CPD IN THE NEWS

NJ.com - 05-06-2015 -  Newark's schools should add more social services and community programming to tackle issues of poverty afflicting local neighborhoods, a group of education advocates said Tuesday.

Dubbed the "community school" model, schools should strive to address needy students' health and emotional needs, teach content beyond what is included in standardized tests and include parental input in the decision making.

NJ Communities United organizer Roberto Cabanas told a packed audience in Kings Family Restaurant & Catering, that the district could work local nonprofit organizations to support a wider range of student needs.

"We need to bring the village inside of the school," he said.

Cabanas was one of four panelists at an education forum organized by activists and the city, including Newark chief education officer Lauren Wells, Evie Frankl of the Center for Popular Democracy and Mary Bennett of the Alliance for Newark Public Schools.

Wells said Newark Public Schools once adopted this approach about five years ago through the Global Village Zone, when the district attempted to turn around seven schools in the city's Central Ward.

At the time, the district announced that the program would implement longer days and provide more professional development and pay for teachers. Under the model, schools were set to turn schools into a place where students would be taught but also be able to go to health clinics.

"A community school is a place, a physical place, but it's also a practice," Wells said. "It is a way about going about doing things."

The program also sought input from teachers and parents when it designed it, Wells said.

"Teachers, specifically, at 18th Avenue School worked with the principal to design what (an) extended day would look like in their school," she said.

Bennett said when she was a principal in the district she tried to better serve students on probation by working with the county probation department to have one probation officer assigned to all the students in her school.

Under the community schools model, the district could streamline cooperation between government and universities, Bennett argued.

"You shouldn't have to spend a year to try and unify the services to support students," she said.

Frankl said districts around the country including in Baltimore, New York City and Lancaster, Pennsylvania are adopting this approach.

"Community schools can happen," she said. "There is no reason why a community school should not be the definition of a public school in the United States of America."

Source: NJ.com

In less than 20 years, one in every five Americans will be over the age of 65 and we will live longer than any generation before us. For those without adequate savings for retirement, those added years will be a time of uncertainty and dependency rather than leisure.

Connecticut is the latest state seeking to stave off this looming crisis in elder poverty, passing legislation to provide access to a state-sponsored retirement plan for the 600,000 Connecticut residents who do not have a plan through their employers. The bill will automatically enroll workers in businesses with five or more workers in a retirement plan overseen by a new quasi-public authority. Connecticut joins California, Illinois, and more than a dozen other states pushing for state-sponsored plans to encourage workers to save for retirement.

The accelerated pace of activity follows decades of wage stagnation that have left the average American worker with just half of what workers saved in the 1970s. Half of those nearing retirement have no retirement savings at all and those that do have savings have only enough to provide a median income of around $400 per month.

At the same time, employers have largely abandoned defined benefit pension plans that once guaranteed a minimum level of security based on salary and length of service, opting instead for plans that put the onus on workers to build up their own retirement accounts. Today, more than half of American workers have no private pension coverage at all.

Those who retire without a pension or sufficient savings will depend largely on Social Security for their retirement income, a system that will grow increasingly burdened as baby boomers retire, leaving fewer workers to cover the costs of each retiree.

This daunting reality has spurred states like Connecticut to act.

Innovation at the state level, however, is currently hindered by the federal Employment Retirement Security Act (ERISA), which generally preempts state action on private sector pensions. State legislatures have had to build language into bills making any plan contingent on an exemption from federal ERISA requirements. This burden creates uncertainty for both workers and state administrators, preventing many states from even exploring the possibility of a plan.

In response, the Department of Labor (DOL) is currently developing a safe harbor rule that would clarify how states can bypass ERISA requirements. The rule would let states develop the retirement security model that best suits their residents, while also learning from the successes and missteps of other state plans.

While the proposed DOL rule is a great first step, it does not go far enough in its present form. The rule is limited to states, but cities such as New York are also considering similar plans. They should be afforded the same opportunity to ensure a secure retirement for their residents.

In developing its rule, the DOL should aim to reach the largest possible number of workers, including those whose state legislatures are unable or unwilling to address retirement security. Including cities also allows for more tailored programs when demographics and industries vary widely across a state.

Preventing an elder poverty crisis will require creative solutions at all levels of government. The DOL should ensure that federal regulations foster that creativity, rather than stifle it.

By ANDREW FRIEDMAN

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Think Progress – October 25, 2013, by Esther Yu-Hsi Lee -

A Center for Popular Democracy report released on Thursday reveals that the majority of construction site accident victims in New York State are Latinos and/or immigrant workers. In an eight-year overview of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigations between 2003 to 2011, the researchers found that punitive measures to impose construction worker safety are often meager and its resulting criminal penalties are almost never followed through, especially at non-union work sites.

Only 34 percent of all construction workers in New York state are Latino and/or an immigrant, but they comprise 60 percent of all OSHA-investigated “fall from an elevation fatalities” in the state. That number climbs to 74 percent in New York City and skyrockets to 88 percent in Queens and 87 percent in Brooklyn.

Latinos, some of whom make up the 17 percent undocumented construction worker population, stay on hazardous workplace sites because refusal to work could mean deportation. A 2002 Supreme Court ruling makes it difficult for undocumented workers to seek basic labor protections because they weren’t legally allowed to work in the first place.

Many of these workers are in the US to support their families abroad. According to the New York Daily News, Daniel Basilio, a Mexican immigrant from Hidalgo, fell four stories and died on route to the hospital. Hours after he died, his wife in Mexico gave birth to his second child.

Basilio’s tragedy is just one of 400,000 construction site deaths that have occurred since 1970. One study showed that at least 85 percent of day laborers were “routinely abused,” including receiving substantially less pay than was agreed upon, receiving bad checks, being unable to take breaks or water, and subjected to robbery and threats, and exposed to chemical wastes and occupational hazards.

New York State has had worker protection laws, like the Scaffold Law, in place since the 1880s. That law makes owners and contractors directly liable for providing a safe workplace for workers who are otherwise too afraid to report unsafe conditions. Owners and contractors must provide worker’s compensation and health care for medical care, pain, and suffering if their safety equipment cause serious injury.

But the Scaffold Law is hard to implement given that OSHA fines are meager and do little to improve construction site violations. Penalties generally run between $2,000 (for a serious injury) to $12,000 (for a fatality)– a paltry sum equivalent to the price of an used car. Also, OSHA inspectors have cut down on the number of OSHA visits due to budget cuts, to the point where an average workplace only receives an OSHA visit every 99 years.

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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., holds a town hall meeting at the Luis Muñoz Marin Foundation in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, Monday, May 16, 2016. Sanders arrived in Puerto Rico on Monday to talk about the U.S. territory's worsening debt crisis ahead of the June 5 primary.

The race for the Democratic nomination is in its final throes, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Hillary Clinton are fighting it out for every last remaining delegate. Puerto Rico’s June 5 primary — in which 67 delegates are up for grabs — will carry more political weight than usual, and the campaigns are lavishing attention on the island.

As he campaigned in the territory’s capital on Monday, Sanders laid out a bold proposal to help Puerto Rico dig itself out from $72 billion dollars in debt, but economists and former government officials tell ThinkProgress the plan is legally impossible.

Both Sanders and Clinton have urged Congress to pass a bill giving Puerto Rico the ability to declare bankruptcy and restructure its debt. But Sanders went further this week, demanding that the Federal Reserve act unilaterally to help the island if Congress continues to drag its feet on a bill to restructure the massive debt the Puerto Rican government says it cannot pay.

Ironically, the reforms Congress passed to rein in Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis — reforms Sanders supported — are part of why the Federal Reserve can’t do what Sanders is now demanding.

“If the Federal Reserve could bail out Wall Street, it can help the 3.5 million American citizens in Puerto Rico improve its economy and lift its children out of poverty,” he said. “Under current law, the Federal Reserve has the authority.”

Some progressive groups, like the Center for Popular Democracy, are voicing support for Sanders’ plan. In an e-mail to ThinkProgress, the director of the CPD’s “Fed Up” campaign said that if the U.S. government could find a way to prop up Wall Street during the 2008 crash, it can do the same for Puerto Rico.

“When the financial crisis hit Wall Street, they used all of their most creative legal minds and institutional power to design solutions that would protect the big banks from collapse; if they wanted to, Fed officials could similarly find appropriate solutions here.”

But other economic experts and former Federal Reserve board members told ThinkProgress that Sanders is mistaken. Ironically, the reforms Congress passed to rein in Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis — reforms Sanders supported — are part of why the Federal Reserve can’t do what Sanders is now demanding.

“The type of assistance Senator Sanders is asking the Fed to provide would not be legally possible,” said Donald Kohn, who served on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors from 2002 to 2010. “[It is] not what the Congress intended. Among other things, [the law] requires that any facility be broadly based and not intended for a particular troubled borrower.”

The reforms in the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill sharply curtailed the central bank’s ability to make emergency loans to struggling banks, partnerships, or corporations in order to keep them afloat. While questioning whether the Puerto Rican government counts as a bank, partnership, or corporation in the first place, Kohn also cited another section of the law saying the Federal Reserve must “prohibit borrowing from programs and facilities by borrowers that are insolvent,” as Puerto Rico will soon be, and that emergency lending powers are “not to aid a failing financial company.”

The Federal Reserve has given Congress the same message, and other fiscal policy experts agree. University of Pennsylvania professor Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on the Fed’s legal authority, told the Washington Examiner that Dodd-Frank “specifically forbids this kind of targeted bailout,” while Cato Institute director of financial regulation studies Mark Calabria added that “the intent and clear language forbids ‘one-off’ rescues to single entities.”

Warren Gunnels with the Sanders campaign argued in an e-mail to ThinkProgress that because only a fraction of Dodd-Frank’s reforms have been finalized and implemented, the Federal Reserve can still step in. “The Federal Reserve has the authority to facilitate an orderly restructuring of Puerto Rico’s debt through a reverse auction process that will lead to major haircuts for Wall Street vulture funds,” he said.

Still, most experts say it falls on Congress to act to rescue Puerto Rico. House Republicans introduced a bill this week that would allow Puerto Rico to restructure its debt, but would also implement an un-elected control board to oversee the island’s budget and cut the minimum wage from $7.25 to $4.25 an hour for workers under 25.

We don’t need more austerity for children in Puerto Rico who are going hungry.

Sanders blasted the proposal as undemocratic and a further burden on the poor. “We need austerity for billionaire Wall Street hedge fund managers who have exacerbated the financial crisis in Puerto Rico. We don’t need more austerity for children in Puerto Rico who are going hungry,” he said.

Regardless of the feasibility of Sanders’ Federal Reserve proposal, his pro-sovereignty and anti-austerity message resonated with Puerto Ricans on and off the island. Two prominent officials, including the mayor of the capital of San Juan, rescinded their endorsements for Hillary Clinton after Sanders’ visit, while other community leaders sang his praises.

“Bernie Sanders is the only candidate dedicated to the people of Puerto Rico,” said Jose Nicolas Medina, an attorney in San Juan. “Much of our problems are due the policies of Clinton. As first lady and as Senator, Hillary did nothing to help the situation of Puerto Rico. So we punish the Clintons with our votes.”

Others watching Sanders’ speeches told ThinkProgress they were inspired by his promise to allow Puerto Ricans to vote for either independence or statehood during his first year in the White House, and his characterization of the current U.S.-Puerto Rican relationship as “colonial-like treatment.”

“To have a candidate for president finally admit that Puerto Rico is a colony is historic,” said Phillip Arroyo, the former chair of the Young Democrats of America’s Hispanic Caucus and a Puerto Rican living in Florida. “He has planted a seed in the mind of the new generation. It will ultimately bear fruit regardless of whether he’s elected.”

BY ALICE OLLSTEIN

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