BY GUY STERLING
Guy Sterling, a longtime resident of Newark and a member of the Newark Water Group, spent almost 30 years as reporter with The Star-Ledger when the paper was located in the Newark.
Education, taxes, housing, immigration, politics, and other issues that affect the people of New Jersey
BY GUY STERLING
Guy Sterling, a longtime resident of Newark and a member of the Newark Water Group, spent almost 30 years as reporter with The Star-Ledger when the paper was located in the Newark.
David Hespe, the former New Jersey education commissioner responsible for many of the worst excesses of state control of the Newark public school district, has a new source of employment–the Newark public school district.
Jordan Thomas made his way to his parents’ car parked outside Gate 4 of Yankee Stadium in The Bronx Saturday. In a stadium suite, the Rhodes Trust had just completed the final interviews of the students vying for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships. Jordan carried with him life-changing news–a good sort of life-changing news–that he could barely contain.
I want to report a case of child abuse.
Well, no. Not just one case.
Thousands of cases. Maybe tens of thousands. One for every child in New Jersey who attended class Monday and Tuesday in near 100 degree heat without air conditioning. Who will still be in school next week when the heat returns–and in September.
Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, former top aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the only two persons to face trial in the 2013 Bridgegate scandal, were sentenced today. Baroni got two years; Kelly, 18 months. They could have received more time in jail. Christie, of course, was never charged and, despite repeated testimony at trial that he knew in advance of the plot to close Fort Lee ramps to the George Washington Bridge, he faced no sanction whatsoever.
Lawyers for Newark’s public school children have asked New Jersey’s appellate courts to block the Christie Administration’s effort to nearly double charter school enrollment in the state’s largest school district, warning the increased privatization of the city’s schools would deepen the system’s fiscal crisis, increase racial isolation, and deprive the neediest public school students of essential services.
About 100 demonstrators, mostly young women of color, marched and chanted their way through the streets of downtown Newark Saturday afternoon, part of a spreading movement against the presidency of Donald Trump. They staged two sit-down protests in four hours, closing McCarter Highway and occupying the concourse of Newark Penn Station.
In September of 2013, a small number of highly-paid government employees from New Jersey–men and women close to Chris Christie, the state’s governor running for re-election and aspiring to be a presidential candidate–tied up traffic at the entrance of the George Washington Bridge to New York, the busiest interstate crossing in the nation. Those employees didn’t want you to know the purpose of the tie-up or who caused it. Now, three years later, another small group of people–including a federal judge, the US Attorney and defense lawyers are still trying to keep the truth about what has come to be known as Bridgegate from the residents of New Jersey and the rest of the nation.