Third Base Politics

11/21/2016

Today the New American Economy, a coalition of politicians and businessmen from across the political spectrum, launched a steering committee for the newly formed Ohio Chapter. The New American Economy group is focused on immigration reform; including securing the nation’s borders, updating and upgrading our visa program, and fixing and streamlining our immigration program. The Ohio initiative is joined by over a dozen other efforts in other states leading into the new Trump Administration.

The Ohio New American Economy Chapter will be lead by two prominent Ohio businessmen; Ray Leach of JumpStart Inc and Tom Demaline of Willoway Nurseries. Ray Leach’s group is a venture development nonprofit organization in the Cleveland area, while Tom Demaline’s Willoway Nurseries is a large growing operation located in several central Ohio counties. Both of these men bring specific areas of expertise on immigration to New American Economy; for example Mr. Demaline has taken an active role previously in immigration reform over the past two decades.

The United State’s immigration system’s current issues were shown as a central issue to the 2016 Presidential race. Prior to the election a Forbes survey showed that 70% of voters listed immigration as a very important issue to their vote. The New American Economy’s goals of reforming the nation’s immigration system, modernizing the visa program, and securing the border itself is a reflection of what voters showed was their top priority this year.

 

 

It’s hard to watch the local news today without hearing a lot about the heroin epidemic that is sweeping the country. It is especially bad here in Ohio. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the inner city, the suburbs or the rural areas of Ohio. It’s everywhere.

With all of the bad news coming with this subject, you can still find some good news and inspiring stories. Check out the story of the in the video below, from here in Lorain County.

https://youtu.be/71yZHq8oneU

What a powerful story.

He had been to government sponsored rehab for his addiction over and over and over and over again. And he had failed every time.

He finally lost his wife, and then his freedom as well. After getting out of prison, he went back to the drugs even harder than before.

Finally, another man reached out to him. A man who ran a faith-based program got involved in his life. He’s been clean ever since, reunited with his wife and spends time with his kids every day. Instead of getting high.

Within an hour of watching this video, I found myself at Beyond the Walls Church in Elyria. After reading more and why they need help (which I’ll get to shortly), I had to see it with my own eyes and made the short drive to check it out.

Paul Grodell from the video is the head pastor of Beyond the Walls Church. He doesn’t look like the stereotypical pastor. He looks like he should be leading a motorcycle gang instead of a church. But he saves lives.

How do they do it?

They call their program “Creation House”. It’s not a quick fix, but other faith-based that are similar to this have an 80% success rate, much much higher than government and traditional rehab programs. This is how it works.

Creation House first and foremost is a HOME. The most important facet of any home is the foundation. We believe that a Faith Based, Christ centered Home is the answer to the breakdown of the family, and the dynamics as well as the struggles that come with it.
There are 3 Phases that are implemented when a candidate enters Creation House, and they are part of our Mission Statement.

Reach the Lost, Restore the Broken, and Release the New Creation

The Introductory Phase – whether we go out to the streets, under bridges, in abandoned homes or someone comes to us, we accept them as they are, right where they are at.

Phase I: Introductory Phase (First 4 months) REACH
Candidates should enter Creation House with the understanding that after the Intake Process and the Conduct Agreement that they are HOME! This home is a faith based program that teaches biblical principles through group and individual studies. The core of this phase is the mentoring that takes place on a daily basis. We call it the Paul & Timothy ministry for the men and Naomi and Ruth ministry for the woman.

Phase II: Training & Teaching (Next 4 months) RESTORE
This portion of the ministry is vital as it uncovers behavior patterns that held the candidate in destructive cycles and the life of addiction. The Training & Teaching program helps the candidate to get a biblical view of why they were created and the purpose and vocation in their life.

Phase III: New Creation (Last 4 Months) RELEASE
Planning for the Exodus! In the last four months of the program, the candidate plans out a reintegration back into society. The candidate can begin the process of looking for employment via internet, phone interviews, transportation, home church, a place to live and most of all an accountability partner. Putting into practice what has been learned in the previous eight months.Creation House first and foremost is a HOME. The most important facet of any home is the foundation. We believe that a Faith Based, Christ centered Home is the answer to the breakdown of the family, and the dynamics as well as the struggles that come with it.

Just last year, the church bought an old school building for $50,000, with plans to use it to greatly expand their ability to help the addicted and the homeless. It will be the new Creation House.

Being under 45 minutes from Cleveland, Beyond the Walls got a special visitor in July. When House Speaker Paul Ryan was in town for the Republican National Convention was in town, he headed to Creation House for what he called his “most important meeting of the convention.”

Read more about Speaker Ryan’s dedication to this issue here and here. He has a plan to fight poverty and addiction, and part of it includes removing government barriers, allowing more indigenous programs like Beyond the Walls to sprout and operate.

Ryan says his plan would create more places Beyond the Walls that can help people recover from addiction, a problem both parties have identified this year as one that must be solved.

“What we are trying to do is get rid of those barriers in society to make sure more of this can happen,” Ryan said.

Unbelievably, the city of Elyria is actually adding barriers, not getting rid of them. You would think that the city would do everything it could to help them. Instead, Elyria has tried to shut them down.

The building was safe enough for children, but not safe enough for adults. At least, that’s what the local code enforcement officer said.

But that isn’t what Paul Grodell was told when he and his ministry first purchased the old abandoned school building. They were ready to transform the 62,000-square-foot eyesore into a church and a recovery home for opioid addicts—something the impoverished and heroin-infested city of Elyria, Ohio, desperately needed.

…

So what’s the problem?

“They eventually told us the building met state requirements for a school,” Grodell said, “but now that we changed the use of the building to a place of worship, it changed all the fire code violations.”

As recently as 2009, the school had housed more than 1,000 young children. But according to the code enforcement officer, the building was no longer “safe” by state standards, even though nothing about the building had changed. And the explanation for the last-minute new requirements was even more baffling to Grodell.

“They told us their reasoning for requiring all this work is because they taught the children fire drills a couple times a year, so the kids would know how to get out of a burning building,” Grodell said. “But I guess they think grown adults wouldn’t be able to figure it out.”

The cost for updating the building—which must include dozens of new doors, new walls, new fire alarms (even though the current system works just fine) and a whole assortment of confusing bureaucratic mandates—adds up to about $75,000.

The church already needed hundreds of thousands to totally convert the large 3-story portion of the school into dozens of dormitories for the people they are treating. But then, the city came and kicked them out of the 1-story portion of the school where they held their worship services.

They were forced to put up tents and hold services in the parking lot. And it further delays them from being able to treat more people who need it.

Unreal.

They now have a temporary permit and are back in the building with some temporary measures. But they are still far from the $75,000 they need to meet the city’s demands.

This is where they need our help. It will take a lot of money to address the city’s code requirements and complete the renovation to get Creation House fully under operation so the people they are treating have a home.

First, if you can donate to this cause, even just a few dollars, please do so at their newly created GoFundMe page.

Second, please share this story on social media and/or email it to your contacts.

The more people who learn the story of this incredible project here in Ohio, the more people they can save and the faster they can improve their neighborhood.

Follow @Nick3BP

 

 

In a time of racial strife, growing inequality and more questions than answers on how to fix it, it is time that we re-examine what Horace Mann once called “the great equalizer”: education.

Educational equality can change the lives of the country’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens. A good education is the key to unlocking the promise of America’s New Economy. From kindergarten to college, a good education is more important now than ever before.

We already know that there are thousands upon thousands of jobs that go unfilled every year in America for lack of a skilled workforce. We also know that, according to some statistics, both Charter and Catholic schools produce more eventual college graduates than their public school counterparts. Furthermore, we also know that it is critical to have a college degree in the New Economy. But in many cities across the country, including Cleveland, there’s still a long way to go to unlock the promise of the 21st century in Education.

There were 96,450 children living in the city of Cleveland in 2015, according to the Center for Community Solutions. 58 percent of those children live in poverty. The Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program, the city’s voucher system, gives priority to “verified” low income families, but only 6,000-7,000 vouchers are available each year. This means that there are likely thousands of eligible children who do not get access to these vouchers. There are some high performing Charter and Public schools in Cleveland currently but far too many students are still in low-rated schools.

Far too often educational equality is viewed as a battle between public, charter and private schools over limited resources. This needs to change. If the leaders of public, private and public charter schools agree to work together with the ultimate goal of doing what’s best for the kids, our education system can be fixed.

For example, in Cleveland vouchers should be universally available, particularly to low-income students. In exchange for that, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District should be allowed to count and apply to their numbers test scores and attendance records of all students across public, private and public charter schools. Private schools will remain autonomous and independent, similar to public charters who today work with the city and its Transformation Plan. But there would be a shared incentive to work together and to view education in the district as a collaborative effort, instead of a competitive one.

The public school district may benefit financially as well, with the increase of students that would technically be on its rolls as well as an improvement in overall test scores. The increase of resources allows the public school district to re-invest in itself while also providing more investment in its private and charter partners. Best practices can be shared (but not mandated, beyond the state standards that everyone follows now), which could help lift all schools. Private and public charter schools, many of whom do not have the same security presence as public ones, can pay the district to provide CMSD police on campus. That would likely lead to an increase of the CMSD police force, which is positive for job growth and, most importantly, keeping our children safe.

The bottom line is that if we want to provide equality in education, we must increase collaboration and decrease hostility. The Cleveland Transformation Plan had led to more cooperation between public and public charters, but we need to go further. Private schools should be at the table too.

Perhaps you’ve seen this ad running here in Ohio. If not, we’ve embedded it below.

We’ve spoken before about the gruesome procedure known as partial birth abortion. The doctor only removes a portion of the fully formed baby from the mother’s birth canal, then pierces its skull to kill it. But since the baby wasn’t completely delivered, the law doesn’t consider him or her a person. It’s revolting.

The doctor you see in the ad wrote the following oped about how extreme pro-abortion politicians are out of sync with the majority of Americans and even a majority of pro-choicers. We are pleased to offer it exclusively to our readers.

Mrs. Clinton is today’s typical pro-choice politician. In the not-so-distant past, these politicians shared–and expressed–the ambivalence the American public feels about abortion. She herself called it, in 2005, “a sad, even tragic choice” and talked about how important it is to find ways to reduce its incidence. Bill Clinton famously said (and the Democratic platform in those days echoed) that the procedure should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

Today, far from referring to the procedure as a tragic occurrence, pro-choice politicians declare abortion a matter of justice and vital to the well-being of all women. Clinton and her party’s platform not only support the status quo, in which abortion is legal for any reason until viability, but call for repeal of any modest federal and state laws that attempt to regulate the procedure—such as clinic-safety policies. In a startling departure from long standing practice, Mrs. Clinton has stated unequivocally that the Hyde Amendment (a budget provision that keeps federal funds from paying for elective abortions) should be scrapped—thus forcing those who morally object to abortion into paying for it. Both Clinton and her party’s platform have abandoned religious liberty and conscience rights when it comes to this ethically divisive procedure, condemning the idea that employers can object to paying for abortifacients through their healthcare plans.

I participated in a commercial that will run in the weeks leading up to the elections in order to illustrate the difference between the views of pro-choice politicians and the American public. The ad consists of five women (not actors) pointing out where the lines of American general opinion really fall on abortion.

A Marist poll conducted in July 2016 showed that about 8 out of 10 Americans support substantial restrictions on abortion. This includes 6 out of 10 who say they are pro-choice! The de-facto position of pro-choice politicians of “abortion on demand” and for any reason throughout pregnancy is far outside the mainstream, with only about 1 in 10 Americans supporting such a view.

This shows that U.S. abortion law as it stands is already out of sync with a typical American’s thoughtful appreciation of what’s at stake.

People understand that abortion pits a woman’s “right to choose” against the life of her own child. As much as our culture paints the procedure as ethically inconsequential, a natural human desire to protect vulnerable pre-natal children persists. Even many European countries that we consider very liberal prohibit abortion after the first trimester.

The poll also reveals that proposals to repeal the Hyde Amendment run counter to the widely held (and eminently courteous) view that people who find abortion morally objectionable should not be made to pay for it. A strong majority, including 65% of African Americans and 45% of those who say they are pro-choice, oppose tax-payer funding of abortion. Americans also respect the conscience rights of physicians and other healthcare workers. By almost 20 points, a majority of Americans do not believe healthcare providers should be forced to participate in the procedure against their will. This includes 4 in 10 who identify as pro-choice.

As a doctor, I was glad to make an ad clarifying these issues for the public. Every day in my practice I examine, via ultrasound, babies that are not yet born but nevertheless exhibit a breathtaking humanity. The awed looks on the faces of their mothers and fathers show me that you don’t have to be a doctor to appreciate the enormity of what’s quietly going on in a pregnant woman’s belly. Pro-choice politicians who act as though it is a moment of pure “woman’s liberation” when one of these children’s lives is ended are simply ignoring not only reality but the opinions and values of most Americans, even most pro-choice Americans.

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie specializes in radiology and serves on the advisory board for The Catholic Association.

Even in Europe, which is much more progressive than the United States, there are stricter restrictions on abortion. But America’s pro-abortion politicians like Hillary Clinton take the blood money from Planned Parenthood and do their bidding to keep barbaric practices like partial birth abortion legal.

Share this video to show people just how extreme Hillary Clinton is.

Earlier this week a certain Youngstown new source ran an article asserting that charter schools in Ohio should no longer receive educational grants from the federal government. Why? Because a few charter schools in Ohio have had less than satisfactory performance. The news source recognizes that new federal grants have additional rules and regulations that were crafted to avoid future under-performance, but these rules do not seem to be enough for opponents of charter schools.

This situation is a great example of opponents of charter schools. They will claim any reason to oppose charter schools, but when steps are taken to improve any situation that may be less than ideal, they will continue their opposition. This is because charter opponents are not against charter schools for “the children’s” sake, but for the special interests of the teachers unions.

Opposition to any sort of educational choice in Mahoning County, with Youngstown in particular seems hypocritical at best. Youngstown City schools have been such a long and spectacular failure that the state has had to step in and take control of the district. Situations like Youngstown City schools show why school choice, with charters in particular, is important. Students should not be condemned to such a poor public choice as Youngstown City Schools if there could be an alternative.

In 2015 the General Assembly and the Governor’s office, but controlled by Republicans, took step to refine rules governing charter schools in the state to improve performance. These state office holders recognized that a small amount of under-performing schools does not represent the whole of charter schools in the state, and that the best approach was a policy driven refinement based on what has worked and what has not worked in Ohio and other states.

It is hard to take such opponents like this seriously on their critic of charter schools, when other public school districts are constantly fleecing the taxpayer. One rural school district in Mahoning County in particular has put additional levies on the ballot almost continuously for the last several years. After the last attempt, the school district miraculously “found” over a million dollars in their budget not previously accounted for.

If regular news agencies put as much scrutiny on normal public schools as they did on charter schools, perhaps the overall educational performance in the state would improve.

Strive Preparatory Schools, a charter school system in Denver, is achieving significant results with a diverse group of children.

Strive Prep, which opened its first school in 2006, is now home to 11 schools and over 3,500 students. 97 percent of their students are people of color and 87 percent are low income. 42 percent are English learners and 12 percent are students with special needs. With a majority-minority and low income population, they are achieving results that surpass many of the public school systems in America.

Between 2007 and 2013, a Strive Prep school led all Denver Public Schools in academic growth at the middle school level. 92 percent of their first senior class was accepted to a four year college.

Strive’s philosophy is community oriented. Chris Gibbons, Founder and CEO of Strive, says “College preparation is a means to an end where scholars are equipped to earn a four-year college degree, come back to their community and lead and transform their own neighborhood in the ways that they imagine and the ways that they seek and believe are possible.”

The city of Denver is home to a robust school choice system. According to the Brookings Institution, Denver Public Schools is the best large district in the country for School Choice.  There has been unprecedented bipartisanship among Republicans and Democrats in the state and many of the stakeholders have come together to put the needs of their population first.

It would be difficult to imagine a charter school group like Strive being successful in an environment where there is the typical partisan rancor over education. In many cities across the country, the school choice conversation immediately turns into war between political parties, parents and teachers unions. In Denver, stakeholders were determined to come together to find solutions for children. As a result of that, the environment was created for schools like Strive Prep to thrive.

The results of the Ohio Charter School system is mixed, with the combination of partisan squabbles and some low performing schools stunting growth in the sector. Cleveland is an exception, with an unorthodox mix of a Democratic mayor and a public school district CEO working together with public and charter schools to enhance the quality of education in the city.

Cleveland has seen growth in education as a result of their ambitious “Cleveland Plan”. Test scores are improving and enrollment in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District went up for the first time in two decades. There is more work to be done, however, with far too many schools in the district still failing and not enough charter schools to meet the need. Residents will decide if work will continue on the robust project when they go to the polls this November to vote on renewing a school levy.

There is some friction in Cleveland between the school district and the teacher’s union, who has threatened to go on strike and has taken a vote of “no confidence” against pro-reform CEO Eric Gordon. However, for the most part community stakeholders in Cleveland, like Denver, are working together to fix education. The hope is to have the same results that Strive Prep and others have been able to deliver for its residents.