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Diamonds to King’s College administrators and students who helped formulate and execute a job preparation program for homeless women at Ruth’s Place Women’s Shelter. Funded through a small grant, the program helped with interview preparation, online job searching and applying for a job. It may have been a relatively small program, with only three students playing major roles, but this is the kind of thing that can help students almost as much as the people they assist. Far too many people dismiss the homeless as those who made poor choices and paid a price: few are willing to acknowledge they may be a few paychecks away from homelessness themselves. As sophomore Ashley Strazdus pointed out, even when their fate may be their fault, the homeless shouldn’t be branded for life. “We make choices, but a person shouldn’t be held accountable forever for some of them.”
Coal to the whole sordid lot involved in the death of a Penn State Beta Theta Pi fraternity pledge at the main campus. Details are still emerging and the wheels of justice are grinding, but the picture so far is a grim indeed: a fast and fatal dose of alcohol, a staggering lack of appropriate reaction among those present to an injury that would lead to death, and finger-pointing among the college officials many think should shoulder some blame. If colleges and universities lack legal authority to rein in alcohol abuse at their fraternities, including those off campus, legislators need to empower them, local law enforcement needs to step up, national fraternity organizations need to respond firmly, and perhaps most importantly, fraternity members present and past need to stand and say “enough.”
Diamonds to ResCare Workforce Services for offering to help staff six of Wilkes-Barre’s parks for the summer. The city was poised to maintain parks but provide no attendants. ResCare has agreed to do that, assuring someone can be at each park to play with the younger kids, keep an eye out for safety issues, and report any problems. It’s true that, strictly speaking, playgrounds and city parks don’t really need attendants so much as they need maintenance and a watchful eye by parents and guardians of the children using them. But it’s also true attendants can make the playgrounds more meaningful and more secure for the children who come to use them.
Coal to the dueling sides offering conflicting prognostications for Wilkes-Barre finances. One would like to think math is math, and that two people looking at the same numbers for city spending and debt would come up with projections that bear important similarities. But consultants from PFM and an economics professor from LaSalle University offered strikingly different stories from reviews of city books: The former warns of finances so bad a state take over could be imminent, the other said there are problems, but they are not nearly that bad. OK, so maybe this calls for a third set of eyes. But who can afford it?
— Times Leader