Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out what someone who is splitting a $1 million prize plans to do with the money. We’ll also get details on a House subcommittee report about how Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his administration tallied nursing home deaths early in the coronavirus pandemic.
Sometimes it’s the students who teach the teachers.
That is the short version of Diana Imbert-Hodges’s story. It’s a story that now includes winning a $200,000 prize that stemmed from what she learned from that student: She started a nonprofit called Defying Legal Gravity to teach high school students from low-income households about the legal system.
The brainstorm that led to Defying Legal Gravity came when she was teaching a Saturday program for seventh-graders in Harlem. She was also falling behind in her own classes as a first-year student at the Fordham University School of Law. Now she is one of the recipients of this year’s David Prize, a no-strings-attached award that recognizes people in New York who have “big ideas to make it even better.” It was named for the real estate developer David Walentas and set up by his son Jed.
One of her students in Harlem had been complaining that a deli near her public-housing apartment on the Upper West Side always served her a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich when she had ordered “fake bacon,” made from turkey, not pork, in keeping with her Muslim background.
“One day she ran in and said she was able to get the right order,” Imbert-Hodges recalled. “I said, ‘You finally told him he was messing up your order?’ She said, ‘No, it was contract law.’ I said, ‘What?’
“She said: ‘Last week you taught us that this interaction I’m having with the deli owner is a contract. I’m standing around waiting to pay, which is offer-acceptance consideration in the law. That forms a contract. When he gave me the wrong order, he had breached a contract, and I didn’t have an obligation to pay.’”
“I had never thought about that in that way,” said Imbert-Hodges, who had been a pre-med student as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania but switched to law after teaching inner-city middle school students in Philadelphia. It turned out that her students had questions about legal issues — family law if they were in foster care, property law if they were homeless or immigration law if their parents were threatened with deportation.
“They looked at me as a person with an Ivy League degree,” she said. “I didn’t understand the legal system.”
She and another lawyer, Craig Shepherd, started Defying Legal Gravity to teach legal basics. “We’re putting them on the same playing field as students who have parents who are attorneys or have had education that teaches analytical reasoning and exposure to the legal world,” she said.
But Defying Legal Gravity quickly began providing more than that. Imbert-Hodges said that she and Shepherd found themselves “dealing with kids who need recommendation letters. They want you to check their college essays. They want to be connected to legal resources about something more specific even than what we’re covering in class.”
All of that made Defying Legal Gravity “a real around-the-clock job on top of our having around-the-clock jobs.”
The $200,000 will change that. “What the money does is it lets us breathe,” she said, adding that for now, she would use some of the prize money to pay herself a salary while continuing as staff attorney with Advocates for Children of New York.
Besides Imbert-Hodges, the recipients of this year’s David Prize are:
-
Meghan Finn, the artistic director of the Tank, an Off Off Broadway theater that offered free rehearsal and performance spaces and support services for artists despite a decline in attendance and ticket sales since the coronavirus pandemic.
-
J.C. Hall, a hip-hop artist and clinical social worker who founded a hip-hop therapy studio program at Mott Haven Community High School in the South Bronx.
-
Mi Jong Lee, a designer who hopes to reimagine clothing manufacturing in the garment district.
-
Gregory Purnell, who is known as Greg the Barber and is scaling up his efforts to provide free barber and beauty services to New Yorkers in need.
Imbert-Hodges said that about half of the students in Defying Legal Gravity’s program come from households that have had interactions with the legal system. Defying Legal Gravity, she said, can help them “realize what they’re facing has legal implications, know how to access their rights, know they can move through the court system — or not move through the court system, from something as small as an interaction in a deli to preventing an eviction.”
Weather
It will be a sunny day with temperatures reaching the high 70s. At night, temperatures will drop to the low 60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Oct. 3 (Rosh Hashana).
The latest New York news
More News
-
Seeking a resignation: Mayor Eric Adams’s administration is seeking the resignation of New York’s police commissioner, Edward Caban, whose phone was seized last week in one of several federal investigations that have engulfed City Hall.
-
Investigations heat up: Former corruption prosecutors said that federal investigators would not have taken the steps they took last week when they seized the phones of top City Hall officials without sufficient reason to do so.
-
Wet market worries: New York City has about 70 so-called wet markets where disease could jump from bird to bird or to other animals before adapting to humans. Public health experts say such places are a concern as bird flu spreads around the world.
Culture
-
The forgotten origins of the Police Department: “Empire City,” a new podcast, is aimed at untangling the mythology and influence of the nation’s largest police force.
-
New in the meatpacking district: “The Great Elephant Migration,” a touring public art installation featuring a hundred animal models handmade by Indigenous artisans, not only depicts wildlife but also helps save it.
-
The city as fashion-show backdrop: The label Off-White left its usual slot in the Paris schedule to go to Brooklyn Bridge Park. Our critic Vanessa Friedman says the show was an unexpected stirring to experience the city from a different perspective — as a place of potential and possibility.
House panel faults Cuomo for handling of Covid in nursing homes
A House subcommittee said that Andrew Cuomo and his aides had sought to undercount and deflect blame for deaths in nursing homes early in the coronavirus pandemic when he was the governor of New York.
A 48-page report from the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic homed in on guidance from the State Department of Health in March 2020 that directed nursing homes to readmit patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus. State officials told the subcommittee that Cuomo’s top advisers had signed off on the directive and that more than 9,000 Covid patients had been admitted to nursing homes or readmitted between March 25 and May 8, according to the report.
“This unjustifiably exposed vulnerable nursing home populations to COVID-19, causing predictable but disastrous consequences,” according to the report.
It also said that Cuomo’s top advisers had influenced the conclusions of a report from the Health Department months later in an effort to deflect blame for deaths in nursing homes.
Cuomo, a Democrat who resigned in August 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations, is scheduled to testify before the subcommittee for the second time on Tuesday.
Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the former governor, said in a statement on Monday that the investigation was “all smoke and mirrors,” which he said was designed to distract from Donald Trump’s “failed pandemic leadership.” He also said that the report “does not conclude there was any causality” between the March 2020 Health Department guidance and deaths in nursing homes.
METROPOLITAN diary
Expert eye
Dear Diary:
I was getting on the elevator at a building in the Flatiron district to meet a photographer friend in the 1970s. Getting on at the same time was an older woman wearing a long brown overcoat and carrying a large shopping bag.
She pushed the button for the floor where I was to meet my friend. When the elevator opened, I found myself following her to the office number I had been given.
It had a Dutch door with the top half opened, a small counter on the lower half and a sign stating that it served only professional photographers. In the space beyond the door, I could see large cameras on tripods and related gear.
The woman approached the counter and touched the stem of a call bell. A clerk appeared and, with the air of the maître d’ at an upscale restaurant, asked what she was looking for.
“I want to see a Sinar camera,” she said.
“Do you realize that’s a professional view camera?” the clerk replied in a condescending tone. “Do you know anything about view cameras?”
The woman drew herself up.
“My name is Berenice Abbott,” she said, “and I’m an expert at it!”
— William Howze
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Sofia Poznansky and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
The post A Student’s Wisdom Helped This Teacher Win $200,000 appeared first on New York Times.
