ON THE LINE
SLAUGHTER, JANE & Craig, Berry & DeMause, Neil & McKissack, Fredrick L. Jr. & Thornburg, Gina K.
ON THE LINE Fighting for Fairer Health Care San Francisco Kit Costello has been president of the California Nurses Association for less than a year. Already she's doing battle to fw/^ overhaul...
...The group, based in Lynwood...
...She also stands up for patients...
...he says...
...NeildeMause...
...In the spring of 1993, while attending Suffolk Community College through the federal JOBS program—an option the state no longer allows—Scofield and some other students began sharing stories of the problems they were having navigating the welfare system...
...A public-school superintendent "can't say, 'Thou cannot teach the following subject because it conflicts with some people's view of religion.' The First Amendment protects a student's right to read material in a textbook that is assigned by the school system...
...That jolted me into realizing they don't give a shit...
...Members talk with kids who have committed violent crimes...
...People ran to our tables to sign," Costello says...
...The amendment would replace the conventional "winner-take-all" electoral system with preference voting—the nonpartisan proportional-voting system used in Ireland for the past seventy years and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the past fifty...
...Dre now works part time for Drive-By Agony...
...For the last several months, she has combined her hectic Suffolk Welfare Warriors schedule with campaigning...
...California, a notoriously high-crime area of South-Central Los Angeles, aims to teach compassion and foster mutual respect among inner-city youth...
...Ndegeocello...
...The Marshall County school system's textbook review committee also approved the book...
...Very few people understand that we do have an extensive science background...
...Drive-By Agony's work has caught the eye of California State Senator Tom Hayden...
...Voters rank candidates numerically, in order of preference...
...A hospital and clinic nurse for seventeen years...
...We have to face people who look for health care, who are uninsured...
...or contact San Franciscans for Preference Voting, P.O...
...She is reluctant to explain her music...
...Ndegeocello's latest work, Peace Beyond Passion (Maverick Records), is a follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut album, Plantation Butterflies, which was nominated for four Grammy Awards in 1994...
...The district she was offered was, her Democratic contact admitted, an incredibly uphill battle—a heavily Republican district with an incumbent on Long Island's conservative east end...
...They would have to give reasons based on sound clinical criteria—it has to be for medical reasons, not because they don't want to pay for it...
...Tracy and Jeff Shaw, who have three daughters in county schools, are thinking about challenging Shadowen in court...
...Preference voting would grant more choices to all voters, would better represent San Francisco's diverse communities, and would enhance coalition-building, advocates say...
...I still have my friends," he says, "but my morals are totally different...
...Her message: If we eliminate corporate welfare and raise income taxes on the wealthy, we could fund real welfare reform—job training, college programs, child care, and family-supporting wages...
...They cannot get themselves out alone...
...Healthcare, Kaiser, and Columbia/HCA are throwing against the initiative...
...For more information, contact Kit Costello or Chuck Idelson, CNA...
...He pauses...
...San Francisco, CA 94103...
...For more information, contact Suffolk Welfare Warriors, 1105 A Kingsley Place, Coran, NY 11727, (516) 732-0525...
...It's like you see a little boy in there who s scared...
...We have to look people in the eye...
...The California Nurses Association and its allies have a big lead despite the corporate bucks that Actna/U.S...
...Gina K. Thornbl rc...
...Berry Craig HIP-HOP DIVA Me'shell Ndegeocello (N-day-gay-o-chello) has been hailed as hip hop's next great diva...
...David Friedman, Kentucky ACLU genera] counsel, says Shadowen may have violated constitutional guarantees of free speech and academic freedom and crossed the line separating church and state...
...1100...
...On the last album [Plantation butterflies], I was disillusioned by so many things," Ndegeocello says...
...Since 1991...
...The Act would curb some of the worst abuses perpetrated by health-maintenance organizations and insurance companies...
...They figure if a woman's walking in the room, can't you get a cheaper woman...
...We wanted to form alliances with groups that want to get progressive political issues back on the radar screen...
...For the past two years, the group has run a six-week camp for families and teenagers to teach family-preservation, conflict-resolution strategies, recreational alternatives to gang violence, and job skills...
...t J "There's no reason people should work all their lives, pay their taxes, put their kids through college—and one medical crisis wipes them out," she says...
...The page-pasting reminds Friedman of the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925...
...she says...
...He added, "It has nothing to do with censorship or anything like that...
...But Hawkins knew what to do...
...310) 537-8018...
...Just a little more than a year ago, Scofield and her son were living on an Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) grant of $576 a month plus food stamps...
...She has gone to voter-registration drives at welfare centers and health clinics...
...The group ultimately won an injunction against the county for treating financial aid for education as income and cutting off AFDC recipients' child care as a result...
...I was following my friends...
...The textbook explains that an immense explosion may have formed the planets and solar systems, but the textbook does not include the biblical version of creation...
...For more information, contact Rob Richie of The Center for Voting and Democracy, (202) 882-7378...
...It's one thing for a school not to adopt a textbook," Friedman says...
...The county board supports Shadowen...
...School Superintendent Kenneth Shadowen objected to a grade-school science textbook that included the theory of creation...
...This has nothing to do with God...
...Drive-By Agony has organized an annual April peace march in downtown Los Angeles...
...She joined the jazz program at Duke Ellington School of the Arts and later attended Howard University...
...Dre Guilders made decisions after high-school graduation that nearly landed him in prison...
...Preference voting allows voters to elect candidates with a lower vote threshold than traditional winner-take-all elections...
...During the past decade, more than sixty localities have resolved voting-rights suits by adopting proportional systems...
...Scofield was surprised when a local legislative aide approached her this May, asking her to run for state assembly as a Democrat...
...Costello became active in the union after management turned down her carefully researched proposal that would have saved enough money to fund an on-site child-care center...
...Like many women receiving welfare, Scofield was fleeing an abusive relationship and moved from job to job...
...says Childers...
...When you let them know what they've done," says co-organizer Patricia Shields, "they get quiet and their faces change...
...Scofield works as a full-time staff person for Suffolk Welfare Warriors, which shares information among the county's 38,500 welfare families...
...I have overcome that...
...The themes on Peace Beyond Passion hover around struggle and liberation...
...So Shadowen ordered school employees to glue together the two pages that elucidate what scientists call the "big bang...
...The other members of Drive-By Agony believe that the most likely solutions to inner-city violence reside with the people who live there...
...Drive-Bv Agonv is battling a whole host ot socioeconomic ills that children of the 1990s are inheriting from their parents...
...But, she says, "I more than satisfied with the dialogue created by the song " $9 '—FREDRICK L McKISSAGKnl 'We Put Their Faces in It' Los Angeles A look of grief settles on Lorna Hawkins's face when she tells how her sons were gunned down—first Joe...
...We put their faces in it, so to speak, to make them look...
...Already she's doing battle to fw/^ overhaul the state's \ corporate-driven Rljp^lflfl health-care svstem...
...Till then, I figured you do your homework, and they listen to reason...
...The album has a brash, fresh, in-your-face style, as in the lyrics of "Leviticus: Faggot": "Let he without sin walk amongst the hated and the feared and know true trial and tribulations/See my dejfl we're all dying for something, searchin' and searchinVSooa nod) found out that god would turn his back on her too...
...But Hayden's interest is an exception among politicians...
...She has met with the local Police Benevolent Association and sportsmen's clubs...
...It also protects a teacher's academic freedom to teach it," says Friedman...
...The parents...
...Mobilizing the Welfare Vote Suffolk, New York It hasn't been easy for Terri Scofield to become a Democratic candidate for the New York state assembly...
...It outlines a bill of rights for medical care...
...Box 590341, San Francisco, CA 94159-0341,(415) 221-9119...
...The week after President Clinton announced he would sign legislation ending the federal guarantee of welfare assistance for the poor, Scofield was among 100 demonstrators who disrupted the opening of Manhattan's Democratic campaign headquarters, chanting "No veto, no vote...
...And if they're not right next to them, they're in jail, they're dead, they're on drugs, institutionalized...
...That's the word: Somewhere, somehow, they're institutionalized, whether it's in a hospital, a jail, some system they got caught up in...
...and the citv that's around me...
...You'd think that things like gluing textbook pages together would have ended long ago," Friedman says...
...People who've been victimized are scared, and then they're angry...
...I am the city," says Childers...
...I hope that the campaign will have broken some stereotypes and given hope to welfare women that not only can you regain your citizen status in this country . . . but every citizen has to be more vigilant in participating in government...
...Stuck in the Past Draff envitle, Kentucky The "big-bang" theory is a sticky subject in the Marshall County public schools...
...an accomplished bassist, was born in Germany in the late 1960s and raised in Washington, D.C...
...But it's something else when a textbook is adopted, then school officials prevent the reading of certain pages in it...
...The complexity and type of work nurses do have been undervalued for decades," she says...
...And she has knocked on doors in low-income neighborhoods...
...She is the power behind Drive-By Agony, a five-year-old violence-prevention organization...
...Thus began the JOBS Network Club (the name changed to Suffolk Welfare Warriors the following year...
...The reason I believe the Suffolk Democratic Committee gave me the nomination was because I have the ability and the opportunity to mobilize a whole chunk of people who don't normally participate—the poor and working poor," Scofield says...
...They're not really looking at the grassroots organizations," Hawkins says...
...The state department of education endorsed the textbook, which is used in fifth- and sixth-grade classes...
...If every average schmoe just took the one little issue that they're passionate about, became an expert on it, and then hounded the politicians on that one issue, we could really have a government by and for the people...
...Even so, Shadowen claims support from most residents of Marshall County, which is deep in mostly rural, fundamentalist western Kentucky...
...They understand the incredible power of this industry...
...Now I'm trying to make them follow me...
...The union is a major backer of the new Labor Party- Costello says the reason is directly tied to nurses' work...
...After kicking around Washington and winning three Washington Area Music Awards in 1990, she moved to New York, where she was commissioned by Alan Douglas, the executor of Jimmy Hendrix's estate, to do her versions of the late ' guitarist's songs...
...that is me...
...For more information, contact Drive-By Agonv...
...A Padu-cah native, Scopes was convicted of violating a Tennessee law against teaching evolution in school...
...If a voter's first-choice candidate loses, excess votes transfer to subsequent preferences until all positions are filled...
...The group has also staged protests at local legislative hearings and serenaded the Suffolk County legislature with specially written Christmas carols like "Away in a Shelter" and "Families Standing 'Round an Open Fire...
...Costello stands up for her profession...
...now it's gone...
...The group, with its rive-member staff and more than thirty volunteers, also produces educational videos, provides referral services, and runs a violence-prevention program at a local school...
...For example, if treatment is denied, they have to tell you in writing why...
...are doing the same thing the kids are doing, right next to them...
...I love to take on impossible tasks," Scofield says...
...They'll take the money every time...
...I went to drugs, and I got popped [arrested...
...Ndegeocello, whose name means "free like a bird" in Swahili, is constantly raising big questions about life...
...who is considering writing legislation that would confer special benefits, such as protracted bereavement leave, on families who experience violent crime...
...Jane Slaughter VOTE ON PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION If an amendment on the November ballot wins, San Francisco will become the first city to adopt a proportional electoral system in a plebiscite since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965...
...Our slate won with a 70 percent approval rate this last time," she says...
...This year the California Nurses Association collected 800.000 signatures to put an initiative called the Patient Protection Act on November's state ballot...
...she remembers...
...3100 Imperial Highwav...
...I didn't have anything to do with my time, so what did I pick...
...Lynwood, CA 90262...
...in a case of mistaken identity, then Gerald Movement in a car-jacking...
...Costello says her members overwhelmingly back the union's new militancy...
...The anger gets you because you don't know what to do with it...
...We're not going to teach one theory and not teach another theory," the superintendent told the Louisville Courier-Journal, the state's largest newspaper...
...I found it to be an 'inclusive' system, giving everyone in South African society a stake in the outcome, rather than the 'exclusive' system which is too often the result of 'winner-take-all.' . . . San Francisco has an opportunity to reinvigorate a voting system that could serve as a model for the next century...
...The referendum would also set safe staffing levels, prohibit gag rules, protect whistleblowers, and set up a fund to maintain community health centers...
...We're a very religious family," he says...
...In a fetter to San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, Jesse Jackson wrote, "I saw proportional representation at work in the South Africa elections two years ago, and I was impressed...
...We just open their eves...
...It's this kind of activist mentality that marks Scofield's campaign...
...Before they asked her to run, she says, "The extent of my involvement with the Democratic Party in Suffolk County, other than being a registered Democrat, was to call them up and harangue them for acting like Republicans...
...I thought making a record and receiving some form of public affirmation would bring me the love I desired in my life, only to find that what I wanted no one could give, and what I searched for lived in my heart waiting to be discovered...
...Give them the money, and they still wouldn't do something decent for working women...
...Universal health care was in the platform four years ago...
...1145 Market Street...
...Jeff says that neither he nor his wife is anti-religion, but they are anti-censorship...
...I was this problem, so 1 know how to solve this problem, but by myself it's not going to happen...
Vol. 60 • November 1996 • No. 11
