Excerpt:

The classic action-comedy Beverly Hills Cop was showing on TV this past week. In it, Eddie Murphy plays a Detroit police detective who follows a murder suspect to the West Coast. The opening 10 or 15 minutes includes a chase scene through Detroit. The city is full of vacant buildings and land—and the 1984 film showed a better-looking Detroit than you’ll find today. Axel Foley’s Detroit declared bankruptcy late last week—the largest city ever to do so—ending a fall decades in the making.

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Excerpt:

Beginning today, nearly 47 million people, including 22 million children nationwide, will see their food assistance benefits cut, when a temporary boost to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) expires.

The reduction stems from the fact that a modest boost in benefits included in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has now ended. While SNAP enrollment growth has slowed this year, national enrollment remains high because many families continue to face a job market that remains weak and other hardships resulting from a slow economic recovery.

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Excerpt:

College is expensive. For some families, it’s prohibitively expensive. Several school districts are trying to follow the Kalamazoo Promise model by offering students money to help cover tuition costs, including one such "promise" in rural northern Michigan's Lake County.

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Over the last seven years, Ypsilanti’s end-of-year music festival Mittenfest has grown into a five-day extravaganza of Michigan-based artists. Held at Woodruff’s Bar in Depot Town, Ypsilanti, Mittenfest has seen performances by acts like Frontier Ruckus, Shigeto, and Passalacqua as well as dozens of up-and-coming performers. The festival is a fundraiser for 826michigan, a Washtenaw County-based organization providing free creative writing and tutoring services to students aged 6-18. To celebrate 826michigan’s recent expansion into Detroit, the nonprofit will hold a summer version of Mittenfest at the Magic Stick on July 20.
 
S’Mittenfest (Summer + Mittenfest) will feature twenty-one acts including Drunken Barn Dance, Santa Monica Swim and Dive Club, and Young Punk. It will be held on Saturday, July 20, at Detroit’s legendary Magic Stick. Admission is $10 and available only at the door; proceeds benefit 826michigan’s free programs for students aged 6-18.
 
Established in Ann Arbor in 2005, 826michigan serves 2,500 youth aged 6-18 with a wide variety of educational and artistic programs. In October 2012, the organization announced that it would launch programs in Detroit, thanks to a launching grant from the DTE Energy Foundation. 826michigan now serves three Detroit schools with In-School Residencies, in which volunteers are organized on a continual basis to assist teachers in overcrowded classrooms and work one-on-one with students who need extra attention. This summer, 826michigan will offer free creative writing workshops in Clark Park, at the Franklin Wright Settlements, and at the Campbell Branch of the Detroit Public Library.
 
“Expanding to Detroit was a dream of ours for a very long time,” says 826michigan Executive Director Amanda Uhle. “And now it’s happening. Every week, we’re reaching forty-five Detroit students with one-on-one attention and support provided by caring volunteers, and that number is set to go up dramatically this summer as we begin to offer Drop-in Writing times at three locations in the city.
 
“For us, the truly great thing about Mittenfest is getting to celebrate with the people of Ypsilanti, where we’ve worked since we first began. We’re proud to call ourselves part of the Ypsilanti community. We know we are new in Detroit, but we’re committed to our work there and to building more and better partnerships with other nonprofits, schools, businesses, and individuals. S’Mittenfest is a party and we are inviting the people of Detroit, who have already shown us an incredibly warm welcome. We can’t wait to celebrate Michigan music and Michigan people on July 20!”
 
For more information about 826michigan and its volunteer-driven programs serving 2,500 youth in Southeast Michigan, please visit www.826michigan.org or call (734) 761-3463. To learn more about S’Mittenfest, please visit www.mittenfest.org.
 
The full line-up includes:
 
The Anonymous
Breezee One
The Campanellis
Caveman Woodman
Clear Soul Forces
Jah Connery
Deadbeat Beat
Drunken barn dance
In Fact
James Linck
The Kickstand Band
Pewter Cub
Red Pill
Revoir
Santa Monica Swim & Dive Club
Silent Lions
Timothy Monger State Park
Twine Time
The Hand in the Ocean
Truman
Young Punk
 
826michigan is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students aged six to eighteen with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Our services are structured around our belief that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.  For more information, visit www.826michigan.org.

Excerpt:

"School is almost out for summer! For some students, that means camp. For others, it means time to get a job. For the three high school sophomores you’re about to meet, it means a break - not just from school, but from riding the bus.

'Every day, the girls leave their homes in the struggling Detroit neighborhood of Brightmoor and hop on two city buses and one yellow bus to get to New Tech High School in Dearborn Heights. Their names are Shaqueria (Shay) Harris-Bay, Navia Daniel and Tanesha George, and they captured their morning trip in an audio diary for our State of Opportunity project."

Read more and listen to the podcast.

Excerpt:

A few weeks ago I took the State of Opportunity storytelling booth to J.W. Sexton High School in Lansing. 

The school is a sand-colored art deco masterpiece. There are three floors, intricate stone work inside and out, and an auditorium that could easily host a symphony from any of Michigan's large cities along with its audience.  

Click to hear the full story. 

Excerpt:

Kindergarten classes in Escanaba and Dearborn are quite similar, with 5-year-olds wiggling in their chairs and brightly-colored artwork lining the walls. But when children walked out of those classrooms in the spring of 2011, they faced different futures.

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Excerpt:

"Michigan and the state's largest school district, Detroit Public Schools, recorded gains last year in the percentage of students graduating within four years, according to data released Wednesday.

'Statewide, graduation rates rose nearly 2 percentage points last year to 76.2 percent in Michigan's four-year high schools in the numbers issued by the Michigan Center for Educational Performance and Information.

'DPS gained even more, hiking its graduation rate for 2012 to 64.7 percent from 59.7 percent in 2011."

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The Michigan Land Use Institute has long been a big backer of the idea that local food should be served in local schools. It seems that the USDA agrees with the organization, as they just gave them a two-year, $100,000 grand to help expand the local Farm to School program.

The grant allows MLUI to partner with eight local districts and area farmers to invest in cold storage and processing equipment to scale up local food procurement by the schools. It also allows MLUI to expand the farm to school activities that it currently operates in six schools.

The grant is going to make it easier for local schools to serve fruits and vegetables that are produced by local farmer across northern Michigan. The result will help local agriculture while teaching kids the importance of local food and healthy eating habits.

Additionally, food service directors have identified a need for washed, dried and bagged salad greens and cut vegetables, but the many farms in the region that typically grow vegetables don’t have the capacity or infrastructure to meet the needs of the region’s schools. The grant will help secure new, centrally located equipment for commercial-scale preparation, making it possible and more cost-effective for growers to scale up vegetable production to benefit schools.

The MLUI grant is one of 68 awarded by the USDA to organizations in 37 states and Washington, D.C., to connect schools with local agricultural producers. These are the first USDA Farm to School grants.

Writer: Sam Eggleston
Source: Michigan Land Use Institute

"There has been an explosion of research over the past decade that shows how important the first few years of a child’s life are in terms of brain development. To help us make sense of how those early experience can shape a child’s brain, we called up Dr. Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University."

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"Researchers at the School of Natural Resources and Environment are leading a five-year, $4 million study of disparities in access to healthy food across the state.

'The researchers will interview residents and study data in 18 small to mid-sized cities to better understand the factors affecting 'food security,' a socioeconomic term that defines easy access to safe and healthy food."

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"The ACLU of Michigan has until Dec. 5 to investigate whether the Highland Park School District is complying with a state law that requires individual intervention for students who aren’t reading at grade level.

'It’s part of a groundbreaking, class action “Right to Read” lawsuit the ACLU of Michigan has filed against the district and state."

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"Jataya is among the first students at a new K-5 charter school, Detroit Innovation Academy, opened last month by the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit through its Y Education Services charter management organization.

'Acclimating kindergarteners to technology is part of the curriculum, along with the expectation that each of the 153 students will graduate and attend college."

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