A few quick articles
Jun. 14th, 2009 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One about nighttime care for patients with Alzheimer's, who are often more active at night. The idea seems like a good one, but the text of the article veers into condescension often - referring to your elders as being "like a kindergartener" is never a good thing.
All-Night Care for Dementia’s Restless Minds
By CARA BUCKLEY and JAMES ESTRIN
THE patients were on the loose again, moving their shrunken frames through the nursing home’s shadowy halls, chattering and giggling like children sneaking out of camp.
It was after midnight. Nearly everyone inside the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, which hugs the banks of the Hudson River in the northern Bronx, was fast asleep. The group crept past a large fish tank and rounded a corner, startling a security guard who jumped at the sight of them: seven tiny women with lights glinting off their silvery hair. Then the guard noticed a young employee pushing one of the women in a wheelchair, and relaxed. It was just the night-care group, out for a supervised stroll.
One of the ladies began singing a salsa song, creakily sashaying her hips. Another took note and grinned. “Shake it, don’t break it,” she called out.
The seven women all have Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, and are part of the Hebrew Home’s ElderServe at Night, a dusk-to-dawn drop-off program intended to strengthen their decaying minds while sating their thirst to be active after dark.
Alzheimer’s is an irreversible brain disease that destroys memory, and it is one form of dementia, a disorder marked by the loss of mental functions. Nighttime can be treacherous for people with dementia, who are often struck by sleeplessness or night terrors and prone to wandering about. This agitation and disorientation, called “sundowning,” is especially vexing for relatives trying to care for them at home, and often hastens their placement in nursing homes.
While there are countless day care programs for the nation’s estimated 5.3 million Alzheimer’s patients, some experts believe that ElderServe at Night, which began a decade ago, is the only one of its kind in the country.
Participants are fetched from their homes by vans and spend 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. painting, potting plants, dancing and talking — or, for those immobilized by their disease, relaxing amid music, massage and twinkling lights. The patients rest as they need, for a few minutes or a few hours, and return home the next morning fed, showered and, usually, tuckered out.
“At home we’re alone, with no one to talk to,” said Maria Viera, 73, who lives by herself in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx and has been in the program since 2007. “And it’s a good place to pass the night, because we can’t be alone in our houses.”
Friendships are forged, and at least one romance has bloomed: Luis Maldonado used to hold the hand of tiny Isabel Quevedo and kiss her cheek. Mr. Maldonado died in April at 83. When asked about boyfriends, she scoffed. Men want just one thing, said Ms. Quevedo, 79, “and I don’t want my reputation to go down.”
On a gloomy Thursday in May, the women drifted in and took their regular seats at round tables, waiting for dinner. Outside, gray clouds hung low and the darkening sky spat showers of chilly rain, but in the room, it felt as if the day had just dawned.
Attendants rolled down blackout shades to mute the effects of sundowning, flipped on incandescent lights in the hallway and lighted incense. A stereo swelled with Cher singing, of all things, “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Mrs. Viera began singing along.
THE program was born in 1998, after Daniel A. Reingold, now president and chief executive of the Hebrew Home, began hearing horror stories from people who jury-rigged alarm systems or slept on mattresses pulled across thresholds to stop their sleepless parents from wandering at night. Sleep deprivation, he learned, was causing many guardians to put relatively high-functioning patients into nursing homes rather than day care programs.
“How do we fix that?” he asked David V. Pomeranz, the home’s associate executive director. Mr. Pomeranz, who at the time had a toddler at home waking in the wee hours, replied: “What if we took the day program and ran it at night?”
The activities mirror those done during the day: arts, crafts, exercise, and holistic remedies like meditation and pet therapy. Rather than give agitated patients mood-altering drugs, ElderServe aides might lead them by the hand into a softly lighted room, slip off their shoes and socks and massage their feet with a warm washcloth.
The twin drop-off programs account for about 3 percent of the Hebrew Home’s $105 million budget; at night, 10 recreational therapists, nurses and aides tend to up to 40 clients, few of whom are Jewish. Most are covered by Medicaid; the private fee is $215 per night.
The staff indulges the urges that dementia and Alzheimer’s induce, walking with patients who crave a 2 a.m. adventure or taking evening trips to the circus or restaurants. “We’re kind of like the party house on the block,” said Deborah M. Messina, who is 32 and the director of both the day and night programs. “The lights are on all night and the music is going.”
Ms. Messina and Mr. Reingold have made presentations to professional associations, hoping others might copy the program. But a spokeswoman for the Alzheimer’s Association, a nonprofit research and education group based in Chicago, said she knew of no other nighttime drop-off program like it. Though it has not been independently evaluated, organizers say the program has helped patients maintain a discernible alertness even as their minds erode. It has also given their relatives desperately needed breaks.
Louise Yarin and her husband and teenage son were at their wits’ end caring for her mother, Catherine Fetonti, who is 90 and was found to have dementia in 2004. Mrs. Fetonti woke them up most nights, yelling Hail Marys and demanding to be taken home. Ms. Yarin tried to fix things by moving everyone into Mrs. Fetonti’s old, smaller house in Yonkers. But the nightly outbursts continued, even after Ms. Yarin began sleeping in her mother’s room.
Then last year, a social worker told Ms. Yarin, who is 52 and works part time in a day spa, about ElderServe, and everything changed.
“Our first night when she was down there, we woke up in the morning and it was like, ‘Huh, what was that?’ ” Ms. Yarin recalled. “It was like when your baby first sleeps through the night.”
Paul Navarro enrolled his 85-year-old mother, Maria, a year ago: Her memory had started to fail after her husband died in 2005, and she developed a paralyzing fear of being alone. Mrs. Navarro resisted the program at first, weeping every time the ElderServe van pulled up in front of their Bronx home. But like a kindergartner acclimating to school, she made new friends, and blossomed.
“It’s like her mind cleared up,” said Mr. Navarro, who works as a property manager for New York City. “She’s happier. She’s truly, truly happier.”
NOWADAYS, Mrs. Navarro calls Ms. Messina on speed dial if the van picking her up is even two minutes late. On the gray Thursday, she arrived early, her dark eyes magnified through bottle-thick lenses, and welcomed Mrs. Viera. Both women are relatively lucid, their forgetfulness surfacing in spurts. Together with Carmen Febres, 64, a woman with a mischievous streak, the Marias make up something of a clique, usually sharing the same table for dinner.
Mrs. Febres came lumbering in, her hair in rollers beneath a kerchief, and lowered herself heavily into a chair. She has grown heavier since she joined the program: She loves to eat but often forgets when she has, sometimes taking double or triple meals. A nurse came to prick her finger and test her blood sugar; like many of the patients, Mrs. Febres is diabetic and frequently fails to take her medicine or accidentally takes it twice.
Mrs. Febres said it was a good night for cuddling up with a man and some wine. “Because of the rain,” she said, her eyes sly beneath heavy lids. She reminisced about earlier, lusty escapades in her life. Mrs. Viera said she separated from her husband long ago. “I never got another man,” she said. “One was enough.”
Most patients eat in groups, but one, Miguel Colon, often sits alone; he coughs forcefully when he eats, spraying food. Mr. Colon is 70, bald and burly, rarely speaks and walks in a slow, pained shuffle. He entered the dining room in a wheelchair wearing a mask that covered his chin but showed his face (his daughter, with whom he lives, bundles him up even when it’s warm).
Mrs. Febres’s eyes widened as a plate was set before her: sole stuffed with seafood in a lemon-garlic sauce, with broccoli. For dessert, fresh strawberries. She dug in.
At 9:30 p.m., Al Smith, a local musician, set up his keyboard and began banging out blues and Motown tunes. The patients shook their maracas, moving their hips in their seats. On salsa nights, the dance floor fills, but Mr. Smith’s oldies brought out only a few nursing assistants and a lone patient, Carmen Hernandez, who is 82 and missing her front teeth; she wore a thick woolen cap over steel gray hair.
Mrs. Hernandez danced over to Mr. Colon — the lone man among the abler patients — and tapped her maraca against his. She wiggled her backside, leaned over, took his face between her hands and planted a kiss on his cheek. Then she danced over to the one-man band. “What a flirt,” a nurse’s assistant said.
NEXT door, a quieter sort of party unfolded in a darkened room filled with sensory delights: A yellow spotlight danced off a disco ball, New Age music purred softly, and a citrus smell filled the air. Three nursing assistants moved among a dozen patients, trying to coax movement out of frozen limbs.
The patients slumped in wheelchairs, arms contracted, Pharaoh-like, across their chests, or leaned heavily on tables, heads in hands. These were the ones whose advanced dementia, compounded by other afflictions, had ravaged body as well as mind, nudging them closer to death; the ones who would need their diapers changed and their limbs washed before being put to bed. One is a blind former pastor who spits, a habit the staff tempers by slipping gum into his mouth.
Early in the evening, Ms. Messina, the program director, worked the room, stopping to rub the back and shoulders of Fouad Moustafa, 82, whose various ailments have stolen his ability to walk and reduced most of his words to slurs. The night nurse supervisor, Mabel Hernandez, caressed Mr. Moustafa’s tufted pate as she passed. He exhaled softly. A smile played on his lips.
“Not everybody touches them,” said Karena Larrequi, the night recreation supervisor. “People think, ‘They don’t know, they don’t feel.’ We want to remind them that even though they can’t speak, that we know they’re there.”
A children’s pool filled with soapy water was set on a table, and a few people sat around it, playing with the suds, squeezing the soft toys.
Patients began nodding off as the nursing assistants massaged their arms with lotion, squeezing palms and wrists. Hilda Marcial, 93, took hold of a nurse’s hand and began massaging it back.
BACK in the active room, the music ended by 11 p.m. and it was guacamole time. Ms. Larrequi, the recreational therapist, handed out avocados, tomatoes, peppers, garlic and cilantro to chop up with plastic knives. Mr. Colon popped a raw garlic clove into his mouth, then some cilantro. Mrs. Febres, the diabetic overeater, asked if there was any rice. “No rice, Carmen, no rice,” Ms. Larrequi replied. Mrs. Febres tried another tack: “Do you have any Löwenbräu?”
Around 1:30 a.m., after their midnight walk, most of the women began drifting to beds, lined up dorm-style in a nearby room.
Mrs. Febres was still up. She sat at a table pulling a comb through Ms. Larrequi’s long raven hair; though she is decades younger than most of her patients, the therapist seems like an older sister, or a really cool counselor at camp.
Ms. Messina, the program director, sat across from them, and the place suddenly felt like a girlish slumber party: Mrs. Febres was talking, again, about men and sex, causing Ms. Larrequi to dissolve into giggles.
“Karena, don’t encourage her!” Ms. Messina said in mock indignation.
Mrs. Febres fixed her eyes on Ms. Messina. “Are you a virgin?” she asked.
“Carmen!” Ms. Messina replied, laughing. “You ask me this every time.”
The night melted by, and as dawn approached, the nurse assistants began hoisting patients from beds, stretching stiff arms and legs, slipping off pajamas and buttoning up street clothes. At first light, they groggily gathered around tables in the main room, waiting for coffee and breakfast and their eventual ride home.
Mrs. Fetonti sat with Mrs. Viera, who was wearing a fresh coat of peach lipstick. Mrs. Viera began speaking in Spanish, which Mrs. Fetonti does not understand; she replied anyway — in English. Mrs. Febres sat nearby, eyes closed, head back, mouth agape and emitting a soft snore.
The day nurse supervisor, Rina Ginat, breezed in and handed everyone elasticized bands for stretching, helping them one by one through elementary yoga moves and breathing techniques, holding their hands in hers.
“Miguel!” Ms. Ginat cried merrily, as she approached Mr. Colon, who was sitting by himself, “Cómo estás?”
Mr. Colon smiled shyly, and uttered his first word in at least 12 hours: “Bien.”
An article on the Amish, religious freedom, and septic codes. It seems to me that your religious freedom ends right about when other people have to drink the water too. Blech.
Religious Freedom vs. Sanitation Rules
By SEAN D. HAMILL
NICKTOWN, Pa. — In 29 years of enforcing sewage laws in Pennsylvania, Jack E. Crislip has never faced violators more adamant, or more pleasant to deal with, than members of the ultraconservative Swartzentruber Amish sect.
For the last two and a half years, Mr. Crislip, a planning supervisor for the state’s Environmental Protection Department, and local sewage authorities have had more than 30 meetings in a futile effort to persuade members of the sect here in Cambria County, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, to upgrade outhouses next to a schoolhouse so they comply with state sanitation codes.
The schoolhouse is on land belonging to Andy Swartzentruber, 53, one of five elders who guide the 20-family Amish community spread out on farms near Nicktown.
Mr. Swartzentruber was scheduled to be released from county prison on Sunday after serving 90 days for failing to correct the violations at the outhouses. Other members of the Amish community could also end up behind bars if the impasse is not resolved.
The fight has grown to include outhouses on the properties of two other sect members, Mr. Swartzentruber’s son Joely and John Miller, the son of another elder, Andy Miller, 58.
For Andy Miller, the issue is as clear as the state laws are to Mr. Crislip. “They’re enforcing stuff that’s against our religion,” Mr. Miller said.
Dressing in plain, dark clothing — with the men in straw hats, the women in bonnets — and shunning modern conveniences like cars, telephones and running water in their homes, the Swartzentruber Amish appear in many ways to resemble the larger, better known Old Order Amish. The Swartzentruber Amish split from the Old Order, fearing that it was becoming too modern. They split in 1913 in Holmes County, Ohio, said Donald B. Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and an expert on Amish culture.
The Swartzentruber Amish in Nicktown, the only known branch in Pennsylvania, arrived from Wayne County, Ohio — which neighbors Holmes County — about a dozen years ago to farm the area’s rolling hills.
“The Swartzentrubers say their whole way of life is religious,” Dr. Kraybill said.
In 2003, Nicktown’s Swartzentruber families successfully appealed an order to pay fines levied by the county after they refused to put orange reflective triangles on their horse-drawn buggies. They said the brightly colored triangles, intended to make them more visible to cars along rural roads, were too garish for their faith.
Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, they were allowed to mount less gaudy gray tape.
“The fact that this group was successful in that challenge,” Dr. Kraybill said, “may have encouraged them to challenge the septic issues.”
The septic fight began in late 2006 when the executive director of the Cambria County Sewage Enforcement Agency, Deborah Sedlmeyer, found that human waste at the schoolhouse, where 18 children were taught, was being collected in a 50-gallon metal drum under an outhouse
“It was overrunning the barrels,” Ms. Sedlmeyer said, and it was being dumped, untreated, onto nearby fields.
The Swartzentrubers agreed to improve the outhouses, adding a larger, 250-gallon holding tank and treating the waste with lime.
But they refused to follow state law, which called for installing a 5,000-gallon precast concrete tank and allowing someone certified by the state to use an electronic meter to test the waste’s chemical content.
The elders had determined that use of a precast tank was too modern — they want to make the vat themselves — as was the electronic meter and the requirement that they obtain certification to do the testing.
“These folks don’t couch their words,” Mr. Crislip said. “They tell the truth and deal with the consequences. They were the most amicable meetings we’ve ever had. But they’d tell us they just weren’t going to do it.”
In response, Judge Norman Krumenacker of Cambria County ordered Andy Swartzentruber to jail.
“He thinks he’s doing the right thing,” Joely Swartzentruber, 25, said of his father. “But his nerves didn’t take to jail. They had to put him on pills to sleep.”
After Ms. Sedlmeyer found that conditions at Joely Swartzentruber and John Miller’s residential outhouses were similar — and their owners also refused to comply with state ordinances — Judge Krumenacker ordered the two homes and their barns padlocked on May 15, forcing the families to move in with relatives.
Last Monday, the judge allowed the barns to be unlocked so the families could harvest and store their hay, but they were not allowed to return home.
“We can make do right now,” said Susan Miller, 39, John’s wife. “I’m not upset, but it makes me sad. We own a farm, and we can’t live there.”
But for many of the area’s non-Amish residents, the impasse represents a test case over whether laws will be bent in the face of religious principles.
“The rules should be the same for everybody,” said Bernard E. Dumm, who owns D&D Wood Sales, next to the farm of another Swartzentruber Amish elder, Sam Yoder. “Besides, it’s not about religion. They just don’t want to follow the rules.”
“If you don’t do the correct sewage things,” Mr. Dumm added, “we all get sick.”
Told of his neighbor’s feelings, Mr. Yoder, 54, was polite but resolute. “You hear people say that we have to live the way they do, but we can’t do that,” he said. “Our forefathers, that’s why they came across the sea, for religious freedom.”
An editorial on same-sex marriage. This politician was shocked - shocked, I say! - to find out that gay people don't want to force homophobic churches to marry them. Uh, duh?
Why I Now Support Gay Marriage
By TOM SUOZZI
Mineola, N.Y.
WHEN I ran in the Democratic primary for governor against Eliot Spitzer in 2006, I vocally supported civil unions for same-sex couples but did not endorse equal marriage. I understood the need to provide equal rights for gays and lesbians, but as a practicing Catholic, I also felt that the state should not infringe on religious institutions’ right to view marriage in accordance with their own traditions. I thought civil unions for same-sex couples would address my concerns regarding both equality and religious liberty.
I was wrong.
I have listened to many well-reasoned and well-intentioned arguments both for and against same-sex marriage. And as I talked to gays and lesbians and heard their stories of pain, discrimination and love, my platitudes about civil unions began to ring hollow. I have struggled to find the solution that best serves the common good.
I now support same-sex marriage. This is a subject of great debate before the New York State Legislature (although the legislators there are a little distracted right now), and I hope that same-sex civil marriage will be approved within the month.
Under current New York State law, same-sex couples are deprived of access to the employment benefits, life and health insurance and inheritance laws that heterosexual couples have. If the state were to institute civil unions for same-sex couples, that discrimination would end, but we’d still be creating a separate and unequal system.
Civil unions for both heterosexual and same-sex couples would be an equal system, but this compromise appears unlikely at the current time. Few heterosexual couples would give up their current civil marriage for a civil union. While some states would recognize civil unions for all, others would not, causing legal problems for New York couples. Advocates of same-sex marriage don’t seem in favor of such a compromise either.
According to the last census, there are an estimated 50,000 households headed by same-sex couples in New York, many who were married in other states. Those marriages are recognized by New York courts as valid. As a result, we have same-sex marriage for some in New York (albeit performed out of state) and no marriage at all for other same-sex couples.
Any change in the New York law can, and must, balance equality while making sure that religious institutions remain free to choose whether to marry same-sex couples. By following the example of Connecticut and Vermont, which included protections for religious institutions when they recently legalized same-sex marriage, we can ensure that churches are not forced to consecrate marriages they do not endorse. This will require a strong liberty clause allowing religious institutions to opt out of solemnizing same-sex marriage, which also applies to the provision of services and programs at religiously affiliated institutions.
Many civil marriages are not considered “holy matrimony” by religious institutions because they do not conform to the rules of the religious institution. Those marriages have not challenged religious liberty. We must see that civil marriage, which has always been separate from religious marriage, will remain so.
But most important, gays and lesbians have suffered too long from legal discrimination, social marginalization and even violence. They are entitled to clear recognition of their equal status as citizens of a country that is founded on the principle that we are all inherently worthy. By delivering a clear message that same-sex couples can no longer be treated as separate and unequal in New York, we will also reduce discrimination in everyday life. We will all be better for that.
Equal civil marriage should, and likely will, pass because of the public’s growing unwillingness to sustain inequality. Society will also be strengthened as more people take responsibility for one another in marriage. I now encourage others who oppose gay marriage to re-examine the reasons they do so, and to consider changing their minds too.
An article on girl's sports teams in cities.
It comes with a slideshow
A Team’s Struggle Shows Disparity in Girls’ Sports
By KATIE THOMAS
The Cougars of Middle School 61 had a basketball game in the Bronx, but a half-hour before tipoff, six girls and Coach Bryan Mariner were still inching through traffic in Brooklyn.
A cellphone rang. It belonged to forward Tiffany Fields-Binning, who passed the phone to Mr. Mariner.
“You don’t want her to go?” he said. He peered up at a street sign. “We’re on Atlantic and Flatbush.” He paused. “O.K. O.K. We’ll wait here.”
Mr. Mariner turned off the ignition. “Tiff-a-ny.” He said her name slowly, like a sigh. “You didn’t set this straight with your pop?”
Tiffany stared out a window.
Mr. Mariner turned and assessed the situation: “We’ve got five.”
Five players. No substitutes.
With this team, it’s always something. In the suburbs, girls’ participation in sports is so commonplace that in many communities, the conversation has shifted from concerns over equal access to worries that some girls are playing too much. But the revolution in girls’ sports has largely bypassed the nation’s cities, where public school districts short on money often view sports as a luxury rather than an entitlement.
Coaches and organizers of youth sports in cities say that while many immigrant and lower-income parents see the benefit of sports for sons, they often lean on daughters to fill needs in their own hectic lives, like tending to siblings or cleaning the house.
Others, like Tiffany’s father, Gavin Binning, are worried for their daughter’s safety, another roadblock to playing.
“Tiffany’s my baby,” he said. “They weren’t going around the corner, they were going to the Bronx. And for me not knowing that, it drove me crazy.”
Since the passage of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX in 1972, girls’ participation in sports has soared. In the 1971-72 school year, girls accounted for 7 percent of all participants in high school sports. By the 2006-7 school year, their share had grown to 41 percent, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
In the suburbs, girls play sports at rates roughly equal to boys. A 2007 survey by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 schoolchildren nationwide showed that 54 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls in the suburbs described themselves as “moderately involved” athletes.
Urban areas revealed a much greater discrepancy. Only 36 percent of city girls in the survey described themselves as moderately involved athletes, compared with 56 percent of city boys.
Girls in cities from Los Angeles to New York “are the left-behinds of the youth sport movement in the United States,” said Don Sabo, a professor of health policy at D’Youville College in Buffalo, who conducted the study, which was commissioned by the Women’s Sports Foundation, a private advocacy group.
The Cougars have few of the basics that suburban public school girls have come to expect, including free transportation, uniforms and full seasons of regularly scheduled games. At M.S. 61 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, each road game is a logistical puzzle for Mr. Mariner, 46, who is dean of students and coach of the school’s girls’ and boys’ basketball teams. Even when the Cougars arrive ready to play, games are sometimes canceled because the opponents — facing the same obstacles — cannot field a team. Parents rarely show up to watch.
Closer to Home
As he waited, Mr. Mariner glanced at the dashboard clock. He had worked hard to ensure that his players would get to the game. He talked his nephew into letting them borrow his Ford Expedition. He pulled the girls out of class 15 minutes early. He even slipped $2 to the cousin of one of his best players, Soledad Pierre, to take over her baby-sitting duties that afternoon.
Now, it was nearly game time. “I can’t just leave you,” he told Tiffany.
Another player, Nia Miller, tried to lighten the mood. She told Mr. Mariner, “Her father might change his mind if he sees your bad self.”
Just then, Mr. Binning pulled up behind them. The men stood between the cars and talked. Tiffany got out, too, and stared at her sneakers. Moments later, the men shook hands. Tiffany and Mr. Mariner climbed back into the car.
“Your pop is all right,” Mr. Mariner said.
Tiffany’s father had reason to be suspicious, Mr. Mariner said later, because she had previously used basketball as a cover when she wanted to leave the house. Mr. Binning said he relented that day because “the coach showed me she’s in good hands.”
Parents rarely question their sons’ whereabouts, Mr. Mariner said.
“I could take my boys to another state, and I wouldn’t get these calls,” he said. “They’d probably say, ‘Oh, you’re back so soon?’ ”
For most of his two decades at M.S. 61, formally known as Dr. Gladstone H. Atwell Middle School, Mr. Mariner has not been paid to coach. In New York City, public school principals must make difficult choices about distributing resources. M.S. 61’s budget for after-school programs is limited to those tied to academics, the principal, Sandra Taylor, said.
“There is very little,” she said. “We make do.”
Along with teaching basketball skills, Mr. Mariner also mops the court before games, persuades reluctant parents to let their daughters play and, above all, tries to ease the way from girlhood to adolescence. Middle school is a crucial time for young athletes, when habits crystallize and they decide whether to continue playing.
“We have so many kids trying to grow up too fast,” he said. “My thing is to try and keep them busy for as long as possible.”
Mr. Mariner asked each player to contribute $80 a year for uniforms, equipment, transportation and other expenses. That is a lot for most of the students. About half the girls paid Mr. Mariner in full. Some gave $1 or $2 at a time.
The Have-Nots
New York City education officials say they are making efforts to involve more girls, but they acknowledge that the system is recovering from decades of neglect. Physical education was nearly eliminated from public schools during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and did not resurface as a priority until 2004, when the Department of Education created an Office of Fitness and Health Education. Among other initiatives, the office has set up spinning classes and invited nonprofit organizations like the New York Road Runners to work with students. City high schools have added golf, lacrosse and double Dutch as varsity girls’ sports.
Another program in more than 200 middle schools is aimed at encouraging students to be physically active, said Lori Rose Benson, the office’s director. Of nearly 500 schools with seventh and eighth graders, 62 fielded girls’ basketball teams this year in a citywide tournament that attracted 107 boys’ teams. For about two months, the students had a taste of what suburbs routinely offer: paid coaches and referees, scheduled games and free uniforms. This spring, the Cougars won one playoff game before losing to a team from Queens. Mr. Mariner was paid about $2,500 for coaching in the tournament, and the girls received MetroCards after every game.
Yet city programs do not come close to matching what the suburban schools provide. On Long Island, most middle schools have a menu of sports and pay for all expenses. So many children try out that schools often field separate seventh- and eighth-grade teams, said Ed Cinelli, the executive director of Section XI of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, which covers Suffolk County. Large middle-school teams also play extra quarters in sports like basketball to give everyone a chance to compete, he said.
In Huntington, the middle school offers 11 teams for girls and 13 for boys, across four seasons, said Georgia McCarthy, the district’s athletic director. Coaches are paid $3,500 to $5,000 a season, and there is no cost to players. “That’s a given,” she said.
Although boys in the city also have fewer opportunities in sports, other factors work in their favor. Lean athletic budgets leave a gap that is filled by a blend of volunteers and private groups that have traditionally served more boys than girls.
“The needs of boys just have always been, and to a large extent remain, the unspoken, often unrecognized priority,” Mr. Sabo, the professor, said.
Other Responsibilities
One cold afternoon in March, the Cougars trickled into the gym for practice. But Soledad did not join them. Her grandmother had left her to care for her younger cousins.
As her teammates ran half-court sprints, Soledad crouched in the basement of a day-care center, rummaging through the cubby that belonged to her 3-year-old cousin Gardyne. She extracted a pink hooded sweatshirt and, with practiced motions, guided Gardyne’s hands through the tiny sleeves. Her 8-year-old cousin Brianna was waiting at the top of the stairs. The girls walked home, three backpacks bobbing in unison down New York Avenue.
Soledad is not the type of girl most basketball coaches recruit. She is 5 feet 5 inches, can be painfully shy and is sometimes ill prepared. One day this winter, Soledad arrived for a game in her uniform and snow boots. She played in Mr. Mariner’s size-9 sneakers.
Yet Soledad loves basketball. In her seventh-grade English class, she composed a poem.
“I am Soledad Pierre,” she wrote. “I am a Haitian girl. I am a basketball player. I am a gift of God.”
Soledad’s after-school routine is different from that of her cousin Karl Pierre, a freshman at Paul Robeson High School, who plays basketball nearly every day after school and says he dreams of earning a college basketball scholarship.
Karl lives in an apartment with Soledad, her father, their grandmother and other relatives. But boys in the family are not asked to baby-sit.
“It’s not fair,” said Soledad, who also hopes to play college basketball. But if she were to complain, she said, “They’d just make me stay home for a week.”
At first, Soledad’s family, especially her grandmother and uncle, resisted the idea of her playing.
“They thought it was strange for a female,” said her aunt Johane Pierre, 26, who was a fencer and volleyball player in high school. “But they all got used to it because she really likes it.”
And yet her adult relatives make few accommodations for Soledad to participate. Because most of them work long hours, household chores and baby-sitting always take precedence. No one in Soledad’s family has seen her play.
Ms. Pierre, a phlebotomist in a health clinic, said the family relied more on Soledad than Karl to care for their cousins, explaining that Soledad’s school was closer to home than his. Besides, Ms. Pierre said, “she’s better with the kids — giving them a bath, feeding them.”
Soledad’s frequent absences present a challenge to Mr. Mariner, who leads the team with intensity and joy. He buries his head in his hands when the girls dribble in the wrong direction, and throws himself to the floor when they miss layups. At a recent game, Soledad’s jump shot arced toward the basket but bounced off the rim. He shouted, “I’ll take that all day long, Soley!”
In March, Soledad missed a Saturday game against a friendly rival, Intermediate School 285, and the Cougars lost. For a time, Mr. Mariner considered pulling her from the starting lineup.
“I’m not going to start someone I can’t count on,” he said.
A Mother’s Doubts
Of all the Cougars, the eighth grader Olivia Colbert would seem to have the best chance to become one Mr. Mariner’s success stories — players he has guided into better public and private high schools. But her mother may prove to be her greatest obstacle.
Olivia, 14, takes the court like a star but is still learning the game: she trips over her dribble, fouls often and sometimes bursts into tears when she makes a mistake. But at 5-9, she towers over opponents and is the team’s top scorer. Last winter, high school coaches showed up more often than her mother to watch her play.
Olivia has enthusiasm. She shows up to nearly every practice and game, and was the only member of the team to accept Mr. Mariner’s invitation to watch two of his former players compete this spring in a citywide girls’ tournament at Hunter College. They sat in the bleachers with Mr. Mariner’s 10-year-old son, Bryan Jr.
In March, Olivia was accepted by Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, a private school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She had applied at the suggestion of Rocco Romano, the girls’ basketball coach, who knows Olivia because he also coaches at I.S. 285.
It is still not clear that Olivia will be able to attend in the fall because the school is offering only up to $1,400 in aid toward the $7,000 tuition. Mr. Romano is trying to find private sponsors. If that does not work, she will probably attend and play for South Shore, a public high school in Brooklyn.
Olivia’s mother, Bertha Colbert, is open to the idea of private school and visited Bishop Loughlin with Olivia in the spring. A single mother, she works as a school crossing guard and says she would be satisfied if Olivia winds up in public school. Olivia’s father died before she was born.
“I told her and told her, there’s more to life than basketball,” Ms. Colbert said. “But she doesn’t see it.”
Though proud of Olivia, she is wary of dreaming too big.
“What did she tell me she wanted to do?” Ms. Colbert said of Olivia. “A lawyer or something. I said no, no, no, no. I’m not going through all that school. You’re going to have to work for yourself.”
No Game Today
The opening buzzer reverberated through the Cougars’ gym.
But on this afternoon the girls were not on the court; their game had been canceled because their opponent, Public School 161, did not have enough players. Instead, most of the Cougars sat watching Mr. Mariner coach the boys’ team.
Nia volunteered to operate the scoreboard, while a teammate kept statistics. Soledad pulled up a chair.
During halftime, an eight-girl dance team from P.S. 161 took the court, clapping their hands, stamping their feet and slapping their thighs to a complicated beat. They wore tight shirts and blue jeans with sparkles.
“Boring, boring, boring,” Soledad said.
Nia added, “They could have taken some girls from over there.”
Sidelined, Nia registered each basket and free throw in the boys’ 51-24 victory. She recalled the last time her team faced P.S. 161.
“We beat the girls just like this,” Nia said. “Just like this.”
And finally, the Stray Shopping Cart Project. Wow.
All-Night Care for Dementia’s Restless Minds
By CARA BUCKLEY and JAMES ESTRIN
THE patients were on the loose again, moving their shrunken frames through the nursing home’s shadowy halls, chattering and giggling like children sneaking out of camp.
It was after midnight. Nearly everyone inside the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, which hugs the banks of the Hudson River in the northern Bronx, was fast asleep. The group crept past a large fish tank and rounded a corner, startling a security guard who jumped at the sight of them: seven tiny women with lights glinting off their silvery hair. Then the guard noticed a young employee pushing one of the women in a wheelchair, and relaxed. It was just the night-care group, out for a supervised stroll.
One of the ladies began singing a salsa song, creakily sashaying her hips. Another took note and grinned. “Shake it, don’t break it,” she called out.
The seven women all have Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, and are part of the Hebrew Home’s ElderServe at Night, a dusk-to-dawn drop-off program intended to strengthen their decaying minds while sating their thirst to be active after dark.
Alzheimer’s is an irreversible brain disease that destroys memory, and it is one form of dementia, a disorder marked by the loss of mental functions. Nighttime can be treacherous for people with dementia, who are often struck by sleeplessness or night terrors and prone to wandering about. This agitation and disorientation, called “sundowning,” is especially vexing for relatives trying to care for them at home, and often hastens their placement in nursing homes.
While there are countless day care programs for the nation’s estimated 5.3 million Alzheimer’s patients, some experts believe that ElderServe at Night, which began a decade ago, is the only one of its kind in the country.
Participants are fetched from their homes by vans and spend 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. painting, potting plants, dancing and talking — or, for those immobilized by their disease, relaxing amid music, massage and twinkling lights. The patients rest as they need, for a few minutes or a few hours, and return home the next morning fed, showered and, usually, tuckered out.
“At home we’re alone, with no one to talk to,” said Maria Viera, 73, who lives by herself in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx and has been in the program since 2007. “And it’s a good place to pass the night, because we can’t be alone in our houses.”
Friendships are forged, and at least one romance has bloomed: Luis Maldonado used to hold the hand of tiny Isabel Quevedo and kiss her cheek. Mr. Maldonado died in April at 83. When asked about boyfriends, she scoffed. Men want just one thing, said Ms. Quevedo, 79, “and I don’t want my reputation to go down.”
On a gloomy Thursday in May, the women drifted in and took their regular seats at round tables, waiting for dinner. Outside, gray clouds hung low and the darkening sky spat showers of chilly rain, but in the room, it felt as if the day had just dawned.
Attendants rolled down blackout shades to mute the effects of sundowning, flipped on incandescent lights in the hallway and lighted incense. A stereo swelled with Cher singing, of all things, “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Mrs. Viera began singing along.
THE program was born in 1998, after Daniel A. Reingold, now president and chief executive of the Hebrew Home, began hearing horror stories from people who jury-rigged alarm systems or slept on mattresses pulled across thresholds to stop their sleepless parents from wandering at night. Sleep deprivation, he learned, was causing many guardians to put relatively high-functioning patients into nursing homes rather than day care programs.
“How do we fix that?” he asked David V. Pomeranz, the home’s associate executive director. Mr. Pomeranz, who at the time had a toddler at home waking in the wee hours, replied: “What if we took the day program and ran it at night?”
The activities mirror those done during the day: arts, crafts, exercise, and holistic remedies like meditation and pet therapy. Rather than give agitated patients mood-altering drugs, ElderServe aides might lead them by the hand into a softly lighted room, slip off their shoes and socks and massage their feet with a warm washcloth.
The twin drop-off programs account for about 3 percent of the Hebrew Home’s $105 million budget; at night, 10 recreational therapists, nurses and aides tend to up to 40 clients, few of whom are Jewish. Most are covered by Medicaid; the private fee is $215 per night.
The staff indulges the urges that dementia and Alzheimer’s induce, walking with patients who crave a 2 a.m. adventure or taking evening trips to the circus or restaurants. “We’re kind of like the party house on the block,” said Deborah M. Messina, who is 32 and the director of both the day and night programs. “The lights are on all night and the music is going.”
Ms. Messina and Mr. Reingold have made presentations to professional associations, hoping others might copy the program. But a spokeswoman for the Alzheimer’s Association, a nonprofit research and education group based in Chicago, said she knew of no other nighttime drop-off program like it. Though it has not been independently evaluated, organizers say the program has helped patients maintain a discernible alertness even as their minds erode. It has also given their relatives desperately needed breaks.
Louise Yarin and her husband and teenage son were at their wits’ end caring for her mother, Catherine Fetonti, who is 90 and was found to have dementia in 2004. Mrs. Fetonti woke them up most nights, yelling Hail Marys and demanding to be taken home. Ms. Yarin tried to fix things by moving everyone into Mrs. Fetonti’s old, smaller house in Yonkers. But the nightly outbursts continued, even after Ms. Yarin began sleeping in her mother’s room.
Then last year, a social worker told Ms. Yarin, who is 52 and works part time in a day spa, about ElderServe, and everything changed.
“Our first night when she was down there, we woke up in the morning and it was like, ‘Huh, what was that?’ ” Ms. Yarin recalled. “It was like when your baby first sleeps through the night.”
Paul Navarro enrolled his 85-year-old mother, Maria, a year ago: Her memory had started to fail after her husband died in 2005, and she developed a paralyzing fear of being alone. Mrs. Navarro resisted the program at first, weeping every time the ElderServe van pulled up in front of their Bronx home. But like a kindergartner acclimating to school, she made new friends, and blossomed.
“It’s like her mind cleared up,” said Mr. Navarro, who works as a property manager for New York City. “She’s happier. She’s truly, truly happier.”
NOWADAYS, Mrs. Navarro calls Ms. Messina on speed dial if the van picking her up is even two minutes late. On the gray Thursday, she arrived early, her dark eyes magnified through bottle-thick lenses, and welcomed Mrs. Viera. Both women are relatively lucid, their forgetfulness surfacing in spurts. Together with Carmen Febres, 64, a woman with a mischievous streak, the Marias make up something of a clique, usually sharing the same table for dinner.
Mrs. Febres came lumbering in, her hair in rollers beneath a kerchief, and lowered herself heavily into a chair. She has grown heavier since she joined the program: She loves to eat but often forgets when she has, sometimes taking double or triple meals. A nurse came to prick her finger and test her blood sugar; like many of the patients, Mrs. Febres is diabetic and frequently fails to take her medicine or accidentally takes it twice.
Mrs. Febres said it was a good night for cuddling up with a man and some wine. “Because of the rain,” she said, her eyes sly beneath heavy lids. She reminisced about earlier, lusty escapades in her life. Mrs. Viera said she separated from her husband long ago. “I never got another man,” she said. “One was enough.”
Most patients eat in groups, but one, Miguel Colon, often sits alone; he coughs forcefully when he eats, spraying food. Mr. Colon is 70, bald and burly, rarely speaks and walks in a slow, pained shuffle. He entered the dining room in a wheelchair wearing a mask that covered his chin but showed his face (his daughter, with whom he lives, bundles him up even when it’s warm).
Mrs. Febres’s eyes widened as a plate was set before her: sole stuffed with seafood in a lemon-garlic sauce, with broccoli. For dessert, fresh strawberries. She dug in.
At 9:30 p.m., Al Smith, a local musician, set up his keyboard and began banging out blues and Motown tunes. The patients shook their maracas, moving their hips in their seats. On salsa nights, the dance floor fills, but Mr. Smith’s oldies brought out only a few nursing assistants and a lone patient, Carmen Hernandez, who is 82 and missing her front teeth; she wore a thick woolen cap over steel gray hair.
Mrs. Hernandez danced over to Mr. Colon — the lone man among the abler patients — and tapped her maraca against his. She wiggled her backside, leaned over, took his face between her hands and planted a kiss on his cheek. Then she danced over to the one-man band. “What a flirt,” a nurse’s assistant said.
NEXT door, a quieter sort of party unfolded in a darkened room filled with sensory delights: A yellow spotlight danced off a disco ball, New Age music purred softly, and a citrus smell filled the air. Three nursing assistants moved among a dozen patients, trying to coax movement out of frozen limbs.
The patients slumped in wheelchairs, arms contracted, Pharaoh-like, across their chests, or leaned heavily on tables, heads in hands. These were the ones whose advanced dementia, compounded by other afflictions, had ravaged body as well as mind, nudging them closer to death; the ones who would need their diapers changed and their limbs washed before being put to bed. One is a blind former pastor who spits, a habit the staff tempers by slipping gum into his mouth.
Early in the evening, Ms. Messina, the program director, worked the room, stopping to rub the back and shoulders of Fouad Moustafa, 82, whose various ailments have stolen his ability to walk and reduced most of his words to slurs. The night nurse supervisor, Mabel Hernandez, caressed Mr. Moustafa’s tufted pate as she passed. He exhaled softly. A smile played on his lips.
“Not everybody touches them,” said Karena Larrequi, the night recreation supervisor. “People think, ‘They don’t know, they don’t feel.’ We want to remind them that even though they can’t speak, that we know they’re there.”
A children’s pool filled with soapy water was set on a table, and a few people sat around it, playing with the suds, squeezing the soft toys.
Patients began nodding off as the nursing assistants massaged their arms with lotion, squeezing palms and wrists. Hilda Marcial, 93, took hold of a nurse’s hand and began massaging it back.
BACK in the active room, the music ended by 11 p.m. and it was guacamole time. Ms. Larrequi, the recreational therapist, handed out avocados, tomatoes, peppers, garlic and cilantro to chop up with plastic knives. Mr. Colon popped a raw garlic clove into his mouth, then some cilantro. Mrs. Febres, the diabetic overeater, asked if there was any rice. “No rice, Carmen, no rice,” Ms. Larrequi replied. Mrs. Febres tried another tack: “Do you have any Löwenbräu?”
Around 1:30 a.m., after their midnight walk, most of the women began drifting to beds, lined up dorm-style in a nearby room.
Mrs. Febres was still up. She sat at a table pulling a comb through Ms. Larrequi’s long raven hair; though she is decades younger than most of her patients, the therapist seems like an older sister, or a really cool counselor at camp.
Ms. Messina, the program director, sat across from them, and the place suddenly felt like a girlish slumber party: Mrs. Febres was talking, again, about men and sex, causing Ms. Larrequi to dissolve into giggles.
“Karena, don’t encourage her!” Ms. Messina said in mock indignation.
Mrs. Febres fixed her eyes on Ms. Messina. “Are you a virgin?” she asked.
“Carmen!” Ms. Messina replied, laughing. “You ask me this every time.”
The night melted by, and as dawn approached, the nurse assistants began hoisting patients from beds, stretching stiff arms and legs, slipping off pajamas and buttoning up street clothes. At first light, they groggily gathered around tables in the main room, waiting for coffee and breakfast and their eventual ride home.
Mrs. Fetonti sat with Mrs. Viera, who was wearing a fresh coat of peach lipstick. Mrs. Viera began speaking in Spanish, which Mrs. Fetonti does not understand; she replied anyway — in English. Mrs. Febres sat nearby, eyes closed, head back, mouth agape and emitting a soft snore.
The day nurse supervisor, Rina Ginat, breezed in and handed everyone elasticized bands for stretching, helping them one by one through elementary yoga moves and breathing techniques, holding their hands in hers.
“Miguel!” Ms. Ginat cried merrily, as she approached Mr. Colon, who was sitting by himself, “Cómo estás?”
Mr. Colon smiled shyly, and uttered his first word in at least 12 hours: “Bien.”
An article on the Amish, religious freedom, and septic codes. It seems to me that your religious freedom ends right about when other people have to drink the water too. Blech.
Religious Freedom vs. Sanitation Rules
By SEAN D. HAMILL
NICKTOWN, Pa. — In 29 years of enforcing sewage laws in Pennsylvania, Jack E. Crislip has never faced violators more adamant, or more pleasant to deal with, than members of the ultraconservative Swartzentruber Amish sect.
For the last two and a half years, Mr. Crislip, a planning supervisor for the state’s Environmental Protection Department, and local sewage authorities have had more than 30 meetings in a futile effort to persuade members of the sect here in Cambria County, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, to upgrade outhouses next to a schoolhouse so they comply with state sanitation codes.
The schoolhouse is on land belonging to Andy Swartzentruber, 53, one of five elders who guide the 20-family Amish community spread out on farms near Nicktown.
Mr. Swartzentruber was scheduled to be released from county prison on Sunday after serving 90 days for failing to correct the violations at the outhouses. Other members of the Amish community could also end up behind bars if the impasse is not resolved.
The fight has grown to include outhouses on the properties of two other sect members, Mr. Swartzentruber’s son Joely and John Miller, the son of another elder, Andy Miller, 58.
For Andy Miller, the issue is as clear as the state laws are to Mr. Crislip. “They’re enforcing stuff that’s against our religion,” Mr. Miller said.
Dressing in plain, dark clothing — with the men in straw hats, the women in bonnets — and shunning modern conveniences like cars, telephones and running water in their homes, the Swartzentruber Amish appear in many ways to resemble the larger, better known Old Order Amish. The Swartzentruber Amish split from the Old Order, fearing that it was becoming too modern. They split in 1913 in Holmes County, Ohio, said Donald B. Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and an expert on Amish culture.
The Swartzentruber Amish in Nicktown, the only known branch in Pennsylvania, arrived from Wayne County, Ohio — which neighbors Holmes County — about a dozen years ago to farm the area’s rolling hills.
“The Swartzentrubers say their whole way of life is religious,” Dr. Kraybill said.
In 2003, Nicktown’s Swartzentruber families successfully appealed an order to pay fines levied by the county after they refused to put orange reflective triangles on their horse-drawn buggies. They said the brightly colored triangles, intended to make them more visible to cars along rural roads, were too garish for their faith.
Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, they were allowed to mount less gaudy gray tape.
“The fact that this group was successful in that challenge,” Dr. Kraybill said, “may have encouraged them to challenge the septic issues.”
The septic fight began in late 2006 when the executive director of the Cambria County Sewage Enforcement Agency, Deborah Sedlmeyer, found that human waste at the schoolhouse, where 18 children were taught, was being collected in a 50-gallon metal drum under an outhouse
“It was overrunning the barrels,” Ms. Sedlmeyer said, and it was being dumped, untreated, onto nearby fields.
The Swartzentrubers agreed to improve the outhouses, adding a larger, 250-gallon holding tank and treating the waste with lime.
But they refused to follow state law, which called for installing a 5,000-gallon precast concrete tank and allowing someone certified by the state to use an electronic meter to test the waste’s chemical content.
The elders had determined that use of a precast tank was too modern — they want to make the vat themselves — as was the electronic meter and the requirement that they obtain certification to do the testing.
“These folks don’t couch their words,” Mr. Crislip said. “They tell the truth and deal with the consequences. They were the most amicable meetings we’ve ever had. But they’d tell us they just weren’t going to do it.”
In response, Judge Norman Krumenacker of Cambria County ordered Andy Swartzentruber to jail.
“He thinks he’s doing the right thing,” Joely Swartzentruber, 25, said of his father. “But his nerves didn’t take to jail. They had to put him on pills to sleep.”
After Ms. Sedlmeyer found that conditions at Joely Swartzentruber and John Miller’s residential outhouses were similar — and their owners also refused to comply with state ordinances — Judge Krumenacker ordered the two homes and their barns padlocked on May 15, forcing the families to move in with relatives.
Last Monday, the judge allowed the barns to be unlocked so the families could harvest and store their hay, but they were not allowed to return home.
“We can make do right now,” said Susan Miller, 39, John’s wife. “I’m not upset, but it makes me sad. We own a farm, and we can’t live there.”
But for many of the area’s non-Amish residents, the impasse represents a test case over whether laws will be bent in the face of religious principles.
“The rules should be the same for everybody,” said Bernard E. Dumm, who owns D&D Wood Sales, next to the farm of another Swartzentruber Amish elder, Sam Yoder. “Besides, it’s not about religion. They just don’t want to follow the rules.”
“If you don’t do the correct sewage things,” Mr. Dumm added, “we all get sick.”
Told of his neighbor’s feelings, Mr. Yoder, 54, was polite but resolute. “You hear people say that we have to live the way they do, but we can’t do that,” he said. “Our forefathers, that’s why they came across the sea, for religious freedom.”
An editorial on same-sex marriage. This politician was shocked - shocked, I say! - to find out that gay people don't want to force homophobic churches to marry them. Uh, duh?
Why I Now Support Gay Marriage
By TOM SUOZZI
Mineola, N.Y.
WHEN I ran in the Democratic primary for governor against Eliot Spitzer in 2006, I vocally supported civil unions for same-sex couples but did not endorse equal marriage. I understood the need to provide equal rights for gays and lesbians, but as a practicing Catholic, I also felt that the state should not infringe on religious institutions’ right to view marriage in accordance with their own traditions. I thought civil unions for same-sex couples would address my concerns regarding both equality and religious liberty.
I was wrong.
I have listened to many well-reasoned and well-intentioned arguments both for and against same-sex marriage. And as I talked to gays and lesbians and heard their stories of pain, discrimination and love, my platitudes about civil unions began to ring hollow. I have struggled to find the solution that best serves the common good.
I now support same-sex marriage. This is a subject of great debate before the New York State Legislature (although the legislators there are a little distracted right now), and I hope that same-sex civil marriage will be approved within the month.
Under current New York State law, same-sex couples are deprived of access to the employment benefits, life and health insurance and inheritance laws that heterosexual couples have. If the state were to institute civil unions for same-sex couples, that discrimination would end, but we’d still be creating a separate and unequal system.
Civil unions for both heterosexual and same-sex couples would be an equal system, but this compromise appears unlikely at the current time. Few heterosexual couples would give up their current civil marriage for a civil union. While some states would recognize civil unions for all, others would not, causing legal problems for New York couples. Advocates of same-sex marriage don’t seem in favor of such a compromise either.
According to the last census, there are an estimated 50,000 households headed by same-sex couples in New York, many who were married in other states. Those marriages are recognized by New York courts as valid. As a result, we have same-sex marriage for some in New York (albeit performed out of state) and no marriage at all for other same-sex couples.
Any change in the New York law can, and must, balance equality while making sure that religious institutions remain free to choose whether to marry same-sex couples. By following the example of Connecticut and Vermont, which included protections for religious institutions when they recently legalized same-sex marriage, we can ensure that churches are not forced to consecrate marriages they do not endorse. This will require a strong liberty clause allowing religious institutions to opt out of solemnizing same-sex marriage, which also applies to the provision of services and programs at religiously affiliated institutions.
Many civil marriages are not considered “holy matrimony” by religious institutions because they do not conform to the rules of the religious institution. Those marriages have not challenged religious liberty. We must see that civil marriage, which has always been separate from religious marriage, will remain so.
But most important, gays and lesbians have suffered too long from legal discrimination, social marginalization and even violence. They are entitled to clear recognition of their equal status as citizens of a country that is founded on the principle that we are all inherently worthy. By delivering a clear message that same-sex couples can no longer be treated as separate and unequal in New York, we will also reduce discrimination in everyday life. We will all be better for that.
Equal civil marriage should, and likely will, pass because of the public’s growing unwillingness to sustain inequality. Society will also be strengthened as more people take responsibility for one another in marriage. I now encourage others who oppose gay marriage to re-examine the reasons they do so, and to consider changing their minds too.
An article on girl's sports teams in cities.
It comes with a slideshow
A Team’s Struggle Shows Disparity in Girls’ Sports
By KATIE THOMAS
The Cougars of Middle School 61 had a basketball game in the Bronx, but a half-hour before tipoff, six girls and Coach Bryan Mariner were still inching through traffic in Brooklyn.
A cellphone rang. It belonged to forward Tiffany Fields-Binning, who passed the phone to Mr. Mariner.
“You don’t want her to go?” he said. He peered up at a street sign. “We’re on Atlantic and Flatbush.” He paused. “O.K. O.K. We’ll wait here.”
Mr. Mariner turned off the ignition. “Tiff-a-ny.” He said her name slowly, like a sigh. “You didn’t set this straight with your pop?”
Tiffany stared out a window.
Mr. Mariner turned and assessed the situation: “We’ve got five.”
Five players. No substitutes.
With this team, it’s always something. In the suburbs, girls’ participation in sports is so commonplace that in many communities, the conversation has shifted from concerns over equal access to worries that some girls are playing too much. But the revolution in girls’ sports has largely bypassed the nation’s cities, where public school districts short on money often view sports as a luxury rather than an entitlement.
Coaches and organizers of youth sports in cities say that while many immigrant and lower-income parents see the benefit of sports for sons, they often lean on daughters to fill needs in their own hectic lives, like tending to siblings or cleaning the house.
Others, like Tiffany’s father, Gavin Binning, are worried for their daughter’s safety, another roadblock to playing.
“Tiffany’s my baby,” he said. “They weren’t going around the corner, they were going to the Bronx. And for me not knowing that, it drove me crazy.”
Since the passage of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX in 1972, girls’ participation in sports has soared. In the 1971-72 school year, girls accounted for 7 percent of all participants in high school sports. By the 2006-7 school year, their share had grown to 41 percent, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
In the suburbs, girls play sports at rates roughly equal to boys. A 2007 survey by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 schoolchildren nationwide showed that 54 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls in the suburbs described themselves as “moderately involved” athletes.
Urban areas revealed a much greater discrepancy. Only 36 percent of city girls in the survey described themselves as moderately involved athletes, compared with 56 percent of city boys.
Girls in cities from Los Angeles to New York “are the left-behinds of the youth sport movement in the United States,” said Don Sabo, a professor of health policy at D’Youville College in Buffalo, who conducted the study, which was commissioned by the Women’s Sports Foundation, a private advocacy group.
The Cougars have few of the basics that suburban public school girls have come to expect, including free transportation, uniforms and full seasons of regularly scheduled games. At M.S. 61 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, each road game is a logistical puzzle for Mr. Mariner, 46, who is dean of students and coach of the school’s girls’ and boys’ basketball teams. Even when the Cougars arrive ready to play, games are sometimes canceled because the opponents — facing the same obstacles — cannot field a team. Parents rarely show up to watch.
Closer to Home
As he waited, Mr. Mariner glanced at the dashboard clock. He had worked hard to ensure that his players would get to the game. He talked his nephew into letting them borrow his Ford Expedition. He pulled the girls out of class 15 minutes early. He even slipped $2 to the cousin of one of his best players, Soledad Pierre, to take over her baby-sitting duties that afternoon.
Now, it was nearly game time. “I can’t just leave you,” he told Tiffany.
Another player, Nia Miller, tried to lighten the mood. She told Mr. Mariner, “Her father might change his mind if he sees your bad self.”
Just then, Mr. Binning pulled up behind them. The men stood between the cars and talked. Tiffany got out, too, and stared at her sneakers. Moments later, the men shook hands. Tiffany and Mr. Mariner climbed back into the car.
“Your pop is all right,” Mr. Mariner said.
Tiffany’s father had reason to be suspicious, Mr. Mariner said later, because she had previously used basketball as a cover when she wanted to leave the house. Mr. Binning said he relented that day because “the coach showed me she’s in good hands.”
Parents rarely question their sons’ whereabouts, Mr. Mariner said.
“I could take my boys to another state, and I wouldn’t get these calls,” he said. “They’d probably say, ‘Oh, you’re back so soon?’ ”
For most of his two decades at M.S. 61, formally known as Dr. Gladstone H. Atwell Middle School, Mr. Mariner has not been paid to coach. In New York City, public school principals must make difficult choices about distributing resources. M.S. 61’s budget for after-school programs is limited to those tied to academics, the principal, Sandra Taylor, said.
“There is very little,” she said. “We make do.”
Along with teaching basketball skills, Mr. Mariner also mops the court before games, persuades reluctant parents to let their daughters play and, above all, tries to ease the way from girlhood to adolescence. Middle school is a crucial time for young athletes, when habits crystallize and they decide whether to continue playing.
“We have so many kids trying to grow up too fast,” he said. “My thing is to try and keep them busy for as long as possible.”
Mr. Mariner asked each player to contribute $80 a year for uniforms, equipment, transportation and other expenses. That is a lot for most of the students. About half the girls paid Mr. Mariner in full. Some gave $1 or $2 at a time.
The Have-Nots
New York City education officials say they are making efforts to involve more girls, but they acknowledge that the system is recovering from decades of neglect. Physical education was nearly eliminated from public schools during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and did not resurface as a priority until 2004, when the Department of Education created an Office of Fitness and Health Education. Among other initiatives, the office has set up spinning classes and invited nonprofit organizations like the New York Road Runners to work with students. City high schools have added golf, lacrosse and double Dutch as varsity girls’ sports.
Another program in more than 200 middle schools is aimed at encouraging students to be physically active, said Lori Rose Benson, the office’s director. Of nearly 500 schools with seventh and eighth graders, 62 fielded girls’ basketball teams this year in a citywide tournament that attracted 107 boys’ teams. For about two months, the students had a taste of what suburbs routinely offer: paid coaches and referees, scheduled games and free uniforms. This spring, the Cougars won one playoff game before losing to a team from Queens. Mr. Mariner was paid about $2,500 for coaching in the tournament, and the girls received MetroCards after every game.
Yet city programs do not come close to matching what the suburban schools provide. On Long Island, most middle schools have a menu of sports and pay for all expenses. So many children try out that schools often field separate seventh- and eighth-grade teams, said Ed Cinelli, the executive director of Section XI of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, which covers Suffolk County. Large middle-school teams also play extra quarters in sports like basketball to give everyone a chance to compete, he said.
In Huntington, the middle school offers 11 teams for girls and 13 for boys, across four seasons, said Georgia McCarthy, the district’s athletic director. Coaches are paid $3,500 to $5,000 a season, and there is no cost to players. “That’s a given,” she said.
Although boys in the city also have fewer opportunities in sports, other factors work in their favor. Lean athletic budgets leave a gap that is filled by a blend of volunteers and private groups that have traditionally served more boys than girls.
“The needs of boys just have always been, and to a large extent remain, the unspoken, often unrecognized priority,” Mr. Sabo, the professor, said.
Other Responsibilities
One cold afternoon in March, the Cougars trickled into the gym for practice. But Soledad did not join them. Her grandmother had left her to care for her younger cousins.
As her teammates ran half-court sprints, Soledad crouched in the basement of a day-care center, rummaging through the cubby that belonged to her 3-year-old cousin Gardyne. She extracted a pink hooded sweatshirt and, with practiced motions, guided Gardyne’s hands through the tiny sleeves. Her 8-year-old cousin Brianna was waiting at the top of the stairs. The girls walked home, three backpacks bobbing in unison down New York Avenue.
Soledad is not the type of girl most basketball coaches recruit. She is 5 feet 5 inches, can be painfully shy and is sometimes ill prepared. One day this winter, Soledad arrived for a game in her uniform and snow boots. She played in Mr. Mariner’s size-9 sneakers.
Yet Soledad loves basketball. In her seventh-grade English class, she composed a poem.
“I am Soledad Pierre,” she wrote. “I am a Haitian girl. I am a basketball player. I am a gift of God.”
Soledad’s after-school routine is different from that of her cousin Karl Pierre, a freshman at Paul Robeson High School, who plays basketball nearly every day after school and says he dreams of earning a college basketball scholarship.
Karl lives in an apartment with Soledad, her father, their grandmother and other relatives. But boys in the family are not asked to baby-sit.
“It’s not fair,” said Soledad, who also hopes to play college basketball. But if she were to complain, she said, “They’d just make me stay home for a week.”
At first, Soledad’s family, especially her grandmother and uncle, resisted the idea of her playing.
“They thought it was strange for a female,” said her aunt Johane Pierre, 26, who was a fencer and volleyball player in high school. “But they all got used to it because she really likes it.”
And yet her adult relatives make few accommodations for Soledad to participate. Because most of them work long hours, household chores and baby-sitting always take precedence. No one in Soledad’s family has seen her play.
Ms. Pierre, a phlebotomist in a health clinic, said the family relied more on Soledad than Karl to care for their cousins, explaining that Soledad’s school was closer to home than his. Besides, Ms. Pierre said, “she’s better with the kids — giving them a bath, feeding them.”
Soledad’s frequent absences present a challenge to Mr. Mariner, who leads the team with intensity and joy. He buries his head in his hands when the girls dribble in the wrong direction, and throws himself to the floor when they miss layups. At a recent game, Soledad’s jump shot arced toward the basket but bounced off the rim. He shouted, “I’ll take that all day long, Soley!”
In March, Soledad missed a Saturday game against a friendly rival, Intermediate School 285, and the Cougars lost. For a time, Mr. Mariner considered pulling her from the starting lineup.
“I’m not going to start someone I can’t count on,” he said.
A Mother’s Doubts
Of all the Cougars, the eighth grader Olivia Colbert would seem to have the best chance to become one Mr. Mariner’s success stories — players he has guided into better public and private high schools. But her mother may prove to be her greatest obstacle.
Olivia, 14, takes the court like a star but is still learning the game: she trips over her dribble, fouls often and sometimes bursts into tears when she makes a mistake. But at 5-9, she towers over opponents and is the team’s top scorer. Last winter, high school coaches showed up more often than her mother to watch her play.
Olivia has enthusiasm. She shows up to nearly every practice and game, and was the only member of the team to accept Mr. Mariner’s invitation to watch two of his former players compete this spring in a citywide girls’ tournament at Hunter College. They sat in the bleachers with Mr. Mariner’s 10-year-old son, Bryan Jr.
In March, Olivia was accepted by Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, a private school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She had applied at the suggestion of Rocco Romano, the girls’ basketball coach, who knows Olivia because he also coaches at I.S. 285.
It is still not clear that Olivia will be able to attend in the fall because the school is offering only up to $1,400 in aid toward the $7,000 tuition. Mr. Romano is trying to find private sponsors. If that does not work, she will probably attend and play for South Shore, a public high school in Brooklyn.
Olivia’s mother, Bertha Colbert, is open to the idea of private school and visited Bishop Loughlin with Olivia in the spring. A single mother, she works as a school crossing guard and says she would be satisfied if Olivia winds up in public school. Olivia’s father died before she was born.
“I told her and told her, there’s more to life than basketball,” Ms. Colbert said. “But she doesn’t see it.”
Though proud of Olivia, she is wary of dreaming too big.
“What did she tell me she wanted to do?” Ms. Colbert said of Olivia. “A lawyer or something. I said no, no, no, no. I’m not going through all that school. You’re going to have to work for yourself.”
No Game Today
The opening buzzer reverberated through the Cougars’ gym.
But on this afternoon the girls were not on the court; their game had been canceled because their opponent, Public School 161, did not have enough players. Instead, most of the Cougars sat watching Mr. Mariner coach the boys’ team.
Nia volunteered to operate the scoreboard, while a teammate kept statistics. Soledad pulled up a chair.
During halftime, an eight-girl dance team from P.S. 161 took the court, clapping their hands, stamping their feet and slapping their thighs to a complicated beat. They wore tight shirts and blue jeans with sparkles.
“Boring, boring, boring,” Soledad said.
Nia added, “They could have taken some girls from over there.”
Sidelined, Nia registered each basket and free throw in the boys’ 51-24 victory. She recalled the last time her team faced P.S. 161.
“We beat the girls just like this,” Nia said. “Just like this.”
And finally, the Stray Shopping Cart Project. Wow.
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