Month: September 2023

Parenting & Family

Son finds his way after worrying about future

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On a recent Sunday at Akron Family Restaurant, I was reminded of one of my earliest Beacon Journal columns in which I wrote about my eldest son, Claude. In January 2017, he took me to lunch at Akron Family to discuss his existential anxiety.

Claude was a freshly minted college graduate who didn’t know what to do next. In fact, instead of graduating the previous spring, when he had all the credits he needed, he took an extra semester at the University of Michigan.

With three more decades of life under my belt than my son, I knew Claude would be fine even if I could not tell him precisely how his life would unfold. He is curious and hardworking, which has made him many things, including pretty smart. 

Claude met his closest friend at college the day they moved into the freshman dorms. Neal earned a degree in engineering, promptly left for Berkeley and began a Ph.D. program with a comfortable stipend. Claude envied Neal’s knowledge of what to do next, even if his friend wasn’t always satisfied.

“I sometimes think I should have taken a gap year after high school,” Claude told me over soup that day.

Thank God you didn’t, I thought.

My parents held entry-level jobs. My mother worked hard, mostly as a waitress, sometimes as a secretary, and lastly baking coffee cakes and fruit bars she sold at markets not unlike the Mustard Seed. My dad worked seldomly, usually retail when he did — a hardware store in Michigan, Circle K in Arizona.

Neither ever talked with me about going to college. After high school, I took classes here and there, including the University of Arizona and Wright State. Finally, at age 21, I settled in at Ohio State where I voraciously studied religion and French, receiving degrees in each at 26.

I set a different course for my children. “After high school,” I told them, “you go to college.” Not “you could” nor “you should,” but “you go.” However, I never pushed them toward, nor dissuaded them from, any particular major. “Just get a bachelor’s degree, that’s what matters.”

A gap year after high school, I feared, might easily lead to a long-term forestalling of college like me, or a permanent one like my parents.

But my children are different from my parents or me. They had a blueprint because I had gone to college and earned degrees. When they talked about juggling studying for tests and writing papers, I understood and could make suggestions.

Also, for four years as a single parent, I regularly brought home Pizza Bogo pizzas before heading off to night classes. I earned my graduate degree at age 44.

Today, my first three children have bachelor’s degrees.

In the years after that luncheon conversation, Claude did as I expected while doing things I could not have predicted. He worked a string of odd jobs, including a stint at Starbucks. They were not career inducing.

In the fall of 2019, Claude became an AmeriCorps VISTA and worked at the Summit Food Coalition, then located at Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank. He also worked several positions at Macaroni Grill to supplement his meager stipend. 

Six months later, the pandemic hit. Claude loaded boxes of food into vehicles at distribution events and learned much about food insecurity, who it affects and why, and that the best-practices model for combating hunger is food stamps, not food banks.

“I want a career in which I can make a difference,” he told me.

He applied to graduate programs in public policy in the spring of 2020 when the country was in COVID lockdown. Ohio State’s hiring freeze extended to assistantships, knocking out Claude’s first choice, the John Glenn School of Public Affairs.

Maybe it was his AmeriCorps credentials, but Texas A&M’s George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service offered Claude a full ride with a generous stipend. In August 2020, he packed up his car, left his cats with me and drove to College Station.

Two years later, he was offered jobs by the federal and state governments. Choosing which to pick was something I could discuss, but my life’s experience held no blueprint for this. I suggested he discuss it with his grad school adviser.

Claude works for the EPA in Washington, D.C., a city we’ve always enjoyed visiting. His friend Neal finished his Ph.D. program and recently spent a long weekend with Claude in D.C. Both appear to have arrived at similar points in their careers.

Now almost 30, Claude was home for a visit when we went to Akron Family. He comfortably explained over breakfast how the federal EPA works with state and regional EPA offices, along with other federal agencies. He believes he’ll have a long career with the agency; it suits him.

Eight years ago, I told Claude I wished I had a crystal ball to show him where he would land. But, then again, doing so would have interfered with the maturity and wisdom he’s gained along his way. As I wrote in 2017, a successful life rarely follows a straight line to some prize, nor should it. 

Now all I ask is that the next time Claude returns home, he retrieve his cats.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on September 17, 2023.

Uncategorized

Phone monopolies reap vast fortunes while overcharging customers for subpar service

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When I was growing up in the 1970s, phones were strictly used to talk to people out of earshot. They were hardwired to walls and a cord connected the handset to the base. A home’s main phone was usually in the kitchen, which meant most calls took place there, too.

Phones today are entirely different, as is how we think of them.

My smartphone is a relatively tiny supercomputer capable of modes of communication few could have imagined in my youth. Instant connectivity, now more so through texting than calling, is ubiquitous.

Answers to most questions can be found using a smartphone’s chosen search engine and math teachers can no longer tell students they can’t go through life carrying a fancy calculator in their pocket. And yet many are the days I’d like to go back. Not for the slower pacing of communication with far fewer daily interruptions, though there is that. 

No, at issue is that while much of the (seemingly miraculous) technology behind smartphones has been, and continues to be, developed in the United States, Americans pay more for less reliable cellphone service than citizens in most other developed nations.

There are two primary reasons for this. One is a lack of competition. In the past half century, the federal government has gotten soft on monopolies, which, as a result, have grown. Two companies, AT&T and Verizon, control the majority of U.S. cellphone plans.

The second is a similar government softness on regulation. The service for cellphones, which have overwhelmingly replaced landlines in the United States, is a significant percentage of most average households’ utility expenses.

For many years, my children and I were AT&T customers. When in 2011 we moved less than 2 miles away, we could not get reliable cell service inside the new house. AT&T’s response was to set up two small signal towers inside the home for a fee, promising me our cellphones would have reception equal to our old landline. Yeah … nope. We continued to walk around our house repeatedly asking, “Hello? Can you hear me now?”

My then-partner was a Verizon customer and did not suffer connection troubles in the house or anywhere else. Eventually, we moved onto his plan. That worked well and when I left my ex, my sons and I moved to our own Verizon plan.

And yet, whenever we called someone’s landline (mostly elderly friends), the caller ID would give my ex’s name. I spent a ridiculous amount of time calling Verizon with what proved to be futile requests to fix this problem. I decided the solution was to go back to AT&T. And I figured it’d been a couple of years so surely AT&T’s connectivity quality had improved on my side of town. Again, yeah … nope. 

The boys and I returned to Verizon last fall for the superior connectivity. But as soon as we switched, multiple people told us their calls to us chronically failed. I missed several calls from an eventual employer, who luckily knows a friend of mine who told me about the calls not connecting.

For several weeks, my boys and I called Verizon about our inability to receive all calls. I also repeatedly asked that my activation fees be waived. Our connections were not fixed nor our activation fees waived until I became exasperated enough to file a complaint with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

Activation fees are simply monopolies getting away with making customers pay for the privilege of paying for cell service that is less reliable and more expensive than it should be. It’s like a playbook page from organized crime: You wanna do business with us? You gotta grease some palms. 

Customer service reps told me the activation fees are necessary to keep cell tower equipment in sterling condition. Baloney. Between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, Verizon’s gross profits were $78 billion and AT&T’s were $72 billion. 

In other words, Verizon and AT&T have more than enough money to maintain superior infrastructure without shaking down customers for money for nothing.

This summer, my incoming calls were once again not connecting. After Apple checked my phone and found no issues, the boys and I switched to T-Mobile. The connectivity was not great, but that’s not why we quickly moved back to Verizon.

We switched back because they billed us $1,725 for two phone purchase plans and other perks they can legally remand if a contract is broken in fewer than 24 months.

Even after we returned through Verizon’s Winback program, the company tried to pull the $1,725 from my bank account. Several other erroneous charges remained as well until I, once again, contacted the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. Soon thereafter, a very helpful Verizon corporate representative began fixing our account.

The representatives, both in the stores and on the phone at all three cellular companies, have been professional and courteous. It’s important to remember that the employees do not make their employer’s policies and understandable frustrations should never be taken out on the person just trying to make a living.

Last fall, the Biden administration announced an initiative to reduce or eliminate junk fees charged to consumers. Cellphone service activation fees — which are $35 on average for each line on a plan — should certainly be at the top of the list of fees to be outlawed.

Meanwhile, our legislators, including Akron’s congressional representative, Emilia Sykes, and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, should seek to replicate the policies adopted in Europe that increased the number of cellphone companies, and thereby competition, which in turn improved service and lowered consumer costs.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on September 3, 2023.

Education

Feed bodies and brains healthy meals for kids to succeed in school

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“You are what you eat,” a cliche phrase commonly attributed to “your mother,” lives on generation after generation because it remains irrefutable.

Research published earlier this year highlighted something your mother would tell you is obvious — the more a food is processed, the less healthy it becomes.

Highly processed foods — packaged chips, cookies, beverages, frozen meals, canned meals such as beef ravioli —are made with industrial ingredients. They tend to last longer, cost less and contain high amounts of calories, sugar, fats, salt and many ingredients you cannot find in a household kitchen (think carrageenan).

Nearly 70% of what American children eat is highly processed, which, according to NPR reporting on the research, “has been linked to health concerns ranging from increased risk of obesity, hypertension, breast and colorectal cancer to dying prematurely from all causes.”

Akron Public Schools serves free breakfast and lunch to all of its students. Last year when I tutored at an APS elementary building, I arrived each day after the children had eaten breakfast.

But this summer when I taught APS’s four-week Third Grade Reading Academy, my students ate their free breakfast in our classroom. I saw that the food Akron schools serves its students is entirely processed, most of it highly so.

The main breakfast item is always a pastry (donuts, apple fritters, waffles, banana bread). The rest of the meal includes some form of packaged fruit and a half cup of a 100% juice.

In other words, complex sugar served with a side of sugary fiber washed down with four ounces of simple sugar.

Unless a student chooses milk instead of juice (none of mine ever did), there is no protein to the first meal of the day, which your mother has likely told you is the most important one.

Of my eight students, two were boys. One, whom I’ll call Josiah, is tall and athletic. Quick to smile, he’d answered me with, “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” and is equally comfortable talking with adults and other children.

The other boy, whom I’ll call Tyronne, is small and has strabismus, or eyes that do not track in unison. Not surprisingly, students with uncorrected strabismus have a higher rate of learning disabilities as it is harder to process visual information without binocular vision.

Tyronne, it is fair to say, worships Josiah while Josiah is a good friend to, and even protective of, Tyronne. I pointed out to Josiah that he is a powerful role model for Tyronne, who sometimes needed to regroup after working hard on the morning phonics lesson.

But mentors can lead proteges in multiple directions.

On our third morning together, Josiah came to school in a foul mood. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t pull him out of his funk. He’d look at me with his forehead bent toward the ground and his brow furrowed. Tyronne followed right along.

After multiple disruptions, I moved the boys, who sat next to each other, to opposite sides of the room. When they got up to dance around a few minutes later, I had the building’s behavior officer remove them from the class.

After lunch, Josiah and Tyronne returned to class with the other students. It took only a couple of minutes to see that Josiah was back to his usual, amiable self.

When the students worked independently that afternoon, I pulled Josiah aside and asked him what had been going on with him that morning.

“I was hungry,” he told me.

“But you had breakfast,” I said.

“I know, but I was still hungry.”

Sugar feeds neither the body nor the brain. Akron schools pump students with empty calories that give them a rush of energy, followed by a crash, leaving their bodies hungry for nutrition.

And then we blame them when they can’t sit still and learn.

The next day I brought in two large bowls. I filled one with apples and the other with clementines. I also brought in a bulk package of mozzarella cheese sticks. I told the students they were free to get up anytime and help themselves to the food.

Two staff members told me the kids wouldn’t eat fresh fruit, it’s not what they want. The opposite was true. Few were the days when all eight of my students were in attendance. Yet frequent were the days that ended with empty fruit bowls.

As for the cheese sticks, the only protein available before lunch, each day they were gone long before dismissal. And, yes, behavior and engagement improved.

Last December, the National Institutes of Health published an article titled, “Unhealthy school meals: A solution to hunger or a problem for health?” It’s a question every school district should be asking.

The federal funds provided to feed Akron’s students should not be spent on highly processed foods that fuel neither bodies nor brains while at the same time encourage dietary habits known to cause myriad long-term health problems and early death.

Feeding students healthy meals won’t solve all the problems facing a large urban district with high rates of poverty like Akron’s. But it would help. Doing so does not require an entirely new program, just a reworking of the current one.

The Drury Hotel chain runs a hot breakfast bar every day. They serve eggs (scrambled and hard boiled), breakfast meat, potatoes, biscuits and gravy, oatmeal, bagels, waffles, toast, yogurt and fresh fruit. On busier days they feed approximately 500 guests.

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The school where I tutor has 374 students, up to a fifth of whom are absent on any given day. If profit-conscious hotels chains can serve a healthy breakfast, federally funded school meal programs can too.

Using the federal dollars currently spent on junk food to instead provide students nutritious meals that will help them learn is simply a no-brainer. Just ask your mother.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, August 13, 2023.

Postscript: Because the OSTs have a written portion that cannot be graded by a computer, the scores of my Third Grade Reading Academy students were not available when this story went to press. Six of my eight students passed. Josiah had the highest score in my class, having improved 29 points. Tyronne was one of the two students who did not pass, however, he improved his score by an impressive 33 points.

My students did so well because I am a good teacher. But serving them healthy foods also helped. What I did not mention in this column is that on the day the students took the OSTs, I brought them all Egg McMuffins from McDonalds. Yes, those are processed too, but Egg McMuffins include substantial protein and are far better in nutritional content than what APS gives students.

Furthermore, and as I discussed in my July 23, 2023 column, Gov. Mike DeWine committed something akin to a crime when he allowed Ohio’s third graders this year to all be promoted to the fourth grade whether or not they passed the reading portion of the OST. Given the huge losses in learning due to virtual instruction during COVID, Ohio should have prioritized sending kids who did not pass the OST back to the third grade with extra supports. What it that would have cost the state today is a fraction of what it will cost the state down the road. The teachers these kids will have in the next few years must try to teach history, literature, science and more to students who are functionally illiterate. Imagine how frustrating that will be for both the students and the teachers. Who benefitted from this wrong-headed idea? Certainly not Ohio’s students.