DCentric

Good morning, DCentric readers! Ready for some links?

Job-training program aims to empower the District’s hardest to employ “This is Project Empowerment, the District’s most expensive job-training program, aimed at one of its most desperate populations. The goal: Take participants from the only Washington they’ve known, where unemployment is chronic, and show them a city they’ve watched from afar, where women wear practical heels and men match their belts to their wingtips. Of more than 800 participants the program serves each year, nearly all are African American, 80 percent have criminal records and many have never held a full-time job.” (The Washington Post)

Sgt. Pepperedjane

826DC: The Museum of Unnatural History

Hidden tutoring centers provide ‘unnatural’ education “826 National is on track to serve 24,000 students this year through its tutoring centers and school outreach programs. Sisters Teah and Janea Green have been visiting 826DC most afternoons since it opened. “This place is awesome,” said Janea, 10, as she worked on her multiplication homework with volunteer Matt Lemanski. “I really, really need help with my homework and my parents are busy sometimes. Sometimes we do poetry, sometimes we do math,” said Teah, 9. When she doesn’t have homework, she works on the story she is writing about a mermaid named Katopia.” (CNN)

Was Slain Principal Targeted Because He Was Gay? “High-profile attorney Gloria Allred is pushing for a federal hate crime investigation in the murder of Brian Betts. Betts was a beloved principal at Shaw Middle School in the District. He was murdered inside his Silver Spring, Md., home in April. Alante Saunders, 19, plead (sic) guilty last month to killing Betts after meeting him on a gay chat website. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison, with the possibility for parole after 20. “If he was targeted because he was on that chat line, then we believe it would fall under the Matthew Shepard Hate rime Law,” said Allred…” (NBC Washington)

How many lives does Marion Barry have left? “He wasn’t very nice,” she says. “He didn’t receive me very well, but I did force myself on him and sat down, and I ended up paying for his lunch.” Barry remained skeptical. “I’m white. He wanted to make sure it was someone who really, really understood the history and where he came from.” She managed to convince him, and before she knew it she was flying to Mississippi with him to meet his mother. Not that having Barry’s approval made filming easy. He blew off nine out of every ten appointments, according to Flor. “He’s a very mercurial person…He’s also “not a very introspective person,” she adds…” (tbd.com)

Lanier building private workout space at police HQ “Given the fact that we just cut over 400 police positions, the fact that the chief of police is building herself a private gym at taxpayer expense is appalling,” said police union Chief Kris Baumann. The department already has several gyms. Although there isn’t one in the headquarters, there are gyms in each of the city’s seven district facilities. There’s also a larger gym at the police academy…”The chief is acting like she’s a monarch taking funds from the treasury and destroying part of the castle,” he said. “It’s government run amuck.” (Washington Examiner )

Washington unemployment lowest in nation “The unemployment rate in the Washington area remains the lowest in the nation among big cities, falling to 5.8 percent in October, from 5.9 percent in September. Washington is the only major city in the country with an unemployment rate below 6 percent, with a tighter labor market than the next four-lowest unemployment rates, in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Austin and Boston.” (bizjournals.com)