Whats on the ballot Nov 6? Cuyahoga County Charter Amendments: A forum to help understand the proposed changes Oct 6, 2018


The flyer is here
Saturday October 6, 2018 at 2pm
Whats on the ballot Nov 6?
Cuyahoga County Charter Amendments:
A forum to help understand the proposed changes
Westlake Porter Library 27333 Center Ridge Rd, Westlake, OH 44145
featuring
The Honorable Ronald B. Adrine, chair of the Cuyahoga County Charter Review Commission, and other members of the Commission.
Moderated by Marcia Goldberg, former LWV-Greater Cleveland Co-President
Attendees may also verify their voter registration and collect a mail-in ballot application before or after this meeting.

Early childhood education still the best ticket out and up for poor, inner-city Cleveland youth: Brent Larkin 9/18/15

Early childhood education still the best ticket out and up for poor, inner-city Cleveland youth: Brent Larkin

By Brent Larkin, cleveland.com

Silvana Ferri, adult at center, receives a group hug from kids at the Cleveland Children’s Academy in October 2010 after the surprise announcement that she’d won a national $10,000 Early Childhood Educator Award.

(Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer, File, 2010)

In his powerful eulogy of Louis Stokes, the Rev. Otis Moss Jr. repeatedly marveled that the longtime congressman was able to “rise above his circumstances,” escaping a life of poverty for one filled with memorable accomplishments.

The single most important requirement to rise above those circumstances, to earn that ticket out of life in the projects, was education.

Lou and Carl Stokes both spoke often of their mother, Louise, and her relentless focus on the subject.

“My mother had scrubbed floors, cleaned clothes and served dinners in order to make a life for us,” recalled Stokes, in an interview at his home just a month before his death Aug. 18 at the age of 90. “When you felt those cold hands and calluses, you began to understand what she was trying to say to us in terms of getting an education.”

It’s a common theme, especially among successful minorities who grew up poor.

Former Cleveland City Council President George Forbes, the last of eight children born in a segregated Memphis, talks similarly of his mother — “she was a great lady; to this day, I miss my mother” — sending her children north, where they would have a better chance to earn an education beyond high school.

And though a mother’s obsession with the future of her children is hardly unique to any culture, for children who grow up in poverty — especially black children — history tells us that education is pretty much the only way out.

The evidence is overwhelming. Consider the most successful black elected officials of the last 50 years:

Virgil Brown, Lloyd Brown, Charles Carr, Forbes, Marcia Fudge, Frank Jackson, Leo Jackson, Perry Jackson, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Peter Lawson Jones, Arnold Pinkney, the Stokeses, George White and Mike White.

Every one of them went to college. Most earned two degrees. Lawson Jones went to Harvard. Mike White was the first black student body president of Ohio State University.

Over time, Mayor Frank Jackson’s school reform plan — with a huge assist from the Cleveland Foundation, the Gund Foundation and corporate leaders — will bring incremental improvements in student performance. There are more good schools in Cleveland today than there were four years ago.

Last year’s statewide report cards showed that Cleveland school students were learning a bit more. Nevertheless, Cleveland still ranked a dismal 607 out of the 610 districts.

That same report card showed that nine of the state’s 14 worst-performing school districts are in Northeast Ohio. Six of the 14 are in Cuyahoga County.

This year’s statewide report cards are likely to provide more documentation that efforts to fix Cleveland schools are enjoying a degree of success. But expecting “transformational” results anytime soon is unrealistic, especially given Cleveland’s daunting poverty rate.

The 1970 census found that 17.1 percent of Cleveland’s 750,903 residents lived below the poverty line. A census update issued last year estimated that 35.4 percent of Cleveland’s 389,521 live below the poverty line.

So, while the city’s population is barely half what it was 45 years ago, its poverty rate has more than doubled.

I’ve been on this soapbox for a decade now, but the single best investment Cuyahoga County can make in its future is a massive investment in early childhood education.

Free, high-quality preschool for needy 3- and 4-year-olds, coupled with intensive parental mentoring and effective programs to reduce the alarming rate of births out of wedlock, might be the only way out.

History tells us County Executive Armond Budish is no risk-taker. But I believe Budish has concluded that a huge expansion of early childhood education should be his signature accomplishment as county executive.

If Budish wants to leave a legacy of change and accomplishment, he’ll ignore his cautious instincts and seize the moment.

So staggering is the cost of our underinvesting in the education of poor children that economists of all political persuasions, including Nobel laureate James Heckman, have concluded that quality preschool will, over time, save taxpayers trillions.

And Port Clinton native Robert Putnam, former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, argues in his phenomenal best-seller, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” that “to ignore these kids violates our deepest religious and moral values” and “undermines our democracy and perhaps even our political stability.”

“Our Kids” should be required reading for every elected official. Members of Gov. John Kasich’s administration should have read it last year, before squashing a budget proposal by state Sen. Peggy Lehner to increase funding for high-quality preschool by $100 million.

That’s the Team Kasich way. If it’s not their idea, it can’t possibly be a good one.

“Of all the things we can do, the biggest single one is early childhood education,” Putnam said in an interview this spring.

With it, thousands of Cuyahoga County’s poor kids might just have a shot. Without it, most probably won’t.

A proud man, Lou Stokes enjoyed all the deserved attention that came his way late in life. But my guess is he’d gladly take his name off all those buildings that bear it in exchange for an investment that offers the poor kids in Cuyahoga County an opportunity to rise above their circumstances and lead better lives.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer’s editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.

To reach Brent Larkin: blarkin@cleveland.com

A Forum on Voting Issues in Ohio Wednesday August 22, 2018

The flyer is here
Wednesday August 22, 2018
“A Forum on Voting Issues in Ohio”
7pm-8:30pm
Panelists:
Representative Kathleen Clyde (D), Ohio House District 75
Dr. David Cohen, Asst. Director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics
Senator Frank LaRose (R), Ohio Senate District 27
Moderator: Thomas Suddes, Editorial Writer, Cleveland.com

This forum will explore current voting and election issues in Ohio including early voting, voting by mail, voter registration, voter ID laws, removing voters from the rolls, gerrymandering, voting equipment and security and campaign finance laws.


Thomas Suddes, Cleveland.com

CWRU Beachwood Facility: 25700 Science Park Dr #100, Beachwood 44122
Cost: Free & Open to the Public
Cosponsors Plain Dealer/Cleveland.com. CWRU Siegel Lifelong Learning, League of Women Voters-Greater Cleveland.
Corporate sponsor: First Interstate LTD

Biographical Sketch of Elizabeth J. Hauser

Biographical Sketch of Elizabeth J. Hauser
written by Livia Fitzgerald, Shana Meyer, Marion White, and Katherine Marion
Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, 1890-1920
Biography of Elizabeth J. Hauser, 1873-1958
By Livia Fitzgerald, undergraduate, Shana Meyer, undergraduate. Marion White, undergraduate and Katherine Marion, faculty sponsor
The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

Vice Chair, National Press Committee, NAWSA; Director, Cuyahoga County Woman Suffrage Association (aka. Cuyahoga County Woman Suffrage Party); Chair, OWSA Literature Committee; Chair, Organizational Committee, OWSA; personal assistant, Carrie Chapman Catt; lobbyist

Elizabeth J. Hauser was born on March 16, 1873 as the seventh of nine children to German immigrant parents, David and Mary Bixler Hauser, in the small town of Girard, Ohio. Living in Ohio for the rest of her life, she only left briefly to participate in the suffrage campaign in New York in 1909. Hauser received a high school education and started her journalism career by working at a local newspaper, the Girard Grit, for three years. She never married nor had children.

In 1889, at the age of sixteen, Hauser attended her first local suffrage meeting and joined Ohio’s campaign. During the 1890s, she affiliated with the local, state, and national suffrage organizations, the Cuyahoga County Woman Suffrage Association (CCWSA), the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association (OWSA) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Starting in 1903, the NAWSA headquarters moved to nearby Warren, Ohio, also the home of the OWSA headquarters, which brought Hauser extensive connections with these organizations.

In 1899, Harriet Taylor Upton, the acting OWSA president, asked Elizabeth Hauser to become assistant treasurer of NAWSA. In 1895, Hauser moved into the position of press secretary for both OWSA and NAWSA. When NAWSA moved its headquarters to New York City in 1909, she moved to New York and transitioned to vice chairman of the National Press Committee at the new location.

In late 1910, she left her position at the NAWSA headquarters in New York as Vice-Chair of the Press Committee, and Upton chose Hauser to lead Cleveland’s campaign. In 1910, Hauser briefly served as NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt’s personal assistant, and from 1910 to 1911, worked as secretary and editor for Cleveland’s mayor, Tom Johnson. OWSA appointed her as the chairman of state organizational work from 1910-1920.

In 1910, Hauser led Cleveland women to form the first suffrage party, the Ohio Woman Suffrage Party. This party worked with OWSA as they tried to mobilize the 1911-1912 Ohio referendum campaign, pressuring both the Republican and Democratic parties to introduce a suffrage amendment in the 1912 Ohio Constitutional Convention.

Through suffragists’ efforts, the Convention voted to set a special election in September 1912 for Amendment 23: Ohio women’s right to vote in presidential elections. Hauser registered as a lobbyist with the Ohio Secretary of State and lobbied in the state capital of Columbus for eight weeks to push for the amendment. Despite hard campaigning, the influence of liquor interests and an overall lack of education, organization, and scope of public appeal in the campaign lost the Amendment 23 vote. Two years later, the 1914 referendum was similarly defeated.

These defeats did not stop Hauser or the Ohio suffrage movement. From 1914-1916, she continued to strengthen state organization efforts as the OWSA Literature Committee Chairman, reaching out to local suffrage groups, lobbying directly in Columbus, and going on statewide tours. While Ohio suffragists changed their strategy from seeking an amendment to pursuing “municipal rule” through local legislation, Harriet Upton chose Hauser to be the Organization Committee chairman for the Cleveland campaign for statewide voting in 1917. This committee worked to get signatures from all women and influence congressional lobbying. This effort emphasized the importance of congressional district work and an overall change in traditional tactics.

The Reynolds-Fouts Presidential Suffrage Bill, although unsuccessful, was followed by the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, giving Ohio women the right to vote. Suffrage organizations like NAWSA, OWSA and the CCWSA moved their memberships to the newly formed League of Women Voters (LWV). Hauser co-founded the Cleveland chapter of the League and became the fourth vice president of the LWV at its first national convention in 1921. Hauser and others in the League pushed for world disarmament in the wake of World War I. She became chairman of the Committee on the Reduction of Armament by International Agreement and continued her career as a journalist for this cause, writing editorials for the League publication Women’s Journal until 1929.

Hauser continued writing privately until 1940 while still living in Girard. At age 85, Elizabeth J. Hauser died on November 11, 1958, and is buried at the Girard Liberty Union Cemetery in Girard, Ohio.

SOURCES

A brief historical context of Elizabeth J Hauser’s life is available in the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History at http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=HE1. The newspaper articles “To Talk Women’s Rights,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 30, 1899 and “Miss Susan B Anthony Present,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 8,1897, outline Hauser’s contribution as NAWSA’s treasurer and close assistant to Upton, marking her as a valuable asset in the movement. Florence Allen and Mary Welles provide details into Hauser’s work as Upton’s secretary and thus her movement between campaign positions in The Ohio Woman Suffrage Movement: ‘A certain unalienable right’: What Ohio women did to secure it, (np, Committee for the Preservation of Ohio Women Suffrage Records, 1949). Eileen Regina Rausch discusses the exact movement of Hauser from Ohio to New York and then returning to Ohio and provides an overview of her activism over these years in. “Let Ohio Women Vote”: The Years to Victory 1900-1920,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1984). In “A Kick is Sometimes a Boost: The 1914 Woman Suffrage Campaign in Franklin County,” Jessica Rae Pliley gives the historical background of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association in which Hauser worked closely with its leadership in 1915 onward. (Master’s Thesis, Ohio State University, 2006). Virginia Abbott Clark, The History of Woman Suffrage and the League of Women Voters in Cuyahoga County, 1911-1945 (Cleveland?, 1949), shows Hauser’s positions in Cuyahoga County and her work in the League of Women Voters after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The 1940 U.S. Federal Census can be found on www.ancestry.com and shows where Hauser lived, her marital status, what career she had, and her age at the time.

Elizabeth Hauser and Zara DuPont Plain Dealer August 19, 1912

Plain Dealer August 19, 1912 article about Suffragists Elizabeth Hauser and Zara DuPont:
Miss Hauser writes as follows as to what Cleveland Suffragists will do if the suffrage does not pass Sept. 3 (1912):
“She never knew defeat. When that happened which others called defeat, she was wont to think of it merely as the establishment of a mile post to indicate the progress which had been made and she never doubted that victory was just ahead”

MUSEUM RIGHT TO DROP MAY SHOW Plain Dealer March 4, 1995

MUSEUM RIGHT TO DROP MAY SHOW
March 4, 1995 | Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH)
Author: STEVEN LITT | Page: 8E | Section: ARTS & LIVING | Column: ART CRITIC

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual juried exhibition of local art, has been the apex of local artistic accomplishment since it began in 1919. That’s exactly what has been wrong with it, and exactly why the museum is right to dump it.

Cleveland needs higher goals to which local artists can aspire.

The May Show played a vital role in nurturing generations of artists before and after World War II. But as artists have increasingly shown work in new commercial and nonprofit galleries, frame shops, theater lobbies, corporate offices, colleges and universities, the May Show’s raison d’etre evaporated. Instead of being a proud medium for the appreciation of local art, it became a tired vehicle for overexposure and redundancy.

Museum Director Robert P. Bergman, who came to Cleveland in 1993, has stated publicly for more than a year he would experiment with ways in which the museum exhibits local contemporary art. He said the May Show wasn’t sacrosanct. But it wasn’t until last week that he said the show was off for the near future.

His announcement was occasioned by artists who daily were calling Tom Hinson, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, to ask for May Show entry blanks, as they have every winter for decades. Predictably, many artists complained that the museum was forsaking them by canning the May Show. But it isn’t. Nor is it turning its back on contemporary art.

In August, the museum will host an exhibition on contemporary art inspired by the secular sainthood of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Admittedly, the show is an attempt to piggyback on the Labor Day weekend opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. But it’s a welcome change after years in which the museum failed to devote major space to contemporary art from outside the Western Reserve.

In 1996, the city’s bicentennial year, the museum is planning a much-needed historical survey on art in the city from 1796 to 1945, tentatively titled “Transformations in Cleveland Art.” The show will include a catalog, which will be a major contribution to public understanding of the city’s art.

The museum is also planning a collaborative exhibition for 1996 with the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and Spaces. Artists from the region, the nation and from other countries will be asked to create new works inspired by the city itself.

Exciting as they sound, these shows would not have been possible if the May Showwere still on the calendar. Budget cuts in 1992 limited the museum to four slots a year for major shows, one of which is devoted to contemporary art. Repeating the May Show ad infinitum would prevent the kind of experimentation Bergman wants to explore.

The next two years will give time for a debate on how the city’s leading arts institutions should serve the region’s artists. Without question, they have an obligation to nurture local talent. But the May Show is not the way.

All the show asked of artists was that they produce one or two good works a year – the limit they could display in the exhibition. By focusing attention thinly on a hundred or more artists, the show appealed to boosterism rather than deep understanding.

All the show asked of collectors was that they come and graze once a year. Apparently, this didn’t fuel a thriving commercial gallery scene, because the city doesn’t have one. Northeast Ohio has a generous supply of artists who want their work appreciated and scores of widely scattered exhibit venues. But the number of serious commercial galleries is minute. Rather than stimulate the local market, the museum may have hurt it by selling works out of the May Show.

For the museum, the show put curators and other jurors in a passive role unflattering for an institution that otherwise prides itself on intellectual rigor. The format required curators or jurors to choose the artworks from those submitted by artists who chose to submit. If the best artists didn’t submit anything, they remained invisible, and the audience remained none the wiser.

It could be argued that the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and Spaces – two important nonprofit exhibit spaces that have emerged in the past 20 years – have filled the gap in contemporary art. They have, but only up to a point.

Spaces concentrates on emerging artists from around the region and the nation, which effectively duplicates the May Show’s primary function as the patron of local artistic talent searches.

The center also has focused attention on emerging local talent, although it does much more by organizing retrospective shows on midcareer artists and by staging ambitious theme shows.

But while the center’s ambitions are national in scope, it can’t afford to do contemporary shows on the order of the sprawling survey of German neo-expressionist painting mounted by the Toledo Museum of Art in the winter of 1988-89. Nor can the center aspire to the likes of the Guggenheim Museum’s Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, which the Wexner Center in Columbus will show next fall.

The Cleveland Museum of Art can, and should, host such exhibitions. Furthermore, it should organize its own contemporary shows, whether local, regional or national in scope, with the same scholarly standards it applies to the art of ancient Greece or 16th-century Japan.

It could be that the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art should be the new home of an annual or biannual survey of regional art. The center has the space, the staff, the resources, the central location and the parking. It also has a mission that could encompass an annual, biennial or triennial local survey show.

Whatever happens, the museum is wise to break the lockstep rhythm of a once prestigious annual show that has gone stale. Now it can go about the business of doing the exhibitions that only it can do.

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