Posted inArts

A clarion call to talk about whiteness to save democracy

Our podcast this week revisits a previous guest, actor April Matthis. She’s starring in “Help,” a play at The Shed written by poet and Yale professor Claudia Rankine, which runs through April 10. We last talked to Matthis in June about making ends meet as an artist in the pandemic, thanks to a grant from the Knight Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund via URL Media. What a difference these 10 months have made. Here’s a sneak peek of the conversation between her and Epicenter’s publisher S. Mitra Kalita. Tune in to listen to the whole conversation tomorrow morning. Edited excerpts:

Posted inSchools

Brooklyn school sheds name of slave-holding family

It took five years, but P.S. 9 in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, finally ditched its school sign, which had featured the name of a slave-holding family name. The school is replacing it with Sarah Smith Garnet, the name of the first Black woman to serve as a public school principal in the city. This process started back when a parent at the school first realized that the school’s namesake, Democratic congressman and historian Teunis G. Bergen, came from a family of slave owners. 

Posted inSchools

Hundreds of sports teams to form over the next two years

We previously wrote about a class-action lawsuit that was filed in 2018 that alleged that the city’s policies for funding and allocating high school sports violated the New York City Human Rights Law. Finally a settlement was approved by a state court this month that requires the DOE and the Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) to form 200 new high school sports teams by the Spring 2024.

Posted inSchools

Data of 820,000 NYC students hacked

Back in January, the software Illuminate Education, which the Department of Education uses to track grades and attendance, was hacked. Illuminate Education runs familiar platforms like IO Classroom, Skedula and Pupilpath. This breach gave hackers access to 820,000 current and former NYC public school students’ names, birthdays, ethnicities and other information. Fortunately, social security numbers and family financial information were not collected. Banks called for city, state, and federal investigations into the breach, expressing his outrage about the lack of standard critical safeguards in a New York Post story. 

Posted inCriminal Justice

Reimagining NYC’s borough-based jails

In 2017, then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to closing the Rikers Island jail complex, by proposing “borough-based” jails. The $8.3 billion project meant four new jails would be built across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, housing a total of 3,300 people. The Manhattan jail would be located in Chinatown, with construction lasting until at least 2027; the proposed 40-story jail would be the tallest in the world. New Yorkers, especially those who live and work in Chinatown are overwhelmingly opposed to the plan. Most New Yorkers don’t want a jail built in their neighborhoods, but at the same time they want Rikers to close down due to the history of violence, deaths and poor living conditions for the inmates.