Judith Kaye Stresses Importance of Education at Flom Lecture

Hon. Judith Kaye, former chief judge of the State of New York, delivered the 2010 Claire Flom Memorial Lecture on March 25 at Fordham Law. The title was “Hats Off to Claire Flom and Her Special Vision: Education and the Importance of Being Involved.”

“Education matters,” Kaye said. “Kids, particularly at-risk kids, lacking or denied an education have a distinctly diminished chance of making it in today’s world. Every single one of us can and we must help to make a difference for them.”

Kaye advocated early intervention to improve the lives and educations of children. “A little attention to a problem at its outset can avoid incalculable costs later, and this is nowhere more true than with respect to children,” she said.

“Our laser-beam focus has to include early intervention—preventive measures that reduce the flow of children into courts and detention facilities.”

Throughout her legal career, Kaye has exhibited her commitment to the welfare of children. Among other commitments, she is chair of the Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children, established in 1988 to improve the lives and life chances of children involved in New York courts.

Appointed to the bench in 1983 by New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, Kaye became the first woman to serve on the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. She served as chief judge for 15 years until her retirement in 2008, longer than any other judge in New York state history.

Workshop Broadens Horizons for Bronx Middle Schoolers

A program participant checks over her notes after interviewing Dahiana Lessard, a bookkeeper with HPAC who also served in the U.S. Army. Photo by Gina Vergel.

About 40 middle school students from the South Bronx have a greater sense of their educational and career potential, thanks to a two-day clinic organized by Fordham’s Graduate School of Education.

Students from the Hunts Point Alliance for Children (HPAC) attended the Career Education Mentoring Program at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Feb. 16 and April 6.

“The goal was to help them create a vision for their futures that includes education and careers,” said Jennie Park-Taylor, Ph.D., an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Fordham who helped stage the program with HPAC staff.

Park-Taylor had been working with HPAC for a year when the children said that they didn’t know a lot of career-minded adults who could act as mentors.

“We decided to do this program so they could learn about the high school admissions process and to introduce them to people from various fields with whom they could connect,” Park-Taylor said.

She and the HPAC staff combed their Rolodexes to bring a wide variety of successful professionals to the event. Students spent time with professionals in fashion, education, counseling, technology, accounting and the performing arts.

Students also picked the brains of doctoral student mentors, and—closer to home—high school student mentors who grew up in Hunts Point, a low-income area of the Bronx where nearly half of all households earn less than $15,000 annually, according to HPAC.

“Programs like this benefit us because we can see and get motivated by people who have succeeded,” said Joshua Santana, a senior at All Hallows High School who plans to attend SUNY Maritime Academy this fall. “For the middle school students, they can learn how important high school is, instead of finding out the hard way.”

Park-Taylor said the event planning committee chose the Lincoln Center campus to host the event so that the youngsters could have a positive experience at a university.

“They’ve responded beautifully to that. We held a focus group after the first day of the institute, and when we asked them what their experience was like, some of them said it was the most beautiful school they had ever seen,” she said. “Others said they were excited to see college students and be in a college atmosphere.”

In addition to interviewing career mentors, students also participated in workshops that focused on content areas such as stress and coping as well as interpersonal communication skills, said Deidre Schwiring, a first-year graduate student at GSE who helped throughout the program.

“A lot of these children aren’t growing up in the easiest neighborhoods, but they are here, so obviously they have the motivation and desire to do something with their lives,” Schwiring said. “We’re really hoping we can give them tools to help them realize their potential and show them that they can be anything they want to be.”

—Gina Vergel

STEM Grows at Fordham

Fordham’s future leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) presented a daylong workshop on April 7 highlighting research projects supervised by faculty mentors.

Nineteen students gave oral presentations while five submitted poster presentations on projects ranging from magnetically sensitive polymers and methods for factoring the product of two prime numbers to the effect of acoustics on bird breeding.

“Working with my mentor has opened up all sorts of opportunities for me,” said Jennifer Kwapisz, a senior computer science major who has worked with Gary Weiss, Ph.D., since her sophomore year.

Kwapisz gave an oral presentation, “Person Identification and Activity Monitoring Using Wireless Sensor Data Mining,” describing her research on accelerometers. Such devices, she said, are found in iPods, smartphones and other electronic handhelds and can measure even small movements in the devices’ users. Monitoring such measurements, said Kwapisz, can have both security and commercial applications.

“There is potential for automatically adjusting preferences, depending on who is using the device,” she said.

The STEM students were mentored by 16 members of Fordham’s faculty in the sciences. For Masaaki Hamaguchi, Ph.D., associate professor of biological science and a researcher in cancerous cells, mentoring students is simply “paying forward.”

“I have had good mentors who changed my life and guided me without asking for a payback,” said Hamaguchi, who mentored Bronx High School of Science student Erica Ma and Fordham junior Olivia Begasse de Dhaem. “It’s my turn to furnish [the] younger generation with something I have.”

The event was sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Fordham College at Rose Hill.