"In a broken foster system, some kids can’t find a bed for the night" by Kay Lazar Globe Staff, April 6, 2019
Children are landing in foster care and mired there for increasingly longer stretches of time as the opioid epidemic continues to splinter families and overwhelm the state’s child protection system. Facing this deluge of need, the Department of Children and Families has been unable to recruit and retain enough foster parents to shelter all the abused and neglected children without a safe home.
It is a crisis in care largely unaddressed, and the children are paying the price, a Globe review found.
The number of children in foster care has spiked by almost 20 percent in the last five years, and now stands at roughly 9,200, yet the state relies on a chaotic, often paper-based system for tracking all of these children on a daily basis, and virtually every night, DCF response workers, with kids in their back seats, are crisscrossing Massachusetts, or camping out at a 24-hour McDonald’s as they await word of a foster family with space for another child.
Many DCF offices have become de facto day-care centers, with toddlers crawling amid computers and paper clips. Portable cribs, packages of diapers, boxes of crayons, coloring books, and videos have become routine office supplies for social workers as they scour the state for available foster homes.
When they do find an opening, it’s often in a home that can take a child only on an emergency basis, for a night or two. Almost one-third of children in foster care in Massachusetts get bumped from one temporary foster home to another in their first few months away from their parents, a rate greater than just about anywhere else in the country.
The shuffling from home to home has a profound and lasting effect on children, social workers say.
“We are seeing in real time a healthy child come into care for a valid reason, and they come out the other end with behavioral problems, attachment issues, and become labeled hard to place,” said Adriana Zwick, a social worker and chapter president of the Service Employees International Union Local 509, the union that represents DCF workers.
Marylou Sudders, the state’s health and human services secretary, said Massachusetts is doing its best to tackle a cascade of complex problems in foster care.
At least you all got raises!
A driving force behind the mounting demand for foster care is opioids; even though state statistics suggest overdose deaths are starting to decline, the epidemic is far from over. Many parents are overdosing, or so strung out on drugs that their children are routinely left to fend for themselves until they are scooped up by DCF, social workers say.
That is in wonderful, deep-blue, liberal Ma$$achu$etts!
Another factor: DCF became hypervigilant in removing kids following the tragic 2014 and 2015 deaths of youngsters killed in abusive families the agency was supposed to be monitoring. The rate of removals has since declined, but DCF remains reluctant to return children to unstable homes, workers say.
Facing a persistent and severe shortage of safe places for these children, DCF says it launched an aggressive advertising campaign that netted a gain of about 300 foster homes since 2017, for a statewide total of 2,423. Still, supply hasn’t kept up with demand.
Quantifying the size of the shortfall is difficult because the state doesn’t track how many licensed foster homes are actually accepting children, or how many beds are available, at any given time, but Sudders, the state health secretary, offered some sense of the problem’s scale, saying that even 600 new foster homes would not be enough.
WTF?
The state also doesn’t track why families decide to stop accepting children, but foster parents interviewed by the Globe spoke to the question, and forcefully: They said they were exasperated with a bureaucracy that fails to communicate vital information and doesn’t supply sufficient therapy and other support for highly traumatized kids in their care. They also point to a maze of sometimes conflicting and outdated rules they’re required to follow.
Given that this is Ma$$achu$etts, I'm sure it's staffed with family and friends of the well-connected for the rea$ons of political patronage, and just pray to God you won't need an autopsy.
Additionally, they say their daily stipend, which ranges from about $23 to $27.50 per child, does not reflect what many foster parents say they actually need to spend.
Although the lack of state data makes it hard to measure the gap between foster care supply and demand, several key indicators point to a crisis.
Despite its wealth, Massachusetts ranks near the bottom — behind only Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Illinois — in finding stable placements for kids during their first year in foster care, according to data from the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
We are #1 in sanctuary cities, though, and I'm sickened by the $elf-$erving narrative of how great we are!
DCF tries to place children removed from their homes with relatives. When relatives can’t be found, are unable to care for a child, or have histories that may disqualify them, such as a criminal conviction, foster care is a last resort.
Ideally, children removed during daytime hours would go straight to a permanent foster home, said Walles, the DCF supervisor.
“If we had enough foster homes, the first placement would be their only placement,” she said, but with too few long-term beds available, many children are placed in temporary, or so-called hot line homes, with families who agree to open their doors in the middle of the night to a child who needs an emergency place to stay, and in some parts of Massachusetts, open hot line homes are scarce because they are already full with children who have nowhere else to go.
I'm tired of hearing excuses, sorry.
For the 15 communities surrounding Lowell, for example, there are no hot line homes and haven’t been for years, according to SEIU, the workers’ union.
One Lowell social worker recently drove nearly 100 miles, to Fall River, to find a child a bed for the night.
The deluge of children with nowhere to go has grown so acute, response workers say they routinely beg hot line homes to accept youngsters for longer than the usual single night while workers search for relatives able to take them, or for a more long-term foster home.
I sure hope this isn't another money grab!
Sometimes, social workers say, no hot line home materializes, and children wait till morning with social workers in cars, in hospital waiting rooms, in police station lobbies.
The state’s failure to track which homes are open and available on any given night means that workers have to rely on an archaic, hit-or-miss system, calling foster parents around the state to find open homes. Sudders, the health and human services secretary, said the state is examining ways to improve its computer system, which she acknowledged hadn’t been updated in more than a decade.
WTF?
Waiting for a place to go during the day, they languish in a netherworld — cramped DCF offices, napping on piled-up blankets and playing under workers’ desks because temporary, licensed day care and preschool slots are not available.
“I’m amazed at the fact that a child has not choked on a paper clip and suffered horrible circumstances,” said Zwick, the SEIU chapter president.
Linda Spears, the Department of Children and Families commissioner, acknowledged the agency’s challenges and said the complexity of problems workers see now are tougher than they’ve ever been.
“In many instances, families are dealing with domestic violence problems and safety for the parent, and they are dealing with addictions and mental health issues,” she said.
It's ju$t one excu$e after the other!
Spears said DCF hopes to launch a program May 1 to provide day care for the hardest-hit 10 agency offices so children aren’t warehoused in workers’ cubicles. The agency aims to expand the program to the remaining 19 offices later this year.
Creating more stability for children removed from their families is a top priority for the agency, she said. It has hired workers to help find more relatives who will step forward for children DCF takes into state custody, to ease the strain on foster homes and because that tends to be better for youngsters. This initiative has boosted such placements, known as kinship care, about 11 percent since 2014, according to the agency’s data.
HA!
“There is not one simple solution to all of this,” Spears said, but she said the agency is making progress. She said the agency has posted billboards on major state highways and launched a robust social media campaign over the past two years urgently seeking more foster families.
Oh, good, I was worried there for a moment!
As we all know, the answer to every problem is a $ocial media campaign!
DCF has also hired more than 300 social workers since 2015 to reduce caseloads on each worker and more carefully monitor children. The state says average caseloads are now close to industry standards, but the SEIU says that in some offices, they never went down, or are beginning to creep back up.
But, but, but, but, but, but.....
Some child advocates, however, say Massachusetts leaders should consider a wholesale change in the state’s approach to child protection.
Oh, they threw a however in there, and sometimes you get a yet.
You know, I was told in Writing 101 that you don't use those kind of words in a report!
Instead of spending and focusing so much on foster care, they argue the state should shift more funding to the critical services troubled families need to stay intact — substance abuse and mental health treatment, and domestic violence prevention — which have not kept pace with the soaring need.
“That doesn’t mean that children should be left home in risky situations, but many more of them could be maintained safely in their own homes if parents are provided better support,” said Michael Dsida, deputy chief counsel at the state public defender agency, the Committee for Public Counsel Services. Dsida has been representing children and families for 30 years.
Don't they have an AG for that (seems like a conflict of interest)?
Roughly 80 percent of the children in DCF’s caseload — more than 36,000 youngsters — remained at home in fractured families desperate for help, and potentially at risk of entering the foster system, yet less than 10 percent of the agency’s services budget goes to family support and stabilization services, according to a recent budget analysis by Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.
There is my yet.
“Foster care is warranted in some cases because of the risks children face in their homes,” Dsida said. “But there has to be more thought given to the harm that they suffer as a result of being removed from their homes and placed in an overtaxed foster care system.”
In the meantime, DCF social workers continue their nightly odysseys, waiting for word that a safe harbor has turned up.
The worker who drove laps up and down Route 9 for hours last fall, waiting for a foster home for the 14-year-old in his back seat, finally got his call. Around 4 a.m. he walked the teen into a home in Lynn, 60 miles from where they started, to meet the strangers who had agreed to take him for what was left of the night.
Just a few hours later, another social worker was back on that doorstep to drive the boy back to Worcester. It was a weekday, and he had to go to school.....
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Related:
For foster parents, chaotic state system makes job even harder
Mass. foster care oversight plagued by conflict of interest, advocates say
Auditor concerned that communication issues hurt foster children’s education
Yvonne Abraham
Being a foster parent is much harder than it needs to be
Stan Rosenberg
Being a foster child is traumatic enough. Let’s stop making it worse
Baker administration pledges major reforms for troubled foster care system
Going to give it a technological overhaul, and what are they working on up on Beacon Hill?
"Too young to get married — but not to end a pregnancy?" by Stephanie Ebbert Globe Staff, April 6, 2019
Take two bills now being considered on Beacon Hill: One would impose a new minimum age of 18 to get married. Currently, a child in Massachusetts can get married at any age, with at least one parent’s permission. The other would let a young woman get an abortion at any age. Currently, she can’t do so before 18, unless she has the permission of a parent or a judge.
If both bills pass as written, they would seem to send conflicting signals on young women’s autonomy: You’re mature enough to choose an abortion, no matter what your parents say, but you are not mature enough to choose marriage, no matter what your parents say.
Ya' think?
Some of the same Democrats are championing both bills, and they say there is no contradiction between the two; both would put young women in the driver’s seat of their lives.
“What we’re trying to do is empower people,” said Senator Harriette Chandler, the lead sponsor of both bills in the Senate. “We believe that if given the freedom to make decisions, they will make good, correct decisions for themselves.”
What kind of insular, fantasy-world bubble do you guys live in?
A girl who can’t or won’t talk to her parents about abortion currently has to find her way to court to get a “judicial bypass” — essentially demonstrating to the judge she is mature enough to make the decision on her own. That presents a hurdle to accessing abortion, a constitutionally protected right, sponsors say. Meanwhile, minors can get every other kind of reproductive care on their own, from contraception to a C-section — without their parents’ consent. (They can even get an abortion without parental consent in one rare circumstance: If they already are married.)
Then why they raising the minimum age to be married?
Btw, whatever happened to keeping the government out of your bedroom?
I gue$$ that's only a good tool when its flogging Republicans, never mind the rank hypocrisy of the Moral Majority of the Left!
As for barring child marriage, Representative Kay Khan, the lead sponsor in the House, believes teenagers often aren’t the ones making the decision — their parents are, such as dictating the teenager marry because of a pregnancy.
“It’s about allowing children to make their own choices,” said Khan, “because sometimes their parents don’t have their interest in mind.”
What a $upremely eliti$t mind $et! That is the kind of $cum that are under that dome.
But she is going to fix the DCF, all right, and they allegedly approved money several years ago to upgrade workers’ computers and cellphones!
With no age limit on marriage in Massachusetts, an average of more than 70 minors a year have gotten married since 2000, according to the state Office of the Child Advocate; however, the numbers are on a downward trend, to as few as 12 in 2016.
They are making a mountain out of molehill!
Given all those factors, the idea of ending adolescent marriage doesn’t generate much outrage, but the notion of a girl as young as 14 ending a pregnancy on her own still stirs concern.
Lee Crowley, a Westborough mother who rallied against the abortion bill outside the State House recently, can’t believe legislators would remove parents from a health care decision of such significance.
“In a world where I have to sign a detailed permission slip for high school-aged children to receive a Tylenol or Advil or a Tums or an antibiotic cream from the school nurse,” Crowley said, “it doesn’t make sense to me that the Massachusetts legislators would want a young teenager to be able to make a decision about a serious procedure that could have serious physical or emotional consequences for their child without parental involvement.”
The abortion bill would also seem to contradict other recent changes to state law, made in the name of protecting children. In recent years, lawmakers have raised the legal age limits for smoking (from 18 to 21), using a tanning bed (forbidding anyone under 18), and aging out of the juvenile justice system to face adult criminal proceedings (from 17 to 18).
“We’re moving everything in a different direction, but when it comes to this issue, you want to eliminate any restrictions?” said Jim Lyons, a former legislator and longtime antiabortion activist who now chairs the Massachusetts Republican Party. “It seems to be incongruous to me,” but seen in another light, perhaps it’s entirely consistent. In the case of both the abortion and marriage bills, lawmakers would be allowing teenagers to remain children longer.
That's the up$ide-down, in$ide-out view here in Ma$$achu$etts!
There is no minimum age requirement for pregnancy, of course, and a teenager, already pregnant, can postpone marriage, but she can’t put off her due date.
The question that abortion opponents don’t ask about existing law: If a teenager is not mature enough to end a pregnancy, what makes us think she is mature enough to become a mother?
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They are doing these contortions because if they don't they will be “leaving these young women in legal limbo.”
"Lawmakers express discomfort over teen abortions without parental consent" by Stephanie Ebbert Globe Staff, June 16, 2019
The notion that a girl as young as 12 could get an abortion without telling her parents is proving to be a tough proposition, even in liberal Massachusetts, where most lawmakers consider themselves supporters of abortion rights. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll released Tuesday also found ambivalence among voters, with 46 percent said they supported that aspect of the legislation, while 41.3 percent said they were in opposition.
I don't believe their poll, sorry, mostly because it is of the Globe concern.
The bill is part of a nationwide campaign to defend abortion access and create oases for women from states that are losing abortion clinics under pressure from conservative legislatures. As they did in New York and Illinois, reproductive-rights advocates in Massachusetts hope to codify in state law the right to an abortion as interpreted by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.
The so-called Roe Act is being pushed by NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts. They seek to eliminate the age limit, saying the judicial bypass process creates an unreasonable burden for a young woman to get an abortion if she doesn’t feel safe in telling her parents.
They want the fetal ti$$ue.
The Roe Act would also allow women to have abortions late in pregnancies that are threatened by fatal fetal anomalies. (Currently, a woman can only get an abortion in Massachusetts after 24 weeks if necessary to protect her life or health.)
The latter provision has been generating most of the heat, with abortion opponents adopting the language and misconceptions used by President Trump to claim that it would allow late abortions for any reason, up until delivery. The Massachusetts Republican Party has been attacking Democratic cosponsors with targeted Facebook ads accusing them of supporting “infanticide.”
If that isn't the Globe pot hollering kettle!
“We are not going to let this proud cradle of liberty become a shameful cradle of death,” said Bernadette Lyons, an antiabortion activist, at a State House rally against the bill beside her husband, MassGOP chairman Jim Lyons.
Democratic state Representative Jay Livingstone, one of the lead sponsors of the bill in the House, told abortion rights advocates last week that proponents are “fighting an uphill battle in a way that I don’t think people appreciate in Massachusetts,” he said. “We’re swimming a little bit against the tide,” but lawmakers also believe their constituents can see past the hyperbole, and the Suffolk/Globe poll showed support for abortion in cases of fatal anomalies.
So it was an agenda-pu$hing piece of $h!t!
Of greater concern to lawmakers now is the age limit. The notion of letting underage girls get abortions on their own is discomfiting even for some members who are women, Democrats, and supporters of abortion rights.
The greater concern now is a problem that doesn't even really exist!
Speaker Pro Tempore Patricia A. Haddad, the other lead sponsor of the bill, said she understands. She has three granddaughters.
“I’d lose my mind if one of them turned up pregnant and went off and had an abortion without a family member or somebody there with her,” she acknowledged, but she said the bill is aimed at teenagers who lack such support from their families.
“Most people, I think, try to make sure that their girls are supported and feel like they can always turn to a parent,” she said. “But this is for a small percentage of people who don’t have that.”
That's $tate government in Ma$$achu$etts!
Rebecca Hart Holder, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, said that the poll questions may capture people’s “knee-jerk reaction” but that advocates have found success when they have thoughtful conversations about teens’ access to abortion.
Yeah, if they can spew their noxious hot air long enough, you will agree!
Not every teenager has parents she can consult about an unwanted pregnancy, she noted, and not every teen could navigate the judicial process to get permission for an abortion without it.
“This is an issue that’s hard to capture in a sound bite, so I’m not surprised by those numbers and I’m also not scared by them,” Hart Holder said.
Public debate on the bill kicks off Monday with a hearing before the joint legislative Judiciary Committee. The bill attracted as cosponsors 92 of the House’s 160 members and 22 of the Senate’s 40 members but could create more controversy if and when lawmakers are asked to vote on its thorny particulars.
Yeah, their careers could be aborted!
Rhode Island, the most Catholic state in the country, according to a Public Religion Research Institute report, recently rejected a bill that would codify the right to an abortion in state law. Legislators are trying again there, having recently advanced a bill through a different Senate committee.
They performed some last-minute maneuvers, and it's now on its way to the full Senate.
So much for NO meaning NO, 'eh, ladies?
Polls continue to show that Americans are broadly supportive of the right to abortion provided under Roe v. Wade, but they favor restrictions rather than unchecked access.
An NPR/Marist poll this month found that 77 percent of voters believe that Roe should stand — but that among those supporters, 26 percent want more restrictions, compared to 21 percent who want abortion available under any circumstance.
In the current polarized political climate, noisy advocates on both ends of the debate are pushing lawmakers for more clear-cut distinctions.....
So we get an EXTREME bill sent up because “you don’t make the perfect the enemy of good” -- unless you oppose them, of course!
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Related: Women’s co-working space The Wing comes to Boston
The first space opened in Manhattan in October 2016, when many women thought they were about to see Hillary Clinton elected president. Then Donald Trump won the election — and the need for a space for women took on a whole new meaning. The Wing was cofounded by Audrey Gelman, a political consultant who worked on Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 2008 who traveled frequently and found herself “using random bathrooms” to change and charge her phone, and Lauren Kassan, a businesswoman in the fitness world. In this age of gender fluidity, putting any emphasis on gender can be tricky. Last summer, as the number of transgender and nonbinary members grew, The Wing changed the wording of its acceptance e-mail from “She’s landed” to “They’ve landed,” to reflect the pronoun preferred by some gender-nonconforming people. Members — including celebrities such as Shonda Rhimes, Mindy Kaling, and Lena Dunham, a childhood friend of one of the founders.
Have you seen her lately (gained a lot of weight), and what's sad is transgenderism is killing feminism.
Of course, it is a Hot Topic nowadays:
Hot Topic Is Still Hot
On a recent afternoon, the Hot Topic store at the King of Prussia Mall, outside of Philadelphia, teemed with teenagers, 20-somethings and stroller-pushing parents. Former mall goths, punks and emo kids may remember the store differently. In the ’90s and early aughts, one did not so much enter as descend into Hot Topic. The suburban shopping center staple was dungeon like, with hellish gates that led shoppers into a dark commercial corridor, but these days the store known for inciting parental panic is also home to a dizzying array of obsessions. The company's sustained brick-and-mortar presence may also indicate its health amid reports of record-high mall vacancies and closures. The expansion of Hot Topic's mandate has helped keep the company afloat in an uncertain retail landscape. It is also evocative of a cultural shift.
Like this:
In San Francisco, Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor's Trash
Trash scavengers exist in many US cities and, like the rampant homelessness in San Francisco, are a signpost of the extremes of US capitalism.
Yeah, picking through the trash is now a profe$$ion!
"Top lawyer latest to probe death of teen trapped in minivan" by Dan Sewell Associated Press, April 6, 2019
CINCINNATI — A prominent civil rights attorney is the latest to seek answers into what happened a year ago when a Cincinnati teenager became trapped in his family’s minivan near his school and died after making two heartrending appeals to 911 for rescue.
Al Gerhardstein has in recent weeks made sweeping records requests to the city and police about the failed response April 10, 2018, to Kyle Plush’s calls. The 16-year-old student eventually suffocated from having his chest compressed after he was apparently pinned by a foldaway rear seat when he reached for tennis gear while parked near his school.
He has asked for reports, recordings, and other records on the 911 response. Much of that information has already been reported by the Associated Press and other news outlets, but the attorney is also trying to go deeply into any history of problems at the emergency center.
The veteran Cincinnati attorney has a history of litigation against the city and police, and he represented lead plaintiff James Obergefell in the 2015 US Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage.
The police department and city didn’t respond to requests for comment about Gerhardstein’s efforts.
I'm sure they disposed of it properly.
The possibility of a lawsuit is the latest development in the year since Plush’s death. It led to investigations and to improvements in the city’s 911 system technology, staffing, training, and police procedures, but the youth’s parents, who started a foundation to push for nationwide reforms, have expressed dissatisfaction.
Jill and Ron Plush took part repeatedly in city council meetings last year, pushing for reforms and accountability for their son’s death. Using the voice-activated feature on his cellphone, he had Siri dial 911, warning: ‘‘I’m going to die here.’’ He called again minutes later, this time describing his vehicle as a gold Honda Odyssey.
Two police officers drove around at the boy’s high school looking for him but left without getting out of their cruiser. Kyle’s father found his body nearly six hours after his first 911 call. Police have blamed communication breakdowns.
‘‘I’m heartbroken,’’ Police Chief Eliot Isaac told the city council late last year, adding that officers and dispatchers are ‘‘heartbroken, as well, that they didn’t get the help to this young man. But we can sit here and we can Monday morning quarterback this thing — but the reality is there were some failures and some breakdowns, and we have to be better.’’
There have also been questions raised about the safety of the 2004 Odyssey.....
What?
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Yeah, that one ‘‘may remain a tragic mystery’’ because she found she ‘‘could not live with anger forever.’’
Also see:
Doctors Use Electrical Implant to Aid Brain-Damaged Woman
They can't even write anymore:
"Kate Gladstone, who calls herself the Handwriting Repairwoman and runs an organization by the same name, says, “The world of handwriting is very much the world of fake news and crooked crooked elections.”
How they going to get into college?
"BU professor is fired after investigation finds he sexually harassed grad student in Antarctica" by Laura Crimaldi Globe Staff, April 13, 2019
Boston University has fired David Marchant, a tenured geology professor who was the subject of an internal investigation that found he violated the school’s sexual harassment policies during expeditions to Antarctica in 1997 and from 1999 to 2000, according to a letter from the university’s president.
In a letter to faculty Friday, BU president Robert A. Brown said he reviewed the case and concluded that Marchant should be let go. The university’s board of trustees endorsed the recommendation Friday, Brown wrote.
Brown’s decision overruled a recommendation from a five-member faculty panel that conducted a hearing to determine how to sanction Marchant. The faculty panel concluded Marchant should be suspended without pay for three years and then permitted to return in good standing, according to Brown and a letter from Jean Morrison, university provost and chief academic officer.
BU suspended Marchant with pay in October 2017 after the magazine Science published a story about the sexual harassment allegations, Sankey said. At the time of Marchant’s suspension, BU had been investigating the accusations for about a year, said attorney Jeffrey Sankey, who represents Marchant.
Erika Marín-Spiotta, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator for ADVANCEGeo, which seeks to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace for geoscientists, said BU’s decision was supported by “overwhelming evidence.”
“Tenure should protect intellectual freedom, not those who abuse and harass,” she said in a statement.....
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Time to go toss a few beers down:
"For some Craft Beer Cellar franchisees, it’s a bitter taste after jumping in" by Janelle Nanos Globe Staff, April 27, 2019
For nearly a decade, the Craft Beer Cellar in Belmont has been a beer lover’s paradise. Its founders, Suzanne Schalow and Kate Baker, placed a shrewd bet on craft beer just as it hit the mainstream and set about creating the country’s first national chain of specialty beer stores. They now boast 30 locations across the country.
“Our trinity,” Schalow said, is “amazing beer, hospitality, and education,” but that early business acumen hasn’t translated into success for many of the franchise owners who were persuaded to buy into their brand. A number of franchisees say they raised money from friends and family, gave up a job, or sold a house to cover the costs of opening their own stores — only to now find themselves facing mounting financial pressures that may cause them to fail.
Aggravated relationships between the founders and some of their franchisees have boiled over into sharply worded e-mails and online screeds. The aggrieved franchisees accuse the owners of providing them with overly rosy financial projections, and of belittling them instead of offering guidance when the numbers didn’t pan out.
Last spring, the owners went so far as to sue 20 unnamed franchisees in US District Court for defamation for posting anonymous complaints on the website Glassdoor.
“The best advice I can give prospective franchise owners is to run,” said one of the postings, according to the federal court filing. “Most franchises are not profitable, and the majority wish they had never signed on.”
The Glassdoor lawsuit was dismissed, and in December, after a second attempt in court to stop franchisees from criticizing them online, Schalow and Baker, who are married, asked members of the Massachusetts Brewers Guild to contribute to a GoFundMe campaign to raise a $125,000 legal fund. Their request implied that some of their detractors were motivated by homophobia.
OMFG!
The fund-raising site had raised $2,480 when it was shut down after a Globe inquiry, but the owners have continued their criticism of franchisees on their blog, casting them as mostly white men “fueled by their own internal rage and hatred of women and sexual orientations that are different from their own.”
Franchisees say the discrimination claims are false, noting that anyone who signs on as a franchisee is aware of Schalow and Baker’s relationship. The owners of the Fort Point, Fenway, Swampscott, and Winchester stores, in a joint statement issued to the Globe, called the assertions of misogyny and homophobia “astounding and unfounded.”
The majority of franchise owners interviewed for this story who raised concerns about dealing with Schalow and Baker would not allow their names to be used, fearing that speaking up would violate nondisparagement clauses in their franchise agreements and land them in court.
In an interview, Schalow and Baker said that certain stores are “damaging the reputation” of the brand by not following the founders’ philosophy and business model and neglecting to build their beer expertise. The duo said they provide guidance as needed but don’t believe in micromanagement.
They did not identify specific instances of discrimination, but Schalow said: “There are a lot of straight white males that have made their way into our lives that do not, and cannot, handle that a woman owns this franchise. And that the same woman is also a lesbian.”
OMG, they are playing the GAY CARD!
How pathetic!
I can't wait until I get to play the straight white male card!
Stephen Spinelli, president-elect of Babson College and cofounder of the Jiffy Lube franchise, said the turnover rate for the stores far outpaces national averages for franchising. “It’s several degrees south of normal,” he said. “It is almost breathtaking.”
Some of the financial strain is surely related to major shifts in the beer market.
“Bottle shops may be somewhat a victim of craft’s broader success,” said Bart Watson, chief economist of the Brewers Association.
Grocery stores now carry pallets of craft brews, and brewery taprooms are siphoning off bottle sales.
“Taprooms are changing the beer industry in an enormous way right now,” Schalow said. “Between breweries and taprooms, how does a store survive?”
Tatum Stewart, the co-owner of the Plymouth Craft Beer Cellar store, which just celebrated its fourth anniversary, said many of her fellow beer entrepreneurs got into the business because they love what they’re selling, “but they don’t have the 500 other skills they need to make the business work,” but one franchisee, who asked not to be identified because he feared retribution, provided the Globe with projected revenue numbers from the founders suggesting he’d make $1 million in revenue in his first year. Instead, he barely broke $500,000.
Another franchisee shared documents with the Globe created by the founders that set his projected first-year sales at $800,000. Instead, he saw just over half of that, and said he never took a salary. “I took a twenty from the safe once to buy a pizza,” he said. Several franchisees also told the Globe they paid more than double the projected startup costs in the franchise agreement, which put them deep in the red before they even opened.
Franchisee postings included in the owners’ suit against Glassdoor echoed these sentiments: One franchisee advised the owners to “be more honest with your investors.” Another posting warned that “low margins and long hours . . . make this a place to stay away from.”
Schalow said projections “may have been provided” to store owners, but franchisees decide how they run their business, and those choices can affect profits.
The Belmont store is significantly outperforming the franchises, but there may be reason to question the company’s financial health. The IRS has placed a lien on the Massachusetts-based parent company of the franchises for $46,000 in back taxes from 2016 and the parent company was operating at a loss of $218,000 in 2017, publicly available documents show. Documents filed earlier this month with the secretary of state’s office in Massachusetts show it took out a loan, with collateral against all its inventory, to pay off its lien.
Schalow said they’re “taking care of our obligations.”
Even retired judge Isaac Borenstein sided against them, calling them “bullies” and their tactics “fraudulent, deceptive, and unlawful,” saying “their concern was, first and foremost, their profits.”
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Related: Couple has crafted a unique beer business model
I'm told “beer is their religion.”
Maybe you should drink wine instead.
You get one cigarette, maybe two, before heading to prison:
"Children make Mother’s Day cards for incarcerated women" by Sophia Eppolito Globe Correspondent, May 5, 2019
Most women in jails are mothers who won’t be able to celebrate Mother’s Day with their children.
On Sunday afternoon, about 30 children — most younger than 10 years old — used markers, feathers, and stencils to craft homemade cards for incarcerated women throughout the state. Messages like “Free Black Mamas” and “Black Mamas Matter” were written across several cards in large, colorful letters.
The children, and the adults who brought them, were participating in “Wee Free Black Mamas,” a card-making marathon inside the Massachusetts College of Art and Design Sunday afternoon.
Photocopies of the handmade cards will be sent to the women since the jails don’t allow cards to be sent in.
A selection of the cards will also be exhibited later this month at locations across Boston, including the Bruce C. Bolling Building, the Boston Children’s Museum, as well as various branches of the Boston Public Library.
Francie Latour, co-founder of Wee the People, which hosts a variety of social justice-themed events and organized Sunday’s gathering, said her goal was to educate young children and their parents about money bail, a practice that forces people to stay in jail if they can’t pay their bail.
“If [the women] don’t get out, they can lose their job; they can lose custody of their children; they can lose their apartment,” Latour said. “So very quickly this can have a ripple effect.”
Latour said Sunday’s event focused on freeing black mothers because they are disproportionately affected by the money bail process. As black mothers, this issue hits especially close to home for Latour and her co-founder Tanya Nixon-Silberg.
“We love our children,” said Latour. “We belong with our children and it is cruel and oppressive to have mothers separated from their children just because we can’t afford to pay our bail.”
The Globe gave her a spot in the Magazine, and she got all sorts of letters.
After the children made their cards, Latour and Nixon-Silberg gave a presentation explaining money bail and how racism affects the criminal justice system.
So they are all innocent, huh? No crimes?
“What’s happening right now is that too many black women are ending up in jail for breaking laws that are pretty small,” Latour explained to the children. “And then because they have to pay this thing called bail money to get out and they can’t afford it, that’s where they get stuck.”
Several parents said this kind of event allows their children to learn about social justice issues in an accessible and kid-friendly way.
That's all the kids need, more indoctrinating and inculcating.
Whatever you do, don't put 'em in foster care!
Molly Perkins, 37, of Milton said she loves bringing her kids to Wee the People events because they open up conversations about tough topics.
“It gives us a chance to talk about things that don’t normally come up in our daily lives,” Perkins said.
Her 7-year-old son, Max, said he wanted to make “art that gets people to feel better.”
Sarah Porter, 45, of Milton said she hopes her children will feel more comfortable discussing incarceration issues in the future.
“I’m sure I’m going to have a lot of difficult questions to answer over the next week, but I’m OK with that,” said Porter, who brought her two daughters to the event.
Porter said she especially appreciated that the event maintained a feeling of optimism despite the heavy subject matter.
“It’s not all sadness,” she said. “People care about people in jail, and I want my children to know that.”
WTF is this, and where is Kushner and his crime bill when you need them?
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Hope they don't die there:
"Could the famed Market Basket ghost be Wilmington’s ‘Lady of the Caskets’?" by Steve Annear and Rebecca Ostriker Globe Staff, April 6, 2019
There was something unmistakably different about one of the shoppers in the Wilmington Market Basket last month. Fully turned out in Victorian-era garb, the elderly woman seemed troubled. And she was unaccountably lingering near the frozen peas — until, abruptly, she wasn’t.
“A ghost?” wondered Christiana Bush, the bakery employee at the store who spotted her, first to herself and then on a Facebook page. Has anyone else seen anything like it?
A sensation ensued, with media coverage, local and national, and streams of shoppers drawn to the store in hopes of a spectral sighting. Wilmington police posted a video of a cartoon ghost floating through the store’s parking lot, and a spokeswoman for the ordinarily tight-lipped grocery chain even issued a statement that its locations are “ghost-free.”
No one could spot the ghost again — or guess who she might be, but might not this mystery be solved? Who, among all of Wilmington’s dead, might have a reason to haunt the spot?
Fortunately, there are clues: Bush got a good look and recalls her vividly — wearing an old nightgown, her curly gray hair pinned up beneath a sleeping cap, her expression “a mixture of anger and melancholy,” she told the Globe.
Could it be a woman who had a strange connection to this place — a woman renowned for her fascination with the afterlife?
In the late 1800s, Wilmington was home to an eccentric figure known as much for her lavish lifestyle as for her obsession with immortality — a larger-than-life character who was determined, as the end of life approached, to be larger-than-death as well, to literally transcend the grave.
Her name was France B. Hiller.....
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Market Basket now says stores are ‘ghost-free’ -- as this post vanishes into thin air.
UPDATE:
"Three youths under the watch of the state’s Department of Children and Families died of overdoses last year, and six others suffered nonfatal overdoses — the most since state officials declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency five years ago. The nine cases, disclosed in a recent state report, have set off alarms among child welfare advocates. While it’s unclear if it’s a grim new trend or a tragic anomaly, the advocates said the overdoses underline how much the drug crisis is still buffeting DCF, the agency charged with helping protect children from abuse and neglect....."
Of course, but, to be sure, but even though, but “don’t blame DCF, the system is clunky.”
