I mentioned before about the terrorizing teens on the metro here and here. Checking the other blogs around Prince of Petworth has a report of an incident on the Red line, with many comments following. What got me was one of the comments of a woman who was targeted by two teenage girls who reached into her bags, and got a “what you want me to do about it” from the station manager when she reported it.
Tag: Kids
Gentrification Reducing Downward Mobility?
I really wish the findings of a Pew Trust report (PDF) regarding economic mobility was a little clearer. The best I could figure, before they threw in the math equation, which totally lost me, is that when a neighborhood decreases poverty a child’s chance of heading downward as he/she grows up decreases. Yeah, there are a lot of negatives, unfortunately it isn’t clear when you make the sentence positive that there is the data to back it up. A positive sentence would be that when a neighborhood becomes richer, or parents move into a neighborhood with less than 10-20% poverty, their children will grow up to become successful adults who make more money than their parents. What was clear was a child growing up in a poorer neighborhood where poverty was 20% or more is more likely to become poorer.
I was reading the report trying to figure out if gentrification, or the lessening of the rate of poverty in a neighborhood, had any positive for poor children who remain in the neighborhood. The best I can figure from the report is that it doesn’t hurt. Apparently there weren’t enough families in the study group who moved from poor neighborhoods to neighborhoods with less than 10% poverty whose children became upwardly mobile adults.
Scott Montgomery Student Hit by Car on NJ Ave
From the Shaw Neighborhood Listserv-
A female student from Scott Montgomery was hit on New Jersey Avenue after school. She was taken away in an ambulance but was still conscious.
Youth Jobs
I grew up in a mid-sized town in Florida. One day at a school assembly in the gym or cafeteria a person from Bob Evans came to speak to my high school about the franchise they were about to open up near the interstate. They were taking applications for waitstaff, bussers, etc and said it would be great after school work. I and a bunch of my friends applied. A guy named Michael from my group of friends got the job and held it from the time he was a junior until graduation. I, miffed that I didn’t get hired, started applying at other places around town and got a job at the Winn-Dixie at the age of 16. One of my friends got a job there too as bagger then stocker but about a year later got fired after an angry exchange with the store manager. Closer to DC and this century, my cousins in Laurel had the typical high school jobs working in the food service industry at the multi-national corporations of Pizza-Hut and Wendy’s.
So someone explain to me the city’s summer jobs programs. I’m a bit confused. Can’t kids get year round after school jobs? Which I believe is good prep for balancing college and “work-study”. So far this year we’ve seen youth produced green litter, tree destruction, and vandalism?/shoddy workmanship.
Before this year my knowledge of the program came from my (now retired) aunts’ description of whatever city sponsored intern was assigned to her at NGS. Some students were hits, with a great attitude, self-motivated, and talented with a wonderful work ethic. But there were several misses, of students who didn’t follow instructions, barely showed up on time, and screwed up so badly that she had to undo their work/damage. The bad ones were sometimes so clueless to their poor work that one asked for a referral letter. Then again, I’ve encountered college aged interns that bad too.
Getting back to the city program, what I don’t get is do these kids, or don’t they, have after-school work opportunities throughout the year? Is it cheaper than summer school, which serves the same purpose of keeping them out of trouble?
I guess what I’m trying to say is this large city sponsored youth employment thing is foreign to me. I’m not entirely sure what it succeeds in doing well. So somebody explain it to me.
13 year old boys are idiots
A neighbor kid along with his little friends were in the alley behind my house and for some reason one of them decided to break a window. I was in the backyard trying to get my little grill going to roast some peppers when I heard the crash of pane glass. Pane glass breaking has a different sound from glass bottles and car windows. I immediately hopped up on a chair to see what was up and saw a group (5 or more) kids running down the alley. I screamed at them and then recognized one and told him he was in trouble.
I went into the alley to see if they actually broke a window, and if so, was it to an occupied house. There was a couple peering over the fence and apparently the kids broke their window, we talked and I told them which house one of the kids lived in. Later I called another neighbor to get the phone number of the adult responsible for the kid I recognized, so I could give her a heads up. As far as I know the police have not been involved yet, and it looks like everything going to be worked out between the adults.
Reflecting on this, boys are idiots. It would have been pointless to ask “what were you thinking?” They probably weren’t. And to do something so stupid “one block” from where you live, very stupid.