Adi Talwar
On a recent mid December morning, Marilyn Thomas feeding Nancy Brown her lunch. Thomas has been a home health aide to Brown since 1997.
“People who do this work love it. You have to love working with people,” says State Assemblymember Karines Reyes, who is a nurse. But she adds, “If you can get a job doing work that’s not as heavy and not as demanding and make more money, why wouldn’t you?”
City residents looking for alternatives to nursing home care, particularly those with limited incomes, confront an array of hurdles: lack of affordable housing, a shortage of safe and accessible apartments, not enough home health care aides and waiting lists at many programs.
Some older workers are retiring earlier than they had planned, a trend that could accelerate if the city provides incentives to encourage them to leave their jobs. While some people leaving the workforce look forward to a life of leisure, others will be forced to scramble for health insurance, dip into savings and receive lower Social Security benefits than they otherwise would have.
On Social Security, healthcare, housing and food support, Joe Biden and Donald Trump offer different visions to older New Yorkers.
The de Blasio administration has no schedule for reopening the centers, and it seems likely the centers will not offer in-person services until 2021.
It will take more than new language or better lessons. Who’s teaching, who’s learning and the very nature of how social studies are taught and tested are also in play.
But with desegregation an increasingly urgent goal, how long will it last?
It is clear that most students get on – or off – the track to go to a specialized high school long before they sit down to take the SHSAT in September of 8th grade. See how the middle schools rank.
Many argue that policy choices helped segregate our schools, and new and different policy choices are needed to integrate them.
Critics target the city’s eight specialized schools for using a single test to determine who gets to enter. But other selective public high-schools use a confusing mix of admissions policies that raise their own questions about transparency and fairness.