For many children, summer camp is often a home away from home. It is a safe haven where children are among others their own age. For the campers at Camp Twin Lakes in Georgia, it is a welcome break from challenges such as medical diagnoses, traumatic experiences and other obstacles they face.

“Camp provides the opportunity for campers to feel ‘normal.’ I use normal because outside of camp, people with adversity in their childhood can feel incredibly isolated in their experience,” said Maisi Corbin, a program leader at Camp Twin Lakes. “When you get to camp, you leave all that behind. You have a community of people who truly understand your experience and it helps you feel a little bit less alone.”

Camp Twin Lakes is a nonprofit organization that aims to provide memorable camp experiences in a way that is both medically and physically adaptive and supportive. It partners up with other organizations throughout the year to facilitate experiences such as weeklong summer camps, family weekends and even camp retreats.

Camp Twin Lakes offers camps for children with a variety of medical needs, ranging from Type 1 diabetes to juvenile arthritis and epilepsy. In addition, the organization offers camps for those dealing with challenges like separation from military parents or growing up in foster care.

Every year, Camp Twin Lakes provides camp experiences to more than 10,000 residents of Georgia and neighboring states. Many of the camps are subsidized by different foundations so families often do not have to pay for their children to attend.

Many campers return as staff

For more than 30 years, Camp Twin Lakes benefited from campers returning as staff for its programs.

Maisi Corbin is a spring program leader for the camp’s Rutledge location and will work her second summer this year as the nature exploration supervisor. She began attending Camp Kudzu, a camp for children with Type One diabetes, when she was nine years old.

“I fell in love with camp because of the community and unconditional acceptance I felt there.”
Haley Mapp,
spring program leader

“I love camp. I always have. I genuinely believe that camp saved my life as a teenager and the thought of being able to provide that experience to campers in return encourages me to keep coming back,” said Corbin about her choice to continue coming to camp through a staff position. “I think people often underestimate the importance of camp, whether it’s CTL or any camp. The opportunity to change the course of a child’s life is incredibly rare, except at camp.”

At Camp Twin Lakes, program leaders are hired for each season of the year to facilitate camp programs. The programs include Outdoor Adventure (OA), Waterfront and NatEx.

OA’s activities include zip lining, giant swinging, climbing rock walls and the individual ropes course. Waterfront is a position where certified lifeguards are in charge of boating, lake and pool activities. NatEx, which stands for nature exploration, offers activities including nature trails, fishing and archery, among other sports.

“Working at camp is just such a magical experience and getting to see these communities come together and support each other and just have the time of their lives, no matter what may be going on in their life, is such a beautiful thing to get to witness,” said Emma Gilson, a summer program leader at Camp Twin Lakes. “I wouldn’t trade my job for the world.”

Haley Mapp is a spring program leader at the camp’s Will-a-Way location. She has been a staff member at the camp for more than two years. Mapp attended Camp Ache Away for kids with juvenile arthritis when she was nine years old. When she aged out of the program, she was hired to help lead it.

“I fell in love with camp because of the community and unconditional acceptance I felt there, because of this I decided to come back and work at camp to support other campers finding a community of acceptance,” she said.

***

 Narda Sigala is an Atlanta-based reporter for Fresh Take Georgia. 

This story was originally published in Fresh Take Georgia.

Fresh Take Georgia aims to bridge the gap in local journalism by providing in-depth, fact-based, fair and balanced investigative journalism to Atlanta’s local communities.

ACWORTH, GA. — At the 15th annual Polar Plunge Fundraiser on Saturday, Feb. 24, hundreds of people gathered at the edge of Lake Acworth to dive into frigid waters, all to raise money for Special Olympics Georgia (SOGA) athletes.

Special Olympics Georgia provides year-round sports training and athletic competitions for over 17,400 children and adults with intellectual disabilities. As a nonprofit organization, SOGA relies on community donations to offer free year-round sports training. The Polar Plunge is the largest donation fundraising effort benefitting Special Olympics Georgia.

In this video, Fresh Take Georgia’s Taylor Boysen reports from Lake Acworth, 40 miles northwest of Atlanta.

Videography Claire Becknell

***

Taylor Boysen is an Atlanta-based reporter for Fresh Take Georgia.

Claire Becknell is an Atlanta-based multi-media journalist for Fresh Take Georgia.

This story was originally published in Fresh Take Georgia.

Fresh Take Georgia aims to bridge the gap in local journalism by providing in-depth, fact-based, fair and balanced investigative journalism to Atlanta’s local communities.

Often, science and art are described as starkly different things. That narrative can start early on, with kids encouraged to pursue a STEM – short for science, technology, engineering and math – education that may or may not include an arts education.

What I learned: Encouraging creative, interdisciplinary thinking matters

As a professor of acting, I’d never thought much about the STEM fields until I received a fellowship to integrate the arts into STEM educational models. I used the opportunity to write and direct a play for elementary schoolers that showed how the arts can improve upon and extend work in STEM fields when properly integrated – but it wasn’t an easy process.

STEM or STEAM?

Whether STEM should be augmented to STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts and math – with the addition of the arts remains something of a debate.

The origins of STEM education can be traced to as early as the Morrill Act of 1862, which promoted agricultural science and later engineering at land grant universities. In 2001, the National Science Foundation pushed a focus on STEM education in order to make the U.S. more competitive globally.

A Biden-Harris initiative launched in December 2022 called You Belong in STEM offers support of more than US$120 billion for K-12 STEM education until the year 2025. But, starting in 2012, the United States Research Council has explored the idea of a STEAM education.

Researchers have found that when integrated into a STEM education, the arts make space for curiosity and innovation. So why the lack of agreement and consistency around whether it should be STEM or STEAM?



Lots of careers bridge both science and arts, from game design to photography and engineering.

The bias toward emphasizing a STEM education could be driven by the higher future salaries of STEM majors or the significant funding that is connected more to STEM-based research and grants than to the arts. A STEAM education takes more time and is more complex than a traditional STEM educational model.

Or it could simply be that many academics in STEM fields lack the incentive for interdisciplinary work that brings in the arts, and vice versa. In fact, that was exactly the position I was in as an arts-based researcher asked to create something about STEM disciplines that I knew very little about.

Putting on the play

It took me several tries and lots of research to get the script of my STEAM-centered play to its current form.

At first, I made basic discoveries. I learned that there is a debate about whether the arts should be included in a STEM education. I learned that “soft sciences” like psychology are not included in many STEM educational models. I lacked a background in most of the disciplines included in STEM. And I struggled to find a project that inspired me.

… without artistic imagination, STEM students’ big-picture thinking skills can get stifled.

But eventually I began work on five one-act plays, called “The STEAM Plays: Using the Arts to Talk about STEM.” Each focused on a category of STEAM education. I wrote the first draft of the show with a chip on my shoulder, trying to prove that the arts did indeed belong in STEM education.

The tone was defensive and provocative – and not entirely appropriate for the elementary age range I was focused on.

The new, revised version that toured Michigan elementary schools in the Fall of 2023 contains 20 bite-sized comedic scenes and songs that dramatize how the arts are integral to many STEM fields. These include how engineering skills go into designing a celebrity’s evening gown, how bakers need to know some basic chemistry, and how the mathematical algorithms of TikTok find new videos for each user.

In each of the scenes, students can see how artistic imagination and creative thinking expand STEM education.

Beyond the stage

These themes emerge from a wider scholarly understanding that STEM isn’t done in a creativity vacuum, and stimulating students’ artistic thinking will help them both in the science classroom and the art studio.

One plot point of the show is about an evil genius who views the arts as less important trying to keep the arts out of STEM. He swaps the bodies of a scientist and an actor, as well as an engineer and a creative writer. In each body swap, the STEM professional and the artist recognize how similar their work is. In the final scene, the evil genius tries to switch the bodies of Pythagoras and Taylor Swift, only to realize that music is all about math.

Many teachers have provided rave reviews. “The plays did an excellent job of highlighting the importance and value of arts in our educational system,” one noted. “Students walked away enjoying and having a deeper understanding of how all of the different aspects of STEAM were able to work together collaboratively.

A STEAM education in which students learn soft skills like empathy, collaboration, emotional intelligence and creativity through the arts helps prepare students for the job market. And these discussions aren’t confined only to K-12 education – many research grants encourage interdisciplinary work.

My understanding of the STEM and STEAM debate and my experience writing, producing and watching how people respond to my show have helped me understand how the arts are necessary to every student’s education. I learned that without artistic imagination, STEM students’ big-picture thinking skills can get stifled.

It only took writing a play for children for me to get it myself.

***

Rob Roznowski is an award-winning actor, author, director, educator, and playwright. He is a Professor at Michigan State University where he serves as the Head of Acting & Directing in the Department of Theatre. He also coordinates the MFA program in acting.

This article is part of Art & Science Collide, a series examining the intersections between art and science.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ENDS

While affirmative action made strides in increasing diversity on college campuses, it fell far short of meeting its intended goals. And now that it’s been struck down, CBS Reports teamed up with independent journalist Soledad O’Brien and The Hechinger Report to examine the fog of uncertainty for students and administrators who say the decision threatens to unravel decades of progress.

WILMINGTON, Del. – A wall of the Rodriguez family home celebrates three seminal events with these words: “A moment in time, changed forever.”

Beneath the inscription, a clock marks the time and dates when three swaddled newborns depicted in large photos entered the world: Ashley, now 19, Emily, 17, and Brianna, 11.

Another “moment in time” occurred last June, one that could change the paths of Emily and Brianna. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its landmark case on affirmative action, barring colleges from taking race into consideration as a factor in admission decisions.

The ruling struck down more than 50 years of legal precedent, creating newfound uncertainty for the first class of college applicants to be shaped by the decision – especially for Black and Hispanic students hoping to get into highly competitive colleges that once sought them out.

It also places the Rodriguez sisters on opposite sides of history: Ashley applied to college when schools in many states could still consider race, while Emily can expect no such advantage.

Their parents, Margarita Lopez, 38, and Rafael Rodriguez, 42, are immigrants from Mexico who moved to the United States as teenagers.

Ashley is the first in her family to attend college, a freshman studying child psychology on a full scholarship to prestigious Oxford College of Emory University, where annual estimated costs approached $80,000 this year.

Emily is the middle daughter, a senior and mostly straight-A student at Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington who wants to become a veterinarian, and who spent most of this fall anxiously awaiting word from her first-choice college, Cornell University.

The impact of the court’s decision on enrollment at hundreds of selective colleges and universities won’t start to become clear until colleges send out offers this spring and release final acceptance figures.

“We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”
TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne

But many students, counselors and families view this admission cycle as the first test of whether colleges will become less diverse going forward, while cautioning it may take years before a clear pattern emerges. The Hechinger Report contacted more than 40 selective colleges and universities asking for the racial breakdown of those who applied for early decision and were accepted this year.

About half the institutions responded and none provided the requested information. Several said that they would not have such data available even internally until after the admissions cycle wraps up next year. Some have cited advice from legal counsel in declining to release the racial and ethnic composition for the class of 2028.

For the Rodriguez family, higher education has already become a symbol of upward mobility, a life-altering path to meaningful careers and the sort of financial stability that Margarita and Rafael have never known.

College wasn’t a part of their culture, and before last year Rafael and Margarita had no idea how complicated and competitive the landscape would be for their bright, hardworking daughters. Of all U.S. racial or ethnic groups, Hispanic Americans are the least likely to hold a college degree.

“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid,” Margarita said recently. She wouldn’t have looked beyond the local community college and state universities for her daughters if she hadn’t learned about TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares high-performing students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.

She immediately signed up Ashley, and later, Emily.

TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne, with his wife, Tatiana Poladko, and team of advisers, guided Ashley and Emily through their high school course selection and college essays, while pointing out leadership opportunities and colleges with good track records of offering scholarships.

[Related: College advisors vow to kick the door open for Black and Hispanic students despite affirmative action ruling]

Emory is one. The school admitted no Black students until 1963, but has aggressively recruited students from underrepresented backgrounds in recent years. Hispanic enrollment had been growing before the Supreme Court’s decision, from 7.5 percent in 2017 to 9.2 percent in 2021. Ashley’s class at Oxford is 15 percent Hispanic.

“I felt like I was right at home here,” Ashley said, shortly after arriving in August. The entire Rodriguez family dropped her off and stayed for a few days until she was settled. “It felt very homey to me,” she said. “Everybody is so welcoming.”

Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

The Rodriguez family at their home in Wilmington, Delaware, left to right: Mom Margarita, middle daughter Emily, youngest Brianna, father Rafael, with their college adviser, Atnre Alleyne.

Still, Ashley worried about her grades as she adjusted to her new workload. She fielded constant texts and calls from her family, who were adjusting to having her away from home for the first time.

Emily missed her sister terribly – together they’d started their high school’s club for first-generation scholars, helping others navigate college choices. “She has the brain and I like to talk,” Emily joked.

This fall, Emily set her sights on some of the most selective colleges in the country, many of which had terrible track records on diversity even before the Supreme Court’s decision. She approached her search knowing that she was unlikely to get any boost based on her ethnicity.

That makes her angry.

“We have so much history behind us as people of color,” Emily said. “So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”

Emily also knew she would need a hefty scholarship to attend one of her dream schools; her family can’t afford the tuition, and they’ve been loath to saddle their daughters with loans.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action.”
Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University

Elite schools like those on Ashley and Emily’s lists are more likely to be filled with wealthy students: Families from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in as other applicants with the same test scores. But such schools also offer the most generous scholarship and aid packages, and Emily and Ashley believed they presented the best shot at a different life from their parents’.

“Ever since I was little, I knew that college was the ticket to break this cycle our family has been in for generations and generations, of not knowing, of not being educated,” Emily said. “And because of that, having to work with their backs instead of their brains.”

That the Rodriguez sisters could even consider top-tier colleges is a credit to their mother.

“I want them to have the opportunity I never had,” Margarita said. “I know that life after education will be easier for them. I don’t want them to be working 12, 14 hours like their dad did.”

Rafael Rodriguez has always worked: first, with livestock as a child in central Mexico and later, in Florida, on an orange farm until the age of 15, with a residential permit. His earnings went toward helping the rest of the family come to the United States and settle in West Grove, Pennsylvania.

Rafael didn’t attend high school because he had to help support his parents and sisters. He now owns a trucking company.

Margarita desperately wanted to go to college, but said her mother did not believe in taking out loans for higher education and refused to sign her financial aid forms.

Instead, she married Rafael a few days after graduating from high school and had Ashley a year later. Emily was born 17 months later. Margarita was thinking of enrolling in community college until Brianna came along six years later. She now helps Rafael with his trucking business while working as a translator.

Both sisters are keenly aware of the gulf between their lives and their mom’s. In her college essay, Ashley described being “a daughter of two immigrant parents who undertook a dangerous journey from their native Guanajuato, Mexico, to America.”

Emily wrote about how Margarita had violated “every norm of our Mexican community, allowing me to sacrifice my time with family on weekends and in the summer” to attend Saturday leadership trainings with TeenSHARP, as well as college-level courses in epidemiology and health sciences at Brown, Cornell and the University of Delaware.

[Related: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible track records on diversity]

The pressure Emily feels is both formidable and familiar to the immigrant experience, magnified by the divisive court decision.

Hamza Parker, a senior at Smyrna High School in Delaware, feels it as well. He was at first unsure of whether or not to write about race in his essay, a debate many students have been having.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority decision that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, leaving it up to students to decide if they would use their essays to discuss their race.

Meanwhile, conservative activist Edward Blum, who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits and said he would challenge essays “used to ascertain or provide a benefit based on the applicant’s race.”

“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid.”
Margarita Rodriguez, mother

Hamza wavered at first, then rewrote his essay to describe his family’s move to the United States from Saudi Arabia in sixth grade and the racism he subsequently experienced. He applied early decision to Union College in upstate New York; earlier this month, he learned via email that he did not get in.

Neither Hamza nor his father, Timothy Parker, an engineer, know why, or what role affirmative action played in Union’s decision: Rejections never come with explanations.

Parker hopes his son will now consider an HBCU like the one he attended, Hampton University, in Virginia. He worries that if Hamza ends up at a school where he is clearly in the minority, he could be made to feel as though he doesn’t belong.

[Related: Beyond the Rankings: College Welcome Guide]

“I’m letting it be his choice,” Parker said, noting that Hamza might also feel more comfortable at an HBCU given the nation’s divisive political climate. With the end of affirmative action, he added, “It feels like we are going backwards not forward.”

HBCUs are becoming more competitive after the court’s decision. Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, said Black high schoolers may be choosing HBCUs because they fear further assaults on diversity and inclusion and believe they’ll feel more comfortable on predominantly Black campuses.

Parker is now finishing his applications to Denison University, the University of Maryland, the University of Delaware, and Carleton College. He’s not sure if Hampton will be on his list.

Alleyne, Hamza’s adviser, said that while they will never know if the court’s decision had any impact on Hamza’s rejection from Union, he’s concerned about what it portends for other TeenSHARP seniors.

“There are so many factors at play with every application,” Alleyne said. “We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”

“We have so much history behind us as people of color. So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”
Emily Rodriguez, high school senior

Alleyne is also concerned that scholarships once available for students like Parker are disappearing. Some of the race-based scholarships his students applied for in past years are no longer listed on college websites, he said.

At the same time, there are plenty who believe that the court’s decision was a much-needed correction, including Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University who testified in the case. He argues that the ban will lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students for all races.

Kahlenberg is in favor of using affirmative action based on class instead of race. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action,” Kahlenberg said.

[Related: A poster child for protesting affirmative action now says he never meant for it to be abolished]

For the Rodriguez family, Cornell’s early decision announcement was long anticipated, to be marked on the magnetic calendar attached to their refrigerator as soon as they knew it. Ashley would be home from Emory for winter break and would hear the news alongside her sister.

For weeks, the family had prepared themselves for bad news: Cornell had announced it was limiting the number of students it would accept early decision, in what the university said was “an effort to increase equity in the admissions process.”

Still, Emily had spent a summer studying at Cornell and gotten to know some faculty and advisers there. She had fallen in love with the animal science program, and the lively upstate New York college town of Ithaca, set amid stunning gorges and waterfalls.

VIDEOGRAPHY AND PHOTOS: KATHERINE WEBB-HEHN

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Black freedom fighters in Alabama once changed this country.

Speaking onstage in Kelly Ingram Park on Juneteenth, Celestine Hood, a woman who witnessed radical change during the civil rights movement, said Alabamians had the power to do it again.

Hood was a child in this park in May 1963, one of the young students participating in a demonstration for racial equality when Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered attack dogs and firehoses on protesters. Images of children enduring that brutality enraged the world, sparking international support for the movement.

In May of this year, a video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in custody for allegedly spending counterfeit money, shocked the world again. Protests erupted in big cities and rural towns, demanding an end to police and vigilante killings of Black people.

“We had dogs and firehoses,” Hood said. “You’ve got tear gas. You’ve got rubber bullets. It’s the same fight.”

The crowd of a few hundred — Black, brown and white, young and old — nodded, raised their fists.

This year’s annual celebration of emancipation from slavery was part of a series of statewide protests hosted by Alabama Rally Against Injustice. Organizers say the modern fight for justice in Alabama is rooted in the legacy of Black-led grassroots organizing in the South — and the white supremacy pushback through state-sanctioned violence. 

It was here where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and where police brutally beat the late Rep. John Lewis as he marched across a bridge in Selma and untold numbers of Black people have been jailed, brutalized or killed in their fight for liberation.

Undeterred by white violence and police brutality, freedom fighters carried their movement throughout the South to Washington, reshaping the ideals of American civil liberty and labor law with the passing of the Civil Rights Act.

Onstage, organizer Celida Soto thanked Hood. “We don’t stop this movement until there is complete change, revolution,” she told the crowd. Her black T-shirt read “freedom fighter.”

To prepare the crowd to take over the streets in Birmingham, Soto pointed to volunteers in neon shirts who would serve as witnesses if police began arrests.

The week before, Huntsville police deployed pepper spray, flash bangs, rubber bullets, and tear gas on a nonviolent crowd, including families with kids. Birmingham police had arrested a prominent activist and comedian for inciting a riot despite his role in stopping a crowd from tearing down a Confederate statue. In towns across the state, protesters had been violently arrested for breaking curfews implemented by city leaders who said they were protecting property from looters.

In the park as they prepared to march, a Black father knelt to tie his son’s shoe. An elderly white couple adjusted one another’s masks worn to protect from the coronavirus. A group of teenagers hoisted a rainbow flag with an encircled Black fist into the air. There was talk of what to do if police used military tactics to break up the protest.

Behind them stood statues of police dogs forever charging stone-faced children who sought basic rights.

Today, activists in Alabama are part of a national movement gaining momentum to defund police. Doing so means reallocating a portion of local police budgets to organizations building healthier and safer communities. Their goal is to eliminate overpolicing in Black and brown neighborhoods while uplifting the community-led efforts to ensure all people have equitable access no matter their race, class, identity, or ZIP code.

“Don’t say this protest is peaceful,” Soto said. “We are not at peace about the conditions of our communities.”

Public health crisis for people living in poverty

When Soto was searching for the right neighborhood to put down roots for her family, she fell in love with Birmingham’s west side. Since moving to Alabama a few years ago, Soto had been living in Hoover, a wealthy suburb of the city, but never felt at home.

“Someone immediately said, ‘Whoa, you don’t want to live in the hood,’ and I said, ‘Whatever it is, this is exactly where I want to be,’” recalled Soto, a hunger advocacy coordinator with the nonprofit Alabama Arise.

She bought a home and began connecting with her neighbors, mostly Black and brown people with tight-knit relationships like her own Afro-Latina family. Because of her work, Soto knew one in four children in Alabama don’t know when their next meal will be. While she shared newfound joy with her neighbors, she also recognized what she calls “hungry faces.”

West Birmingham, Soto knew, had a reputation for being dangerous. It’s where the majority of the city’s homicides take place, police presence is high and surveillance cameras installed by the City Council and Alabama Power record the streets for illegal activity day and night.

But as a resident, Soto said, she witnessed a different kind of violence — a public health crisis much quieter and more pervasive than the crimes making the nightly news.

Her neighbors dealt not only with hunger, she said, but with insecure housing, inadequate health care, underfunded schools and unreliable public transit.

It wasn’t always this way. In the early part of the 20th century, the west side was home to a thriving steel industry and diverse population. Craftsman homes lined lush green boulevards. Downtown strips bustled with shops and restaurants. Segregated Black neighborhoods flourished in spite of Jim Crow. Then, beginning in the 1950s, as Black people sought equality during the civil rights movement, white west siders fled the unrest to the suburbs, where Black people could not legally follow. In the 1970s, the steel industry collapse led to further, devastating population decline.

Jobs disappeared. Businesses shuttered. The streetcar stopped running. The state erected I-20/59 through the heart of a historic Black neighborhood, relocating into public housing many of the residents whose homes were razed. Mortgage lenders stifled prosperity through redlining, the American practice of tracing the outline of Black neighborhoods in red ink on maps and restricting lending within those borders.

Disinvestment rooted in systemic racism continues today as real estate investors are denied loans for revitalization projects that are commonly greenlit in white or gentrifying neighborhoods like Avondale in east Birmingham.

Today, the buildings of the west side are ghosts of what once was. Still, Soto said, the people are resilient.

“Poverty doesn’t mean without intelligence. What these people are capable of doing while living in complete deprivation, that’s beauty,” Soto said. “And that’s the thing I wish our government officials would understand.”

Soto’s activism is rooted in this love of her neighborhood and in the fear of what might happen to her teenage sons if things don’t change, if Black boys continue to be seen by others as inherently dangerous.

Her own work centered policy and advocacy since graduating from Rutgers University but it wasn’t until police shot and killed 21-year-old Emantic “E.J.” Bradford Jr. at a shopping mall in Hoover on Thanksgiving in 2018 that Soto felt called to organize for police accountability.

“He could have been one of my sons,” she said.

In late July of this year, Soto was arrested in Hoover for leading a protest on public grounds — in the same spot where blue lives matter supporters gathered without law enforcement intervention during a counter-protest to those calling for Hoover to release the video of police killing Bradford.

Soto said she won’t stop organizing protests.

“What we’re asking for is basic human rights,” she said.

Achieving that starts with reallocating a portion of the police budget toward community-led efforts to make neighborhoods healthier and safer, she said.

Police afraid to ask for help, chief says

In the small university town of Jacksonville, Alabama, the police department’s first Black chief said it’s time for America to decide what the police are for.

“Do we want police officers to be social service workers? Do we want them to protect and serve?” asked Chief Marcus Wood.

The calls to defund police are “foolish,” he said.

His list of reasons for more funding is long: to improve training beyond the roughly 500 hours required, to offer pay higher than the current entry-level rate of $10 an hour, and to provide mandatory mental health services for officers who will undoubtedly work traumatic cases.

Right now in Alabama cosmetologists need three times the hours of study to wield their blow dryers as police are required to spend at the academy before being issued their guns. To ensure their discretion in using those guns, officers undergo a psychiatric exam during the hiring process, but “nobody checks up on them after we hire them,” Wood said. And, he added, the academy doesn’t prepare recruits for the cumulative stress of a demanding job where training emphasizes combat tactics to stay alive in the line of duty.

The result is a culture in which police are expected to be “bulletproof,” he said, and are afraid to ask for help for fear of being stigmatized.

“Some of those situations where excessive force is used, maybe the cop is having a bad day. That’s not an excuse. I think that’s real life,” he said. He’s working to change the culture around mental health and to ensure officers step in to stop fellow officers’ use of excessive force.

But many are baffled by the idea that a bad day for a cop means someone might die or that more money for police might cause less harm. Police budgets have risen in recent years across the South as the role of officers has expanded to respond to a growing list of societal problems from accompanying social workers when DHR removes a child from parental custody to mental health crises.

Wood said people call the police over ridiculous skirmishes like a dog pooping in a neighbor’s yard.

Accountability + repair the harm

In Birmingham, the City Council allotted 20% of its budget for policing, totaling nearly $93 million. The state’s other large cities — Montgomery, Mobile, and Huntsville — allocated nearly $50 million each.

Not every municipality has that kind of budget. There is a disparity between police departments, seen clearly in the split between cities and rural towns, said Mike Rollins, who was the director of Coosa Valley Youth Services in east Alabama for decades before retiring in 2019. Now, he trains officers across the state in best practices with juvenile offenders.

“Some of these departments are the Taj Mahal. Some are real dungeons,” he said.

With increased budgets, the expectation is to see better results for the central tasks of police. Trends in Alabama are similar to what’s happening nationally. The latest data from the FBI shows police cleared fewer than half their cases, leaving 46% of violent crimes and 19% of property crimes unsolved.

Those most adamantly against defunding police often cite fear of rising crime, in particular, gun violence. In recent years, violent crime has dropped, according to the Bureau of Justice. Data does not show a connection to soaring police budgets.

Because police training emphasizes combat and the danger of public encounters, police presence can escalate situations to violence, as with current protests.

“Some of what we’re asking for costs nothing,” Soto said, referring, in part, to policy changes like ending qualified immunity, which would ensure police are not held to a lower standard than other citizens when they do harm someone.

Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin told the media in mid-July he has plans to ban deadly chokeholds and mandate officer intervention for excessive force in alignment with “8 Can’t Wait,” a popular campaign intended to reduce police violence. Other Southern cities have also adopted all eight policies. In Atlanta, Georgia, and Jackson, Mississippi, progressive mayors have spoken in support of defunding the police without much follow-up action.

But because the Birmingham Police Department policies already cover what’s outlined in “8 Can’t Wait,” including not using chokeholds, Soto said Woodfin was “reaching for optics.”

What activists want is funding to train social servants to respond to nonviolent crises and civilian review boards made of community members, not government officials.

“If you’re going to serve me, you’ve got to know me,” said David Baker, chairman of the Police Citizen’s Advisory Committee in Anniston, a city 60 miles east of Birmingham. Both cities are majority Black.

When majority white police forces are in majority Black cities, community members need a chance to hold cops accountable, Baker said. He pointed to investigations by the FBI and media that have outed white supremacists working in law enforcement.

A few years ago, Baker spearheaded efforts to have two white police officers in Anniston fired for ties to white supremacy groups, including the neo-Confederate League of the South. One of those officers is working for the county now, he said.

“The city knew he was racist,” Baker said. “And he’s policing the same neighborhoods as he was before.” Recently, the Anniston City Council voted to send a letter to the county sheriff to prohibit the deputy from patrolling within city limits.

If every policing body had a citizen review board and those boards were connected, Baker said, that kind of loophole would close.

Chief Wood also said police needed “Big Brother,” or a larger governing body to ensure all police departments in the state follow the same rules and require the same training for officers.

As an example, he said, when cops sign up for their annual 12 hours of continuing education in the state, they “can play 12 hours of new gun training, because that’s fun” instead of de-escalation tactics or bias training.

Without statewide regulations, Wood said, every police chief is responsible for individual departments, which is challenging when cops move city to city and leaders have opposing ideas.

[Click here to read full interview with Chief Marcus Wood]

That kind of reform requires more money, Wood said, doubling down on his stance against the calls to defund police. Social programs need more money, he said, but we don’t have a magic wand to wave and fund everything.

Imagining a better way

Meanwhile, the state is “utterly failing” social service programs for the most vulnerable, said James Tucker, the director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program in Tuscaloosa. As an example, he said the state defunded mental health care by $20 million for all 67 counties during the 2008 recession and has never refunded that loss.

“Our state is in such a quandary that you almost could propose any rational funding mechanism for a needed service, and it’s hard to say we don’t need it,” he said.

“I know we can imagine better worlds than this. What type of community does everybody deserve?”

That’s the question people should be asking right now, according to Martez Files, an activist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he studies diverse populations and works at the intersection of police accountability and racial justice.

Files grew up on the west side of Birmingham and was radicalized as a teenager.

“I was slammed to the ground in my own backyard by Birmingham police officers who believed I had robbed a Burger King,” he said.

Files began doing what he calls “helper work,” assisting the most vulnerable people in society to gain access to basic resources — those same resources Soto saw lacking in her community. Studies have long linked living in disenfranchised, impoverished neighborhoods to chronic stress, where structural violence shapes individual actions. By meeting people’s needs through community-led work, activists like Files are also addressing the root causes of crime.

One such group is already working to end gun violence and was tracking improvements in community health before the pandemic. Led by resident activist Onoyemi Williams, who worked 14 years as a parole officer, the “peacemakers” of Faith in Action are a collective of ministers from more than 60 churches. They go on door-to-door for weekly “peace walks” in the West End on the blocks with the highest rate of homicides, helping connect residents with resources more readily available in higher socioeconomic areas: mental health services, grief counseling, job training or drug rehabilitation. Often, the volunteers simply talk to residents to find out what’s needed.

“When people start seeing that someone else sees their self-worth, they start to see their own self-worth,” Williams said.

The group Be a Blessing Birmingham hands out hygiene and clothing essentials to homeless people and will soon be constructing mobile showers. The Birmingham Free Store is just that: a storefront where people can pick up free essentials, a box of pasta, toilet paper, soap or contraception. The Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust organizes around affordable housing, land ownership, and sustainable agribusiness. The trust is resident-led and located in the historic neighborhood nicknamed Dynamite Hill for the bombs white terrorists planted at Black residences.

Files said the U.S. has failed to have the collective imagination to see how programs like these deserve sustainable funding. Doing so, he said, would be a step toward repairing the harm to Black communities.

“When we think about who the criminal is, the person who is stealing is not a wealthy executive stealing multimillions and committing white-collar crime and actually hurting folks but the parent who goes to Walmart to steal a stroller because they can’t afford it,” Files said.

“Let’s talk about the through line to policing and the overcriminalization of particular communities,” said Stef Martinez, a community outreach organizer with the ACLU of Alabama.

Alabama has one of the highest incarceration rates in the U.S., the country with the highest incarceration rates in the world. Nearly 49,000 people in Alabama are in detainment. Black people make up more than half the prison population but only a quarter of the population in the state, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

Beyond incarceration, past efforts in Birmingham have relied on systems that fail across the U.S., including militarization tactics and surveillance cameras.

All that is enough to consider a different way to spend tax dollars. Law enforcement can’t spearhead violence reduction in predominantly Black neighborhoods where people have a living memory of police violence during the civil rights movement, Williams said.

“As long as they overlook the recommendations of grassroots organizers, we’re always going to have this level of violence,” Soto said. “And that is extremely saddening to me because the solutions are so simple and basic, basic human rights.”

After leading the people through the streets on Juneteenth, Soto said there’s really one question people should be asking:

“Why not let the people tell us what they need?”

This is a collaboration among the Center for Sustainable Journalism, which publishes Youth Today and the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, the Anniston Star and Scalawag, a journalism and storytelling organization pursuing justice and liberation in the South. It’s part of the Center’s national project on gun violence. Support is provided by The Kendeda Fund. The Center is solely responsible for the content and maintains editorial independence.

VIDEOGRAPHY AND PHOTO: MARCO POGGIO

NEW YORK — They all had disturbing stories, and they all had a familiar ring to them. 

Yakov, who declined to give his last name, was waiting in line at the Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan waiting to take a leisurely ferry trip across the bay to Staten Island when he was told to get out by other passengers. He was wearing a mask, he said, but that didn’t matter as much as his conservative garb. 

“They’re looking for an excuse to hate us, and they found it in the virus,” the 16-year-old said. “The pandemic has given them the freedom to say what they always have wanted.” 

Yehuda Weinstock took his children upstate to go apple picking. “We were treated like we had the plague,” he said. ‘What do you say to your children?” 

Coronavirus and the fear it has stoked across the city after bodies were piled up outside hospitals in the spring has led to the resurgence of a social virus. Scarred by daily experiences of anti-Semitism, Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn fear the pandemic and the restrictions that come with it will incite hatred and violence toward them.

Shea Wertz, a 16-year-old, said cameramen from television stations were mocking him when he asked why they were only shooting footage of people not wearing masks and not all of his neighbors, who were. He said it’s part of a trend that has gotten worse as city and state leaders have targeted people like him for fueling a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I like how he’s [New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio] saying that he loved the Jewish community but he’s still targeting us,” he said.

Asked why he thinks the mayor is picking on the Jews, Wertz turned the question around.

“I would like an answer,” he said. “Anti-Semitism is one.”

They feel singled out

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo cited a spike in coronavirus cases in four different areas of the city, three of which are home to Hasidic communities, to justify the Oct. 6 closure of schools, businesses and houses of worship.

Orthodox Jews felt officials were singling them out and assaulting their way of life, in what they saw as anti-Semitism gussied up as “common good” politics.

Wertz, a Hasid living in Borough Park, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in southwestern Brooklyn, joined an estimated hundreds of other young people in the streets one October evening to protest coronavirus restrictions. There were as many children and teenagers on the street as there were adults, some zooming by on scooters with flashing lights. About half the people in the crowd were wearing masks

The young had passionate feelings about President Donald Trump and what they saw as an effort fueled by anti-Semitism to target their religion. Children pumped Trump election signs in the air and plastered Hebrew Trump bumper stickers to light poles. Wertz and others said there was one thing he felt sure about: Cuomo and de Blasio were hypocrites. At best. At worst, they hated Jews.

Wertz felt particular animosity against the mayor, who in the past represented Borough Park at the City Council and still prides himself on keeping a special relationship with the city’s Orthodox Jewish community.

The atmosphere was part protest and part cultural celebration, but there was an undercurrent of resentment as well. Some members of the crowd turned on reporters. Jacob Kornbluh, a national reporter for the Jewish Insider, was beaten and hospitalized. A mix of visceral anger, folklore and political cabaret transformed, for one night, a peaceful and traditionally religious neighborhood.

Groups of young people gathered produce boxes along 13th Avenue and set them on fire in the middle of the road. Music blasted from speakers placed outdoors.Teenagers broke into dance. Others stood around the fire and watched it burn with righteousness in their eyes. 

Familiar scenario with a difference

Many teenagers drew comparisons to the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the city over the summer. They were responding, they said, to being targeted for being Jews. 

“They’re closing the synagogues. It’s the only thing that keeps us together,” said Aron Gravs, 18, who was at the protest with a large group of friends.

A Gadsden flag with the words “Dont Tread on Me” translated into Hebrew flew over people gathered to listen to a local businessman, Harold “Heshy” Tischler, railing against Cuomo and de Blasio with colorful language and insults. His strident voice reverberated from an impromptu stage, while Trump and Thin Blue Line flags turned several city blocks into patches of red and blue. He would later be arrested by police on charges of inciting a riot and unlawful imprisonment in connection with Kornbluh’s incident. 

Borough Park’s spiral into disorder followed something of a familiar script from around the nation. But teaching online is particularly problematic for this community because they have an aversion to screens for religious reasons. Much of the teaching has been done by phone, which has been disastrous for many parents. 

Weinstock said his daughter, who has a speech impediment, had been making great strides before the pandemic. Now her speech has regressed because therapists have not been able to work effectively with her over the phone. 

Borough Park transformed into a reservoir of pent-up rage.

“All this violence and all this anger,” said Wertz, who works as a cashier in a grocery store, “you gotta give it out somewhere.” 

He lives with his single mother and several siblings, some older, some younger. He lost his cashier job when the lockdown forced the store to close. Like many across the city and the nation, he barely got by, he said.

“We sat six months in our house,” Wertz said. “We were on lockdown. Businesses were closed. The single mothers, the married parents, at home having to deal with the children all day. Nobody’s house was in order. And now, everybody is releasing all their anger. I mean, it’s normal.”

A powerful precedent

A Supreme Court decision from 1905, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, gives state governments ample powers to limit individual liberties during a public health crisis. 

The case, which stemmed from a Massachusetts resident challenging compulsory vaccination laws, culminated with upholding the state’s power.

The significance of the ruling is two-fold. It established that a citizen’s individual liberty is not absolute, at the same time creating a legal framework to regulate state power in order to prevent its abuse. The case set a precedent invoked by several other cases related to public welfare later.

Tischler, a self-styled community organizer and the host of a radio show, with a past conviction for immigration fraud, said Cuomo doesn’t have the authority to impose restrictions. He is running for the City Council seat representing Borough Park in the 2021 citywide election.

“Show us the numbers,” Tischler said, referring to Cuomo. “The man is lying, he can’t show anything. Who made him dictator? He’s acting like a child with too much power. 

“I’m going to stop him,” he added.

‘Not second time!’

At the Oct. 9 protest in Borough Park, references to Nazi Germany often came up to express the discomfort of a community that feels it’s being scapegoated for the spreading of coronavirus.

A man shouted, “Like the Nazi in 1938. Beautiful. Look at this,” to some TV news crews, lamenting that they focused on people who weren’t wearing face coverings. A tiny 13-year-old boy with a giant hat agreed, shouting: “Germany was only once. Not second time!” in an Eastern European accent. Tischler and a mob of dozens of Hasidic males, many teenagers, surrounded first a Jewish woman talking to a reporter, then a man on the stoop of a house on 48th Street.

She called out some of them for not wearing masks. “If you care about Jews you should wear a mask and respect social distancing. Shame on you,” she said. 

The crowd told her to leave: “You shouldn’t have children,” a teenage boy told her. “Why do you hate Jews?” another one said. “What were you doing at a protest with only men?” another boy asked.

Some in the crowd, particularly older people, referenced the Holocaust to articulate their fear over the current pandemic crackdown and the feeling that once again their community is being targeted.

To Wertz and his friends, anti-Semitism is not something abstract based on the collective experience of Jews rooted in the horrors of the past. It’s the posture of government officials in dealing with their community since the pandemic began. The health crisis allowed anti-Jewish bias to manifest, often in form of law enforcement harassment, he said.

“How many times did the sheriffs come to our community when we were on lockdown, and not to other communities. They were harassing us,” Wertz said. “They came down to our community with six cars. They weren’t going to any other communities.”  

Announcing the restrictions on Oct. 6, Cuomo acknowledged that the vast majority of the houses of worship that were ordered closed were synagogues. 

“I’ve been very close with the Orthodox Jewish community for many years. I understand the imposition this is going to place on them,” Cuomo said then. “I spoke to members of the Orthodox Jewish community today. We had a very good conversation.”

The restrictions, however, spurred immediate backlash, prompting hundreds of Hasidic people to take the streets in Borough Park, culminating with the boisterous early October protests. 

Hatred of media

Many of the young men in the crowd expressed distrust for the media for creating a perception that Orthodox Jews are to blame for spikes in coronavirus transmission rates. That perception fuels anti-Semitism, they say.

“The public decides by what they see in the fake news who’s the bad guy. And then they come to us. ‘Oh! It’s the Jews! It’s not China spreading virus!’,” a man who didn’t want to give his name said. “It’s a very evil thing.”

Some youths said they felt oppressed by the presence of reporters in their community in the two weeks leading up to the protest. 

As reporters and photographers made their way through the crowd, people screamed, “Fake news!”

“We hate the media,” one of them said. 

Many of the people at the protest quoted Trump as their ultimate source of truth.

Several youths said they didn’t believe the infection rates officials gave were real. Others said they believed people from outside their community were getting tested there to boost the numbers of positive cases in order to give state and city officials an excuse to enforce restrictions.

Borough Park went heavily for Trump in 2016.

Several youths said they felt the city and state government are targeting the Orthodox Jewish community because they support Trump. Some of them called it “retribution” or “revenge.”

“Conservatives are pro-life, pro-First Amendment, pro-Second Amendment,” one teenager said. “What are the values of the liberals?”

VIDEOGRAPHER: KELLEY BOSTIAN

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the sixth of six articles in an occasional series about the intersection of OST and students experiencing homelessness.)

As the pandemic continues, the number of people experiencing homelessness could rise — especially if eviction moratoriums are lifted. More children in summer and after-school programs could be impacted.

How can after-school providers respond?

One thing people in the field can do is to learn more about homelessness among children and youth and how to address it — then use and build on the relationships they have with kids and families.

Training about homelessness is important, said Daniel Zavala, director of policy and strategic communications at Building Changes, a nonprofit that pulls together government, philanthropy and other nonprofits to work on homelessness in Washington state.

“We are likely to see a mass influx of people experiencing a housing crisis,” he said. While after-school providers might not have the resources available to train their staff, they could ask state agencies or associations to provide it, he said.

After-school providers need to check in with students

After-school programs can help fill the gap created when schools closed. Schools had provided stability as well as meals and other resources for kids experiencing homelessness, Zavala said.

“Many students have actually dropped out of [school] rosters and contact has been severed,” he said.

Bellwether Education Partners estimates 3 million students across the country are no longer on the school rolls. In Miami-Dade County public schools, for example, 16,000 fewer students are enrolled.

Outreach and identification look different with school being closed, Zavala said.

“One of the things we’ve been learning is the importance of relationships,” he said.

“It will be on [after-school] providers to understand, to have those relationships, to know the language to build that trust, so that identification can happen properly.

“Be intentional about check-ins,” he urged.

About three-fourths of children and youth identified as homeless are living “doubled up” in another household, according to the National Center for Homeless Education. About 15% are in shelters, more than 6% are temporarily in motels and 4% are living unsheltered. Families may be living at campgrounds or in cars.

District liaison can help providers

If youth workers and community members suspect a child is homeless, they should look more closely, learn more and then act, according to Schoolhouse Connection. The organization suggests ways to talk to children and parents with sensitivity and respect.

After-school providers also need to know that federal law gives homeless students certain rights, and it mandates the responsibilities that schools have to them.

VIDEOGRAPHER: KELLEY BOSTIAN

Under the McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth Act, each school district is required to have an employee, a McKinney-Vento liaison, who ensures that kids get services required under the law. 

After-school providers can contact this district liaison.

Students have the right to stay in the same school even if they move, and they have the right to get transportation to that school as long as it is in the child’s best interest.

They can enroll in school without the documents schools usually require. They get free school meals and help with supplies and other needs. Youth on their own can get extra support, and young children can get connected to early childhood services.

States and localities may also require that certain services be provided, Zavala said. Each state has a McKinney-Vento statewide coordinator who should be able to provide information about such programs, he said.

After-school programs are an important component in addressing the needs of kids who are housing-insecure. For example, a recent report from Building Changes noted that school districts that show better outcomes for students experiencing homelessness had a variety of after-school opportunities for students.

Within those programs, flexible transportation and the provision of meals were important, the report said.

An effort to monitor and address the opportunity gap was also a characteristic of districts that showed better outcomes for kids experiencing homelessness, as were specific efforts at relationship-building and structured social-emotional programs, it said.

Homelessness disproportionately affects young people of color, and programs addressing those groups were important, the report said.

VIDEOGRAPHER: JACOB LANGSTON

JACKSONVILLE, Florida — Teri Sopp’s former self stares down from a wall in Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit Public Defender’s Office. The painting, a gift more than a dozen years ago, bears silent witness as she works to free people also frozen in time, serving lifelong sentences for crimes committed before they turned 18.

For one client, she’s arguing reduced culpability because of lead. She expects to argue the same for other clients.

Sopp is the director of the resentencing project for juveniles serving life without parole. Once de rigeur, the Supreme Court has ruled mandatory life without parole for juveniles is unconstitutional. So now all such cases are eligible for resentencing.

Today, Sopp’s working the case of a client serving life for crimes committed when he was 17 in the mid-1990s. One night, he and some others tried to rob a man. The man shot and killed one of the co-conspirators. Sopp’s client was subsequently convicted of armed robbery and murder for his co-conspirator’s death under Florida’s felony murder law.

Sopp described this as common. “Really, the law in Florida allows any case to be … murder,” she said.

Although the youngest, her client’s consecutive life sentences made his the longest sentence. Today only one of his co-conspirators remains in prison.

A light, chilly rain falls outside as Sopp explains the evidence she will present to convince the court that his sentence should be reduced, ideally to time served. Without resentencing, her client, whose name she asked to be withheld to avoid accusations of trying the case in the press, may die in prison. Much of the evidence to reduce his sentence, known as a mitigation package, is familiar to people in the criminal justice field — child abuse, abandonment, poverty and, of course, youth.

Related story: Abused, Often Homeless, Florida Man Got 2 Life Sentences At 17

Lead can affect impulse control, decision making

One argument stands out from the rest: lead poisoning. For much of his youth, the client lived in and around some of Jacksonville’s most contaminated sites.

According to his case file, “He ate crawdads from McCoys Creek when he was homeless. …  in the early 1990s, he exclusively drank water from Lonnie C. Miller Park. He slept in the park, which was later closed due to contamination from toxins. He lived half a mile away from 5th and Cleveland Street ash incinerator and he drank water from the contaminated aquifer. He lived a mile away from the Forest Street Incinerator EPA Superfund site.

“It’s all fenced off now.”

Lead poisoning’s deleterious effect on young children’s brain development is thoroughly established. This is largely why the United States banned lead in paints and gasoline in the last quarter of the 20th century. Today lead persists in the environment and older homes and fixtures. Though more commonly associated with the Northeast, Sopp says Jacksonville’s former industrial center is among the state’s most contaminated. The lead poisoning rate here is more than double the statewide rate.

Lead contamination has given rise to a cottage industry for civil litigation, but it’s a rare argument in criminal cases, when it can factor into sentencing. That may be changing. Numerous studies have demonstrated a link between childhood lead poisoning and crime, including violent crime such as homicide.

The lead author of one such study, Brian B. Boutwell, associate professor at the University of Mississippi School of Applied Sciences and Medical Center, stressed that while there’s a demonstrated correlation between lead exposure and violence, more research is necessary to determine the significance of the link. “I wouldn’t say we’re there yet,” he said. “… there’s certainly mounting evidence to think of lead having causal impact on behavior.”

Ingesting or breathing the toxic metal at a young age, which is more common among low-income and minority children, can lower intelligence and permanently damage centers of the brain associated with decision-making and impulse control, all of which contribute to the propensity for crime and violence. Yet most people remain largely unaware of the association; and some, among them prosecutors, Sopp said, scoff at the notion that lead poisoning can make someone more likely to commit a crime.

Armed with her client’s history and scientific research, Sopp is trying to establish that he was exposed to lead and that this exposure diminished his 17-year-old brain’s ability to make sound choices, thus reducing his culpability.

This will be the first time she’s presented such evidence in her 43-year legal career.

A lifetime of harm

Humans have used lead for many millennia. As far back as the Roman Empire, there were rumors that the slightly sweet-tasting metal, whose uses then ranged from pipes to dishes to paints and even as an additive for wine, could make you sick.

Early in the last century, scientists began more closely examining lead’s impact, particularly on children. The findings are clear: Lead damages kidneys, bones, blood and brain. The harm is often permanent.

“It has an impact on IQ. It has an impact on impulsivity. It has an impact on executive function. It has an impact on academic achievement,” said pediatrician Jeffrey Goldhagen, a former Duval County (Florida) Health Department director who implemented the city’s first lead program in the 1990s.

“It has an impact on criminality.”

A peer-reviewed 2015 study of nearly 60,000 children in Chicago found that early childhood lead exposure, even after controlling for factors such as poverty, mother’s education level, low birth rate and race, significantly increased a child’s chance of failing math and reading in the third grade. That year, the Chicago Tribune reported that a map of lead poisoning cases among children under 6 in 1995 looked extremely similar to a map of aggravated assault rates in 2012, when those children were 17 to 22 years old.

Boutwell’s team used the blood tests and addresses of roughly 60,000 Cincinnati children to track the likelihood of lead exposure at the census tract level. They then mapped 15,000 violent crimes by census tract. They found that areas where more children were exposed to lead also had higher violent crime rates. 

“With the exception of rape, aggregate blood-lead levels were statistically significant predictors of violent crime at the census tract level,” reported the peer-reviewed study in the Public Library of Science’s PLOS-One publication. The study is archived in the National Institutes of Health.

Boutwell characterized their findings as statistically significant, though he described the correlation between lead poisoning and violent crime as small to moderate. “That’s not to say that it’s unimportant, it just speaks to the nature of how complex behavior is,” he said.

Studies like Boutwell’s and others have led researchers to theorize that lead contributed to the 1980s crime wave. There are fears that children exposed to lead during the Flint, Michigan, water crisis will one day end up in prison.

The science correlating lead poisoning and criminality is clear, Goldhagen says.

Yet some, including people in the legal arena, are skeptical of lead’s effect on criminal behavior. Speaking on background, one mitigation specialist, a physician who advertises expertise in lead poisoning, described it as preposterous. Another said that when lead poisoning is established, prosecutors often offer a plea deal. But doing so can be difficult for cases like Sopp’s client, who grew up in a time when testing was rare and the standard for diagnosing lead poisoning was far higher.

Decades ago, the threshold blood lead level (BLL) to diagnose lead poisoning was 25 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL). Today it’s five. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) holds that no amount of lead exposure is safe.

There’s no way to know how many people living today were exposed to unsafe levels of lead, as testing was extremely limited and levels now considered poisonous were classified as safe. In 2016, Reuters found that millions of children still go untested.

The more time passes, the more difficult it is to prove lead poisoning. But by examining symptoms, possible sources of exposure and brain scans — lead poisoning in young children often leaves gaps in certain areas of the brain — it may be possible to make a compelling case. That’s what Sopp is hoping to do.

Poison on the walls

If he had to do it all over again, Frank probably never would have bought that home in south Jacksonville. Soon after they moved in in 1980, his wife set about fixing up the 1950s era home. To get old paint off the interior, Frank (name changed to protect his family’s privacy) said she used a technique where paint is heated, stripped and swept or vacuumed up.

The memory bothers him now.

“If that paint had lead in it, it probably was weaponized,” he said.

His first daughter was born several years after they bought the house. Everything seemed fine at first, but as time went by, she fell further behind her peers. Frank says her language and motor skills were stunted; she struggled with impulse control and aggression. He recalled her throwing things — never at people — and smashing her head against walls.

She was eventually diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and being intellectually disabled, though he believes her IQ is actually higher than that because she struggles to focus.

For years, the family sought answers. Test after test failed to find any reason for her diagnoses. Frank recalls a Pennsylvania children’s hospital giving her a brain scan at one point.

“There were some areas of her brain that were shrunk or not developed,” he said.

Eventually, doctors told them that the cause was either environmental or indeterminable.

Since then, science has established links between lead exposure and all his daughter’s symptoms. Frank theorizes it could have been lead or any number of other things. They may never know for sure.

The family moved out of that home before their second daughter was born. She is neurotypical.

Burden on poor, people of color

By 2015, lead poisoning had largely fallen out of the collective consciousness. Then the Flint, Michigan water crisis exploded in the headlines. By the time the water’s unsafe lead levels became front page news, nearly 30,000 children were exposed.

A government-appointed commission later determined that the crisis was partly caused by systemic racism. If Flint had been wealthier and whiter, the crisis might have never happened.

Flint may be the most famous example of how systemic racism contributes to lead poisoning, but it’s not unique. Nationwide, low-income neighborhoods and racial minorities are more likely to be exposed. The CDC reports that children enrolled in Medicaid, who are disproportionately minorities, “are at the highest risk of being exposed to lead.”

“The impact on [Black] communities was devastating and ignored. Hundreds of millions, from an epidemiological and population perspective. Tens of millions of IQ points lost,” Goldhagen said. “… From my perspective it is an example and among the most pressing examples, of the impact of structural and institutional racism in U.S. history.”

The Florida Department of Health’s childhood lead screening map for Jacksonville shows that most of the city’s majority-Black neighborhoods in the urban core and northwest are in target ZIP codes for lead screening. These areas have homes built before 1960 or 1970, which are far more likely to contain lead-based paint. They also have some of the highest rates of violent crime in a city known as the state’s murder capital.

Many of Sopp’s clients come from these ZIP codes, which also contain the majority of Jacksonville’s dozens of Superfund sites, many of them contaminated with lead. Like the client she’s arguing was exposed to lead, many are Black.

“Many of our clients grew up in that same northwest Jacksonville, same side of town, same poverty-stricken brownfield neighborhoods where all kinds of toxic environs contribute to malformed brain development,” she said.

Why was his blood lead level so high?

Jessica (name changed to protect her son’s privacy) lives in a historic district in the urban core. Her son is enrolled in Medicaid. A year ago, a routine test on her son, then 2, found a BLL of 11 µg/dL, more than twice the threshold deemed a “level for concern” by the CDC. A subsequent blood draw found a BLL of 9 µg/dL.

She was stunned. “I guess I didn’t grow up thinking about that sort of thing. I felt stupid,” she said.

Suspecting paint, one of the most common sources of exposure, she and her husband tested the entire house. The tests were negative, but they took preventative measures anyway.

“We got lead-encapsulating paints and painted all the walls and all the trim and his results weren’t really down,” she said.

In case the lead was in the soil — decades ago many local homeowners and builders used toxic incinerator ash the city gave away as fill dirt — they put down cardboard, mulch and covered it with soil. She also fed him foods rich in nutrients that help pull lead out of the system, like vitamins B, C and E. 

His BLL remained stubbornly high. She called the local utility, which provides free lead testing to water customers. It found 6 parts per billion (ppb) of lead, well below the EPA’s actionable level of 15 ppb. (At the height of the crisis, some in Flint had 100 ppb. Ninety percent had above 15 ppb.)

At the same time, she noticed behavioral changes.

“He would get really aggressive sometimes and throw things. I know aggression is a sign of heavy metal,” Jessica said. “I don’t know if he’s upset and doesn’t know how to handle big emotions.”

Jessica searched for answers for months. After reading a paper about bananas possibly having lead in them, she switched to organic bananas for the smoothies she makes him most days.

His most recent blood test showed a 5 µg/dL BLL, which the CDC says is unlikely to cause negative health effects. She and her husband are now talking about selling the house. In the meantime, they’re planning an extended trip in the hope time away detoxes him. They may never find out how he was exposed or how it impacted him, if at all.

“It’s been the unknown that’s been so haunting,” she said.

How children are exposed

Based on the results of a 2005-06 survey, the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that as many as 37 million American households have lead paint. The CDC places the number of homes with deteriorated lead paint or lead-contaminated house dust at 24 million, with young children living in 4 million of the most dangerous residences, it estimates.

Children are exposed to lead through paint, household fixtures, parents inadvertently bringing it home from work and in the environment. Young children are more likely to suffer long-term effects because their bodies absorb more lead, they’re more apt to eat things from the ground and put their hands in their mouths and their brains are developing. While Goldhagen agreed that there’s no fixed age at which permanent damage is no longer a risk, the commonly used threshold is 6 years of age or younger, when the brain is rapidly developing.

In parts of Jacksonville, the environment is contaminated with lead from decades past. Some of the city is built on toxic soil.

Being Florida’s industrial center helped Jacksonville thrive in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The industry that contributed to its early success also left behind a toxic legacy in the form of dangerous chemicals and metals. The city is also contaminated by ash that contains lead. Unaware of the risk, the city long offered incinerator ash to residents and builders. Some billed the ash as fertilizer. The city also used this ash as fill dirt on which it built parks, schools and community centers, many in Black neighborhoods. Some operated for decades before the contamination was discovered. Due to toxicity, several remain closed to this day.

Many of Teri Sopp’s clients attended these schools, played in those parks and lived in homes where lead could be on the walls and in the ground.

Jacksonville was largely unaware of the problem until the 1990s when Goldhagen implemented the city’s first lead program, not long after the CDC created its first lead detection program in 1991.

They tested thousands of residents and spent millions cleaning up what they could.

“It became a very significant public health issue,” Goldhagen said. He recalls doing a lot of chelation — a therapy that helps remove lead from blood — on children with dangerously high BLLs.

While ash received much of the publicity, they found that most children were exposed by indoor paint, he said.

Still, the memory of the ash remains imprinted on John Delaney, who was mayor from 1995 to 2003.

“I wasn’t even born when the ash was scattered, but the situation still haunts me,” he said via email.

The city lead program had a measurable impact on reducing lead poisoning and educating the community about the risk. Three decades on, much awareness has faded; like Jessica, many assume lead is a problem from the past.

In recent years, however, the number of Jacksonville residents with unsafe amounts of lead in their blood has quintupled. For years, the city held steady with a few dozen positive tests per year. In 2017, the number leaped from the 30s to more than 150 annually, according to the Florida Department of Health (FDOH).

The local health department couldn’t explain the increase. It said via email that “many factors” may contribute.

Regarding how people are exposed, Chowdhury Bari, the Duval County Health Department epidemiology program administrator, said via email, “This is due mainly to the different sources of lead in the environment and other risk factors.” Risk factors include contaminated water, poverty, living in homes built pre-1978 (when the U.S. banned lead paint), people putting hands or objects into their mouths and family members unknowingly bringing lead dust home from work, he said.

Whatever the cause, lead poisoning is disproportionately high in this coastal city. In 2019, Duval County’s rate per capita was twice that of Florida’s. In the last three years, 150 local children aged 4 or under have been diagnosed with lead poisoning, FDOH reports. Jessica’s son is one of them.

What can be done

While having a child test positive for lead is frightening, testing is part of the solution, as it alerts families to the issue. Jessica knowing about her son’s BLL led her and her husband to take proactive measures to reduce his exposure.

Jessica said their Medicaid insurance, which she believes instigated the initial test, has been extremely helpful throughout.

“They’ve got such a great program,” she said.

For people concerned about lead in the water, the local utility, JEA, offers free testing for customers, as some older homes may have lead pipes or solder. If lead exceeds 15 ppb, per the EPA guidelines, it must work to correct the issue. JEA said that in the last 10 years, it hadn’t found a single case above the EPA action level. (The reporter’s spouse works at JEA.)

The health department also offers resources, such as care coordination, in-home visits and health and nutritional counseling. Goldhagen suggests that remedial programs and academic assistance can help overcome the brain deficits caused by lead exposure in early childhood.

Jacksonville’s legacy of contamination is another matter. Boutwell says that, while overall the country has done a “reasonably good job” at lead cleanup, the potential harm caused by residual lead pollution makes the case for funding further cleanups.

The government was working on developing a federal lead strategy when, in 2018, the Trump Administration abruptly put Ruth Etzel, the EPA’s head of children’s health, on leave. Etzel, who is also a pediatrician, was later permanently removed from her post. The administration said it was based on allegations about her leadership, but numerous colleagues and peers suggested it was actually an attempt to stymie her work, which likely would have recommended increased environmental regulations and cleanups, the New York Times reported. The plans for a federal lead strategy have stalled since then.

The EPA’s work on local Superfund sites is ongoing, albeit slowly, but little else is being done to remove lead from homes in the city. Falling out of the public awareness means there simply isn’t funding or programs for remediation. Although a 2009 analysis found that every dollar spent on lead removal can have an economic benefit of $17 to $220, homeowners are largely on their own — if they know there’s lead, which many don’t. There are laws that require notifying buyers and renters of the potential for lead exposure, but Goldhagen described enforcement as sorely lacking.

For people like Sopp’s client, who’s now in his mid-40s, it’s simply too late to undo the harm. But it might not be too late for that exposure to save him from spending the rest of his life in prison.

Sopp isn’t giving up.

“It’s difficult now. Because of the half-life of lead there’s probably not any indicia in the physiology, you probably couldn’t go and do any blood levels and find lead now because it dissipates over the years,” she said.

“So what you have to look for is proof that there is contact with the lead, exposure to the lead and look at a brain scan and see where it’s left deficits and how the different parts of the brain connect with the other.”

This is the fifth in a Northeast Florida-focused series collaboration between WJCT and the Center for Sustainable Journalism, which publishes Youth Today and the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. This series is part of the Center’s national project on gun violence. Support is provided by The Kendeda Fund. The Center is solely responsible for the content and maintains editorial independence.

VIDEOGRAPHER: SIMONA LUCCHI

ATLANTA – Millions of American families with children will start receiving monthly payments this week as a result of the temporary expanded child tax credit introduced as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. 

The credit — up to $3,600 per child, paid out in monthly installments and/or a lump sum this year — is expected to cut child poverty in half, said Ray Khalfani, a research associate at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.     

Khalfani said the tax credit will be especially beneficial to people of color who are being left behind in the economic recovery since widespread vaccination slowed the coronavirus pandemic. 

“This policy will help our families recover from the pandemic, and a permanent expansion of the child tax credit will ensure these benefits don’t go away,” he said.

An analysis from GBPI projected the current policy could lower national poverty rates from 13.9% to 5.9%. 

Genesis Appiah, a Georgia mother of a six-year-old daughter, said that in addition to helping pay for food, childcare, and rent, the monthly credit will allow her to take her daughter out for ice cream or to Chuck E. Cheese— a luxury she has not been able to afford, despite working two jobs.

“Children … don’t care about bills that need to be paid,” Appiah said. “They want to have fun and that’s what they deserve.”

She echoed calls for the benefit to be made permanent. 

“I know too many families that have to worry about more than just taking their children to Chuck E. Cheese,” Appiah said. 

Most families that qualify will automatically receive the payments without having to sign up if they filed taxes in 2019 or 2020, or if they signed up to receive a coronavirus stimulus check. The maximum amount for a child under six — $3,600 — is distributed in six monthly installments of $300 and a lump sum of $1,800 when the head of household files taxes.

Families who wish to receive the credit all at once can opt-out and get the full payment when they file their taxes. 

For Pamela Grisham, an unemployed mother of four from Georgia, the payments will allow her 8 and 10-year-old daughters to restart gymnastics and therapy. 

Grisham said she’s been unemployed since the beginning of the pandemic. Back in March, her unemployment checks stopped arriving, and she said she doesn’t know why.  

“It was a lot,” said Grisham. “My kids were stripped away of everything. I want to give them a life again.”

While the expanded child tax credit is the largest families have ever received, and includes those who don’t make enough to be required to file taxes, it only lasts until the end of the tax year, said Kimberly Scott, the executive director of Georgia Women’s Action for New Direction, an Atlanta-based nonprofit.

“Congress must act, and they must act now … so that the economic gains we have seen in the last few months aren’t erased, particularly the gains made by the communities of color, which have been hit the hardest,” Scott said.

Scott described the expanded credit as “especially meaningful” for Black women and people of color, as they often face persistent discrimination in pay and hiring and are frequently relegated to the lowest-paying jobs. 

A version of this article was originally published by Fresh Take Georgia. 

 

VIDEOGRAPHER: RAH HOWARD

Between January 1, 2022, and April 25, 2022, Little Rock, Ark. — the 24th most violent of 65 cities, according to the FBI’s most recent data — counted 24 homicides. That compared to 21 homicides during the same period in 2021, according to the Little Rock Police Department’s most recent count. A disproportionate number of those murders involved guns, continuing a trend.

Blacks — mainly males — accounted for all homicide victims under 30 years old in Little Rock.

Back in 2005, when he was 13 years old, Little Rock native Christian Kimborough barely missed becoming one of what has been a perennial run-on of Black males murdered by guns in his hometown. Kimborough was shot in the head, at point-blank range with a .38 caliber pistol, during a sleep-over at a friend’s house — by a teen who was showing it off and randomly pointing at Kimborough.

“He whispered,” Kimborough said, reflecting back, “‘It’s got two blanks in the gun, it’s two real bullets in the gun’ … I said, ‘What does that mean?’ … “I’d never seen an actual gun until that point. I’d always seen them in the movies. I heard about them … When he shot me, it was crazy … “

His recovery required two major surgeries that included placing a metal plate in his skull, repairing damage done as the bullet entered and exited his brain. He had to relearn how to walk and talk. He’s made what his physicians consider a full physical recovery, but he still lives that trauma, said Kimborough, CEO of Revived Minds, which doubles as his mission-focused clothing brand and international, youth-focused campaign against gun violence.

“It’s really taken its toll on me, after all these years,” he said, of being shot. “I get really paranoid, really fast … I don’t know why we do this. It’s got to stop.”

Gun violence, said attorney Carmen Hardin, criminal justice department chair at Little Rock’s Philander Smith College, “is a leading cause of death for adolescents aged fifteen to nineteen … Black boys and Black men, around the ages of fifteen to thirty-four — even though they are small percentage of the population — are thirty-seven to forty percent of gun homicides.”

Aiming to combat the gun scourge in his city, Mayor Frank Scott placed Little Rock under a state-of-emergency on Feb. 1, 2022. The City of Little Rock recently rolled out a youth summer and partnerships with several community organizations, hoping to provide opportunities that help stem the violence.

As he speaks in cities across the country, Kimborough urges the same: “What I see for my future is getting everybody in line with the message.”