Adult Education has been serving California for over 150 years, but in the last five years it's been cut to the bone. The Local Control Funding Formula puts Adult Schools at risk for further school closures because it does not provide designated funding for Adult Education. Adult Education empowers marginalized communities and creates a ripple effect that includes better community health, greater school success for children, stronger families, and reduced recidivism. It provides job training to put Californians back to work. The new Local Control Funding Formula for K-12 Public Education can safeguard Adult Education if it includes Adult Ed as one of the non-flexible categoricals - and then Adult Education can safeguard our state. Your signature supports this effort and tells our elected officials that Adult Education Matters!

Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet at Pearl High School is one of only two academic magnet high schools in our city (the other being Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet). Due to recent overcrowding trends, the Metro Nashville Public Schools director has recommended dropping the seventh and eighth grades in coming years. We believe that it is necessary to keep 7th and 8th grades intact at MLK because these grades prepare students with the critical academic skills necessary for 9th through 12th grade attendance at a nationally ranked Top 100 high school. Key reasons why we believe it is important to keep the 7th and 8th grades intact at MLK: • Every single ZIP code (with the exception of Downtown Business District) in Davidson County is represented at MLK. • MLK 7th and 8th students are exposed to unique opportunities and advantages unavailable in a middle school; these include the ability to later access a record 22 AP and other advanced honors courses, cohesive 6-year pathways in key subjects such as math, science, and foreign languages, mentoring by older high school students, and lower transition stress to high school. • Students who don’t arrive until 9th grade often struggle and face challenges with MLK’s rigorous academic curriculum due to lack of adequate preparation from non-academic magnet middle school feeder schools. • The general solution for overcrowding in Metro Schools is to find more space through both temporary portables and/or more permanent additions. We never hear of other high schools removing their 9th grade class due to overcrowding. • Other potential solutions to overcrowding exist and will require changes in pathway policies and/or academic qualifying criteria.

Imagine if your husband is risking his life for his country fighting overseas, but your home state says that if something happens to him, you won't be entitled to equal access to health and death benefits. That's happening. Even though the Department of Justice and Department of Defense issued directives to provide benefits to same-sex spouses, Texas announced that it intends to deny equal access to military benefits for National Guard families. Most states are already allowing federal coverage for health and death benefits to be processed for same-sex spouses the same way that they are processed for everyone else - even if state constitutions ban marriage for same-sex couples. However, Texas is putting needless, discriminatory roadblocks in the way by forcing service members’ spouses to travel miles out of the way to a separate federal facility to access the benefits they are legally entitled to. The Department of Defense deserves great credit for updating their policy to provide equal access to benefits regardless of sexual orientation. Now it's up to the governor to use his authority over the National Guard to provide equal care for all Texas service member families. American service members risk their lives every day to protect liberty and equality all over the world. It's time to show them the same basic fairness when it comes to protecting their own families in their home state.

Our mission is to ensure the protection of the residents of Camillus from toxic gaseous emissions released during Honeywell’s remediation of the Onondaga Lake Superfund Site. Dredging is being done to remove toxic material from Onondaga lake to Wastebed 13 in Camillus. The process is creating toxic gaseous emissions in the surrounding Camillus neighborhoods. This process is going to continue for years and these toxic emissions need to be stopped! Wastebed 13 in Camillus is where the toxic material ends up. The dredging process and wastebed storage methods are producing toxic gaseous emissions that are making their way to surrounding neighborhoods. Current air quality measuring is inadequate. A safer and more reliable method (TO-16) needs to be implemented as soon as possible to improve safety and to accurately measure effects the SCA is having on our air!

Being a podcaster is a culmination of producing, engineering audio, editing audio, marketing, research, and social media. Most podcasters will tell you we do it for the love of the "art" and making significant money is unlikely and, quite honestly, unattainable. Our reward comes in the form of downloads and listener interaction. Competing for rankings with well established celebrities and well known personalities makes it extremely difficult to grow a listenership that ,quite frankly, we sacrifice so much time and money to gain.

Workers at the Embassy Suites hotel in Irvine, CA, have been standing up against management. Albertina Solorio, who has been a vocal supporter of the organizing effort at the Embassy Suites, was recently fired after working there for 12 years as a housekeeper. The hotel is owned through investments from public pensions, including the pension system for thousands of public employees in Los Angeles County, known as LACERA. It makes no sense that a worker's investment fund is being used to hurt other workers! It's time to tell LACERA and MassMutual, the parent company of the investment manager, to stop the abuse and do what's right for the workers, and it's time for the Embassy Suites to give Albertina her job back.
 Please read the article, "L.A. County pension fund is taking heat over hotel investment", published on Sept 16, 2013, in the LA Times: http://lat.ms/151kBEl

By failing to expand Medicaid, the Republican majority turned their backs on 70,000 uninsured Montanans. They turned away $1.5 billion in federal funds and more than 12,000 jobs across Montana. They refused to throw a much-needed lifeline to the rural and critical access hospitals and clinics that struggle to provide care to the uninsured. They ignored the voices of thousands of Montanans who spoke up in support of Medicaid expansion. Now is the time for special session to expand Medicaid.

This measure would make a significant tangible, and symbolic effort to address the recent financial difficulties Penn State University is facing as a direct result of the negligence of several top administrators (including $60 million via the NCAA fines, estimated hundreds of millions of dollars paid out in lawsuits and settlements, mismanaged healthcare initiatives, etc.) These tremendous costs should not be borne by the faculty, staff, and students of this University who are clearly not responsible for what can only be considered administrative failures at the highest levels. For the past five years, faculty and staff salaries have been limited to what are essentially below cost-of-living increases, and tuition rates have continued to rise annually for students already burdened with massive loans. It is unacceptable, unethical, and wholly unjust for the top administrators not to share the burden of responsibility in their earnings. As members of the Board of Trustees of the Pennsylvania State University, you have both leadership and fiduciary responsibilities—to act on behalf of the entire Penn State community. We urge you to take this action.

Bill SB 1435 is unconstitutional and in general allows stolen property to be sold by thieves.

Before his mother's death, she and Noah were to move here to N.C. with us so Noah would be removed from the influence of gangs. To be in an environment conducive to having a fair shot at education, a social life without having to hide away in his apt. to be safe, was our goal. Child Protective Services in Newport News, Va., where Noah is from can do nothing according to them. Child Protective Services in Seattle, Wa., where Noah has been taken can do nothing w/out the police being involved according to them. The police there say they can do nothing unless the police from Newport News, Va. contact them concerning this situation. Now, the police in Newport News say there is nothing they can do, according to the states attorney. Where is the justice for Noah? He is in an environment with a 40 yr. old man who has a felony record, gang affiliation, and Noah is not used to this type of an environment. We, [his Aunt] and I are very worried about Noah.

To much police brutality In America People do not feel safe people are afraid of the very people who work for the people so much abuse by police shooting innocent bystanders Police drinking while on duty Police sexual abuse among woman when being stopped while driving Children afraid of the police Just to much crime in the police department and to many cover ups by dirty cops something has to be done now Stop Police Abuse

House Republicans have a plan to cut SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as the food stamp program), by at least $40 billion over ten years, affecting up to 6 million hungry families—including children, seniors and veterans.. The plan to vote on these life-threatening cuts in the coming days. The new House proposal is harsh, and continues the attack on working families and poor people by the GOP. Their scheme would deny SNAP to at least 4 million to 6 million low-income people — including some of the nation’s most destitute adults — as well as to many low-income children, seniors, and families that work for low wages. The people the proposal would cut off SNAP include but are not limited to:  2 million to 4 million poor, unemployed, childless adults who live in areas of high unemployment — a group that has average income of only 22 percent of the poverty line (about $2,500 a year for a single individual) and for whom SNAP is, in most cases, the only government assistance they receive;  1.8 million people, mostly low-income working families and low-income seniors, who have gross incomes or assets modestly above the federal SNAP limits but disposable income — the income that a family actually has available to spend on food and other needs — below the poverty line in most cases, often because of high rent or child care costs. Some 210,000 children in these families also would lose free school meals;  Other poor, unemployed parents who want to work but cannot find a job or an opening in a training program — along with their children, other than infants. We demand that Congress cease playing political “hunger games” that hurt vulnerable families, children, and local communities. Instead, Congress should close corporate tax loopholes and make large companies such as Apple, General Electric and Verizon pay their fair share of federal taxes. Please sign our petition to stop the cuts of food to our most vulnerable neighbors. As former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey said, “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.