Talk Bronx New York

 ”If You Don’t Ask You Don’t Get” .. To Teen Program Activists RE Funds

 A Bronx neighborhood has done an end run around a city agency to get an after-school program for its teens, after years without one.

John Fratta, district manager for Community Board 11, has been complaining for months about the lack of after-school programs for local teens.

But the Department of Youth and Community Development responded that since no one in the district had applied for funding when they should have years ago, local kids were out of luck.

So Fratta, politicians and community leaders got creative.

The Mosholu Montefiore Community Center went grant hunting and secured $100,000 from the Boys and Girls Club, hopefully to be matched by the city Housing Authority for a program in the Eastchester Gardens Community Room this year.

“I know deep in my heart you are not going to get the bad kids off the street no matter how you try,” Fratta said.

“But we’re going to get those marginal kids that might become bad kids if they don’t have something to do.”

He said several other teen programs outside of the city youth agency are in the works, including one at an unused gym at Jacobi Medical Center that might become a community center.

Leaders are looking for funding for a Police Athletic League program.

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Xochitil Casanova, 19 (l.), with 1-month-old Mayte, and Rosalie Delgado, 19, are counseled by Romilda Grella

‘Babies’ Having Babies Statistics Grow In The Bronx 

Welcome to the bleak world of teen pregnancy in the South Bronx.

When Maria was smuggled across the Mexican border four years ago, she was hoping for a better life.

But Maria (not her real name), a pretty 17-year-old, didn’t enroll in school or learn English. Instead, she stayed in her sister’s apartment watching television. She eventually found work packing aromatic candles in a factory, where she met her now-18-year-old boyfriend.

With her mother living in Mexico and her father dead, Maria was eager to start her own family. She saw plenty of teenage mothers in her South Bronx neighborhood, became pregnant and moved in with her boyfriend’s family.

Without citizenship or an education, her chances of escaping the poverty plaguing the South Bronx are slim. As a teenage mother, her prospects are even bleaker. But in the South Bronx, Maria’s story is fairly common.

The South Bronx has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in New York City, according to the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, ahead of Central Harlem and North and Central Brooklyn.

Fifteen percent of girls aged 15-19 became pregnant in the South Bronx in 2005, compared to 9.4% in all of New York City.

The borough’s rate is double the national average.

“One of the things you have in the South Bronx is a high concentration of poverty — teenagers who have low access to jobs and education,” said Robert Leibson Hawkins, an assistant professor of social work at New York University. “Whenever you have that type of environment, you wind up having high rates of teen pregnancy.”

Hawkins explained that while most teens are aware of birth control, they don’t always use it. Since there is a lack of jobs and few of the youngsters attend college, teenage pregnancy doesn’t carry the same stigma often found in other communities. Read more..

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Take The Train To The Plane. Plans For LaGuardia Airport Train 

Freight rail lines could be converted into subway lines, new regional train stops could open in the Bronx and a train could take passengers directly to LaGuardia Airport under a 40-year plan proposed by the head of the region’s transit agency.

In a “State of the MTA” speech Monday, Metropolitan Transportation Authority executive director Elliot Sander proposed several long-range projects for the agency that runs the city’s subways, buses and suburban train lines.

The MTA could look to “underutilized or dormant” services like a freight rail line in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn and available land in Rockaway Beach in Queens to extend subway service in decades to come, Sander said.

Sander also said the MTA would explore creating a second AirTrain service to connect LaGuardia Airport to Long Island Rail Road service in Woodside, Queens, as well as light rail service on Staten Island and new Metro-North train stops in the Bronx.

Sander said the MTA would add $30 million worth of promised new service this year, increasing service on 11 subway lines and extending several bus routes.

SOURCE: USAToday.com

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Hip Hop Birthplace Saved

A Bronx building where a young DJ pioneered hip-hop in the 1970s has been saved from a plan that would have moved it from affordable to market rate housing, Sen. Charles Schumer said Monday.

Last year, tenants of the building reached out to DJ Kool Herc after receiving word that the owner planned to leave an affordable housing program that would have opened the door to rent increases.

During the 1970s, DJ Kool Herc began spinning records at parties in the basement recreation room of the Sedgwick Avenue building. The hip-hop movement then spread around the world.

The 100-unit apartment building has been deemed eligible to be listed on national and state registers of historic sites.

The affordable housing program, known as Mitchell-Lama, offers owners incentives such as low-rate mortgages and tax breaks in exchange for charging tenants low to moderate rents for a certain period of time.

Schumer said the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development rejected the proposed sale to developer Mark Karasick because current rents could not be sustained if the sale had gone through.

“This very positive development is the first step toward preserving affordability” for all endangered Mitchell-Lamas housing, Schumer said.

The HPD’s decision paves the way for tenants to negotiate directly with the owner, the senator said. The tenants are working on a plan to buy the building.

SOURCE: NewsDay.com

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Students attend an accounting class at the career-focused Bronx School of Law and Finance in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx.

Vocational Is Old School! They Are Now Called ‘Career Schools’ 

Eyeing a scrolling stock ticker flashing the latest prices, a 16-year-old high school junior, Raymond Rodriguez, said the other day: “That’s like my morning coffee.”

Wendys International was down; Intel was down; Allied Waste was down, and then another announcement rolled across the ticker:

Graduation is June 5. It was 10:30 a.m. at the Bronx School of Law and Finance, a small high school on the eighth floor of the gigantic John F. Kennedy campus in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx where students choose between two majors — law or finance — and then rack up a laundry list of practical skills, from how to wear a suit to how to trade stocks. (Mr. Rodriguez, a finance major, has invested about $100,000 in virtual dollars in Coca-Cola, Kellogg, and Xerox.)

This is the new face of vocational education, updated for the 21 st century, where securities class replaces shop and, rather than heading to factories, students serve summer internships at places such as McKinsey, Deutsche Bank, and Citi.

“Vocational — that word is out. They’re now career schools,” the school’s principal, Evan Schwartz, said.

Having posted among the most remarkable results in the city — Regents scores and graduation rates are well above the citywide average — the new schools, known by the name career and technical education, could also become the new face of New York City’s public schools. In his State of the City address this year, Mayor Bloomberg named expanding CTE schools a main priority, announcing that three CTE “demonstration” schools would be opened by 2009.

“Traditionally, such career and technical education has been seen as an educational dead-end,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We’re going to change that.”

Although not technically accredited as a CTE school (that requires going through a Byzantine process the state Board of Regents is looking to revamp), Law and Finance is part of the National Academy Foundation, a national umbrella group for CTE, and it receives federal vocational education grants.

It has also caught the attention of CTE’s chief proponent at City Hall, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, who dropped in unannounced for a visit last month.

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