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:
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
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We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. 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 eyeDear 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 nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: A student’s wisdom helped a teacher win $200,000
September 10, 2024
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