This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
⛅Warmer today with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 6:33 p.m.
New Bedford City Councilor Leo Choquette has noticed something in his community: the city of 100,000 has four active landfills, and he’s worried about their impact on neighbors’ health.
“My wife’s next-door neighbor died from multiple myeloma. The house next door to them — the man had testicular cancer. The house on the other side of them, a lady had breast cancer,” Choquette told CAI’s Tribekah Jordan. Choquette’s own father, he said, had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and his wife had bowel cancer (both of them recovered). “There are supposed to be rules and statutes in the commonwealth that protect environmental justice communities from having a concentration of trash like we have now.”
Now the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the Greater New Bedford Regional Refuse Management District are working on a seven-acre expansion of one of those sites, the Crapo Hill Landfill. Choquette said he would like to see regulators do more to protect his city’s residents.
“No one wants to live next to pollution and trash,” Choquette said. “I would feel betrayed if I paid taxes in a city that didn’t put up a fight to stop this. You fight the fight no matter how much it costs the city.”
Four Things to Know
1. Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch apologized for what he called “ill-thought remarks” saying the Catholic church’s abuse scandals were “mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia” on WBZ’s “Nightside with Dan Rea.” The two were discussing Koch’s decision to install two statues of Catholic saints outside a new building for the city’s police and fire departments. Koch made the remark after Rea said he is still shocked by the Catholic church’s abuse scandal. Rea said many survivors were children and teenagers at the time of the abuse, and Koch replied, “They were? Well, pedophilia’s a younger age than, to me, a teenager. But that’s another issue for another day.”
“The conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia has been repeatedly refuted by medical and scientific experts,” said Sarah Pearson, a spokesperson for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “Mayor Koch’s comments serve to scapegoat gay men, imply that middle-school and high-school boys are not actually victims of abuse and completely dismiss every girl or woman who has been assaulted in the Catholic Church.”
2. A judge in Worcester said she’ll look at police body camera footage to decide whether to keep or dismiss a criminal charge against Worcester City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, who was arrested protesting a federal immigration operation in May. You can watch the video in question here.
“No amount of bogus charges or threats or harassment will intimidate me or keep me quiet, on and off the City Council,” Haxhiaj said outside the courthouse. The next hearing in this case is set for Nov. 19.
3. If you’ve been waiting to hear what’s happening with state rules for cannabis social consumption establishments (like a bar, but for weed), you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The state’s Cannabis Control Commission is delaying the release of its regulations because Chairwoman Shannon O’Brien is back on the committee after a two-year legal fight.
“To support the transition of leadership and ensure all Commissioners are prepared for the final regulatory review of Social Consumption Establishments, agent registration reform and related policies, the Commission intends to postpone relevant public meetings, originally planned for the end of September, to Oct. 23 and 24,” commission officials said in a statement.
4. If you’re looking for something orchestral to do this weekend, Brian McCreath of our music sister station, CRB Classical 99.5 FM, recommends the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, also known as the Jupiter Symphony, and Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, or A Hero’s Life.
“This is full-on, major orchestra, absolutely pedal-to-the-metal, big orchestra stuff that fills Symphony Hall,” McCreath said. “There’s no other experience quite like it.” Tickets are still available, but if you can’t make it, you’re in luck: CRB will be broadcasting the performance (for free!) tomorrow starting at 8 p.m., on the radio at 99.5 FM and on their website.
A record number of students lack basic reading skills. Can this approach help?
About 43 million Americans don’t have three reading comprehension skills that experts consider basic components of full English literacy: understanding, and comparing and contrasting information (as GBH’s Callie Crossley explained it on Under the Radar: “he is taller than his brother, but shorter than his father;”) paraphrasing (“this pill can help you shed pounds — or, this pill could help you lose weight;”) and making low-level inferences (“Since you didn’t text me back, I guess you’re mad.”)
“It’s alarming,” Siobhan Dennis, senior director of customer experience at Wilson Language Training, told Crossley. “And I do think we have this sense of urgency where we see the stagnation and then the decline of our students’ reading performance across the nation.”
So how do you teach kids to read in a way that sets them up for literacy success?
Our Under the Radar panelists explained the two main methods used in American schools over the last century and a half: the first is phonics, in which students learn to sound out words and connect the letters on the page with their corresponding sounds. The second, which came into wider use during the 20th century, is called balanced literacy, or three-cuing: students are asked not to sound out the word, but to use its first letter and surrounding context clues like photos or other words in the sentence to try and guess it. (If you’re curious, our friends at PBS have a video explaining the two methods here.)
In recent years more states have transitioned from balanced literacy back to phonics, guided by newer science that shows phonics education is more effective. Faythe Beauchemin, assistant professor at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, said the discussion does not have to be strictly framed as phonics-versus-balanced literacy.
“Children should have it all,” she said. “We need all of the components of reading to make sure that children become proficient, as well as engaged and excited, readers.”
Catherine Snow, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard University, said low literacy is “a real threat to the functioning of society.”
“We have a science of reading,” Snow said. “But now, we need a science of teaching reading that is equally well-developed if we want to support teachers optimally to do what they are trying to do in first- through sixth-grade classrooms.”
You can hear the full discussion from GBH’s Under the Radar with Callie Crossley here.
Learn more:
-How Do Fossils Form? A Paleobotanist Explains the Secret to Fossilization
-Is There Life on Mars? NASA’s Discovery Explained by an Astrophysicist and Microbiologist
GBH Daily
Your essential daily newsletter delivering trusted news, local insights, ways to connect, and can't miss programs from Boston and beyond.
