Pennsylvania

The Way to Work program is a statewide initiative that has put 12,000  adults back to work in full time employment and 14,000 youth into summer employment. This program is slated to be cut off on September 30th. Many people across the state are pushing to extend this program, in hopes of lessening the unemployment crisis instead of adding to it.

Members of PSU recently traveled to Harrisburg PA to meet with students from Harrisburg's William Penn High School and engage them in our Campaign for Nonviolent Schools and our Campaign for Equitable School Funding. We led a participatory workshop that explored the root causes of violence in our schools and communities. We also talked about conditions inside our schools, and students from both Philly and Harrisburg agreed that underfunding of schools is a root cause of many of the problems we face.
 
By sharing our experiences, students came to the realization that the problems we see in our schools are not isolated to our own districts; that the struggle for a high quality education is a statewide struggle. In this radio piece, we hear from Harrisburg students about conditions in their school, their views on violence, and how PSU's Nonviolence workshop affected their perceptions.

By Gregory Jordan-Detamore & Dylan Washington
 
In late 2007, a Costing Out Study was released. It was commissioned by the state to find out how much money is needed to give all students in Pennsylvania an adequate education, broken down by school district. It took into account factors such as poverty, English language learners, and cost of living. The results were not surprising, but nonetheless were very important.

This map by Mark Price at the Keystone Research Center shows the deepening crisis of unemployment in Pennsylvania over the past few months. When we consider that official statistics on unemployment do not include those who become discouraged by the state of the job market and no longer look for work we can suspect these numbers are much worse.

Miles de personas en el estado de Pennsylvania han recibido sus licencias de manejar con un Número de Identificación Tributaria (TIN).

Yesterday more than 70 Philadelphians headed to Harrisburg to the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board Hearing for what was supposed to be a "status update" on the Philadelphia casinos.

Instead, what many of us were greeted with was essentially an ambush - the announcement that Foxwoods used the status hearing to announce that they planned to move within a matter of months into the Strawbridge's building.