for music lovers of all ages followed by refreshments and a chance to meet the musicians. This fun program features popular music on the theme of “Rochester Weather” by the Women of Note.

These are some of the best singers in our region and they will be at our very own Arnett Library! We hope to see you and your families there!

Click here or on the image above to download a printable PDF flyer.

for music lovers of all ages followed by refreshments and a chance to meet the musicians. This concert features the RPO Salaff String Quartet accompanied by the Eastman Performers.

These are some of the best musicians in the area and they will be at our very own Arnett Library! We hope to see you and your families there!

Click here or on the image above to download a printable PDF flyer.

for music lovers of all ages followed by refreshments and a chance to meet the musicians. This concert features one of the Eastman School of Music’s Community Youth Ensembles.

These are some of the best up-and-coming musicians in the area and they will be at our very own Arnett Library! We hope to see you and your families there!

Click here or on the image above to download a printable PDF flyer.

for music lovers of all ages followed by refreshments and a chance to meet the musicians. This concert features an Eastman Pathways Concert by the Rochester School Performers.

These are some of the best up-and-coming musicians in the area and they will be at our very own Arnett Library! We hope to see you and your families there!

Click here or on the image above to download a printable PDF flyer.

This year’s community Christmas tree in our Garden Park on Arnett Boulevard has been a great success! From its arrival from Naples and set up by an enthusiastic group of neighborhood volunteers and local Firemen on December 1, to its decorating from top to bottom the following Monday by classrooms of local elementary school students, its been lighting up the neighborhood with the Christmas spirit of unity and harmony.

Look for scenes from our community caroling around the tree event on December 11, in the slideshow posted below. We had a bright bonfire going to roast marshmallows on, warm refreshments to share, and a time of celebrating all that’s good in our neighborhood. Click here to read a full report.

Come on by and visit while it’s up!

And contact us to volunteer in community park events in the future.

A few weeks ago, I went into my son Chase’s class for tutoring. I’d e-mailed Chase’s teacher one evening and said, “Chase keeps telling me that this stuff you’re sending home is math—but I’m not sure I believe him. Help, please.” She e-mailed right back and said, “No problem! I can tutor Chase after school anytime.” And I said, “No, not him. Me. He gets it. Help me.”

And that’s how I ended up standing at a chalkboard in an empty fifth-grade classroom while Chase’s teacher sat behind me, using a soothing voice to try to help me understand the “new way we teach long division.” Luckily for me, I didn’t have to unlearn much because I’d never really understood the “old way we taught long division.” It took me a solid hour to complete one problem, but I could tell that Chase’s teacher liked me anyway. She used to work with NASA, so obviously we have a whole lot in common.

Afterward, we sat for a few minutes and talked about teaching children and what a sacred trust and responsibility it is. We agreed that subjects like math and reading are not the most important things that are learned in a classroom. We talked about shaping little hearts to become contributors to a larger community—and we discussed our mutual dream that those communities might be made up of individuals who are kind and brave above all.

And then she told me this…

Click here to read the whole story.

Saturday, October 13 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. residents will have an opportunity to take part in “Inspiring Our Community: Today, Tomorrow and Always”, a conference sponsored by Mayor Lovely Warren, WDKX Radio and MJS Productions.

Please see the attached letter from the Mayor for conference details, workshop descriptions, and information on how to register.

You may also use the graphic below to post on your social media platforms.

Please feel free to share this information with your ministry networks and if you have any questions, please call me at 585/428-6684 or email me at the email address above, thank you!

Tracey D. Miller, Assistant to Mayor Lovely A. Warren Esq.

She has one of the most influential positions in the country, but as a girl who did not grow up privileged, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor credits her incredible journey to one thing.

“The key to success in my life, it’s the secret that I want to share with kids and how I became successful. I’m here as a Supreme Court Justice only because of books,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The first Latina Supreme Court Justice spoke to a packed main hall of over 2,000 people at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Saturday at the 18th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival.

Organizers said Sotomayor is the first children’s book author invited to speak on the main stage at the festival. After the main hall filled up, several hundred more watched on monitors in the hallways.

“I wish every kid here could see that if I can do it so can you!” said Sotomayor.

An avid reader growing up, Sotomayor’s new book for young readers, Turning Pages: My Life Story, is a richly illustrated book that chronicles her life growing up in New York City.

“Reading books opened the world to me. Especially for children growing up in modest means as I did, books give you the chance to explore the wider world. Television and especially now the Internet don’t let you imagine,” said Sotomayor.

Click here to read the full NBC News report.

Library Story Readers Needed!

Interested in being part of our Story Reader program for kids at the Arnett Branch Library? Click here for more information!

In New York City, thousands more black babies are aborted each year than born alive.

As Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination tees up another national debate about reproductive rights, is it too much to ask that abortion’s impact on the black population be part of the discussion?

When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, polling showed that blacks were less likely than whites to support abortion. Sixties-era civil rights activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Whitney Young had denounced the procedure as a form of genocide. Jesse Jackson called abortion “murder” and once told a black newspaper in Chicago that “we used to look for death from the man in the blue coat and now it comes in a white coat.”

In the intervening decades, those views shifted. Mr. Jackson abandoned the pro-life ship to run for president in 1984, and leaders of black civil-rights organizations today are joined at the hip with abortion-rights proponents such as Planned Parenthood. A Pew Research Center survey taken last year found that 50% of Hispanics, 58% of whites and 62% of blacks now say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Social scientists aren’t sure why black attitudes toward abortion have changed. One theory is that as more blacks migrated out of the conservative Deep South and settled in other regions of the country with more liberal views on reproductive rights, their attitudes changed accordingly. Another possibility is that people with higher incomes and more education tend to be pro-choice, and since the early 1970s the socioeconomic status of blacks has increased dramatically.

What’s not in doubt is the outsize toll that abortion has taken on the black population post-Roe. In New York City, thousands more black babies are aborted than born alive each year, and the abortion rate among black mothers is more than three times higher than it is for white mothers. According to a city Health Department report released in May, between 2012 and 2016 black mothers terminated 136,426 pregnancies and gave birth to 118,127 babies. By contrast, births far surpassed abortions among whites, Asians and Hispanics.

Nationally, black women terminate pregnancies at far higher rates than other women as well. In 2014, 36% of all abortions were performed on black women, who are just 13% of the female population. The little discussed flip side of “reproductive freedom” is that abortion deaths far exceed those via cancer, violent crime, heart disease, AIDS and accidents. Racism, poverty and lack of access to health care are the typical explanations for these disparities. But black women have much higher abortion rates even after you control for income. Moreover, other low-income ethnic minorities who experience discrimination, such as Hispanics, abort at rates much closer to white women than black women.

The more plausible explanation may have to do with marriage. Unmarried women are more likely to experience an unintended pregnancy, and black women are less likely than their white, Asian and Hispanic counterparts to marry. It’s true that many of these would-be partners are sitting in prison, but it’s also true that this racial divide in marriage, which started in the 1960s and has grown ever since, predates the “mass incarceration” of black men that took off in the 1980s.

Among civil-rights activists today, talk of black self-destructive behavior is unpopular and minimal. Writing in Commentary magazine last month, Jason Hill, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University, noted the hypocrisy of groups like Black Lives Matter, who “want white people to esteem black lives and value the humanity of black people when they themselves can’t condemn and express moral outrage at those who maim and kill black children in the course of gang warfare, senseless street violence, and drive-by shootings.”

Mr. Hill added that the “moral hysteria raised by a few incidents of police brutality in the face of this larger national tragedy is reckless hyperbole” and “hides from the nation a deep malaise at work in the psyche of some in the black community: a form of self-hatred that manifests itself in a homicidal rage not fundamentally against white people, but against other black people.”

When you combine the amount of black violent behavior directed at other blacks with the number of pregnancies terminated by black women, the rate at which blacks willingly end the lives of one another is chilling and far surpasses what goes on within other racial and ethnic groups. Racial disparities in abortion rates are no less disturbing than racial disparities in income, crime, poverty and school suspensions. Why are the people who want to lecture the rest of us about the value of black lives pretending otherwise?

By Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2018

Last week, I delivered the Baccalaureate address at my alma mater North Central High School in Indianapolis. This is what I said to the graduates:

In kindergarten, I got a prize in the science fair for painting Play-Doh black. I wedged plastic dinosaurs and saber-tooth tigers in it to make it look like the La Brea tar pits. I think it was in 4th grade when I won a ribbon in the Allisonville grade school pancake supper poster contest.

And those two pinnacle moments pretty much sum up the entirety of my academic accolades in Washington Township schools, including all the way through high school.

I got an F in high school chemistry, and an F in algebra and a bunch of C’s, a couple D’s and if it weren’t for gym and kings court singers, I doubt I would have gotten any A’s. Any kings court singers here? I was the jester in the madrigal dinner. I did a few other things. I was in junior spec, Reviewing the Situation, 1981 baby. I played trumpet in band — actually I was second to the last trumpet — which means I played exactly two notes in every song. Blaaamp blaaammp.

Nobody ever saw my name on some academic kudos report sent out by the school, and no parent ever uttered the words: “Louis Profeta made honor roll, why can’t you?”

And if I had to apply to college today at Indiana University, I would not get in.

Click here to read the amazing message that Dr. Profeta shared with these graduates.