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☂️Rainy day with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 7:22 p.m.

Two bookish stories as we head into Labor Day weekend, both from our colleagues at GBH’s All Things Considered’s Joy Beat: Raul Fernandez of Brookline has been stocking the town’s little free libraries — the wooden boxes where you can take a book or leave a book, for free — with stories by authors of color. He was inspired by reading to his daughter Maya, who is four and a half. “We really span from young kids’ books all the way up to adult books. We try to have a variety. We reach out to friends and see what books they think we should be including,” said Fernandez, Brookline’s executive director for Racial Justice and Equity. “It’s really been a joint community project.”

And in Quincy, the Prison Book Program is celebrating 50 years of sending books to people in prison. “Books have a significance to incarcerated people that non-incarcerated people often fail to understand. It’s more than just a book; it’s a survival tool,” Executive Director Kelly Brotzman said. “It’s also a way that people tell us they connect with others. Most people tell us they share books we send them with eight, 10, 12 other people, and then it gives them something to talk about with those other people.”

A programming note: we will be off for the holiday on Monday. See you back in your inboxes on Tuesday.

Four Things to Know

1. Boston school bus drivers will get more training and daily safety checks, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said yesterday. This comes after a Boston school bus hit and killed a 5-year-old boy named Lens Joseph in Hyde Park in April. The driver who hit Lens had an expired certification and “should not have been on the road,” Wu said.

“As a mom, I am devastated that this happened,” Wu said. “I take seriously my responsibility and our collective charge to ensure that this never happens again.”

2. After federal authorities announced a takeover of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, Deputy U.S. Transportation Secretary Steven Bradbury visited Boston and said the Trump administration wants to “clean up” the city’s South Station. Gov. Maura Healey called the D.C. move a power grab.

In a statement reported by GBH’s Katie Lannan, Healey said she believes a federal threat to take over South Station has nothing to do with public safety or transportation. “It’s more political theater, more political power grabs from Donald Trump. We don’t need or want his interference here. We’re not going to let the guy who went bankrupt six times take over our train stations,” she said. Another thing to note: while the federal government owns Union Station, South Station is managed by the MBTA.

3. Rep. Bruce Ayers of Quincy has filed a bill that would ban Massachusetts drivers from installing license plate covers that make their plates illegible. The idea, he said, is to stop people from using those covers to evade tolls. 

“States like New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania have already banned tinted license plate covers, leading to measurable results,” Ayers said, according to the State House News Service. “Notably, New York recovered over $19 million in lost toll revenue in just one year following stricter enforcement.”

4. Cool it now — or don’t: The city of Boston is taking Saturday to celebrate New Edition, one of our very own home-grown boy bands. Members Ronnie DeVoe, Bobby Brown, Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, Ralph Tresvant and Johnny Gill founded the group at Roxbury’s Orchard Park in 1978.

The city is renaming a block of Dearborn Street, near the intersection of Ambrose and Albany streets in Roxbury, as New Edition Street at 10 a.m., then throwing a block party at the Orchard Gardens Boys & Girls Club, 2 Dearborn St., starting at 11 a.m. While you wait, check out the “Candy Girl” music video and see how many 1980s Boston landmarks you can spot.

Meet the Roxbury teenagers who spent the summer creating documentary projects about mental health — and getting paid

Magdiela Matta on Morning Edition | Aug. 22, 2025

By Magdiela Matta, GBH News

Picture it: a handful of teenagers are stringing together a set design. There’s a mattress on the floor, a box of Froot Loops cereal is open and spilling onto the sheets and a video camera sits on a tripod.

This is Youth Purpose and Partnership, a program run by the Children’s Services of Roxbury. Each year, they employ about 40 young people of color from Boston to create films, podcasts and other media over the course of 8 summer weeks.

“Coming here, I was just thinking it was just about to be a job,” said Janiyah Sorrel-Bryant, who has been participating in the program for four years. “But I actually made some new bonds here with the staff and with the peer leaders also.”

Each cohort centers around a different theme. Previous topics included social media, and breaking out of boxes and expectations. This year it’s mental health.

Ceazia Paul came here after noticing the difference it made in her older cousin’s life.

“We feel like that mental health especially with teens is not like brought to people’s attention, a teenager could be like living in like a toxic household, and they could be going through a lot of stuff, and their parent just like doesn’t even realize,” Paul said.

Program Director Timothy Fitzegerald said the goal is to prepare teens for adulthood.

“Once they go into school, every skill that we teach here, they should be taking it to the community, their homes and their schools,” Fitzegerald said.

Last week the teens got to showcase their work at the Eliot Church in Roxbury. Sorrel-Bryant directed a documentary called “It’s Okay Not to Be Okay.”

“That’s basically what we’re trying to get out of the documentary,” Sorrel-Bryant said. “We’re not trying to make the documentary like a sad documentary, but we just want the teens to know, like, if you need help, we’re here.”

The young participants say they’ve learned to find their own voice, and they were always treated with respect.

“Even though this is a kid job or a youth job, they still treat us as if we were grown adults,” Sorrel-Bryant said. “They hold us to a higher standard than what we are, like than what actually are. Like they respect us like adults, they communicate with us like adults, even though we’re still all teenagers.”

She says this program also taught her self-discipline and time management.

She’ll be a senior in high school this year. Once she graduates, she’ll have the option to come back as a peer mentor and coach the next generation.