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Dozens more officers to walk beats
Dozens more officers to walk beats
(Boston Globe)
Less than six months after 18 police officers began walking beats around some of the city's most crime-plagued neighborhoods, Commissioner Edward F. Davis said yesterday that dozens more will be joining them.
They will patrol in nine teams of six officers, as part of Davis's effort to promote community policing.
Police officers stood yesterday at a press conference, where it was announced that 54 will be walking beats around the city. (JOHN BOHN/GLOBE STAFF)
"Walking beats get patrol officers out of the cruisers and back into the neighborhoods," he said yesterday, standing with Mayor Thomas M. Menino in front of dozens of uniformed police officers gathered at Talbot Avenue and Washington Street in Codman Square.
The expansion, Menino said, is a result of the success of the initiative, which began in March with three teams of six officers patrolling Grove Hall in Roxbury, Bowdoin Street and Geneva Avenue in Dorchester, and Downtown Crossing.
Menino cited recent police statistics that showed shootings were down in some of these areas.
"The numbers show these foot patrols are already making a big difference," he said.
Cynthia Loesch, who is president of the Codman Square Neighborhood Council and stood alongside Davis yesterday, said she is hopeful that police officers walking beats will interact with residents to prevent violence and gain the trust of the community.
"Welcome," she told the officers, who were standing ramrod straight. "Welcome to Codman Square. Know that we want to work with you. We need you to make our neighborhoods safe."
Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
Teens tackle community issues through technology
Teens tackle community issues through technology
Liz Hoffman (Boston Banner)
For the last 12 weeks, four groups of area high school students have been busy working on projects as part of their final event at the South End Technology Center’s (SETC) Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn program.
They were asked to design creative solutions to problems they saw in their community.
Presented last Friday at SETC’ Columbus Avenue site, their solutions were as different as the issues they attempted to tackle.
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Vanessa Gomez-Brown, Angel Fernandez (back row) and Joseph Jaquez teach a computer animation program to students at the El Batey Computer Learning Center in Villa Victoria during the teaching phase of the Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn Program of the South End Technology Center. (Photo courtesy of South End Technology Center
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One was an empty chair that symbolized the tragedies of gun violence.
Another was a thugged-out teddy bear, complete with a heavy gold chain and oversized T-shirt, telling kids to stay in school.
The third was an anti-drug cartoon that featured a talking, animated marijuana cigarette.
And the final one was an alarm clock that crowed like a rooster to keep drivers awake and alert on the road.
Amon Millner, a doctoral candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-coordinator of the Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn Program, said the projects were part of a larger lesson.
“Everyone is going to be a consumer of technology at some point.” Millner said. “Even working at McDonald’s, you use a touch-screen that is hooked up to a computer. But we want these kids to go a step further. We want them to do more than consume. We want them to be producers of technology.”
The summer-long program employed 28 teens as students, teachers and innovators. Beginning in late May, the students attended courses at the technology center and at MIT, one of the center’s community partners. They learned several “core modules,” which covered physical engineering, energy production and consumption, and graphic and Web design.
They were exposed to several emerging technologies, from a bio-diesel truck that runs on vegetable oil to the “FabLab,” which is run in conjunction with MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms.
In late July, the teens went to 12 community organizations, where they taught area youth what they had learned.
Tracey Lewis, director of the Madison Park Community Center, had five SETC teen teachers at her center.
“The kids loved them. They kept asking me, ‘Ms. Tracey, when are they coming back?’” said Lewis, who is working on getting funding to continue the program year-round at the community center. “This was something different for the kids.”
And for the participants. Each of the final projects involved a physical construction, an electrical wiring or computer-programming element, and a combination of sounds or graphics — all imagined, blueprinted, created and compiled in the technology center’s basement.
Teen teachers of the South End Technology Center’s Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn program present the “Truth Chair.” Designed and built by the program’s teens, the chair symbolizes the tragedies of gun violence. (Photo courtesy of South End Technology Center)
The FabLab, short for “fabrication laboratory,” is a technological workbench. The teens used the machine to create the physical objects, like acrylic casing for the “Sonic Boom” driver alarm or the message engraved on the gun violence “Truth Chair.”
“It’s all about being creative; not just creative in an imaginative sense, but creative in the truly constructive sense,” said Ed Baffi, director of the FabLab and co-coordinator of the program. “Everybody buys physical objects. With FabLab, now you can think about building one.”
The center also contains a recording studio that was the site for much of the sound for the projects, as well as new computer animation software called Scratch.
“Everything about the center is designed to make these kids active producers of technology,” Baffi said. “They mix their own music, tell their own stories, and create their own products.”
Having fun is only part of the program.
“There are three elements — a learning element, a teaching element and a project element,” Millner said. “We want to broaden their horizons. We want to show them that technology is not only the Internet or cell phones, but it can be real, tangible things and it can be a career and it can be fun.”
Vanessa Gomez-Brown of Dorchester is one of the program’s teen teachers and enjoys sharing what she has learned with younger students.
“We’re telling them that they don’t have to be the next teenage statistic,” Gomez-Brown, a junior at Melrose High School. “There are things they can do with their lives, and technology can be part of that if they want it to. They can change the pattern. Knowing that I have the opportunity to make a positive influence on these kids is something that I take very seriously.”
That impact, as well as the anti-drug, anti-gun violence messages promoted in their projects, comes full circle and back to the teen teachers.
“It helps us to recognize that we can’t be hypocritical,” Gomez-Brown said. “We can’t tell them to stay in school and not do drugs and then turn around and do all those things ourselves. As we’re teaching them, we’re learning at the same time.”
And according to Baffi, that’s all part of the design.
“They learn, they produce, and then they teach,” he said. “They go out in the community and create more students.”
B.C. High preps for new middleschoolers
By David Benoit
Special to the Reporter
Boston College High School has been educating young men in the city of Boston since 1863, but this year when the school opens its doors for the 144th time, it gets a little bit bigger, and a couple of years younger.
The Arrupe Division, the name for the high school's brand new middle school, will welcome in the first seventh and eighth graders to its Morrissey Blvd. campus, widening the influence of the Jesuit high school.
"We want to create a school that has academic excellence, where every student can achieve the best he can," said the new man in charge of the middle school, vice-principal Robert Hamblet. "We want the boys here to really love learning and we want to show that seventh and eighth grade boys can be excited about every class."
Hamblet came to BC High as a social studies teacher in 2004 after 12 years of working in a middle school where he taught and worked as an administrator. He has spent the last year working to prepare the school to open up for the two younger grades, hiring a staff of 23 faculty and meeting with parents and even high school students to plan the new venture.
The biggest change to the school is the construction done to the Walsh building at the back of the BC High campus. Once legendary among BC High students for its complete lack of windows and yellow cinderblocks straight from the 1960s, the old science building has been entirely remodeled to host the 210 new students where they can have an almost entire separation from the older students. The boys who will now inhabit it will have at their hands state of the art technology: science labs, computers and a blackboard system called Smart Board that allows a user to hook a laptop up to and simply turns it into a giant touch screen system.
The school originally was expecting to receive about 80 seventh graders and maybe as few as 60 eighth graders, but soon realized interest in the program ran higher. The building was designed to hold 280 students, so increasing numbers only meant hiring more staff.
"We originally thought we were going to have smaller numbers and then towards the end of the fall we realized the interest was much higher," Hamblet explained. And then when it came time to accept students, they had to raise it again. "Our yield in enrollment ended up being higher than we expected too. It just allowed me to hire more teachers."
(This picture is provided by answer.com)
A total of 16 of the new students come from Dorchester: 11 in the seventh grade, and five in the eighth, and a significant percentage of students are from the city, as school President William Kemeza says that getting more kids from the city was a key component in deciding to expand.
"When we were looking to enhance enrollment and we were concerned about making sure that the school was accessible to a lot of city students, we originally weren't thinking about a seventh and eighth grade, but it came up more and more," he explains. "We began to hear that they wanted same good character formation of values that the Catholic schools have always been known for and we felt we could do that for them."
The school is named for the influential Jesuit priest Rev. Pedro Arrupe S.J., the man who created the phrase that BC High and Jesuit schools across the world use as a goal: "we must each be a man for others." Arrupe was the Superior General of the Jesuits from 1965 until 1981, and his life makes what BC High hopes will be a role model for the young men.
"We just decided that the kind of nurturing that he engendered is what we imagined for our students," says Kemeza, explaining why the school chose the name. "Having role models is really important for young boys and we thought he is a fantastic person."
Some of those role models will be coming straight from the high school, as Hamblet has organized a mentor program between high schoolers and middle schoolers. Boys in the eleventh grade will be paired with eighth graders and boys in tenth grade will be paired with the seventh graders. Modeled after a program the high school uses in which seniors are appointed to freshman homerooms, Hamblet envisions the influences flowing both ways.
"There aren't many leadership roles for the juniors and sophomores so this gives them a chance to get more involved and be a leader in the school," he says. "And we see the high school boys as being invaluable resources for the seventh and eighth graders."
But Hamblet is also aware that there is a big difference between the maturity levels and abilities of a seventh grader and a high school senior, and knows he might have to work with the younger boys on when to just stay away.
"We don't anticipate too many problems because the incoming freshman don't have too many problems, and who is going to pick on a seventh grader?" he asked, before stating he knows that some might ignore that logic. "Some of it will be just teaching the seventh and eighth graders that they should leave them alone."
The students will mostly be in classes of about 20 boys, taking subjects ranging from the basics to languages &endash; options of Spanish, French, Latin, and Chinese &endash; to religion, physical education, art, and drama. Hamblet emphasizes the cross-classroom connections each student will see day in and day out.
"Particularly this year there is going to be a focus on really making sure things are coordinated across disciplines, and what you are doing in English fits with what you are doing in social studies."
The students will also have an occasional "advisory meeting" where they will meet with a teacher in groups of about 12 students to discuss school and various other issues that might come up.
After their two years at the Arrupe Division, the boys will not have to re-apply to BC High, meaning competition for the school in ninth grade could become tougher in the next few years. Tuition rates will be the same as the high school, meaning 2007 will cost $12,500. But for now the school is ready to open up this new chapter in its history, and as Kemeza says, make a bigger impact on boys across the city.
"I do believe that reaching young men and these boys when they are really impressionable will help us, along with their parents, to help us develop that character we want to see from our graduates."
New trees adding to Dot canopy
Reporter Staff Dotnews.com
