Opinion: UPDATE: In today’s pages: The new Locke High School
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UPDATE: The Craig Childs op-ed noted below did not run in today’s Times. Instead, we offered a timely op-ed by Asra Q. Nomani on the place of Muslims in Indian society.
The school year is three months old at Alain Leroy Locke Senior High School or, as it’s called by charter school operator Green Dot, the Locke family of high schools.
The Times editorial page brings forward the fourth in its series on the transformation of the troubled school and finds progress, frustration and hope.
Problems include both overcrowding and a falling off of the high attendance numbers that greeted the school’s reopening in September. But fighting is down, and so is graffiti. Students wear uniforms, although some still refuse to tuck in their shirts. The ditorial notes:
Locke High School represents the kind of transformation that can take place practically overnight under committed, energetic new leadership. As the school struggles with crowding and early signs of student backsliding, however, it also illustrates the pervasive and persistent difficulties that challenge urban schools.
Read the previous three editorials in the series, including one from May 25 just prior to the takeover by Green Dot, one from graduation day and one from the first day of school in September.
And on the op-ed page, three perhaps unexpected responses to recession: a call for a bailout of nonprofits; fret over the demise of French cafes (and their American counterparts); and a recommendation to look for riches in the trash.
First, scavenger Craig Childs celebrates Dumpster diving, or urban foraging, or garbage-gleaning, or skally-wagging, or -- well, you get the idea.
There were times in my life that I got most of my food out of trash cans, and lived well. In fact, I lived on the tips of my toes, my senses heightened, eyes sharpened for anything left lying about. I try to keep that skill honed. I stay on the lookout. I glance into every open trash can I pass.
Thanks for sharing.
Columnist Gregory Rodriguez speaks out for the corner bar and even Starbucks -- any ‘third place’ that’s not work and not home where people can mingle -- now that it’s been reported that French cafes are on the decline: ‘You think I’m kidding. But if the economy does tank totally, all we’ve really got is each other, and I fear we don’t even have that anymore.’
Finally, Teresa DeCrescenzo, executive director of GLASS Youth and Family Services, notes that the economic meltdown has an enormous effect on the nonprofit organizations that deliver services under government contract to people in need.