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San Francisco Is The First U.S. City To Make Community College Free To All Residents

A similar program in Tennessee is seeing positive results.

 Tod Perry
02.14.18

THE GOOD NEWS:

San Francisco provides its residents with greater educational opportunities.

Community colleges can provide an important ladder to help low-income students make their way to the middle class. According to Georgetown University, nearly 30% of Americans with an associate’s degrees now make more than those with bachelor’s degrees.

Photo by Andrew/Flickr.

The city of San Francisco just took a huge step in making higher education affordable to students from all walks of life by becoming the first U.S. city to offer free community college. Starting in the fall, all San Francisco residents are eligible for free tuition at the City College of San Francisco. Currently, students pay $46 per credit.

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“Making City College free is going to provide greater opportunities for more San Franciscans to enter into the middle class and more San Franciscans to stay in the middle class if they currently are,” San Francisco supervisor Jane Kim told KGO-TV. The new program is paid for by a transfer tax on properties in the city that sell above $5 million.

Nearly 30,000 students will benefit from the new program, including low-income students who already receive fee waivers from the school. As part of the new program, low-income full-time students are eligible to receive $250 per semester to help defray the costs of books and transportation.

In 2015, the state of Tennessee began providing two years of free community college tuition to all graduating high school students, and the results have been positive. After two years, 56.2% of the first class of Tennessee Promise students are either still enrolled, have earned a college credential or transferred to a four-year university. That’s 17.3% more than their peers who did not participate in the free program.

Education

Pizza guy whose quick thinking saved a woman's life gets the reward of a lifetime

WITI Milwaukee

Joey Grundl, a pizza delivery driver for a Domino's Pizza in Waldo, Wisconsin, is being hailed as a hero for noticing a kidnapped woman's subtle cry for help.

The delivery man was sent to a woman's house to deliver a pie when her ex-boyfriend, Dean Hoffman, opened the door. Grundl looked over his shoulder and saw a middle-aged woman with a black eye standing behind Hoffman. She appeared to be mouthing the words: "Call the police."

"I gave him his pizza and then I noticed behind him was his girlfriend," Grundl told WITI Milwaukee. "She pointed to a black eye that was quite visible. She mouthed the words, 'Call the police.'"

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Airport security worker fired after giving traveler 'You Ugly' note


Rochester NY Airport Security passing insulting notes to travelers caught on tape www.youtube.com

Neil Strassner was just passing through airport security, something he does on a weekly basis as part of his job. That's when a contract airport security employee handed him a small piece of folded cardboard. Strassner, 40, took the paper and continued on his way. He only paused when he heard the security employee shouting back at him, "You going to open the note?"

When he unfolded the small piece of paper, Strassner was greeted with an unprompted insult. "You ugly!!!"

According to Strassner, and in newly released CCTV of the incident, the woman who handed him the note began laughing loudly.

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A single dad became an internet hero after taking a cosmetology lesson to style his daughter's hair

What if the tables were turned?


Facebook: kktv11news

A post on the Murdered by Words subreddit is going viral for the perfect way a poster shut down a knee-jerk "double-standard!" claim.

It began when a Redditor posted a 2015 Buzzfeed article story about a single dad who took cosmetology lessons to learn how to do his daughter's hair.

Most people would see the story as something positive. A dad goes out of his way to learn a skill that makes his daughter look fabulous.

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West Virginia coal miners are getting retrained as beekeepers to boost the economy and the environment

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Coal mining is on the decline, leaving many coal miners in West Virginia without jobs. The Mine Safety and Health Administration says there are about 55,000 positions, and just 13,000 of those jobs are in West Virginia. The dwindling amount of work is leaving some struggling to make a living, but the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective is giving those coal miners a way to find new jobs and make a supplemental income as coal mining diminishes.

The Appalachian Beekeeping Collective trains coal miners and other low-income residents in mining communities to keep bees. Some coal miners are getting retrained to work in the tech industry, however beekeeping allows coal miners to continue to work in a job that requires a similar skill set. "The older folks want to get back to work, but mining is never going to be like it was in the '60s and '70s, and there is nothing to fall back on, no other big industries here, so all of these folks need retraining," former coal miner James Scyphers told NPR. "Beekeeping is hands-on work, like mining, and requires on-the-job training. You need a good work ethic for both."

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In Florida, it was illegal to have a vegetable garden in your front lawn. This couple fought back and won.

Photo by Stella de Smit on Unsplash

There was once a time in Florida where you could park your boat in your front lawn, but you were SOL if you wanted to grow squash and lettuce there. However, thanks to one Miami Shores couple, that's about to change.

Hermine Ricketts and Tom Carroll had been growing a front yard garden for 17 years, but in 2013, Miami Shores changed its city ordinance, making the activity illegal. The new city ordinance said that backyard vegetable gardens were a-OK, but Ricketts and Carroll couldn't keep a garden in their backyard because it didn't get enough sun. So the couple could either dig up their garden or face $50 in daily fines for letting it continue to grow. The couple opted to do neither and instead, they sued the city.

Ricketts and Carroll took their case to the Florida Supreme Court. Initially, the courts sided with Miami Shores, but the fight wasn't over. Florida State Senator Rob Bradley introduced legislation preventing "a county or municipality from regulating vegetable gardens on residential properties." Earlier this year, the Senate passed the bill 35-5.

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