearly all major demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic subgroups of teens, but the nation’s youngest teens (16-17), males, Blacks, Hispanics, and low income youth remain employed at rates below those of their respective peers. Low income, Black and Hispanic teens face the equivalent of a Great Depression."

Sum et al. continue:

"There are many reasons to care about rising youth joblessness. . . . The more teens work this year, the more they work next year. These path dependency relationships hold true for all major educational and demographic subgroups, especially among low income and minority youth. Less work experience today leads to less work experience tomorrow and lower earnings down the road. Disadvantaged teens who work in high school are more likely to remain in high school than their peers who do not work. Teens who work more in high school have an easier time transitioning into the labor market after graduation. National evidence shows that pregnancy rates for teens are lower in metropolitan areas where employment rates for teen girls are higher."

Such bleak accounts led me to reflect on the variety of summer and other vacation jobs I had between the ages of 12 and 21 in the 1980s and early '90s -- from mowing lawns, cleaning engines, stacking wood, throwing hay, and checking a hardware store's inventory, to door-to-door canvassing for environmental causes, working at a group home for adults with severe disabilities, and counseling and tutoring high school students in an Upward Bound program.  Not only the money earned but also the range of experiences (from mistakes and frustrations to inspiring rewards) were important to my own development personally and professionally.  Surely many other adults would cite similar influences and lessons learned from their adolescent years.

Every teen willing to work hard (beyond the classroom as well as in it) should have the opportunity to do so, if possible on a paid basis.  Summer jobs for youth are an investment in their futures and in our common future.

A June 13 New York Times article by Winnie Hu, "Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It," addressed engineering education in the early grades.
 
The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has offered a number of seminars on engineering -- among many others on STEM subjects (in addition to humanities and arts subjects) more broadly -- in response to requests from public school elementary- as well as secondary-grades teachers participating as Fellows.
 
For example, "Nanotechnology and Human Health" is the subject of one of the ten (New Haven or national) seminars the Institute is offering in 2010, five of them in the sciences or mathematics.
 
W. Mark Saltzman, Goizueta Foundation Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, is leading the nanotechnology seminar.  This is the fifth straight year Mark Saltzman has led such a seminar in which public school teachers have participated as Fellows, in order to strengthen teaching and learning of the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  His earlier seminars addressed "Engineering in Modern Medicine"; "Health and the Human Machine"; "Nutrition, Metabolism, and Diabetes"; and "The Brain in Health and Disease" – the last two national seminars, as is this year’s.

Martin Gehner, Professor Emeritus of Architectural Engineering, has led New Haven and national seminars on bridges, math, and architecture.
 
Eric Dufresne, who is John J. Lee Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Physics and Cell Biology, led a New Haven seminar on "Science and Engineering in the Kitchen" in 2009.
 
The curricular resources that teachers developed as Fellows in these and other seminars are available for non-commercial, educational purposes.

May 23 and 28 posts to this blog addressed aspects of India, such as the success of the new Delhi Metro (subway), and included reference to a March 23 New York Times article by Vikas Bajaj. 

This month, Bajaj wrote about how "Clogged Rail Lines Slow India's Development,"  while “Economists say India must invest heavily in transportation to achieve a long-term annual growth rate of 10 percent — the goal recently set by the prime minister, Manmohan Singh. But whether measured by highways, airways or — particularly — far-reaching railways, India’s transportation is falling short. Critics say the growth and modernization of Indian Railways has been hampered by government leaders more interested in winning elections and appeasing select constituents, rather than investing in the country’s long-term needs. It is one of the many ways that the political realities of India’s clamorous democracy stand in contrast to the forced march that China’s authoritarian system can dictate for economic development. A 40,000-mile, 150-year-old network, Indian Railways is often described as the backbone of this nation’s economy. And in fact it is moving more people and goods than ever: seven billion passengers and 830 million tons of cargo a year. But its expansion and modernization is not keeping pace with India’s needs.”

Another recent Times article covered Rahul Gandhi , potentially the fourth generation of the Nehru/Gandhi (Indira and Rajiv, not Mohandas) family to lead India.  Rahul Gandhi is striving to help the Congress Party oust Mayawati as chief minister of the vast state of Uttar Pradesh, and to gain parliamentary seats there.

Posts to this blog between December 21, 2009 and January 2 of this year included mention of Uttar Pradesh and Mayawati and of train travel between Delhi and Rajasthan.

A recent Pew study reports “14.6% of all new marriages in the United States in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from each other, according to . . . analysis of new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That figure is an estimated six times the intermarriage rate among newlyweds in 1960 and more than double the rate in 1980.This dramatic increase has been driven in part by the weakening of longstanding cultural taboos against intermarriage and in part by a large, multi-decade wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. In 1961, the year Barack Obama's parents were married, less than one in 1,000 new marriages in the United States was, like theirs, the pairing of a black person and a white person, according to Pew Research estimates. By 1980, that share had risen to about one in 150 new marriages. By 2008, it had risen to one-in-sixty.”

Such trends have received attention occasionally on this blog, such as in a March 22 post on the Census and demography that made reference to a January 25, 2009 entry noting a January 21 New York Times article by Jodi Kantor:  "A Portrait of Change:  In First Family, a Nation's Many Faces"  -- as well as a May 2006 commentary on the This I Believe website "Cushioning Globalization through Global Families"  and a similar, expanded June 2006 essay.

Yesterday John Wooden died, some 35 years after retiring from coaching UCLA to 10 NCAA basketball titles.  Wooden, revered by players and coaches for decades (despite a brush with scandal involving a program booster in his final years of coaching), was described in his New York Times obituary as a “dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was.”  Wooden kept sports in context, understanding “love” and “balance” to be primary in life.  An AP article included these Wooden maxims: "Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow"; and "What you are as a person is far more important than what you are as a basketball player." 

A January 24, 2010 post to this blog had cited Wooden (not to be confused with John Woodenlegs, quoted by Sarah Palin in a statement she mistakenly attributed to Wooden) on the theme of “competitive greatness.”  That January 24 post addressed UConn basketball, as had a January 26, 2009 post that referred to former UConn player Ray Allen, known as a “cerebral” player with interests well beyond basketball.  (Reading is among the causes he has promoted.)

Ray Allen and Emeka Okafor – who graduated in three years with a finance major and high GPA while leading UConn to the 2004 NCAA championship – are among the distinguished players  and people the Huskies have had under Coach Jim Calhoun. 

Calhoun’s biggest mistake was Nate Miles, whose recruitment apparently involved NCAA rules violations before he was expelled without ever playing a game.  Now UConn has joined UCLA, USC, Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Michigan and other schools whose accomplishments on the court have been marred by infamy.  Let’s hope the violations are an aberration that will not be repeated, that will lead to salutary reforms.

Nate Miles was the subject of an October 2008 piece, "Domestic Violence No Game"— which argued “our state university should win the right way” and, like a May 14 post to this blog last month, connected sports and violence. 

Readers are encouraged to support the "Stay at Home" Fundraiser of Domestic Violence Services of Greater New Haven.

A Virgin Atlantic flight scheduled to take former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf from Newark to London was delayed this week "after a passenger of Middle Eastern descent bought a one-way ticket with cash," according to a Trentonian report the New Haven Register carried.

My family flew Virgin Atlantic between Newark and London in December, including immediately after the Christmas flight bombing attempt. A January 2 post to this blog noted “Preschooler Pat-Downs” – when “Our children, ages 4 and 2, were patted down twice each as they went through security checks at Heathrow, in addition to having their shoes removed.  The next day, back home in New Haven, the kids had incorporated these security precautions into their play.  Brother and sister spontaneously were patting each other down, blissfully unaware of the real dangers behind the arguably absurd examination to which they had been subjected.”

Since then, U.S. policy on flight security seems improved, according to an April 2 New York Times report:

“Before Dec. 25, airlines were given the no-fly list of people to be barred from flights altogether and a second ‘selectee’ list of passengers to be subjected to more thorough screening. Those lists have been expanded considerably this year and now contain about 6,000 and 20,000 names respectively, officials said. The new system will send the airlines additional names of passengers not on either the no-fly or selectee list but identified as possible security risks because of intelligence about threats. Only the names of the passengers selected for extra screening, not the underlying intelligence, will be shared with airlines and foreign security personnel, officials said. . . . [According to one expert,] ‘I do think it makes sense to look at people and not nationalities.’  He said he also thought the new plan promised to do a better job of applying fresh intelligence to preflight screening. ‘It’s an experiment, and we’ll have to see how it works.’”

Alas, a BBC report today brings news that “More than 100 people are now known to have been killed in a train crash in eastern India. At least 145 people were injured – many critically – when two trains collided overnight in West Bengal. Police said Maoist rebels sabotaged the track causing the Calcutta-Mumbai passenger train to derail, throwing five of its carriages into the path of an oncoming goods train. But a spokesman for the Maoist rebels called the BBC to deny any involvement. . . . In April, 76 paramilitary troops were killed in an ambush – the single biggest attack on the Indian security forces by the rebels. Maoist rebels have in recent months stepped up attacks in response to a government security push to flush them out of their jungle bases. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described the insurgency as India's biggest internal security challenge.”

U.S. media including the New York Times and NPR have featured developments in India, including related to education, in recent weeks.  Selected coverage by the Times included Lydia Polgreen’s May 14 article, In India, Hitching Hopes on a Subway : “The Delhi Metro offers new hope that the nation's decrepit urban infrastructure can be dragged into the 21st century.”  This was a more favorable account than Vikas Bajaj’s March 23 article, India's Woes Reflected in Bid to Restart Old Plant , which maintained “For all the progress India has made in information technology and service-sector jobs, the country is still unable to provide reliable power, water, roads and other basic infrastructure to most of its 1.2 billion people.”   Another economics story, reported by the BBC, was the visit to India of U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in early April, following a New York Times preview  that noted “Bilateral trade has tripled in the last 10 years, to $37.6 billion. American private investment in India is worth $16.1 billion, about 10 times what it was in the late 1990s.”  But as a Times graphic shows, that $37.6 billion figure, for 2009, ranked just 14^th  among U.S. trading partners, immediately behind Singapore and ahead of Venezuela – and about one tenth of the trade with China (which ranked number two, just behind Canada and ahead of Mexico).

Weeks earlier, the metropolitan Delhi city of Noida was featured in a March 19 Times article by Jim Yardley, For India's Newly Rich Farmers, Limos Won't Do : “Land acquisition has created pockets of instant wealth and a new economic caste in India: nouveau riche farmers.”

Yardley’s March 24 article, Indian Students Wield Tests for College Spots , asserted:  “As India's middle class has steadily grown, so has the intensity of the competition for entrance into the country's universities. . . . The mania over testing underscores a fundamental disconnect in Indian education: Even as elite Indian students have achieved remarkable success studying overseas, the Indian educational system is widely considered to be failing both the tens of millions of students at the bottom, who drop out before high school, and the smaller pool at the top, who are competing for entrance into universities that are too few and too underfinanced. Education presents such a stubborn problem, especially access to quality education, that experts warn that the future advantages of India’s youthful population could become a disadvantage if the government cannot improve the system rapidly enough to provide more students a chance at college. Of the 186 million students in India, only 12.4 percent are enrolled in higher education, one of the lowest ratios in the world.”

The Times reported this month on a teacher from China working in Oklahoma who observed cultural differences between education in China and the U.S.: “My life in high school was torture, just studying, nothing else,” said Ms. Zheng. . . . “Here students lead more interesting lives,” partly because they are more involved in athletics, choir and other activities. “They party, they drink, they date,” she added. “In China, we study and study and study.” . . . Ms. Zheng said she believed that teachers got little respect in America. “This country doesn’t value teachers, and that upsets me,” she said. “Teachers don’t earn much, and this country worships making money. In China, teachers don’t earn a lot either, but it’s a very honorable career.”

. . .

On April 1 a new education law (enacted in 2009 after a 2002 constitutional amendment) took effect, providing for a free and compulsory education for all Indians ages 6 to 14.  The Voice of America and the Times of India provide information almost entirely absent from major U.S. media.  Implementation of the new law is uncertain with the extreme range of quality among Indian schools, in particular the corruption that infects many government schools.

NPR’s reporting from along the Grand Trunk Road asked, "In India, Can Schools Offer Path Out of Poverty?"  A city in which my wife lived for several years as a child was examined; the story was evocative for her in its statement that “Muslim girls almost never stay [in school] beyond the onset of puberty.” 

My wife’s family is Muslim, and her impoverished great-grandmother departed from this common pattern when she (herself with little schooling) insisted that her daughter – my wife’s grandmother – pursue education.  The daughter went on to become a school principal, and her daughter (my mother-in-law) and granddaughters adopted academic careers.  The rarity of that in India’s Muslim community is suggested by my wife’s recollection that in the early 1990s, she was one of only two Muslims in her high-school cohort of fifty – substantial underrepresentation given a Muslim minority population in India (some 13 percent) so large that only Indonesia has a greater number of Muslims.

This blog’s early January 2010 and late December 2009 posts addressed aspects of India (including the Delhi Metro and a Noida mall), during and after a recent trip there, as did a September 2009 post.  

Experiences with education in India and in China  can be glimpsed in a film – on how academically oriented high-school students often spend their time in those countries versus most of their counterparts in the U.S. – mentioned in a June 2009 post and again in a December 3 post: "Two Million Minutes."

A May 6 New York Times article noted At Virginia, a Vigil and the First Attempts at Healing:
UVA President John Casteen said he hoped Yeardley Love’s  death at the hands of George Huguely “inspires an anger and a sense of outrage” about violence.  “If your relationship is toxic, seek help,” Casteen said. . . . “Don't hear a scream, don't watch abuse, don't hear stories of abuse.   Speak out.”

In Connecticut, Amanda Falcone’s May 6 Hartford Courant account notes the State Senate’s passage of three domestic violence bills and their provisions.

New Haven’s Clifford Beers Clinic since held a May 12 event that considered the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study of trauma’s long-term effects.

A May 1 blog post below discussed related developments, including the "Stay at Home" Fundraiser of Domestic Violence Services of Greater New Haven.

Tonight, my daughter and I enjoyed a moment that evoked a March 21 New York Times article by Michael Winerip, " Generation B:  A Father-Daughter Bond, Page by Page ."

In our family, as Mother’s Day turned to night, my wife and I were dividing pleasant responsibilities; she put our son to bed, while I read to our daughter.

We’ve been reading E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan after having finished Stuart Little.  These were two of my favorites as a kid, as was Charlotte’s Web, which we will turn to next.  Re-reading these books to my nearly five-year-old has been a treat, especially the sharing of a story and intermittent conversation with her but also the rediscovery of White’s writing.  In addition, my daughter and I recently have been enjoying several of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books together.  For his earlier children’s classics, White won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1970, the year The Trumpet of the Swan was published.

My daughter has gradually been gaining confidence and facility in letter recognition, but not until tonight had she read, or at least successfully guessed, a phrase.  That first happened when we came to an illustration of Louis the (mute but accomplished) swan holding a slate around his neck, with the following words proclaimed in chalk to his intended sweetheart swan, Serena: “I LOVE YOU.”  Without prompting, my daughter said what those letters meant.  What more could a smitten dad ask than to have his little girl – entirely unscripted – make those words the first she had ever read?!

Thanks to the New Haven Public Library for its role in what promises to have been a memorable family experience, assisted by this blog as a recording device. . . .

A Family Literacy Forum was held in Fair Haven earlier in the spring.

According to a May 3 New York Times Editorial:  The New Haven Model  "A new teacher training and evaluation system in New Haven shows what can go right when school districts and unions work together."  The editorial notes, "The city of New Haven and the American Federation of Teachers deserve high praise for the new teacher training and evaluation system they unveiled."

An April 26 Times Editorial:  When the System Works  contends "The Education Department has vowed to fix failing schools. It will need comprehensive, district-wide programs, like an innovative one that is working in North Carolina." 

That April 26 editorial urges paying "close attention to what is happening in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.  Two years ago, district administrators adopted an innovative staffing system intended to put the best principals in the most troubled schools ­ and give them the autonomy they need to succeed. While Charlotte was already one of the highest-performing urban systems in the country, it has made progress since then. Under the Strategic Staffing Initiative, principals who have improved student performance at their current school are given bonuses and allowed to recruit new leadership teams in exchange for moving to chronically low-performing schools."
. . .

In 2009, the Charlotte Teachers Institute was launched, joining the school district in a partnership with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Davidson College.

Teacher Appreciation Week begins today.  Resources include:

http://teacher-appreciation.info

http://myteachermyhero.com

http://teachingquality.org

http://teacherleaders.org

http://teachplus.org

The New Haven Register published an April 22 opinion article, "Domestic Violence Is a Public Challenge" -- days before the Connecticut House approved related legislation following recommendations of a task force.  Now the Senate has through May 5 to pass the three bills this session.  An earlier report concerned a West Haven police effort to counter the problem.  Beyond Connecticut, revelations that he had discouraged accountability for an abusive aide contributed to New York Gov. David Paterson's decision not to run for re-election.

This blog has addressed domestic violence periodically, such as on January 20 of this year and in an October 2008 opinion piece, "Domestic Violence No Game" - which touched on athletes and the more positive role sports could play in this area. 

Readers may wish to support the "Stay at Home" Fundraiser of Domestic Violence Services of Greater New Haven.

Earth Day has expanded to Earth Month.  As that month concludes, below are curricular resources related to environmental sciences, and math.

A February 17 post to this blog had discussed Michelle’s Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, nutrition, health, and the environment, including curricular resources.

John Wargo, Professor of Environmental Risk Analysis and Policy and author of the book Green Intelligence, has led several Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute seminars.  For example, see volumes of curriculum units on Energy, Climate, Environment and Urban Environmental Quality and Human Health  that public school teachers have developed as National Fellows.

In an earlier, New Haven Institute seminar that Oswald Schmitz – like John Wargo a member of the Yale Environment School faculty – led on “Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation,” Fellows developed curriculum units including “Cycles of Life in an Urban Habitat: Changes in Biodiversity,” by Pedro Mendia-Landa (then a bilingual elementary school teacher and now supervisor of bilingual education for the New Haven district).

Another Yale faculty member, Gary Brudvig – who is Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry – has recently led national seminars on Green Chemistry and Renewable Energy – the latter of which is also the subject of a 2010 New Haven Institute seminar.

David Bercovici, Professor of Geophysics, led Institute seminars on “Forces of Nature” (2008) and “The Science of Natural Disasters” (2007).  Resulting curriculum units teachers produced as Fellows included a 2007 unit by Zakia D. Parrish, Ph.D., on “Greenhouse Gases: The Chemistry Behind the Culprits.”

. . .

Other  resources include:

http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/sustainability

http://www.solaryouth.org

http://www.nhep.com

http://www.greenmyparents.com

http://www.environmentconnecticut.org

http://www.connpirg.org

http://www.1000friends-ct.org

http://www.cdc.gov/Features/EarthMonth/

http://www.yale.edu/uri

http://www.yale.edu/sustainablefood

A January 30 post below noted the death of my grandmother, who was named Dorothy and was born in 1912.

Yesterday her much more famous contemporary, the great Dorothy Height, died.

Vote for history teacher Leslie Blatteau's class trip to the Metropolitan Museum; her students are at the Connecticut Scholars Academy of Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven.

Today's New Haven Independent includes an account of last week's Family Literacy Forum.