Shaker Candidates Forum, Thursday, September 26, 2019 7:00pm

The City Council video is here

The School Board video is here

The Mayoral video is here
The flyer is here
Shaker Candidates Forum

Thursday, September 26, 2019 7:00-9:00 PM

Shaker Middle School Auditorium

20600 Shaker Boulevard

Free to the public.

Get to know the candidates and ask questions at this moderated forum.

City Council Candidates (vote for 4)

Tom Cicarella

Sean P. Malone

Nancy R. Moore

Carmella Williams

Earl Williams Jr

School Board Candidates (vote for 2)

Ted Auch (not available-will provide written statement)

Jeff Isaacs

Emmitt R. Jolly

Kathleen Sauline (write-in candidate)

Mayor Candidate

David E. Weiss

Cosponsored by Shaker Heights Public Library and

The League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland-Shaker Chapter

2020 U.S. CENSUS FORUM: Accurate census vital to Ohio’s future by Julie Hullett 9/12/19

Photo: left to right: Michele Pomerantz, Daniel Ortiz, Lisa Neidert, Rich Exner, mod.Accurate census vital to Ohio’s future
By JULIE HULLETT
SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
The pdf is here
The video is here

BEACHWOOD — Local government officials and activists are doing everything they can to get an accurate count for the 2020 census, which will affect redistricting and funding for various programs and projects, according to a panel of experts.

Lisa Neidert of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, Daniel Ortiz of Policy Matters Ohio and Michele Pomerantz, director of regional collaboration for Cuyahoga County spoke on the importance of the census and how they are working to count every individual, in addition to brief comments from county Executive Armond Budish. Rich Exner, data analyst editor for cleveland.com, moderated the panel discussion, which drew a crowd of more than 50 people at the Beachwood Landmark Centre on Sept. 12.

“The county has been putting a lot of resources into this effort because it is so important. We need everyone to be counted,” Executive Budish said, who is also co-chairman of the Cuyahoga County Complete Count Committee.

“So many of the things we do depend on a complete census. We provide Medicaid, SNAP, Head Start, foster care and the resources that come through those programs to people who need it depend on the census.”

The event was sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland, The Siegal Lifelong Learning Center at Case Western Reserve University and cleveland.com.

Self-reporting for 2020 census

Ms. Pomerantz noted an important change for the census. The 2020 census is the first one that will offer the option to self-report online or on the phone. In the past, a U.S. Census Bureau employee, known as an enumerator, came door-to-door to gather information or the census was mailed for residents to fill out and return.

“Self-response is the first and preferred way that we ask of those to respond,” according to Susan Licate, partnership specialist at the Philadelphia Regional Census Center.

She explained the process for reporting census information this year. There are four “touch points.” In early March, households will receive the invitation in the mail to respond to the census online or by phone. One week after the first notification arrives, the household will receive a reminder in the mail. If a household still does not respond, it will receive another reminder. The fourth reminder comes as a paper census page in the mail to fill out. After that, an enumerator will come to the door to gather census information, including name, age, race, sex, relation to the head of the household and whether the person rents or owns the home.

Protecting underreported populations

Mr. Ortiz serves as the chairman of the county subcommittee on Hard to Count Communities, including minorities, homeless people and those living in poverty. He said that although the technical process has improved over time, the U.S. still has a history of undercounting certain populations.

“It’s something that’s always been political. There’s a history of people not being fully counted,” he said of the census, which has occurred every 10 years since 1790.

He noted that black Americans were not fully counted until after slavery, Native Americans were not counted until 1870 and Hispanic and Latinx individuals were counted as Mexican in 1930 and then counted with the term Hispanic in 1970. The census committee is looking at ways to target hard-to-count communities to ensure that they are informed and prepared for the census.

Ms. Pomerantz added that after the census is over for regular households, enumerators will spend several days in communities to count homeless people, whether they are on the street or in a shelter.

Earning trust for the census

Ms. Neidert said that it will prove to be a challenge to gain the trust of individuals filling out the census and convince them that the information is necessary for leaders to efficiently govern. Mr. Exner noted that there will not be a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

“Even when the president decides to create havoc about the citizenship question…[committees] are put together with those individuals who already have the relationship so that this continues to be an outpouring of a message that the census is safe to take,” Ms. Pomerantz said.

The panelists said that the challenges arise in finding every person to count and convincing each one that their information is private and will not be misused. Ms. Neidert also noted that following WWII, census data was used for Japanese internment.

Funding the effort

According to Ms. Pomerantz, Ohio legislators did not appropriate additional funds in the biennial budget for the 2020 census.

“If the state of Ohio was to put extra funding in for the census, even just for promotional materials, it would go a long way,” she said. “But we have not seen that funding and we were pretty surprised about that.”

Ms. Neidert said that the state has been “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and that the money will not be useful if it comes too late. According to Ms. Pomerantz, the county census team has relied on the Cleveland Foundation and the George Gund Foundation for their philanthropic efforts.

How to get involved

Armed with knowledge by the end of the discussion, attendees asked how they can get involved in the 2020 census. Panelists advised them to spread the word with their family, friends and community neighbors about the importance of the census. The bureau is still seeking enumerators and those interested can gather more information at cuyahogacounty.us/2020census.

Melanie Biché of Cleveland Heights said that she came to the discussion to learn more about the census and gerrymandering.

“I’m very concerned about gerrymandering and I want to understand how the census will impact us,” she said. “I didn’t realize the amount of money that is involved in this. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the census was. Right now I have more questions than answers.”

As for the census itself, committee members and census bureau employees are working to make it as clear and straightforward as possible. They are hoping that the process will be easier to complete with the option of sharing information online or on the phone, according to the panelists. Nada Martinovic, who represents Cuyahoga County at the Philadelphia Regional Census Center, said that people can respond in 12 languages online and 59 languages on the phone, in addition to English online or by phone.

Cleveland Heights Charter Amendment Forum Video Oct 10, 2019 7pm

BALLOT ISSUE 26 FORUM
Cleveland Heights
Charter Amendment Thursday, October 10, 7 pm
Here’s the video

Cleveland Heights High School Cafeteria

13263 Cedar Road

Featuring representatives of

Citizens for an Elected Mayor and
Cleveland Heights Citizens for Good Government

Panel will present statements and
answer questions from the audience.

Presented by the LWV of Greater Cleveland Heights Chapter

Cuyahoga County Votes to Expand Resources for Community College-Spectrum News Nov 5, 2019

Cuyahoga County Votes to Expand Resources for Community College

By Ryan Schmelz Cleveland – Spectrum News Ohio
PUBLISHED 10:26 AM ET Nov. 06, 2019

CUYAHOGA COUNTY, Ohio– The passage of Issue 3 renews a tax levy in Cuyahoga County that will help expand resources for its community college district.

53 Year-old father of three, Steven Brooks has spent many hours with IT hardware and walking the halls of Cuyahoga County Community College, or Tri-C, as it’s known, Brooks balances work and fatherhood.

“It’s very challenging, I’m kind of always tired but, you know, it keeps you going, it keeps you striving, it keeps you wanting to be better, “says Steven Brooks, Tri-C student.

And, with ten years in the IT field, he’s taking advantage of the resources to stay employable, and hopefully, even earn a promotion in his industry.

“It’s always changing, and I either go and learn something else or get left behind in old technology, which I’m not willing to do,” says Brooks.

The Tri-C Tax levy renews 1.9 million dollars and adds 400,000 dollars in funding to the school’s programs for students seeking an affordable higher education option and job training. With the property tax increase, the owner of a 100,000 dollar home would pay an extra 14 dollars a year.

That tax increase is worth it for the non-partisan League of Women Voters. “Having a skilled, trained labor force is so important to this region. We’re a rust belt area, we need new technologies, health care center, and so many people can get their start in community college,” says Janice Patterson, League of Women Voters.

One of those students getting their start is 20-year-old student Balquise Alshafei, who lives on her own while managing life as a full-time student.

“It’s challenging, you know, it gets lonely sometimes,” says Alshafei.

But the tax levy will allow Tri-C, the lowest costing school in Ohio, to keep tuition affordable, so students like her can have more opportunity to reach their educational ceiling.

Morrie Zryl brought pizzazz and showmanship to movie theaters: An appreciation Obit – Jan 24, 2019 Plain Dealer

Morrie Zryl brought pizzazz and showmanship to movie theaters: An appreciation Obit
– Jan 24, 2019 Plain Dealer
By Joanna Connors,

Morrie Zryl in front of the Colony Theater in 1988. “I like what I do,” he said. “It’s a wonderful business. Take this movie, ‘Big.’ A 13-year-old in an adult man’s body. What a great idea! How wonderful that is! When you look at the world out there, this still takes you into a world of imagination.”Cleveland Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio – In July of 1981, Morrie Zyrl gave Clevelanders a taste of true showmanship.

Zryl, who had just taken over the moribund Colony Theater in Shaker Square, had to work harder than other theater managers to bring audiences to a theater that had been closed, except for the occasional special event, for years. He had to work harder to book movies with Hollywood distributors, too, who balked at giving him a shot at first-run films in a theater with only one screen.

His solution was to take advantage of the Colony’s 70mm projector, one of only three in northeast Ohio at the time, and show movies on a second-run basis in their full, big-screen glory. He backed up that strategy with old-fashioned promotional pizzazz.

One of the first movies he booked, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam epic, “Apocalypse Now,” had come and gone from the area’s multiplexes two years earlier. So Zryl rented a huge helicopter, attached giant speakers to it, & sent its pilot buzzing over the city blasting “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the soundtrack to the film’s most indelible scene, the helicopter cavalry attack orchestrated by Robert Duvall’s unhinged Capt. Kilgore.

To borrow the line from Kilgore: Zryl loved the smell of popcorn in the evening.

Zryl, who died in Florida on January 16 at the age of 69, loved everything to do with movies. He told a reporter from The Plain Dealer in 1988 that he caught the bug when he was 3 years old and living in Israel with his parents, both Holocaust survivors. They took him to see “Gone with the Wind,” and his romance with the movies began.

It continued in Cleveland, where his parents moved when he was 8 years old. At 14, he got a job as an usher at the Cedar Lee Theater, became assistant manager of the Colony when he was still a teenager, and from there went on to work as a theater manager, a specialty film distributor and the owner or operator of several Cleveland theaters, including the Colony, the Centrum on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, Tower City Cinemas and the Fairview.

To each theater, Zryl brought his irrepressible zeal for promotion and zany stunts.

“He was this P.T. Barnum figure to me,” remembered Cindy Barber, the co-owner of the Beachland Ballroom, who met Zryl in the 1980s when he was running the Colony and she sold ads for the Cleveland International Film Festival’s program guides. As Barnum said, “Nobody ever made a difference by being like everyone else.”

Zryl, as many who knew him have said, was a showman. The lobby of his theater was his stage.

When he booked “The Wizard of Oz,” at the Colony, he dressed up as the Tin Man, spray painting his face silver. “One little girl looked at me and said, ‘The Tin Man didn’t have glasses or a beard,’” he told a Plain Dealer reporter. “I told her, ‘He aged.’”

For a 1982 showing of Abel Gance’s restored 1927 masterpiece “Napoleon,” Zryl dressed as the Little General himself. “I’m the right size,” he told The Plain Dealer’s gossip columnist, Mary, Mary, referring to his own rather short stature. “And it does give me a feeling of power.”

And before a big-screen showing of “Ben-Hur” in 1982, he planned the obvious Zryl stunt, given that the Colony is located on Shaker Square. “I’ve already located two chariots,” he told a Plain Dealer reporter. “Fortunately, we have a round square here.”

“He was very good at getting free publicity,” said Jonathan Forman, the owner of Cleveland Cinemas, whose Cedar Lee Theater competed with the Colony for both audiences and film bookings. “He was nutty, but I would admire somebody who took their job that seriously. I thought it was very clever.”

John Ewing, the director of the Cleveland Cinematheque at the Cleveland Institute of Art, said, “Morrie was clearly bitten by the bug in the ’50s and ’60s, when movies meant big-screen entertainment and prestige presentations and so forth. What I liked and respected about him was he had a sense of what was important and would make a great presentation.”

The press certainly loved him. One Plain Dealer columnist called him “the human equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.”

This was not hyperbole.

When Zryl lost the lease to the Colony Theater in 1991, in part because he opposed chopping the big theater into five smaller theaters, he teamed up with developer Charles Zuchowski to renovate and reopen the movie theater on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights. Zryl and Zuchowski rechristened it the Centrum Theater. and the renovation won plaudits from Plain Dealer architecture critic Steven Litt when it opened in 1992. Litt, who considered the Colony’s multiplex renovation a disfigurement of a grand Art Moderne space, said the Centrum was a triumph.

“Without question the Centrum is one of the best places in greater Cleveland to see movies,” he concluded. “Architecture is the reason. As Zryl rightly says: ‘The place is part of the show.’”

In addition to running theaters, often several at a time, Zryl was active in the Jewish communities of both Cleveland and South Florida, and was the Second Generation president of the Kol Israel Foundation here.

He was able to combine his faith and his passion for movies when he took over managing the Hanna Theater in 1986, before it was renovated and officially became part of the Playhouse Square complex. The first film he booked was “Shoah,” the monumental, 9 ½-hour Holocaust documentary directed by Claude Lanzmann.

When he moved to Florida in the early 1990s and managed a multiplex in Boca Raton, Zryl championed the Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List.” He called it “the ultimate film of the Holocaust” and spoke about it to audiences before screenings.

The Future of Political Debates City Club of Cleveland Aug 12, 2019

No Debate About It: The Future of Political Debates

Monday, August 12, 2019 at The City Club of Cleveland

Elizabeth Bennion, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science & American Democracy Project Director, Indiana University South Bend, and Host of WNIT’s “Politically Speaking”

Harry Boomer
Anchor Reporter, 19News/CW43, and Immediate Past President and Member, Greater Cleveland National Association of Black Journalists

Richard Davis, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science and Director of the Office of Civic Engagement, Brigham Young University

John C. Green, Ph.D.
Interim President, University of Akron; Director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics; Distinguished Professor of Political Science

Moderator
Dan Moulthrop
CEO, The City Club of Cleveland

Read about it here:

A forum on journalism in Dayton July 29, 2019

A forum on journalism in Dayton July 29, 2019
What: Media and Democracy: What the proposed sale of Cox Media might mean to Dayton.

Why: The Dayton Daily News, Channel 7, and WHIO Radio are being sold to a private equity fund.

What might the impact be? What can you do?

The Video is here:

Join us for an exploration of how media and democracy intersect and the importance of strong local media. Panelists include:

In order of speaking (from right to left)

Yosef Getachew, Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Program Director, will provide an overview of media consolidation all over the country and its impact on communities.

Plus

• The Honorable Nan Whaley, mayor of Dayton

• Bob Daley, former political reporter (Dayton Journal Herald, Dayton Daily News, Congressional Quarterly),

• Joel Pruce, Univ of Dayton Prof of Human Rights

• Dr. Jim DeBrosse, retired assistant professor of journalism and a veteran newspaper reporter who worked 20 years for Cox newspapers in Dayton,

• Kevin Z. Smith, director of the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism

• The Honorable Tom Roberts, former member of the Ohio General Assembly and Ohio Conference President of the NAACP

Program moderated by Catherine Turcer, Common Cause Ohio

In mirror he sees color of success by Regina Brett, Plain Dealer Sept 7, 2007

In mirror he sees color of success

September 7, 2007 | The Plain Dealer

by Regina Brett; Plain Dealer Columnist

Justin Bibb still gets accused of acting white.

He was a seventh-grader at Shaker Middle School when I first met and interviewed him. That was seven years ago.

Back then, some black kids tormented Justin for being smart. They spit on his food at lunch. Called him names. Punched him. One day in the restroom, they urinated on his daily planner.

Back then, Justin cried himself to sleep some nights. His dad put him in private school after a boy picked up Justin and dropped him on his head in gym class.

Back then, a black principal suggested to Justin’s parents that his interests – debate and studying hard – were too white.

Last week, I was sitting at a restaurant when a tall, GQ-handsome black man in a crisp black suit and deep purple dress shirt called out my name. I recognized his eyes.

Justin Bibb.

He’s 20. He left Shaker Heights for Orange Christian Academy and went on to graduate from Trinity High School. He’s a junior at American University in Washington, D.C.

He interned his freshman year with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas. Sophomore year, he interned with Sen. Barack Obama. He was elected president of his pre-law fraternity.

He got a scholarship to study urban issues in one of the poorest neighborhoods in D.C. He created a nonprofit called D.C. Today-D.C. Tomorrow to help students create service projects and become leaders.

Justin interned this summer at the Cleveland Clinic. He leaves in two weeks to study abroad. He’s spending his junior year at the London School of Economics.

The boy he once was told me, “Why can’t I be who I am?”

The man he is gets quiet about that painful time.

“I didn’t really know who I was,” he said. “Kids were calling me white, yet I look in the mirror and see an African-American male.”

Justin grew up in Cleveland where his mom taught him to dress for success, for the part you want in life. His first day of school, he wore a buttoned-down dress shirt tucked into khakis. The taunting began.

Justin has straddled two worlds, splitting time with his mom in Cleveland and his dad in Shaker. He has caddied at a country club and has worked construction jobs in the inner city.

At college, he sees too few black males. In some classes, he’s the only one.

“The spotlight is on you. You represent the black race,” he said. “I’m on the path not just for me, but to help another brother. I represent them.”

Justin believes every success he makes will show others that blacks are so much more than what TV and movies depict.

He tells kids it’s not acting white to be successful. He reminds them that Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both wore a suit and tie.

“We’ve lost that sense of history,” he said.

He doubts the stereotyping will stop anytime soon. The key, he said, is don’t let it stop you.

Justin has no regrets. His experience at Shaker taught him a message he passes along to every child who wants to achieve:

“Dream big,” he said. “The dream has to be greater than the struggle.”

Join Regina Brett today at 9 a.m. on WCPN FM/90.3, where she hosts “The Sound of Ideas” every Friday. Today’s topic: “Reading. What’s on your nightstand?” To reach Regina Brett: rbrett@plaind.com, 216-999-6328