Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
JOBS IN PHILADELPHIA
https://phila.peopleadmin.com/postings/search
Contract Coordinator (General) | 2F69-20111128-PR-01 | 11/28/2011 | 12/09/2011 | City-Wide Promotional | |
Announced in Anticipation of Approval by the Administrative Board This is administrative contract management work. Employees in this class develop, coordinate, and monitor contract activities for a major operating division of a health or social service department or for a major department with responsibility for managing all contracts including engineering and construction contracts departmen...View Details | Bookmark | Email to a Friend | |||||
Painter 2 | 7H44-20111128-20-00 | 11/28/2011 | 12/09/2011 | Department Only Promotional | 20 - Department of Public Property |
This is skilled painting work at the advanced level in City buildings and facilities. An employee in this class performs the most advanced painting assignments and may provide guidance to lower-level painters engaged in preparing surfaces and painting buildings, fixtures and equipment. Work is performed under the supervision of a trades or maintenance supervisor, and involves some physical effo...View Details | Bookmark | Email to a Friend | |||||
Custodial Work Supervisor 2 | 7D15-20111128-PR-00 | 11/28/2011 | 12/09/2011 | City-Wide Promotional | |
This is second-level supervisory custodial work coordinating cleaning and general upkeep activities of public buildings and surrounding grounds. The work differs from the next lower level in this series in that the employee supervises a larger number of workers and has responsibility for more extended areas. A significant aspect of work involves scheduling and overseeing a large number of per...View Details | Bookmark | Email to a Friend | |||||
Bridge Safety Inspector 1 | 7G20-20111128-12-00 | 11/28/2011 | 12/09/2011 | Department Only Promotional | 12 - Streets Department |
This is technical work inspecting bridge structures for maintenance and repair needs. An employee in this class inspects contractual bridge repair work for conformance to specification requirements, investigates complaints and accidents involving bridge structures, and recommends repairs as conditions require. Work entails hazardous conditions which include working from heights, out of doors ...View Details | Bookmark | Email to a Friend | |||||
Youth Detention Counselor 2 (General) | 5B23-20111128-22-01 | 11/28/2011 | 12/09/2011 | Department Only Promotional | 22 - Department of Human Services |
This is youth custody and counseling work, at the full performance level, monitoring and supervising the activities of a group of involuntary detained youths in the City’s juvenile detention facility. This class is differentiated from the next lower level in the series in that employees are expected to perform all job functions with relative independence and fully understand all the prin...View Details | Bookmark | Email to a Friend | |||||
Revenue Collection Representative (Enforcement) | 2B18-20111128-36-01 | 11/28/2011 | 12/09/2011 | Department Only Promotional | 36 - Revenue Department |
This is specialized revenue collection work performing a variety of projects and activities designed to effect collection of revenues owed to the City. Work is distinguished from the lower level Collection Customer Representative by its emphasis on managing multiple tax account caseloads or by responsibility for adjudicating disputed accounts. Eliciting information from customers and their re...View Details | Bookmark | Email to a Friend | |||||
Accountant | 2A06-20111128-36-00 | 11/28/2011 | 12/09/2011 | Department Only Promotional | 36 - Revenue Department |
This is accounting work at the full performance level recording, adjusting, categorizing, summarizing and analyzing financial data needed to facilitate financial planning and control by municipal agencies. Employees in this class follow city-wide and departmental accounting procedures, directives, and guidelines in researching and analyzing financial data and account status, make estimates of e...View Details | Bookmark | Email to a Friend | |||||
CHRISTOTELIC!: Community Legal Services Offer Seminar on Paying C...
Community Legal Services Offer Seminar on Paying Court Costs In PA
Contact: Kentia Waters
Phone: (215) 227-6161
Kitchen, Community Legal Services Offer Seminar on Paying Court Costs
Philadelphia, Nov. 21, 2011— State Sen. Shirley Kitchen and Community Legal Services are offering a free seminar to help individuals who owe or may owe criminal court costs and fines.
The free seminar, Culture of Collection: The New Court Payment System, takes place on Wednesday, November 30, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Philadelphia Recovery Community Center, Unit #6, in the Lehigh Pavilion, 1701 W. Lehigh Ave. in Philadelphia.
Attendees can find out if they owe money, how much they owe and how they can reduce or eliminate the debt and make payments.
The Philadelphia Courts have recently stepped up collection efforts for individuals owing costs, fines, supervision fees, restitution and bail to the criminal courts. One in five Philadelphians owe money to the court.
“Individuals who are not current with their costs risk loss of public benefits, wage garnishment, sheriff’s sale and other financial consequences. Forgoing this debt is not a risk worth taking,” Kitchen said. “There are affordable options and payment plans. I encourage everyone who owes payment to the courts to attend this free seminar and learn the steps they need to take.”
For more information, call Community Legal Services at 215-227-2400, e-mail rvallas@clsphila.org or visit www.senatorkitchen.com
Thursday, November 17, 2011
How to Improve Education for Young Black Philadelphians The cure for low test scores has already been discovered. So why aren’t we using it?
Are Philadelphia’s black children stupid? Why is it that they consistently lag behind all other kids in school? How is it that while 85 percent of Asian, 75 percent of Caucasian, and 55 percent of Latino students are proficient or advanced in math, as determined by this past spring’s Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests, only 53 percent of African-American students are? And in reading, what’s the reason that number is 72 percent for Asians, 70 percent for Caucasians, but just 47 percent for African Americans? Why is it even worse for black fourth- and eighth-graders with 68 percent of those fourth-grade students scoring below basic levels of achievement in reading on the 2009 National Assessment of Education Progress test and 46 percent below the basic levels in math? And for the eighth-graders, why are 58 percent below in reading and 60 percent below in math? Also, why are six of the state’s 10 worst-scoring high schools on the PSSAs predominantly black in Philly? There is one of two explanations for all of this.
The first explanation could be that black youngsters are, in fact, stupid. That means they are genetically predisposed to be at the bottom. The brains of their African ancestors—and therefore the brains of these students—are not as evolved as those of other ethnic groups. Or maybe, just maybe, there’s another reason.
The second explanation could be that today’s low test scores are the result of yesterday’s racist broken promise of a quality education that was supposed to have been delivered first with the Brown v. Board of Education “separate but equal is unconstitutional” decision in 1954, then with the Brown II “all deliberate speed” vague decision in 1955, and then again with the Brown III “we really mean it this time” decision in 1978 that wasn’t completely implemented until 1998. 1998! That was only 13 years ago. That’s the explanation, goddammit! That, along with today’s inequitable school funding and incomplete curricula, is precisely the reason for such poor academic performance by African-American children. Better stated, that is the educational disease inflicted upon black students. But there’s a cure in Philadelphia. And it was discovered by the victims themselves.
On November 17, 1967, a mass movement for much-needed Afrocentric programs came together when approximately 5,000 black students peacefully marched to the School District headquarters to peacefully demand a complete education as well as (including but not limited to) the equitable appointment of more African-American board members, administrators, and teachers, and the renaming of schools to honor blacks who fought for civil and human rights instead of whites who enslaved blacks. There were 25 demands made by student representatives who had been trained to calmly and skillfully debate and negotiate and to do so peacefully. Then the police arrived. Then, as eye and ear witnesses reported, Frank Rizzo arrived and yelled “Get their black asses!” And then the peace ended. Without any provocation whatsoever, the cops on foot and horseback began attacking, clubbing, beating, tear-gassing, and arresting defenseless and innocent children. But those courageous students didn’t give up. They understood that real change, meaning real revolution, is not a one-day march. It’s an ongoing and incremental process, one that requires the participants to be willing to remain actively involved for the long haul. That’s why they never gave up. That’s why they sought the help of Walter D. Palmer in the spring of 1967.
Palmer was the director of cardiopulmonary care at Children’s Hospital from 1957 to 1967 and is a Howard Law School graduate. He founded Black Men at Penn and also the Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School that focuses on student leadership, character development and social justice. The students sought his help because he was known throughout Philadelphia and nationwide as one of the “premiere grassroots organizers in the 1960s” (and later in the 1970s as well). He created the culturally and politically powerful Black People’s University that helped set the African-American agenda in this city from 1954 to 1984. And beginning in 1966, he was director of Grassroots Organizing for Model Cities. Because of his solid reputation as an uncompromising strategist, the students from Gratz, Germantown and elsewhere, along with a young unknown activist named David Richardson, requested his wise counsel. He gave it to them by speaking with them, not by lecturing to them. He asked what they wanted and needed from the school district, and he showed them how to get it. In short, he was the political and cultural brains behind the historic and well-planned November 17, 1967 protest, and he helped students to articulate their demands—most of which the district agreed to as a result of the impressively persuasive student arguments.
A key to Palmer’s strategy was those arguments—arguments that had to be based on solid and unimpeachable scholarly research, especially since the demand for a complete education, by necessity, had to be Afrocentric. In other words, it had to inspire these black children. It had to make them believe that they could master not only reading, writing and arithmetic but also the sciences and the advanced mathematics and the advanced grammar.
That’s when he reached out to Edward W. Robinson, Jr., the renown historian, professor, U.S. Senate-appointed first black member of the Federal Reserve, Pennsylvania governor-appointed Deputy Secretary of State, Mayor-appointed Assistant Managing Director, attorney, and—most pertinent—the author of the first Philadelphia curriculum for teachers of African history, called “The World of Africans and Afro Americans.”
In fact, it was Robinson who, in 1967, proved to superintendent Mark Shedd by documented scientific experimentation that, when children were taught about the beauty, grandeur, sophistication and intellect of their African ancestry, their mathematical achievement went from an “average of Cs to high Bs.” In order to improve and excel, those students needed to know that the first human on the planet was from the Nile Valley region of East Africa 200,000 years ago. They needed to know that geometry, calculus and algebra came out of Africa. They needed to know the truth, which is precisely what the doctors—I mean the students—ordered. This was the cure. And they inspired Palmer and Robinson to organize and compile it. But much of it has been sitting stagnant in the labs for 44 years instead of being distributed in the schools, despite the fact that as recently as 2004, the superintendent requested and approved it for infusion into the official school curriculum.
In honor of the 44th anniversary of those enlightened black students’ fight for complete education, a demonstration will be held on November 17 at 12:30 p.m. at the school district building at 440 North Broad Street. It will be headed by today’s students, along with Palmer and Robinson, to demand the immediate distribution of that proven cure. The ‘ritin’s still on the wall, next to the readin’ and the ‘rithmetic—and the revolution continues.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Who is behind the attacks on our voting rights?
In recent years, the billionaire political operatives have used their vast fortunes to finance the drafting, promoting and introduction of model bills restricting people's ability to vote, and so far legislatures in 38 states have introduced Koch Brothers-supported legislation. All told, this is the most aggressive and widespread attack on the right to vote since the voting rights restrictions that paved the way for segregation.
This week, Brave New Films debuts a new video shining the spotlight on the Koch Brothers and their role in the voting rights attacks. "Koch Brothers Exposed" is a call to action for all Americans concerned about protecting this most fundamental of rights.
Watch the video and then sign the Stand for Freedom pledge today to fight back:
http://action.naacp.org/voting-rights-video
The voter suppression laws take many forms: prohibitive voter registration requirements, sharply reduced early voting periods, government-issued photo ID requirements, and discriminatory laws that disproportionately deny voting rights to people with felony convictions.
As I note in the video, these attacks on voting rights are only the beginning. The reason that you take away somebody's right to vote is so that you can take away the rest of their rights.
Everything we care about is at stake: the right to equal opportunity, the right for every child to attend a quality school, for clean water to drink and clean air to breathe, and basic protection of civil and human rights.
The NAACP is organizing aggressively to stop these rollbacks. On December 10th, International Human Rights Day, we will organize a series of rallies and events around the country. In New York City, we will begin our march at a demonstration outside the Koch brothers' offices, and continue on to a rally at the United Nations Building.
Please join the resistance against these fundamental attacks on human rights. Click the link to watch this new video from Brave New films, then sign the Stand for Freedom petition today and share it with your friends, colleagues and family members:
http://action.naacp.org/voting-rights-video
The NAACP has never stood on the sidelines when the extremists of any era attacked the voting right of Americans. We will fight the Koch brothers and their ilk, and with your help, we will prevail.
Standing for Freedom,