Alabama Becomes 37th Marriage Equality State, Despite Resistance From State Judges
As of Monday morning, District Judge Callie V. S. Granade’s stay on marriage equality in Alabama has expired and, with the Supreme Court declining to issue its own stay, her ruling declaring the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is in effect. Though same-sex couples are preparing to marry, they may not be able to because probate judges may not abide the ruling.
You made it personal: We are not the enemy -
“Dear Governor Cuomo: We are teachers. We have given our hearts and souls to this noble profession. We have pursued intellectual rigor. We have fed students who were hungry. We have celebrated at student weddings and wept at student funerals. Education is our life. For this, you have made us the enemy. This is personal.”
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The title pretty much says it all. Robin Hood in Reverse, a new report from the Center for American Progress, explains why “portability"—the notion that states should be allowed to opt out of the current system of Title I that directs federal education funds to help low-income children—is a bad idea.
The result of portability, the report explains, is that the nation’s largest school districts could stand to lose millions of dollars. If Illinois opted for portable Title I dollars, for example, Chicago could lose more than $64 million, while the much more affluent suburb of Naperville could see allocations increase by more than $380,000. In California, students in the Los Angeles Unified School District could lose out on more than $75 million, while the Beverly Hills Unified School District could gain $140,000. These patterns are similar for every state. Portability would redistribute vast amounts of resources away from the students with the most needs to provide marginal new funding to other, more well-off students.
Read more about the problems with portability.
Most members who take AFT training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation never get a chance to use it.
That was not the case for Robin Herrin, a special education paraprofessional who saved a woman’s life on New Year’s Eve. She was ringing in the new year with her husband and sister-in-law at a resort casino when, after dinner, she heard a woman cry for help because her wheelchair-bound mother had slumped over and stopped breathing.
“I didn’t want the mother to die in front of her daughter,” says Herrin, a member of Red River United in Shreveport, La.
Herrin had taken CPR training at the AFT several years ago. She found the older woman without a pulse, her lips and nails turning blue. As she’d practiced in AFT training, Herrin stated that she knew how to do CPR, asked a bystander to call 911, and told another bystander to bring the hotel’s defibrillator.
It seemed like just a few breaths and a couple of rounds of compressions before paramedics arrived. By the time they did, the woman had resumed breathing.
“I was a little bit shaken up,” Herrin says, but “glad I was able to help.“
The AFT is urging that children (and their parents) get vaccinated.
Here’s a fact sheet on measles we’ve put together.
This Black History Month, join us as we highlight Black organizers from the past and the present.
BAYARD RUSTIN served the trade union and civil rights movements as a brilliant theorist, tactician and organizer. In the face of his accomplishments Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten and fired from leadership positions because he was an openly gay man in a severely homophobic era. He conceived the coalition of liberal, labor and religious leaders who supported passage of the civil rights and anti-poverty legislation of the 1960s. As the first executive director of the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, he worked closely with the labor movement to ensure African American workers’ rightful place in the House of Labor. Rustin was posthumously awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom for his brilliance in organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was the largest demonstration the country had ever seen.