Yale Daily News Magazine January 2019

The university model

DAILY NEWS

by ellie garland

MAGAZINE VOL. XLVI ISSUE 3 JANUARY 2019

in between homes by isabella zou

Cold cases, open wounds by kyung mi lee

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

Magazine Editors in Chief Jordan Cutler-Tietjen Liana Van Nostrand

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Managing Editors Nicole Blackwood Isabel Guarco

Senior Editors Flora Lipsky Frani O’Toole Will Reid Jacob Stern David Yaffe-Bellany

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Fiction & Poetry Editor Lucy Silbaugh Audio Editor Cam Aaron Associate Editors Ko Lyn Cheang Julianna Lai Kyung Mi Lee Zoe Nuechterlein Alexa Stanger Magazine Design Editors Lauren Cueto Jesse Nadel

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COURTESY OF ROBERT ANDY COOMBS

Robert Andy Coombs ART ’20 Portrait by Nicole Blackwood

Photography Editor Madelyn Kumar Illustration Editor Keyi Cui Copy Editors Maddie Bender Selena Lee Editor in Chief & President Britton O’Daly Publisher Eric Foster

ASSISTANT DESIGN EDITORS: Andre Costa Rebecca Goldberg Emily Lin Maggie Nolan Lauren Quintela Chris West Karena Zhao

23 The University Model Feature by Ellie Garland

2 | December 2018

fact check

Civilian Review Board JULIANNA LAI

portrait

Thomas “DJ Action” Jackson EILEEN HUANG

poetry

Kumiho CLAIRE LEE

insight

On Steam and Secrets JANE ZHANG

insight

Homecooked WILLIAM MCCORMACK

TABLE OF CONTENTS

11 Inside Yale’s Alexandria Insight by Robbie Short

08 Cold Cases, Open Wounds Feature by Kyung Mi Lee

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32

33

35

insight

More Than Scores WILLIAM LANGHORNE

poetry

Like Cicadas EDIE ABRAHAM-MACHT

essay

This Is Not a Ghost Story JINGJING XIAO

bits & pieces

A Guide to Waving VERONICA BORATYN

28 In Between Homes Feature by Isabella Zou

Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

PORTRAIT

Robert Andy O Coombs ART ’20 Stare at the photos and the photos stare back.

BY NICOLE BLACKWOOD

n the westernmost white wall of the Yale School of Art Gallery, adjacent to pieces built of flashing lights and feathers, hangs a 40 by 30 inch photographic self-portrait, printed on simple metallic paper. A man’s naked back fills the center of the frame, boxers around his knees, bare legs facing the viewer.

Though he commands the foreground, his body fails to mask the second, more imposing figure, made immediately visible by the black-and-yellow machinery of his wheelchair. Robert Andy Coombs ART ’20 lies diagonally in the chair, clothes on, both of the first man’s hands supporting

PAINTING BY AMALIA ONO OF SELF-PORTRAIT IN “CRIPFAG” SERIES, COURTESY OF COOMBS

4 | January 2019

his head. Coombs stares directly at the camera; it’s easy to read the smirk in his eyes. He’s giving his partner a blowjob.

Coombs chose this photograph for his first showing at the School of Art, a calculated decision meant to assert his creative ethos: confronting stereotypes of sexless disability and staking a claim for his own very present sexuality within an able-bodied queer community. Though he largely shoots self-portraits, not all are so explicit; a series of three feature the necks of Coombs and a faceless partner, and another focuses on Coombs’ tattooed torso, stretched out across olive-green grass. The piece in the gallery answers questions about disabled sexuality before the viewer can ask them. It’s meant to startle.

As I looked at it, a single frame of an ongoing sexual act, I could feel Coombs watching me, waiting for a reaction. We were the only ones in the locked gallery.

I mustered a “wow” before he wheeled backward, saying, in a burst of frustration, that he wished the photograph had been hung at his eye level. Now when he looks at it, his likeness appears above him, each staring directly ahead and missing the other by degrees.

“I hate when people look down on me, especially with a bird’s eye view, photographing down,” he said. “It’s showing me in a submissive way … which I’m not at all.”

The whole time I was with him, sitting in his stark-white School of Art studio, Coombs didn’t break eye contact, except to blink. I sat in a small folding chair, adrift in the empty professional space — Coombs produces most of his work in his bedroom, a logistical necessity given the dual need for accessibility and intimacy.

His service dog lay on the ground of the studio. Coombs was the highest point in the room, and I had to look up.

After a trampoline accident in 2009, Coombs — then an undergraduate at the Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan — became a C4C5 quadriplegic, paralyzed in his legs, torso and hands. Because he can’t hold a camera and relies on a wheelchair, his photographic process is slow, a juggling act of disparate connections. He uses a medium-format digital camera tethered to a computer monitor and triggered by a joystick, which he controls with his

PORTRAIT mouth. An assistant physically moves the camera, but Coombs dictates the click of an image, even when he lies within the frame.

Coombs is currently working on a series about disability and queer sexual life, the fully realized counterpart to “Disability and Sexuality,” a series he began in the years immediately following his accident.

Those images depicted queer disabled people, naked and framed by sharp, harsh light, edging out their faces. Coombs’ newer series, “CripFag,” focuses on his own sex life — “the ins and outs and all abouts,” he said coyly. The series, and its often explicit nature, responds to what Coombs sees as public ignorance about queer disabled sexuality.

“People would ask me, even to this day, does your dick work?” he said.

A native of Norway, Michigan, Coombs discovered photography and gay identity during adolescence. His early crushes on boys coincided with an ease and delight in male nakedness — he and his friends would often skinny dip in the summer.

There was nothing to do in what he viewed as “the middle of fucking nowhere,” so he documented each moment of that nothing religiously, from landscapes to high school parties. He submerged himself in sports, theater and multimedia classes, determined to both mirror and reject every TV stereotype. Everyone knew he was gay — like his wheelchair now, he couldn’t hide it.

But he could subvert and control it.

When Coombs began his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Kendall College, he was creating beautiful images for the sake of themselves, intensely concerned with aesthetics and their curation; the images reflected and magnified this intent. In one, Coombs poses in front of a white wall, hand outstretched, “Creation of Adam”-style. His torso is bare; he is backlit in blue, and the glare stretches across his abdomen, outlining each muscle.

He planned to become a fashion photographer, the rare photographic job with a stable income. After the accident, his parents mourned a lost career. But Coombs had no plans to stop working. His art had always reflected his life. His life looked different after the accident, so the work would bend and adapt, as Coombs blended politics with aesthetics.

“I actually had something to say for the first time in my life … Something really fucking important,” he said.

His transition into his current photographic focus was inspired by the realities of his disabled existence.

After the accident, he inhabited a body he needed help to understand. The older nurses in his rehabilitation facility couldn’t tell him what his sex life would look like, whether he could be penetrated, whether he could ejaculate. Coombs did his own research online, but his paralysis necessitated partnership, which he sought on dating apps.

He found himself attempting to prove his own sexual worth, to articulate a narrative of disability with which the gay community was unfamiliar.

“We’re in this culture where everyone’s so focused on making sure that they just get their rocks off and then leave … You can’t really do that when you have a disability like mine.

It’s a little slower. I need help undressing,” he said.

“Make that sexy! It’s all in your mindset to make it fucking work.”

In many ways, Coombs is fighting a losing battle.

He grew into his disability during an “insta-gay” era, where images of able-bodied naked men pervade and define whole segments of social media. It’s the kind of unabashed and uncomplicated vanity that Coombs would have revelled in before his accident, and it’s the kind that excludes him now; the images fail to represent disabled sexuality in their celebration of muscled bodies, beautiful and homogeneous homosexuality.

It would be easy enough to relinquish his space in the world of oiled abs and strategically-placed coffee cups, but Coombs sees his work as “sexy Instagram

“I hate when people look down on me, especially with a bird’s eye view, photographing down. It’s showing me in a submissive way ... which I’m not at all.”

pics” under fastidious control.

Ultimately, all sexually stimulating images are about this struggle for visual power: how much is on display, where the line is drawn.

Coombs makes eye contact with his viewer because he wants them to know that the bodies in his pieces are “meant to be seen,” lest art become voyeurism. But because he can’t often view his own body, the work is for him, too — a form of power over not only how he’s seen, but also how he sees himself.

“Before my accident, I loved looking at every part of my body — my back, my ass, my feet,” he said.

Now that Coombs doesn’t need to look in a mirror to perform daily tasks, like brushing his teeth, he can go days without needing to scrutinize his features. In many ways, he said, this self-alienation is freeing.

He can’t hide the wheelchair, he can’t curate the body, but he alone determines how they’re viewed, each an extension of the other. He has a camera, after all. He has metallic paper, a gallery and an audience, watching him watch them.

If you stop at the bulletin boards on Elm Street, you’ll see a flier posted by Coombs: “MALE MODELS NEEDED” for photographs of an “intimate encounter, whether that be cuddling naked or something more sexual.” If anyone contacts him, he’ll ask for a full-body nude, though anonymity is freely granted. He stipulated that he needs to be attracted to his models; anything else would feel like falsification, so the search for multiple candidates is standard. The fliers, however, are an experiment — usually, potential models find him via dating apps, Craigslist or word of mouth.

So far, no one has responded to the old-fashioned advertisement, reminiscent of a world before images and their digitization held dominion.

Yet tear sheets, which list his website, are missing from each rainsoaked piece of paper. People are interested. Coombs doesn’t blame them. The work, he said, is a “slap in the face … It fills some curiosity that needs to be filled.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

FACT CHECK

FACT CHECK CLAIM: “State statute does not allow the Civilian Review Board to have subpoena powers.”

SOURCE: Ward 29 Alder Brian Wingate at the Joint Legislation/Public Safety Committee public hearing in the Board of Alders Chamber in New Haven City Hall on Tuesday, Nov. 13.

STATUS: False

A

s the nation continues to reckon with violent, sometimes deadly clashes between police officers and civilians, New Haven has not been immune to the climate of tense police-civilian relations. Led by community organizers from People Against Police Brutality, New Haven citizens have doubled down on New Haven alders and Mayor Toni Harp’s administration to resurrect the New Haven Police Department Civilian Review Board — this time, with several key changes to the ordinance. One especially contentious issue: whether the board will have the right to subpoena.

Five years have passed since the NHPD Civilian Review Board last met. A committee of citizen representatives charged with investigating cases of officer misconduct and liaising with and developing trust between law enforcement agencies and the public, the oversight board was suspended in 2014 as the city reevaluated its effectiveness and overall mission. Now, alders have proposed a num-

DJ ACTION

By night, Toad’s icon.

By day, physical therapist.

BY EILEEN HUANG

Y

ou might imagine that a man named DJ Action never has to pay for parking, drive to Toad’s Place from his house

6 | January 2019

BY JULIANNA LAI

ber of revisions. Most significantly, the Civilian Review Board would become a permanent part of the city’s government structure, operating independently from the existing Board of Police Commissioners, which many consider an extension of the police department.

But critics of the alders’ most recent proposal argue that in order to truly avoid a conflict of interest, the revamped board must be able to collect public data and summon witnesses. Subpoena power, advocates contend, is necessary for the board to conduct independent investigations of police misconduct complaints. Still, several alders — including Wingate — have adamantly refused the Civilian Review Board this power, citing the absence of a statute that definitively grants a civilian oversight committee the ability to subpoena.

Yet New Haven’s 1899 Special Act No. 467 seems to be just such a statute.

The act explicitly vests “[t]he presiding officers of the board of aldermen … of the several committees of said boards, and of the several boards of commissioners” with the power to issue subpoenas.

And the 1899 statute has been recited in the City Charter for many years. Most recently, the 2013 version of the city’s constitution restates the clause conferring subpoena power to the Board of Alders, its committees and its boards of commissioners. In a 2015 memo obtained by the News to Albert Lucas, director of legislative services for the Board

of Alders, Corporation Counsel John Rose Jr. cited Article VII of the Charter as proof that a civilian oversight committee would count as one of these commissions under the Board of Alders. Like the Board of Alders itself, however, the committee would not have the power to enforce a subpoena; it would need a court’s authority to arrest unwilling witnesses, for example.

Ward 25 Alder Adam Marchand GRD ’99 and a few others have maintained that state law is too ambiguous about whether the Civilian Review Board qualifies as a commission. Some have proposed a solution that secures subpoena power while circumventing the legal debate entirely: ensuring that an alder is always among the members of the board. Dan Barrett ’04, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, says that indecision over the legality of subpoena power is just an excuse for the alders to get away with a “decoy” civilian oversight committee.

Facing pressure from community members, the Board of Alders unanimously agreed to resurrect the oversight panel on Jan. 7.

While the board’s language does not explicitly mention subpoena power, it cites the 1899 statute, thereby effectively allowing the oversight panel to issue subpoenas. How effective the Civilian Review Board will be in invoking and implementing subpoena power to hold local law enforcement accountable remains to be seen.

or do laundry. You might think that he lives in the bunker beneath Toad’s, subsisting on a steady diet of penny drinks, only ever emerging for Woads or Soads to play a remix of “Party in the U.S.A.” that evolves into Waka Flocka Flame. You might think that DJ Action doesn’t talk, that he communicates solely through emails telling us to hop on over to a dance party tonight, 10:30 p.m. doors! You might picture him on the turntables, always spinning our favorites.

“Call me Tom,” he says. Having paid for

parking, DJ Action stands in front of me carrying a well-worn messenger bag, wearing a long fleece jacket and running shoes — less disc jockey and more dad on a run to Home Depot.

We sit down in uncharted Yale territory, a sagging blue couch in the upstairs lounge of Toad’s Place that Tom says smells partly like “animal urine.” In the Emerald City of Yale’s most frequented club, Tom pulls back the curtain to reveal what he does when the toad isn’t hopping.

PORTRAIT “Sometimes folks have a misconception that DJs have this ultra-glamorous life.

They get to party all the time and drink as much as they want to,” Tom tells me. “Not really. Those of us that are good at what we do, there’s a lot of hard work that goes into it. It’s a balance.”

Throughout most of his adult life, Tom has had to maintain that balance. During the day, he’s Thomas Jackson, physical therapist. He grew up in Chicago. He was an avid, almost professional, skier. He likes listening to smooth jazz.

“My father was the DJ that never existed,” Tom says. “This man had so much music from different genres, it would make your head spin.” As a child, he idolized his father’s vinyl albums — Led Zeppelin, jazz, blues, folk, bluegrass and Tom’s favorite, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” When his father left for work, Tom made covert trips to the family stereo. His DJing career began when he was five years old. After he accidentally broke the turntables, his father decided to teach him how to use them properly.

Today, Tom DJs for Toad’s Place on Wednesday and Saturday evenings while working other events on the side — nightclubs, b’nai mitzvahs, anniversary parties, weddings. Tom’s DJing philosophy: If it requires music, he’ll do it. In fact, he recently DJed a wedding for a newly immigrated Iranian couple who requested strictly Kurdish or Iranian music.

“I don’t even know what they’re talking about in this song, but it’s got a beat, and it’s got a rhythm,” he says, describing the wedding soundtrack. “If I can feel it, I can play it. You don’t need to know what it’s saying.”

Still, a majority of his clients are Yalies, many of whom visit Toad’s on “Yale Only” Wednesday nights.

Having worked at Toad’s since 2003, Tom has seen his fair share of Woads drama: a guy getting into a heated argument with another guy’s shirt; couples “engaged in bedroom activity” on the dance floor; and people intoxicated enough to warrant emergency transports. In some cases, he’s also witnessed sexual assault.

“It’s a sore spot for me when I hear about assaults,” he says. “I look at some of these

LUKAS COX

guys and I think: You know what you’re doing. You knew that person was not capable of giving consent, and you knew exactly what the hell you were doing. … That pisses me off.”

Even when it’s difficult to see everything, the DJ booth also serves as a good vantage point in Toad’s. He notifies club security if he sees signs of a possible assault.

“We have our signals,” he says. “If we see something that doesn’t look so good, we try to do our best to prevent it from going any further. We’ve escorted many young men

“I’ve have people come back and say, ‘Man, do you know you’re the reason I survived four years of college?’

Really.”

out of here because they didn’t look like they were up to much good.”

For Tom, DJing involves more than “just machines.” It also involves people’s lives.

“I’ve have people come back and say, ‘Man, do you know you’re the reason I survived four years of college? Really,’” he said.

Tom’s proudest moments are his physical therapy patients’ recoveries.

He spoke of a patient who had undergone a craniotomy, a surgical opening of his skull after a brain hemorrhage. For months, he couldn’t talk, eat, or use the bathroom by himself.

Now, he’s finally back to work.

“I’m not a crier, but he almost got me.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

FEATURE

cold cases, open wounds Closure feels out of reach for families of New Haven’s unsolved crimes.

I

n the breakroom at work, Sherell Nesmith watched televised news coverage of a mysterious discovery — along the Metro-North rail tracks at the State Street train station, someone had scattered dismembered human limbs. On July 15, 2015, the stench of rotting flesh had led a passerby to the location of two severed legs. A bag containing handless human arms was discovered below the Chapel Street bridge.

“I’m watching this and I’m saying — wow, people cutting people up now? Like where do they do that?” Nesmith said. “Not knowing that two weeks later, it was going to end up in my backyard, literally.”

The limbs belonged to her brother, Ray Roberson.

In the intervening three years, his murder has not been solved.

A few weeks after the initial discovery of his legs, police uncovered Roberson’s torso in the abandoned Salvation Army on 274 Crown Street. He was a 54-year-old New Haven resident, a house painter and artist, the eldest of six siblings, affectionately known to family and friends as “Booboo.”

“I think we were all numb,” Nesmith said. “Of course, you cry instantly. But it makes you numb because you’re like, this can’t be.

Everybody thinks that these things don’t hit their families.”

Ray Roberson’s murder is an ongoing investigation at the New Haven police. A prevailing sense of anger and mistrust plagues the families of unsolved homicides; grief extends beyond the criminal justice system. Nesmith continues to pray that his case will be solved.

“It’s hard,” she said. “You try to push it back so you don’t think about it, but there are times when you can’t do that. It’s a process where you’re numb. We’re still here. We’ve still got to live. But you don’t ever forget about it.”

Some families seek closure through arrests and convictions, a difficult process in open cases. Ongoing investigations serve as daily reminders of painful events they wish to leave behind.

“Some people are fortunate in the atrocity that they may know who [the killer] is,” she said. “But there are some of us whose crimes may be elongated.”

—

In 1998, Yale senior Suzanne Jovin was found fatally stabbed in the back near the corner of Edgehill and East Rock roads. Decem-

8 | January 2019

BY KYUNG MI LEE

ber 4, 2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of her murder.

“From our perspective, this year is no different than any before,” the victim’s parents, Donna Arndt-Jovin and Thomas Jovin, shared in an email with the News. “Suzanne was a good citizen (and a good student) of Yale, was happy there and derived great benefits from an outstanding institution of higher learning.”

On the night of her murder, she was walking back to campus from a pizza party for the New Haven chapter of Best Buddies, an international organization dedicated to serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. A celebrated member of the Yale community, she posthumously received the Special Elm and Ivy Award from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven in 1999. There are numerous dedications honoring her contributions to the Yale community, including a memorial plaque in the Davenport College courtyard. The Suzanne Jovin Memorial Fund continues to support promising undergraduate students who “reflect Suzanne’s aspirations and commitments.”

FEATURE Over the intervening twenty years, the Jovins have maintained close contact with public investigators in New Haven. They are still searching for conclusions to be made about the circumstances of her death. In an email to the News, Jovin’s parents credited the University as an “outstanding institution of higher learning.” But they urged the University to finally share the information gained by its private investigators with the New Haven and Connecticut authorities.

“For whatever reason, the University has opted, at least up to now, not to release the material,” the Jovins wrote. “We by no means condemn the University, merely urge it to join us in facing the challenges generated by the violence that is so prevalent in our society.”

University spokesperson Karen Peart stated that Yale “has cooperated fully with the investigation and has provided all available information that the law enforcement authorities have requested.”

— According to the Division of Criminal Justice, Jovin’s case is one of thirty-eight open cold cases in the State of Connecticut. Many are serious crimes or homicides of decades past, ranging from the 1968 abduction of 13-year-old Debra Spickler to the 2012 Waterford shooting of Kyle Seidel.

In an effort to dedicate special resources to the investigation of unsolved crimes, the Connecticut Office of the State’s Attorney established its Cold Case Unit in 1998. Cen-

tral to the core of its mission is the idea that every case, no matter how old, deserves to be solved. As the Senior Assistant State’s Attorney for the New Haven Judicial District, Seth Garbarsky works with a team of twenty-five law enforcement individuals to prosecute felonies for the State of Connecticut. Although a majority of homicides in the New Haven County occur in the City of New Haven, his role extends to cover any and all cases in the County’s jurisdiction, including the murders of Ray Roberson and Suzanne Jovin.

“The primary function of a cold case unit is to look into cases that for whatever reason have (been) deemed to have gone unsolved.

It’s just to put a new, fresh pair of eyes,” Garbarsky said. “It could be a case that’s two weeks old; it could be a case that’s twenty years old. […] It’s not a very exact science.”

The Governor’s Office authorizes thousands of dollars for information leading to arrests and convictions in open cold cases. Sizes of rewards vary by case; the maximum state commitment is $50,000. Additional funds come from the families and communities of murder victims. In the case of Suzanne Jovin, Yale University has offered $100,000 in addition to the state’s $50,000, making the total cash reward the largest in Connecticut.

Authorities work with a wide range of sources for potential leads. “That could be family members; it could be eyewitnesses; it could be witnesses that are cooperating from prison — jailhouse informants,” Garbarsky said. Fluctuating budget cuts and limited access to resources requires creative methods to

find tips on unsolved crimes.

In 2010, the Cold Case Unit released the first edition of cold case playing cards, each card featuring a picture and brief details about an unsolved case. Since then, the unit has received 675 tips on open cases, leading to 20 arrests and convictions. A total of four editions have been distributed through the Connecticut correctional system. The fourth and current edition was released just last month.

Rapid advancements in forensic science also help to uncover previously unknown details, allowing new methods of application towards criminal investigation. It was post-mortem DNA testing that led to the identification of Roberson’s dismembered body. DNA identification allows authorities to gather DNA from articles of clothing, surfaces, and other pieces of evidence.

“Every day, there is constant advancement in this field, which obviously goes to help us,” Garbarsky said. “It also goes to exonerate individuals who were found not to have committed a crime.”

Garbarsky’s work is inextricably linked to legitimizing the grief of the living.

“I don’t even think it has anything to do with a punishment, or jail, or incarceration,” he said. “I think [families] just want to know who did this horrific thing and why they did this horrific thing. I think that’s why we continue to investigate — to give the families some sense of justice and closure.”

—

“

According to the Division of Criminal Justice, Jovin’s case is one of 38 open cold cases in the state of Connecticut.”

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SHERELL NESMITH

Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

FEATURE

Life goes on despite the tragedies of injustice. For Winter Alston, the news of her brother Iriquois Alston’s death coincided with her son’s first birthday on August 6, 2011. She was shopping for the birthday party with her mother when she received the call. They rushed to the scene of the shooting only to be stopped by police — “I told them I was his mother,” April Barron said. He had been shot in the back of a Honda sedan, along with his friend Rickita Smalls. That night, Alston identified her brother’s belongings in an evidence bag at the Norwalk Police Station.

Alston, 27 at the time of his murder, was a loving father and dedicated son.

“He was always smiling. There was never a dull moment around him,” his daughter Dynasty Alston said.

A family member’s passing is a difficult process to endure, his murder an unexplainable reality to communicate to his child. She remembers being pulled from dance practice and rushed to her grandmother’s house.

“Nobody wanted to tell me what was going on. I had to beg to find out,” she said. “I think about it a lot. I’m more angry if anything. […] It’s hard.

It’s a lot to take on.”

Seven years after Iriquois Alston’s death, his family has cycled through four police detectives, made countless weekly calls and prayed daily. Barron, Alston’s mother, calls the Norwalk police “three to four times a week” to inquire about new progress. It is a tireless task of never-ending grief, the presence of unceasing sorrow in the absence of her son.

“May 26, 1984 was the best day of my life, and August 6, 2011 was the worst,” she said.

The Alstons have remained in contact with the family of Smalls, the woman also found dead in the sedan.

Since the murder, they have relied on

“

‘May 26, 1984 was the best day of my life, and Aug. 6, 2011 was the worst.’”

each other in times of need.

“We just need justice,” Alston’s daughter said. “It’s been going on too long now. Seven years and nothing. He’s still not here. They still took a life. Whoever did this is still somewhere walking around.”

“My response then and my response now is: there’s a special place in hell with [the killer’s] name on it,” she said, echoing a sentiment repeated by the Alstons. “One day [they] are going to meet those fiery pits of hell.”

They share their stories in honor of their loved ones, as Nesmith said, to “keep his name out there until justice has come.”

— Sherell Nesmith frequently communicates with the New Haven police, serving as the point person to represent her family in the case.

Overcoming her grief to maintain an active role is an essential part of honoring her brother’s passing.

“In the beginning, [the detective] was present quite often. As time goes on, you hear from them a little less. If they get something, they’ll reach out to you. But he’s always made it very clear; ‘if you have any questions, I’m a phone call away. You call me. You text me. We can get together.’”

Over time, it is perhaps inevitable that cold case investigators become an important part of grieving families’ lives, acknowledging that victims of unsolved homicides include the living.

“When I’m walking around throughout the city, I’m looking like — could it be that person? — your mind is all over the place,” said Nesmith. “It’s just a matter of trying to stay sane because it never goes away. [...]”

An arrest or conviction comes at the cost of personal hardship; families of the deceased endure years of grief in search of closure.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHELLE M. LI

10 | January 2019

INSIGHT

inside Yale’s alexandria Request one item per minute every day for a decade, and you still wouldn’t exhaust this secretive archive.

BY ROBBIE SHORT

T

ake a drive all the way up Prospect Street, then hang a left where the road ends, then a right where it ends again. Keep going. Then you’ll see, past the Bible Gospel Center and its playground, across from the Engineering and Science University Magnet School and its brainiacs, what might be the most nondescript building not located in the former Soviet Union.

Much bigger than a breadbox and about twice the size of an American football field, this concrete cuboid is Yale’s Library Shelving Facility. You may know it better by its acronym, LSF, which on library catalogs — as the Quicksearch and Orbis fiends among us know — indicates that an item will need

to be transported before you can pick it up and devour its insights. (Figuratively speaking, of course. Literal devouring of insights would violate library policy.)

“

Much bigger than a breadbox and about twice the size of an American football field, this concrete cuboid is Yale’s Library Shelving Facility.”

Inside are what the starry-eyed might call all of Yale’s riches. Numbering more than 7.5 million items, the LSF holdings include nearly all of the Uni-

versity’s archival materials not currently in use by patrons, as well as much of its circulating material and thousands and thousands of objects from the Yale University Art Gallery. Picture an Ikea warehouse, except much bigger and climate-controlled, and, instead of budget Swedish furniture, there are irreplaceable historical documents and artifacts and books.

If you, like me, have trouble imagining just how many things add up to 7.5 million things, never fear. Using the quantitative reasoning skills I honed in my two required Quantitative Reasoning courses, I’ve done a bit of back-of-thereporter’s-notebook math and can tell you that, supposing that you wanted,

Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

INSIGHT

for kicks, to request every single item housed at LSF, and supposing also that you could do so at a brisk but constant rate of one request per minute, it would take you more than 14 years to work through the entire catalog. And that’s with no breaks, and to say nothing of how long it would take you to read all the material. What was it they said about the Library of Alexandria? That it was big? Maybe, but this place is big-big.

Usually LSF is closed to all but its stalwart attendants, who, despite the figurative and literal enormity of their task, somehow number just 13. Luck often visits upon the undeserving, though, so I recently got the chance to join a group of Very Important Persons during a rare tour.

The facility is divided into a processing area and a set of storage modules;

12 | January 2019

we began in a meeting room just inside the former. Michael DiMassa, longtime director of Library Collection Services and one of the Gilded 13, gave us a brief history lesson.

LSF celebrated its 20th birthday this Nov. 30. The University opened it in 1998 to address growing problems arising from overcrowding in on-campus libraries and has expanded it twice since then: once, in 2002, when five shelving modules were added to the initial module, and again, in 2009, when another three modules were added, as well as a new processing section for special collections materials. Some of the first materials to enter the facility were a set of thousands of boxes of Manuscripts and Archives materials that, to that point, had been stored in the tunnels that apparently connect Sterling Memorial Li-

brary and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (The existence of these tunnels was a shock to me, though not to the VIPs, who work in the libraries and nodded along with DiMassa as if he had just been describing the weather.)

Past events accounted for, the LSF staff then took us deeper into the processing center to show us some of the present-day workings of the facility.

We started at the southern end, where they pointed out the loading dock where the semitrucks that twice a day deliver materials to campus make their pick-ups and drop-offs. Moving north, we saw a cleaning station, where staff use car wash-like handheld vacuums to sanitize books coming in; a scanning station, where staff respond to an average of 30 or so digital scan requests per day; and then an assembling station, where staff group books into cartons before they enter the storage module.

At the facility, books are grouped not according to author or title or subject but, instead, according to size.

Staff members consult a laminated diagram with 14 multicolored rectangles that correspond to common (and uncommon) book sizes and group them accordingly. This minimizes wasted shelf space and ensures that as LSF continues to ingest hundreds of thousands of new items each year, the facility can keep up with the vociferous appetite of the library system. (Eventually, of course, the facility will need to again expand, but these plans remain to be planned.)

The final step before items enter the storage module involves staff members double-checking that they match the carton they’re in. They accomplish this by way of scanning the special barcode that is affixed to each and every item stored at LSF; these are intended, assuming human civilization makes it that far, to last for the next 250 years.

During the processing center portion of the tour, our guides and the VIPs talked a lot of shop about things like delivery schedules and organizational principles.

At one point, one of our guides trashed what I now understand to be the considerably less efficient layout at Harvard’s storage facility. Much of their talk lay outside the purview of a general-interest magazine, but know this: These are people who know a lot, and care a lot, about what they do.

The necessity of their knowledge and

INSIGHT

care became obvious once we finally entered the storage module. In order to do so, we passed through a giant steel door that looks like something out of a bad bank heist movie, one of those slabs that pops a bit out of the wall upon the swipe of a VIP’s — and, presumably, only a VIP’s — ID card. Beyond the threshold was little fanfare; we had already arrived.

The advent and widespread adoption of the photo-capable high-resolution printing press spares me some of the hair-pulling task of trying to describe for you in words what I experienced in three dimensions and five senses, but here are a few facts that might not be obvious from the pictures: The shelves in the storage module are 30 feet high and three feet deep. They are arranged into 28 aisles. Every conceivable spot on these shelves is full — of what, I could not tell you, as the supremacy of the barcode here cancels out any possibility of casual browsing.

The entire module is kept at a cool 50 degrees and a relative humidity of 30 percent to minimize decay, especially of archival materials, and every light bulb in the building was recently replaced with a

modern LED to further reduce damage. This is a place that is self-conscious of its simultaneous existence in space

as well as time. The things here are meant to last in a way that’s more than a little humbling, even if the mission of a place like this — as the experiences at Alexandria and, more recently, at Brazil’s incinerated Museu Nacional show — is inevitably a fraught one.

We mortals on the tour putzed around on the warehouse floor for a bit, taking our pictures and listening to our guides explain how the staff uses harnesses and what are essentially cherry-pickers to move up and down aisles and shelves with agility.

Whatever these people are being paid is not enough.

They process up to a million items a year and — ac-

PHOTOS BY ROBBIE SHORT

cording to one of our guides, who knocked on a wooden desk as he said this — have never lost a thing.

After about 20 minutes inside, we exited as discreetly as we entered. Passing through the processing center, we gave our guides our nicest thank-yous before emerging back into the parking lot. When Michael Lotstein, head of University Archives, turned and started speaking to me on our way to the car, I was, on the outside, still busy taking notes and, on the inside, still trying to incorporate what we had just seen into my mental model of the world.

“So, as you can see,” he said to me, “we’re not messing around.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

POETRY

Kumiho

BY CLAIRE LEE

I. Undergrowth: lady in russet, her nine tails sweeping beds of foliage. Earth creaks on its axis as she bays for soft human liver.

II. Man rises at the light’s first break through glass, steps on a 9 o’clock Seoul subway toward Gongju foothills and begins his trip to hell. Portrait of a working man: skinned to the bone.

III. Lady takes the hunter’s stride. Her hair is her whip; her canines, scepters. She preys on a body under forest leaves, man’s gouged gut foaming opal like a riverbed burning in snow.

ILLUSTRATION BY ZIHAO LIN

14 | JANUARY 2019

INSIGHT

on steam and secrets Deep (underground) philosophizing — brought to you by vermouth and a chainsaw.

BY JANE ZHANG

I

t was around midnight when we came upon the large street vent. The vent smelled of sunburnt cement and wet pages from an old book. One vent panel folded upwards, revealing a ladder descending infinitely into the dark. We sat down by the edge, feet dangling, as if to test the nonexistent water. We exchanged nervous looks. We circled the vent in clumsy reluctance. We speed-walked to our suite, chugged a bottle of wine and came back, two granola bars in hand. We bathed longingly in the self-induced drama of our secrecy. I sneezed. We stole one last, longing glance at the sky, took a breath to feel our lungs and slowly climbed down.

“Part real and part rumor, underground Yale is Edgar Allan Poe territory,” concluded the Yale Alumni Magazine. “All the ways Yale is just like Hogwarts,” announced the Yale Daily News. We were alone in the tunnels, but not in our fantasy. Campus publications also fill the steam tunnels with airs of mystery and suspense. The forbidden tunnels. The secret tunnels. The not-everyone-knows-where-they-are tunnels.

But as we tightened our grip on the rusty ladder, shaking with excitement, perhaps part of us knew that the tunnels were nothing special. That steam tunnels are tunnels meant to carry steam. That they were built for convenience, not reveries. If you took a look at the “Architectural Drawings and Maps of Yale University Buildings and Grounds” papers, you would see that the tunnels were built along with the original eight residential colleges, Sterling Memorial Library and Payne Whitney Gymnasium in the early 1930s. The underground tunnels were meant to transport steam and electricity. Connecting the 10 buildings, they make it easier to transport services and equipment. Built for convenience, not reveries. Spellbound students might forget this fact, walking around campus with their heads down, searching for an alluring birth myth.

So as we descended, hearts pounding and noses running, into our very own alluring birth myth, we couldn’t help but wonder about the appeal of secrecy. What is it that makes the claustrophobic utility tunnels a sacred labyrinth? What makes the unseen want to be seen?

We wondered and wandered. The inside of the steam tunnels was dusty in a yellow way, or yellow in a dusty way. Large water pipes ran silently along cement walls. In forgotten corners were piles of even more forgotten things. Chairs tucked under tables. Chairs piled above tables.

Some traffic cones. A stack of plates. A broken popcorn machine.

We circled the popcorn machine, trying to discern the doodles written across the broken glass shards. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenologist, addressed the tension between subjective perception and objective reality with a playing die. One person can only see one side of the die at one time. But together with six others, we can inform each other about our individual sides and piece together our collective reality. Even if we rotate positions so that we each see a different side of the die, the die we eventually piece together would be identical to our previous attempt. Only as a collective can we attest to the existence of an identical, external world. What a relief, says Husserl. Hooray, says Heidegger.

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INSIGHT But as I left a trail of murky footprints on the crummy ground, as I stepped over stacks after stacks of forgotten pipes and plates and cones and a popcorn machine, I wondered if we as the “collective” love secrets because we need a break from constantly confirming the world for each other.

“I imagine that [being in the tunnels] feels like a completely different world,” said Rachel Diaz ’20. Maybe we want a place to ourselves. Maybe we want a fact to ourselves. Maybe we no longer want to be different people in the same place in the same world.

Maybe we are seeking our own individual realities.

“I think I kind of romanticize the fact that we aren’t allowed to be in there,” said Amanda Patterson ’21.

The anthropologist Victor Turner coined the word “anti-structure” to describe practices of revolt that intentionally counteracts mainstream culture. As we stumbled around in the tunnels with downturned heads to avoid the rumbling steam pipes, we became hyperaware of the intentionality of each step. The sense of radical agency comes not only from breaking away spatially but also socially.

But can we really escape a worldly reality and claim something solely for ourselves? A secret mentioned but unrevealed is a secret; a secret unmentioned is plain silence. We fumbled around the tunnels and discovered a forgotten box of vermouth.

We decided a souvenir was in order.

We dug through the box, found an unopened bottle and stuck it to the wall of our common room. Why is there a bottle of vermouth stuck to the wall? people would ask. We would smugly disclose a story of the vent and the wine and the plates and the yellow.

Just like those before us who wandered upon an entrance to the tunnels, we revealed a narrative in hopes of concealing a reality. We told and retold. We found an anti-structure just to feel more secure in our structure.

We confirmed and reconfirmed. We

16 | January 2019

ran away only to come back.

The paradoxical nature of secrecy isn’t special to this day and age. Years ago, a student named Charles Albertus took a collection of scenic photos around campus. Photos of Sterling Memorial Library. The residential colleges. Payne Whitney Gymnasium. The photos COURTESY OF MANUSCRIPTS & ARCHIVES, YALE UNIVERISTY LIBRARY contained no human subjects. But two photos of the newly constructed tunnels snuck their way into the very back of the folders.

The pipes were just as dirty and the floor just as clammy. Unlike the lonely depictions of the solitary buildings, the photo included five construction workers. They stood in a tight and comfortable line above a sturdy pipe, smiling assertively at the camera. I wondered if Albertus felt that the tunnels were different than the other buildings he took photos of. I wondered how the workers felt about the tunnels. I don’t really know.

But there are things that I do know. The last time we went back to the tunnels, the panel was tied down by an iron chain. I remember how my heart sank and floated slowly back up, how we hurried forward and how we stared down at it. We didn’t speak for a short moment and the short moment seemed very long. Even if the escape was brief and the exemption was illusory, I still wanted it. A few months after our adventure, my friend came back from Christmas break with a chainsaw — for the chain, he joked. For the semester, the chainsaw lay in the same room as the vermouth. It’s not in our room now. I’m not sure where it went.

INSIGHT

MADELYN KUMAR

Homecooked A new social dining app aims to feed the city’s appetite for friendship.

BY WILLIAM MCCORMACK Afeefa’s dining room was warm, insulated by an amber ceiling light and long, drawn shades that concealed the dark street outside.

Her husband Sami had just steered four strangers into their East Rock quadruplex, closing the door to the unit and shutting out the crisp November chill. Afeefa joined him in embracing the guests and jiggling their hands as if reuniting for Thanksgiving. Her cooking, arrayed along a plastic purple tablecloth on the floor, was already assembled at the center of her tableless dining room, but this feast had no special occasion. Strangers and loose acquaintances gathered on a Sunday evening, forming a cross-legged rectangle on cushions that surrounded the food in the name of conversation and new connections.

Only once her guests had removed their coats and bags did Afeefa herself sit down. She had been darting around the kitchen since 11 o’clock to produce a 12-dish, 29-plate banquet, ambitious for even the hungriest crowd of eight. A diverse group prepared to dig in: Syrian refugees Afeefa and Sami, an IT coordinator from Iraq,

a Yale student from Boston, an early employment specialist working in New Haven, a Yale student from the Netherlands, a volunteer coordinator for Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services and a Yale junior from Florida.

While Afeefa produced the food and flavors of her home in Syria, Florida-native Kevin Zhen ’20 assembled the concoction of guests in the dining room. Afeefa hosted her event through Homecooked, a social dining startup that connects conversation-hungry guests with local amateur chefs who prepare dinner, set a booking price that typically falls between $15 and $20 and invite six to eight guests to a meal in their own home.

Founded by Zhen and his high school friend Hojung Kim, Homecooked seeks to be anything but transactional. Though Syrian stuffed grape leaves and spinach-filled flatbread may be what initially brings guests and hosts to the table, its founders hope the platform will help people cultivate the ongoing social ties they believe a shared meal can inspire. Zhen compares Homecooked to a blend of “Airbnb for food” and a Tinder for friendship.

“The long-term dream is you open Homecooked, you’re in New York and you see that across the street there’s this Vietnamese lady who makes amazing pho,” Zhen explained. “You go, you sit down, you eat with her, you find out her story, you learn a little bit more about her and you love the experience so much that you come back every two weeks. You bring her presents and just hang out. That’s really what Homecooked is about.”

Homecooked’s concept and vision, however, began with Kim. As a student living off campus at the University of Chicago, Kim struggled with loneliness and depression. He started cooking for friends,

Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

INSIGHT who found themselves returning for the — Zhen, Kim, Duong and creative director company of other members of the UChica- Gabe Oviawe — have spent the past year go community as much as they did for Kim’s securing funding, developing the app and cooking, and charged them to make rent marketing the idea to potential hosts and money as more people came — 30 people guests. Recent UChicago graduate Kim — twice a month. At the same time, he began or “Mr. World Tour” as Zhen beams — has researching the social psychology behind traveled to Atlanta, San Francisco, Copenhagen and other major cities for startup loneliness.

“I ended up knocking on a professor’s competitions, while Zhen balances Homedoor [to discuss] the reasons for this widespread epidemic of isolation throughout society,” Kim said. “We talked about ways to bridge that gap again, to reintegrate communities, and we centered in on food as this really powerful way to connect with others.”

In 2017, Kim posted an open invite on the internet and hosted a Thanksgiving dinner, which featured Korean-inspired turkey, in his apartment. International students left on campus flooded the event, and when Kim stopped by New Haven in between two squash tournaments a few weeks later, he proposed the idea to Zhen. Though Zhen was initially hesitant, Homecooked incorporated in January 2018.

Two days before Afeefa’s dinner, Homecooked released its revamped app, coded by Eric FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: KEVIN ZHEN ’20, HOJUNG KIM AND ERIC DUONG ’20.

Duong ’20. The iOS program provides the backbone of the service, cooked’s operations and his coursework a way to process payments and reservations as an East Asian studies major at Yale. The and to explore the profiles of guests and venture has won $70,000 in non-equihosts. Although it doesn’t yet allow for re- ty funding, including a $15,000 summer ferrals, ratings or tips, the founders plan to accelerator grant from the Tsai Center for implement these features in updated ver- Innovative Thinking at Yale and a $50,000 sions. Users can track the mutual interests award from 1ST50K, a contest whose stipof their fellow guests and former hosts. ulation has sent Kim and Oviawe to expand Kim, who lists the Milwaukee Bucks, squash the company’s presence in Cape Girardeau, and startups in his profile, could add Kevin Missouri.

As the team prepares to launch a market— who also lists startups, as well as breaking campaign with the revamped app now dancing and storytelling—to keep in touch.

Homecooked and its four-person team available for download, they’ve found sup-

18 | January 2019

port for social dining in unexpected places. Companies like banks have expressed interest in adopting Homecooked meals to promote closer relationships between company employees, stronger corporate culture and even friendly competition between two bosses who, for example, might battle for the better Homecooked barbeque. According to Zhen, apartment building managers also see Homecooked as a means of strengthening community and would be willing to incentivize meals on the platform if they ultimately increase retention.

Even New Haven restaurants, with which Homecooked began partnering in mid-November, like the idea of using empty private rooms to connect their cooks with diners.

But no matter who hosts a meal, Zhen is insistent that chefs should sit down with guests in order to maximize the true benefit of a social dining experience. He once went undercover to an Eatwith event — a more established competitor to Homecooked that has hosted meals in over 130 countries — in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Zhen felt the company prioritized a high-quality culinary exLUKAS COX perience, typically offering plates between $50 and $100. His Eatwith host did not sit with her guests, and Zhen believed that damaged the social experience and relationships his meal might have otherwise facilitated.

With the food handled by hosts, Homecooked continues to research ways to improve the social experience of their company’s events. Zhen said he has looked at dating sites like OkCupid to assess how they generate a sense of trust in other users and what algorithms they use to make better matches. Eatwith, for example, often requires hosts to include high-quality photos

INSIGHT of the food, the atmosphere, the table and the cooking. A few paragraphs on the experience and an extensive sample menu also familiarize guests with the event they’ll be attending. In the app, Homecooked events feature a short biography on the host, profile photos of guests and three interests they each list.

Former Homecooked host Hannah Lant GRD ’21, who learned about the platform by first attending a friend’s event over the summer, agrees that the dynamic between guests and hosts is Homecooked’s strength.

Joining a wide range of individuals around tables that blend New Haven residents and Yale students — locals, immigrants and others on short-term stays — generates conversation that can’t be achieved within the limited scope of one’s own social sphere. Though Kim conceived of Homecooked to fight social isolation, it might present a way to combat social polarization too.

In Afeefa’s cozy East Rock dining room, guests with five occupations from three countries and three American states conversed in two languages, brought together by one meal.

Ali, the IT specialist from Iraq, translated between Arabic and English on the fly as the group discussed Afeefa and Sami’s move to New Haven three years ago, IRIS’s refugee work in the city, the family’s first Homecooked event the weekend before and, of course, the food. Sami and Afeefa encouraged guests to sample appetite-replenishing radishes halfway through dinner, heaping additional helpings of food onto everyone’s plates and urging the group to stretch their stomachs.

A framed tapestry overlooking the feast in Afeefa’s dining room reads, “Happy is the house that shelters a friend.”

As people who value the hospitality and communal dining that Homecooked seeks to cultivate, Syrian refugees have shown great interest in hosting meals. The company filled November with three meals a weekend, most hosted by Syrians hoping

to offer the New Haven community a taste of their country. IRIS recommends refugee chefs to Homecooked, and Zhen helps them organize their meals. “The craziest thing is that these cooks want to cook every single week,” Zhen said. “That is a game changer.”

The founders of Homecooked didn’t initially envision the intersection of the company and Middle Eastern refugees, but in its early months, Homecooked has become a way to engage them locally. Hosting meals through the app, refugees meet those in their new community, share their own culture and cuisine and walk away hav-

ing made some money from it all. The day after its unofficial one-year anniversary on Thanksgiving, Homecooked hosted its 40th event — “Hala’s Table” in East Rock — and the Syrian chef treated guests to mandi chicken with rice, green beans and lambstuffed zucchini with tahini-parsley sauce.

“I’ve eaten food that I’ve never eaten before, and I’ve eaten more than I’ve ever eaten before,” Alina Glaubitz ’21, the Yale College guest from the Netherlands, said after Afeefa’s dinner. “I just really enjoyed listening. … Even though there’s this disconnect in terms of our English understanding, there’s still something that’s bringing us all together to sit at the same table.”

WILLIAM MCCORMACK

Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

INSIGHT

MORE THAN SCORES A Yale-invented, New Haven-implemented educational model turns 50.

BY WILLIAM LANGHORNE

I

t was 2:25 p.m., and class had just let out at the Metropolitan Business Academy, an interdistrict magnet high school in New Haven. Outside, the cluster of dismissed students chatting in front of the entrance was thinning. Some waved goodbye to board their buses. Others peeled off to walk home. For the members of the School Planning and Management Team, however, there was still a meeting to attend.

The committee was to gather in the guidance conference room, a two-story, oval-shaped lounge. Three-quarters of its arc are walled off by stacks of translucent blocks. With light flooding in from almost every angle, the towering room resembles a human-sized fishbowl.

At the door, I was greeted by Nicholas, a junior class representative.

With pride he extended his hand and said, “Welcome to Metro.

This is my school.”

Principal Mike Crocco came in behind me and joined Nicholas at the table in the center of the room. Two freshman representatives arrived soon after and sat down in chairs along the wall. Nicholas motioned for them to come to the table.

“You all sit with the big dogs now,” he said, and the freshmen beamed. Within a few minutes, a dozen students and teachers representing different grade levels, disciplines and school committees had gathered. Chris Willems, a freshman science teacher, scanned the table. He was acting as the stand-in chair of the team that day. At exactly 2:29:50 he called the meeting to order.

Collaborations that inspire he system behind the school management team at Metro is the Comer Model or the School Development Program, known as SDP. Created by Yale School of Medicine child psychiatrist James Comer, the SDP shifts the focus of education

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20 | January 2019

toward a holistic understanding of child development. Instead of conducting assessments strictly through standardized testing, the program encourages educators to evaluate their students not only cognitively, but also along five additional “developmental pathways” emphasizing ethical, physical, linguistic, social and psychological growth. In 1968, the model was first implemented in the two lowest-performing schools in New Haven. Now in its 50th year, it has spread to over 1,150 schools across the country, even making its way to South Africa, England and Ireland.

At the classroom level, the model works by embedding the six developmental pathways throughout the curriculum.

According to Amanda Lupi, a fifth and sixth grade teacher at the L.W. Beecher Museum School of Arts and Sciences, a New Haven elementary and middle magnet school, the pathways are woven into everything from the school pledge to classroom readings.

COURTESY OF LAUREN CHICOSKI Shoutouts during announcements and award ceremonies celebrate students who have excelled in the pathways.

Last year, Lupi saw how effective the Comer principles were in giving children a sense of belonging. When her students analyzed the pathways exhibited by Auggie, the main character from the novel “Wonder,” she noticed that a child who was having trouble fitting in began to feel more comfortable as his peers saw how he was connected to the character.

Child development philosophy plays a role in determining how instruction style changes over grade levels. Camille Cooper, director of learning, teaching and development initiatives at Yale’s SDP, explained how students between the ages of 10 and 11 become argumentative. According to Cooper, this is a natural step in maturation; children are learning to be more self-sufficient at this stage. Instead of suppressing this behavior, the SDP

INSIGHT encourages teachers to channel it constructively through debates and compare-and-contrast discussions.

Under the Comer Model, assessments are designed to take into account yearlong student development. At Metro, teachers from the same subject area gather twice annually to review performance and adjust their assessments and instruction based on levels of student mastery. Metro students choose a teacher every year to serve as an academic adviser to help them through the process. Three times a year, students hold individual student-led conferences where they present work from each of their classes and discuss their academic performance with their adviser and any adult invested in their future. During their time at Metro, students build a portfolio of their best work to be showcased in a senior year celebration. According to Lauren Chicoski, the magnet recruitment specialist at Metro, a Q&A is held at the end of the celebration for teachers and parents, which results in deep discussions and reflections on students’ high school careers.

“This is very different from high-stakes standardized tests where you administer the test and … [it goes] into never-ever land.” Willems said.

“We’re constantly looping back with children and helping them master content they have not yet mastered.”

Driving the school n the schoolwide level, three teams are implemented by the SDP to provide support for the model: the School Planning and Management Team, the Parent Team and the Student Staff Support Team.

According to Willems, the School Planning and Management Team is “the engine that drives the school.” At Metro, the group meets once a month, providing a platform for students and teachers to discuss school wide policies ranging from funding raising to academic advising. Opportunities for student internships and class trips are facilitated by the committee through partnerships with nonprofits, government organizations and local businesses.

Willems has found that despite the range of its responsibilities, Metro’s School Planning and Management Team is able to stay on task by following the Comer principles of “collaboration, consensus and no-fault problem-solving.” These values save time by keeping team members from assigning blame and taking irrefutable stances on decisions.

While the School Planning and Management Team deals internally with school policies, the Parent Team provides an outside perspective on the school management network. For Cooper, this became apparent when she was working as a principal in Dayton Ohio in the late ‘90s. She decided to work part of the SDP into her school by establishing a parent committee. Through this

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COURTESY OF SEQUELLA COLEMAN

new channel, parents began advocating for a shift to a year-round school calendar.

“They moved the whole community to say yes,” said Cooper.

After Cooper left Dayton to join the SDP at Yale, she observed how engaging with these committees could improve child development at home. In her current work, she is training parent groups at Brennan Rogers School of Communications and Media and Christopher Columbus Family Academy. Some parents have told Cooper the workshops have changed the way they engage with their children.

“They’ve stopped shouting at them or they’ve looked at new ways of trying to correct their [children’s] behaviors,” said Cooper.

During school hours careful engagement with students is particularly important to the Student Staff Support Team, a group designed to help manage the stress that students and staff might bring with them from home.

At Metro, the team is made up of a lead council from Southern Connecticut State University, Metro’s own school leadership team, partners from the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven and graduate student social workers from Southern Connecticut State and the University of New Haven. Every week, the group meets to discuss individual cases that may require support. Two or three graduate student interns are also always on call to talk with students and help them return to class. Some New Haven schools such as Brennan Rogers offer more support through morning meetings which allow students to collectively share their feelings with their classmates and teachers.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

INSIGHT According to Fay Brown, the director of child and adolescent development for the SDP, teachers can also carry issues with them to school that can get in the way of education. At Metro, the Student Staff Support Team monitors staff mental health and is responsible for organizing stress reduction workshops, nutrition seminars and the occasional back massage.

To support these three main teams, Comer schools often have specialized subgroups. Data teams advise School Planning and Management Teams and Student Staff Support Teams using metrics from attendance to test scores. School Climate Committees, mandated by the state, are incorporated to monitor culture and bullying. Other teams handle fundraising and magnet school requirements. Together, these groups work to carry out and update the Comprehensive School Plan, a living document containing the objectives of the school.

To help coordinate these teams and ensure the Comer model is functioning properly, Yale SDP staff will occasionally sit in on School Planning and Management Team and Student Staff Support Team meetings to provide feedback and assistance. According to Sequella Coleman, the principal of Davis Street Arts & Academics School, a New Haven magnet elementary and middle school, the extent of this assistance varies based on the progress of the school in setting or reviving up the model. Chicoski finds that the Yale staff keep the meetings balanced by providing research and articles for the teams to discuss. In one instructional exercise led by SDP staff, Willems was asked to picture the day in the life of a Metro student.

“We actually imagined what it was like to get on the bus and come here and then experience through the child’s lens the dayto-day interactions,” he said. “It was a really powerful vision and activity that helped me a lot to think about the whole child.”

Rallying the village hile the Comer Model has maintained a presence in the New Haven Public School system since its creation in 1968, support and funding for the program has ebbed and flowed. In the late 1990s, Brown noticed New Haven Public Schools began adopting or returning to the program in waves.

In 2001, however, public education moved sharply towards the prioritization of test scores with the No Child Left Behind Act. Funds for travel were cut and districts stopped searching for reform models. Before, workshops offered by the SDP at the Omni Hotel in New Haven drew 200 to 300 educators five or six times a year from around the country. After the legislation passed, only half as many attended the sessions. Teachers started to see the model as an extra burden to work into their test preparation curriculum.

But what the educators failed to see was that SDP’s methods could only improve standardized test performance. A report published in 2002 by the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk labeled the SDP as one of only three models with “statistically significant and positive achievement effects” on test scores. During the sessions, teachers were encouraged to pay

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attention to the physical development and mental health of their students. How much sleep were they getting? Were they drinking enough water?

“It would take by midweek … for [the teachers] to really have their eyes opened,” said Brown. “They were just being advised … to work differently.”

Despite the success, support for the SDP in New Haven has been repeatedly tested by new initiatives. Some programs such as the New Haven Public Schools 21st Century Competencies, which stresses many of the same values as Comer, can be combined with SDP, though Willems said other initiatives are continuously emerging that could replace the Comer Model.

However, New Haven teachers who are veterans to the SDP have remained loyal. Willems, who taught at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven before coming to Metro, worked under three principals who used the model to varying degrees. According to him, no other system rivaled the Comer program. He acknowledged, however, that the model requires unified endorsement to function. “[Wilbur Cross] was the largest high school to manage in the district. … Without much direct support for Comer principles, it was not going to happen,” he said.

In 2014, the SDP started a collaborative with Southern Connecticut State University and New Haven public schools to introduce future teachers to child development. After receiving a Kellogg grant to fund the partnership, Yale staff have delivered presentations at Southern Connecticut State and provided onsite training. The grant has also allowed the SDP to hold a four day academy in July for the past four years where Southern Connecticut State students are mixed in with teachers from New Haven public schools for workshops. According to Brown, the future teachers can learn a lot about the current realities of education from the New Haven veterans. It all comes back to the Comer principle of collaboration.

“One person alone in the school can’t do it all,” said Brown.

“The principal can’t do it all. He or she needs to work with the entire staff to rally the village.”

Just before 3:30 p.m., Willems called Metro’s School Planning and Management Team meeting to a close. In under an hour, the team had covered an impressive amount. Principal Crocco began by sharing statistics about the successful completion of student-led conferences. The Student Staff Support Team reported that since the beginning of the school year, they had worked with 71 individual students. Teachers from different grade levels and subject matters commented on the revisions they had made to their curriculums in the past semester. When concerns about the academic advisory guidelines were raised, students and teachers quickly arrived at a consensus and updated the system. Issues with the bake sale policy and the “failure-intervention plan,” the school’s strategy for helping struggling students, were similarly resolved. After opening up the final minutes of the meeting for any need-to-know updates, the group adjourned. Students zipped up their backpacks and teachers gathered their papers. Another productive meeting was in the books.

FEATURE

The university model S As the world governments sit idle, Yale is experimenting with carbon pricing that could save the planet— but is a university the right test bed?

BY ELLIE GARLAND

ince Aug. 26, Travis Tran ’21 has placed every piece of his personally-generated trash into a 64-ounce glass mason jar. Filled with a Tide Pod bag, Glutino bar wrapper, cupcake mold and several plastic spoons, the result looks like an avant-garde art piece — a colorful critique of consumerism. The jar, which sits on a shelf in his common room, serves as a physical reminder for him to “live his values.”

Tran feels morally responsible for the trash he creates. After a summer in Tanzania, where he witnessed the damaging effects of climate change firsthand, Tran has committed to a zero-waste lifestyle. He spent the fall semester transforming his Berkeley suite into a hub for environmental innovation. He composts banana peels in an old yogurt container and concocts his own toothpaste, detergent and deodorant from baking soda, vinegars and natural oils. To bathe, he fills an industrial orange Homer’s All-Purpose bucket with four gallons of water and pours it over his body in a Berkeley shower stall.

“When it comes to waste and our earth, I think I have a higher level of caring than most,” said Tran.

While his behavior is admittedly extreme, Tran is by no means alone in his concern for the planet. Over 70 percent of Americans are “alarmed, concerned, or cautious” about climate change, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, an interdisciplinary research team that investigates barriers and motivators to climate action.

Concern is often an important precursor to climate action at Yale, but the former does not reliably predict the latter. To bridge the gap between value and action, economists and environmentalists have devised a plan: make people pay for pollution through a global tax on carbon.

Carbon pricing creates natural incentives to reduce fossil fuel consumption and develop clean technology. If polluters were to pay the “social cost” of carbon at a rate reflecting the harm they imposed, the theory holds, they would find creative and cost-effective ways to reduce their carbon footprint.

While a carbon tax has received bipartisan support in polls and is cited in climate reports as a panacea, world governments have struggled to impose the kind of comprehensive tax that could save our planet from the environmental, economic and social damage predicted to occur as early as 2040.

As the world debates and awaits the implementation of a carbon tax, Yale and eight other American colleges and universities have taken matters into their own hands. These campuses have launched internal carbon-pricing programs to decrease carbon emissions and promote green innovation. But is it effective to tax emissions within the non-market economy of a college campus?

Universities are at once optimally and adversely positioned to implement carbon-pricing programs. They can be more transparent with their data than private companies, contributing to global understanding of carbon pricing, and have more flexibility with implementation than a corporation or government.

“As a research university, we are poised to test out new solutions to global challenges,”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

FEATURE Virginia Chapman, director of the Office of Sustainability, wrote in an email. “The Yale Carbon Charge provides great visibility around energy use and conservation.”

But given the inherent difficulty of financially in‘Carbon pricing in a non-market economy is not the most obvious fit,’ centivizing students and faculty who do not personalsaid Pickett. ‘But at some point, it becomes a wasted effort to try to ly pay energy bills, Yale forest policy professor Robert predict and perfect everything. It’s useful to just go out and try it.’”

Mendelsohn has some reservations about universities sharing their experimental results.

“From theory to practice, the devil is always in the details. Great ideas can be defeated without proper application,” said Mendelsohn.

“We don’t want to prove that pricing is a bad idea just because it wasn’t administered properly on one campus.”

Casey Pickett, the director of Yale’s internal carbon-pricing program, takes a different stance.

“Carbon pricing in a non-market economy is not the most obvious fit,” said Pickett. “But at some point, it becomes a wasted effort to try to predict and perfect everything. It’s useful to just go out and try it.”

“

— Yale’s carbon-pricing program came about as a collaborative effort between its students and professors. The carbon tax is the brainchild of Yale economics professor William Nordhaus ’63, who has advocated for taxation as an effective climate remedy since the 1970s.

On Dec. 10, Nordhaus collected his prize: a Nobel diploma, a medal and 4.5 million Swedish krona, equivalent to about $500,000.

Months earlier, Nordhaus learned he’d won the Nobel Prize in economics while still in bed. “I slept through it,” he said, at a press conference.

He was honored for calculating the economic damage inflicted by a single ton of emitted carbon — a model that translates into a succinct policy, backed by scientists and economists alike: Tax what you don’t want.

“Nordhaus’ prize gives added impetus to the idea of carbon charges as the right kind of policy to drive not just attention to climate change, but also the innovation required to spur a clean energy future,” said Daniel Esty, a professor of environmental law at Yale.

But since the mid-1990s, when Nordhaus’ solution first gained political attention, no major world government has succeeded in imposing the kind of carbon tax for which Nordhaus and his colleagues advocate. In Washington state, a referendum to create a first-in-thenation carbon tax was easily defeated last November. Another plan, co-authored by former Republican Secretaries of State James Baker and George Shultz, hopes to make carbon pricing more attractive by returning all proceeds from a $40 per ton carbon tax to the American people on an equal and monthly basis via dividend checks. While the plan has received bipartisan support, according to an October poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, its passage in Congress looks unlikely under the current administration. In theory, a carbon tax is a more efficient way to reduce carbon emissions than regulation, but at the ballot, voters struggle to justify policies that raise their current cost of living in return for a more livable planet in

24 | January 2019

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ISABEL LEE

FEATURE the distant future.

This inaction has come at a high price. On the same day in October when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Nordhaus’ Nobel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report, produced by 91 scientists, including Yale environmental studies professor Karen Seto. The report predicts that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels could come as early as 2040, causing food shortages, flooding and the displacement of tens of millions of people. At the same time, America’s emissions show no sign of slowing. In fact, this year, they rose by 3.4 percent, the largest leap since 2010, according to the Rhodium Group. To curb emissions, the IPCC report recommends swift action through a global carbon tax. Nordhaus estimates a critical two or three–year period to successfully implement a global carbon-pricing program while avoiding the estimated $54 trillion–worth of damage expected by 2040.

On campus, things are looking more hopeful. In 2014, professors Nordhaus and Esty hosted an outdoor “teach out” on Cross Campus to discuss solutions to climate change in celebration of Earth Day. Inspired by the discussion, a group of graduate and undergraduate students drafted and submitted a letter to the Yale administration suggesting that the University adopt a carbon-pricing program. President Peter Salovey appointed a committee to investigate the feasibility of the program, and at their recommendation, Yale launched a financially impactful pilot carbon charge program in 2015 — the first university in the world to do so.

The pilot program initially included 20 Yale buildings and tested four different schemes.

Collectively, the pilot units reduced emissions by 4.9 percent below the baseline, more than the control group’s 1.4 percent reduction. In 2017, Yale expanded the carbon-pricing scheme to 259 campus buildings that together account for about 70 percent of the institution’s emissions. In January 2018, Yale launched the Carbon Charge in its residential colleges. Each participating building receives a monthly report detailing its electricity, chilled water, natural gas and steam consumption. These emissions are reported in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and made publicly accessible on the Energy Explorer — an interactive digital map created and maintained by Yale Facilities.

Yale’s revenue-neutral carbon charge is essentially a redistribution of funds between the University’s planning units, based on their emissions reduction as compared to the campus average.

Like business units in a corporation, planning units are the University’s top-level administrative designations, including its graduate and professional schools, museums and libraries, senior administrative offices, and operational departments. Under the Carbon Charge, each planning unit has two budget lines in its monthly report: a charge line for its buildings’ carbon charges, priced at $40 per MTCDE emitted, and a return line, which gives a percentage of the University-wide carbon charge to each planning unit. If a building outperforms the campus average in emissions reductions, its return exceeds its charge, netting funds for its planning unit. If a building underperforms the campus average, its charge exceeds its return, and the planning unit contributes the net funds to the carbon charge.

Every Yale College building — from William L. Harkness Hall and Linsly-Chittenden Hall to the 14 residential colleges — falls under the designation of one planning unit: the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, headed by Dean Tamar Gendler. While Yale College, headed by Dean Marvin Chun, is organizationally independent from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, all Travis Tran’s suite in Berkeley might be turn- of its buildings roll up to the FAS financially. For example, if Pierson College stuing down their heat and limiting their showers, dents turned off their lights, turned down their heat and shortened their showers, but their efforts could be completely offset by thereby reducing Pierson’s emissions, Deans Gendler and Chun could choose to financially reward the College. If Pierson was particularly wasteful one month, the their neighbors across the hall.”

“

Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

FEATURE FAS pays its charge. Back in the 2016 pilot program, Pierson College received a $3,000 rebate for their energy reduction, which it plans to invest in automatic water bottle refill stations.

“For the Carbon Charge to be effective at the residential college level, we needed to get students involved,” said Tanya Wiedeking, the Carbon Charge Liaison for the Council of Heads of Colleges and the building manager of Pierson College.

“For the Carbon Charge to be effective at the residential college level, we needed to get students involved,” said Tanya Wiedeking, the Carbon Charge Liaison for the Council of Heads of Colleges and the building manager of Pierson College.

“Students need to be at the center of the Carbon Charge in its design, implementation and the evaluation of lessons learned, especially as end-users of energy at Yale,” said Ryan Laemel ’14, a former project manager of the Yale Carbon Charge, who urges students to take ownership of the program in order to maximize its efficacy.

Residential colleges present a unique set of challenges for the Carbon Charge program. As with any campus building, its students, faculty and staff do not personally pay energy bills. An optimal pricing system would incentivize every member of the Yale community, but under this model, responsibility falls primarily on building managers and heads of planning units. As residential buildings, the colleges also face the challenge of full-time occupancy and personalized climate zones. Tran’s suite in Berkeley might be turning down their heat and limiting their showers, but their efforts could be completely offset by their neighbors across the hall. On the other hand, since energy use in the colleges is highly dependent on occupant behavior, they present a major opportunity for collective student impact.

Sarah Brandt ’17 wrote her senior thesis on the environmental attitudes of Yale students and faculty under the Carbon Charge pilot program. She identified concern for the environment as the primary driver of emissions-reducing behavioral change, but her research concluded that people at Yale would be willing to further reduce their consumption with decentralized economic incen-

26 | January 2019

tives, clear feedback on energy use and more collaboration. With these ideas in mind, the Carbon Charge Working Group — a student group spearheaded by Wiedeking — is spreading awareness and rewarding good energy habits within the residential colleges.

“Most of our work is figuring out how to get the word out to students,” said Trini Kechkian, a Pierson sophomore in the CCWG. “Because when students are aware and participating in an internal carbon-pricing program, it gives them some sense of agency in a problem where we most often feel helpless.”

The Carbon Charge Challenge last spring offered cash prizes for innovative ideas to save energy in the residential colleges. The winning proposal advocated for incorporating a sustainability workshop into first-year orientation. Wiedeking transformed the “Recess Checklist,” a list of energy-saving measures students should take before going on break, into a lottery for Pierson students to win a free suite dinner and movie.

“Pizza is a very good motivator,” said Esty. “In my experience, on a college campus, it’s probably the single strongest economic incentive, which goes to my spirit of green lights, a reward for doing what we want people to do.”

The Yale College planning unit received a modest return in the most recent financial year, according to Wiedeking. Among Yale College buildings, the residential colleges were the biggest contributors to energy reductions and returns, which attests to the positive impact student behavior can have in tackling the emissions problem. But as a whole, is the Yale Carbon Charge working?

Eighteen months have passed since the Carbon Charge’s campuswide expansion, but according to the program’s director Casey Pickett, it is too early to assess its efficacy and impact. Pickett, who runs the carbon charge program from the Provost’s Office, estimates it will take at least five years to produce significant data. When it comes to climate action, five years is a long time. Nordhaus predicted a critical two to three–year period to implement a global carbon tax and avoid $54 trillion in damage.

Unlike most major studies, Yale has no clear control group to which to compare its results. Rather than retain the initial non-

charged control group, the program was implemented as widely as possible in 2017. So to measure impact, Pickett plans to compare Yale emissions levels to other institutions with similar consumption meters but without a carbon charge program.

Like Mendelsohn, Pickett is wary of prematurely releasing an analysis, in part because carbon-pricing schemes tend to affect long-term decision-making, like the construction of new buildings and purchasing of major pieces of equipment, not short-term outcomes.

“It’s a dicey thing,” said Pickett. “You don’t want to report on the experiment before a reasonable person would expect there to be a result, because the lack of a result could be misinterpreted as a lack of an impact, when it’s really just too early to say.”

Besides, for Pickett, emissions reduction is almost beside the point. He views the Carbon Charge program as an experiment and the campus as its petri dish. Its success depends on its academic value and its ability to produce research that could inform local, state and national policy design.

“There are lots of different ways we could reduce campus emissions with much greater confidence. The purpose of this effort is to experiment with carbon pricing,” Pickett said. “This will be a success whether it has an impact or not because there is a lot of useful information to be harvested.”

Thankfully, Yale’s Office of Sustainability is taking other steps to reach its emission reduction goals, mainly through capital projects and operational improvements executed

by Yale’s Energy Management team. The University is on track to meet its 2050 commitment to carbon-neutrality, including its intermediary goal to reduce emissions 43 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Despite lingering uncertainty about efficacy, carbon-pricing programs are taking off at universities across the country.

Pickett — in collaboration with researchers at Swarthmore College, Smith College and Second Nature, a non-profit — has developed a toolkit to help campuses implement a version of Yale’s policies.

“Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to innovate and inform the broader effort,” said Alex Barron, an envi-

FEATURE ronmental science professor who worked with undergraduates on a $70 proxy carbon price at Smith College. “With the toolkit, we can help other schools, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.”

After hearing about the Yale Carbon Charge, Camilo Monge SOM ’19, a Peruvian economist, was inspired to bring internal carbon pricing to campuses in Peru. He found the toolkit very helpful in developing

his proposal.

“My background has zero relation to any sort of carbon charge, but having this toolkit available made all the difference,” said Monge. “It has a lot of potential, and it has to go outside the U.S. — to China, to India, the big guys.”

Pickett expressed the potential for Yale to learn from peer institutions as they adopt their own carbon-pricing models. Each university will serve as a new test bed.

“As more institutions engage in carbon pricing, we’ll start to see lots of different approaches,” Pickett said. “I hope that we will make some adjustments to our own program design to help this policy idea better fit the

duction goals, birth a flood of new research and keep student conversation focused on carbon pricing in sync with national-level outreach,” said Alexander Posner ’19, the co-founder and president of the group.

But in the ominous countdown to 2040 and beyond, focusing the national conversation on carbon pricing is not enough. As politicians debate the merits of a global carbon tax and Yalies await the Carbon Charge results, concrete climate action is needed more than ever. Without external incentives, genuine concern for the environment — rather than the free market — must drive this green innovation.

At Yale, most pro-environmental behavior is motivated by concern.

“More than any other single factor, both interviewees and survey respondents cited their concern for the environment as what motivated them to abate their energy use in buildings at Yale,” wrote Brandt in her thesis.

“This mentality is an important precursor to environmental action, and the success [of climate action] might hinge on a predisposed sympathy for environmental causes.”

Yale’s student-led environmental innovation takes many PHOTOS BY YEHIA ELKERSH forms: from projects that help local food trucks go solar and pubHow do we get this off campus? How do we lications that highlight environmental news get this in states and nations and across the to sit-ins that demand Yale divest from fossil fuel companies — the most recent of which globe?”

Universities can bring visibility to the resulted in 48 arrests. While these avenues global challenge of emissions reduction, ide- of activism have little in common, they all ally pressuring governments to implement function independently of economic inmarket-based environmental solutions of centives. And there’s Tran, for whom green their own. In the absence of government ini- innovation, from dorm-room composts to tiatives, Students for Carbon Dividends — a bucket showers, is a way of life.

“We need market-based approaches bipartisan student-led movement that aims to catapult the Baker-Shultz carbon divi- and national policies to change the world dends plan into the national spotlight — has in a substantial way,” said Tran. “But in the focused its attention on lobbying for carbon meantime, I ask what are some actual steps I can take right now? If I want to tackle the pricing on college campuses.

“Campus carbon pricing could genu- problem of carbon emissions, I can at least inely help colleges meet their emission re- start with myself.” institutional context.”

As the movement spreads in the education sector, climate activists on campus hope to influence the wider policy discussion.

“Our program has started so many conversations about effective climate policy on campus,” said Nathaniel Graff, a Climate Action Senior Fellow, working on a revenue-positive carbon-pricing model at Swarthmore. “But the real question is:

Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

FEATURE

in between homes

BY ISABELLA ZOU

Michaelle Gonzalez used to be one of the twenty-three percent of youth experiencing homelessness in Connecticut who are LGBTQ+. Now she’s advocating for them.

W

hen she was 15 years old, Michaelle Gonzalez came out to her parents as queer. To her surprise, her mother, a member of a Pentecostal cult with extremely conservative views, acted normally.

“She pretended like everything was fine,” Gonzalez said. “I thought everything was fine.”

When her parents announced they were going on vacation to their native Puerto Rico, she thought nothing of it. They dropped her off at a friend’s house and told her they would be back in two weeks.

She never heard from them again.

At first, Gonzalez continued living with her friend’s family. But after enduring

28 | January 2019

six months of frequent beatings from the family’s son, she made the decision to leave, she said.

“I felt like, if I’m going to sit here and get hit or I’m going to go live on the street, then I’ll go live on the street,” Gonzalez said.

Her sister, who remained in the house her parents had left, barred her from entering because of her sexuality. When she couldn’t break in, she slept outside in the extreme cold and in extreme heat.

At times, she slept behind The Sound School, sneaking in during after hours for warmth. Other times, she slept on the New Haven Green. For a few months, she slept at a man’s house in exchange for sex.

Meanwhile, she started working two jobs at different locations of Dunkin’ Donuts.

She ate her meals there sometimes, ate at her school or stole from convenience stores.

“I was so frightened about being very small, and by myself, and nobody knows where I’m at,” she said. “I was always frightened of getting caught [stealing] and also frightened that nobody would ever find out.”

She said that the Department of Children and Families knew of her case and was searching for a living situation for her, but her caseworker told her that few foster families would want to adopt someone as old as her. The department did not

FEATURE respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Gonzalez moved from place to place, unmoored.

— On Nov. 16, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced that Connecticut would receive $6.5 million to end youth homelessness in the state by 2020. The grant was the largest sum conferred this year as part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program, which aims to award states with concrete and innovative plans for combating youth homelessness.

According to a study conducted by the True Colors Fund and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, compared to other states, Connecticut is doing well. The study graded each state on dozens of metrics spanning legal, systemic and environmental barriers faced by youth experiencing homelessness. Their resulting State Index on Youth Homelessness gives Connecticut a score of 61 out of 100 for homeless youth — the third best in the country.

Connecticut is one of only four states to have a strategic plan to end youth homelessness that specifically includes strategies to address LGBTQ+ needs, per the study. And it’s one of only six states that maintains a youth action board, which represents youths’ needs in the making of youth homelessness policy. Overall, Connecticut and the District of Columbia had the highest “environment” scores, indicating a supportive environment for youth experiencing homelessness.

But Connecticut lacks crucial support for homeless youths’ education rights, as well as a state law to provide funding support in the style of the federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act. And despite efforts to remedy these deficiencies, both across the state and nationwide, the number of youth experiencing homelessness is on the rise.

Last January, Connecticut’s third an-

nual Youth Count administered surveys to youth in schools, colleges, local drop-in sites and other gathering places. Overall, 5,054 homeless or unstably housed youth were counted, up from about 4,300 the previous year.

In the Greater New Haven region, 816 were counted, and in the city of New Haven itself, 87 were counted to be homeless or unstably housed.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act mandates that schools in the U.S. provide a homeless liaison for their students, ensuring that youth experiencing homelessness are identified and connected to services including health care, mental health, substance abuse, transportation and housing. In reality, however, according to Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, the Chief of Youth, Family, & Community Engagement for New Haven Public Schools, the people who serve as McKinney-Vento liaisons are teachers, social workers, guidance counselors and even principals, who prioritize their primary duties over their McKinney-Vento responsibilities. Furthermore, their services tend to be poorly publicized, leaving students experiencing homelessness to feel a lack of support from the school.

Gonzalez said that during her time experiencing homelessness while attending the Sound School, she wasn’t aware that a McKinney-Vento liaison was in the build-

ing.

Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing one-tenth of the school year, hovers around 19 percent of the general student population in New Haven. Among students facing homelessness, the figure is more than double: 44 percent. Increasing embarrassment resulting from teachers’ attitudes and her own sense of dignity and presentation contributed to Gonzalez’s worsening attendance — and her eventual dropping out.

“When I did show up to class, teachers would point me out, like oh, you’re late, you need to see me after class,” she said.

“And that felt like you’re putting all this attention on me right now, and all the students are noticing I’m wearing the same things I was wearing three days ago, and they all notice now that I haven’t been here for a few days. It made me wonder, what’s the point of being here?”

At a Board of Alders meeting the night of Wednesday, Oct. 17, Gonzalez and other high school students who had experienced homelessness advocated for schools to provide more basic services for students, such as washers and dryers.

Gonzalez also advocated for the need to train teachers and youth peers to work with homeless youth and connect them with important resources.

“If I had been able to see that there was some sort of support available, I would

PHOTOS BY ISABELLA ZOU

Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

FEATURE have reached out for it. I wanted to be housed. I wanted off the streets. But I was really afraid of asking for help when I didn’t see any resources available. I just felt like, what are they going to do for me anyway?”

Gonzalez’s friends knew what she was going through, to some extent. But she warned them not to tell anyone. Gonzalez said they were afraid of what they didn’t know — what the school would do, what legal action might ensue.

After talking to other youth who have experienced homelessness, she said that this is a common phenomenon.

“Our friends always know — and they don’t say anything,” she said. “And it’s not their fault, but I feel like the school system is failing us by not pushing us, not educating us, not being open and inclusive and saying that this is a safe place, and nothing bad is going to happen to you and your friend; we will provide some sort of support.”

— On a bleak day in 2017 on the Green last year, Gonzalez met another teenager experiencing homelessness, who told her about Youth Continuum.

The organization is the largest resource for unaccompanied homeless youth in New Haven and runs the only shelter for homeless youth in Connecticut. It provides a range of services, from street outreach to a variety of housing opportunities.

Gonzalez came to their drop-in center for homeless youth, where together with a caseworker, she called 211 — the statewide point of entry for homeless services — and began the intake process. Soon, she was accepted into the transitional living program and began sharing an apartment with a roommate. For the first time in more than two years, she had a place to come home to.

According to Paul Kosowsky, Youth Continuum’s CEO, the youth homeless population is primarily composed of runaways, youth who are choosing to live outside and “throwaways,” whose families have forced

30 | January 2019

“

‘If I had been able to see that there was some sort of support available, I would have reached out for it. I wanted to be housed. I wanted off the streets.’”

them out of their homes — sometimes after they come out, like Gonzalez, and other times after learning they are pregnant.

Across crisis housing beds, the transitional living program, rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing and scattered site programs, the organization serves approximately 100 youth.

“What we do is so unique because there are so many different pieces, and they’re all connected to each other, so we’re able to move people through the system in a timely way,” Kosowsky said.

Fighting youth homelessness poses unique challenges in a system designed for adults. HUD defines homelessness literally, meaning that to qualify for many longer-term housing resources, someone has to be living either in an emergency shelter or in a place not meant for human habitation.

However, Kosowsky said, many youth avoid adult shelters because they feel out of place or unsafe, and many don’t sleep outside as Gonzalez did. Instead, adolescents will couch-surf to survive. But this creates a sort of limbo, destabilizing their housing situation while disqualifying them from most of the adult-oriented housing services in the area.

“Now they find themselves being sexually trafficked or engaging in survival sex for a place to stay or for food to eat,” Kosowsky said. “Now they’re in danger, and now they qualify for housing, but until they get into that bad situation, they don’t qualify. It’s a system that was built on the adult model, and it doesn’t easily take into account that unique equation that youth [who] are homeless bring. We try to be the agency that understands the issues and

provide a range of services and can help figure out how to get into the system.”

One of these services is LGBTQ+ counseling. Twenty-three percent of youth in the 2018 Connecticut Youth Count identified as LGBTQ+, and nationwide, the estimates range from 20–40 percent.

Gonzalez’s homelessness directly resulted from perceptions of her identity.

Her situation seemed only to reinforce her parents’ beliefs, leading to an ongoing mental health struggle with self-identity and worth.

“All I’d ever heard at seminars and things was like, gay people do drugs, and they end up homeless, and everybody gets HIV and AIDS, and they die, they go to hell, and they’re evil,” Gonzalez said. “I got a very negative education about it. And then, it was negative reinforcement when I was housing unstable and living on the street.”

The Voices of Youth Count, an ongoing project by the University of Chicago, interviewed 26,161 people about their experiences with youth homelessness for one recent study. It found that not only are LGBTQ+ youth at more than double the risk of homelessness compared to nonLGBTQ+ peers, but homeless LGBTQ+ youth had over twice the rate of early death among youth experiencing homelessness.

The research also showed that most LGBTQ+ youth became homeless not in the immediate aftermath of “coming out,” as in Gonzalez’s case, but as the result of increasing family instability and frayed relationships over time.

This was the case for Violet Thomas, 20, who came out to her family as a trans woman during her senior year of high school and, as her situation at home worsened, eventually decided to leave. According to an article from Connecticut Public Radio, she couch-surfed for a while before living in her car.

Research advocates for increased resources for LGBTQ+ youth to provide the kind of counseling and targeted support that has helped Gonzalez. The staff and counseling at Youth Continuum, some of whom are openly LGBTQ+, helped Gonzalez accept her sexuality, something she was previously unable to separate from her

FEATURE homelessness.

“I have to forgive myself,” Gonzalez said.

“I need to stop hating myself for something I shouldn’t hate myself for.”

— Kellyann Day — the CEO of New Reach, an organization that runs shelters primarily serving women and children — believes that ending youth homelessness could help address the issue of adult homelessness.

“If you give kids a stable environment to grow up in, a stable home, you help prevent them from becoming homeless later as adults,” Day said.

Studies as recent as 2010 have found that adverse childhood events, including the neglect and abuse that accompany homelessness, are powerful risk factors for adult homelessness. According to the American Psychological Association, homeless children are twice as likely as other children to have a learning disability, repeat a grade or be suspended from school and are twice as likely to experience hunger and its adverse effects on cognitive development. Also, about half of school-age children grapple with depression or anxiety, and unaccompanied youth are often more likely to struggle with mental health and substance abuse issues.

But working to rectify this is difficult.

New Reach must fight to balance longterm prevention with the immediate needs of people in crisis, which vary greatly case to case. Even families with older children have different needs than those with younger ones, Day said. Parents of young children need childcare to work, while teenagers might require career and academic support.

“We want to help people today, but also make sure that they’re thriving and staying housed,” Day said. “For the chronically homeless individual who’s on the Green and who’s struggling with mental health and substance abuse, that thriving definition is different than the [one for a] 21-year-old mom who’s got two kids under the age of four, in a shelter. Neither is right or wrong: it’s just different. So the

interventions need to be different, and the services need to be different.”

New Reach is receiving some of Connecticut’s grant money to help provide these services. And out of the $6.5 million, Youth Continuum CEO Paul Kosowsky said his organization will be receiving $450,000, all to be used in New Haven.

He said the money will help his agency to double the number of short-term beds in its crisis housing program from six to 12, hire two youth navigators and enable 28 people — up from four — to receive rapid rehousing services, emergency housing stabilization and short-term rent assistance to get into their own apartments as soon as possible.

“The most important thing is to provide more of what’s needed so we don’t have to have a waiting list,” he said. “The goal of all the programs to make sure that homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring.”

Youth Continuum is hiring several “youth navigators” to work with youth on the brink of homelessness to help stabilize their families or connect them to other community resources to keep them out of the homeless system. For those who do become homeless, they provide crisis housing to keep their period of homelessness as brief as possible. Finally, their longer-term housing and support programs aim to lift them into self-sufficiency and ensure they don’t have to enter the system again.

— Gonzalez is now part of a Youth Advisory Board at Youth Continuum, a group of about 12 former or current clients of the organization that advocate for the needs of the youth it serves. She said it gives them “a sense of power in [their] own decision-making.”

The board represents the needs of the homeless youth population in city government settings, participating in New Haven Board of Education meetings once a month.

“We wanted to become human to these people, so we’ve created our own platform to speak and to share our experiences,” she said.

The board also engages in statewide initiatives to end youth homelessness, attending monthly meetings at Youth Action Hub, a youth-led research and advocacy organization, and participating in Youth Engagement Team Initiatives, which bring together youth advisory boards from across Connecticut.

At Youth Action Hub, they meet with the likes of Jay Perry, 25, who was abandoned by his parents as a 2-month-old because he was constantly sick and hard to care for.

He grew up in the foster care system and became homeless after he aged out of the system at age 18.

“My experience being homeless has proven useful for some of the projects we work on at the Hub, and I think it has made the people we interview feel more comfortable and understood,” he wrote in a recent blog post. “Working at the Youth Action Hub has allowed me to gain more contact with support systems, as I have continued to struggle with unstable housing, and the knowledge I have gained has made a big difference in my life.”

The members help organize the annual Youth Count, conduct sensitivity trainings for Yale student volunteers at Youth Continuum, and train to use and teach others to use naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal drug.

Gonzalez said that after Youth Continuum helped house her for the first time, she felt inspired to give back through advocacy work. She hopes to stay in the program as long as possible — probably until December of 2019 — and, meanwhile, start earning enough money to afford her own apartment when the time comes. In January, she will begin a six-year term with the National Guard, serving for one weekend a month and two full weeks a year.

Gonzalez hopes to continue her work with youth homelessness as a career, working full-time with Youth Continuum or a similar organization — or even starting her own nonprofit to enhance the network of services.

“When I was homeless, it made me feel like I was less than a person sometimes,” she said. “And I don’t think anybody deserves that.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

POETRY

Like Cicadas

BY EDIE ABRAHAM-MACHT It has been a tumultuous night.

A smell permeates, a smell that means the presence of a stranger who makes things fly apart from the center, makes us realize the center was only made of string and tape, anyway.

I spent 90 seconds with my hand on the light switch tonight and haven’t unpacked or repacked my suitcase.

I hear soft sounds in the next room and wonder how they were achieved: how that weighty anger was, if just for a moment, set aside.

Strangely, in this Brooklyn brownstone I hear something like cicadas and it feels almost God-sent — street and all things hushed by a soft buzzing, blessed inhale, the city domed, for once, by the wide starriness of country sky.

Because any imposition of nature on this all-too-human moment is needed, humbling, needed and humbling.

I fall asleep to this.

32 | January 2019

ILLUSTRATION BY ASHLEY ANTHONY

ESSAY

O

This is not a ghost story

BY JINGJING XIAO

IRENE KIM

33 | January 2019

nce upon a time, in the kindergarten I was to attend, a girl who loved to draw died.

I would learn of her after my markers began disappearing from their yellow plastic box, through the stories my classmates told. I do not believe in ghosts, and thought my classmates superstitious or playful, but to date I cannot explain how these markers kept disappearing even when I held the box closed. Eventually, I lost all my markers. Only a handful, and only the ugliest colors, returned to me, reappearing in trash bins and girls’ toilets.

I remember spending afternoons at school long after class ended, the autumn sun pulling my shadow long as I hunched over a toilet bowl, stuffing it with toilet paper so I could flood the marker out without touching the water.

This story may or may not be true; I have always had a tenuous relationship with reality. In kindergarten, chronic sickness kept me fever-mad, and sleepless delirium permitted dreams to remold my memory; perhaps that is why when I think of family, I think about a man I’ve never known.

— When my father was nine, my grandfather, who was dauntless, died.

My father tells me stories of him with a smile that is never entirely happy, with motions like the tearing open of an old wound. I do not believe in ghosts, but I try to handle his memories with care because I know how malleable memory can be. I scheduled weeks in advance to record an interview with him, and even then the request felt insensitive. How do you cram an entire life into an one hour interview, especially when that life had been your father’s?

We conducted the interview remotely, in my Connecticut dorm and our Kentucky home, two points in space tethered together by an Internet connection. As my mother set up Skype, I set aside 20 minutes to download a video call recording program so my father need never do this interview

ESSAY again.

I no longer remember how he appeared during our call, but I can imagine him sitting in the rotating desk chair with that familiar wrinkled cushion, hunched over his joined hands. The top edge of a yellow legal pad appeared in the bottom of the video frame as he spoke; he had compressed his father into three bullet points. These sentence fragments reappear in English on my own notepad, 850 miles away, describing my grandfather as dauntless, loving and curious. Dauntless, for he outlived the short lives of Red Army rebels, ate the leather off his belt to survive the Gobi Desert and fooled a dozen bandits in a shootout where he held a single gun. Loving, for he never beat and always spoiled his children, especially my father, the youngest, whose homework assignments he paid my aunts and uncles to complete. Curious, for he was selected for covert operations because of his intellect. He learned to memorize secret documents by sight, but regretted all his life never learning to read.

These scrawled anecdotes covered two pages of the notebook.

Now, I reread the bullet points after our interview and experience the ugly thought that they remind me of the stories my classmates told, the stories that may or may not be true. At the end of the interview, my father admitted that what he tells of Grandfather are not only the decades-old remnants of his own memories, but also stories he has spent 40 years telling and retelling to himself, forming a mélange of dreams with reality. He has never told them to anyone else, my father said, with that smile which is never entirely happy, as he described the act of storytelling with a gesture like the tearing open of an old wound. I remember the dread I experienced while hunched over the girl’s toilet, when all I had lost were markers, and I think of my father hunched over his hands, with that yellow legal pad which held all that remained of his father. I prepared to record the interview, I realize, because I fear to prod. That video recording permits that I never again ask this of my father.

Besides, I have always had a tenuous relationship with reality.

Before the interview, I thought that my grandfather disappeared on a mission, one of the covert “operations” on which he used to vanish for months at a time. My father often spoke of afternoons he spent waiting, sitting on the front porch playing marbles or completing homework, believing that his father would soon return. “I was too young to understand death,” my father would say, “so every day I waited for your grandfather to come home.” At this, he would gesture, always with his left hand. I would imagine him sitting on wooden steps, pointing to the path approaching his porch from the left — a path only he could see because it no longer existed except in memory.

My grandfather had died of liver failure. My father had been waiting for him to return from a medical, not a military, operation.

I had not known. The notes I took during the interview are in Chinese, my parents’ first language, though I have the Chinese writing skill of a fifth grader. I transcribed the characters in phonetic sounds, with English letters, to keep up with the pace of my father’s speech.

Now, less than an hour later, I’m having trouble associating the letters with the characters. And our family language leans so heavily on unspoken gesture; I remember watching Father make certain move-

ments, thinking, “Thank God I have this on video.” With just my written notes, I can’t remember what the gestures were. I couldn’t come up with words fast enough to match the gestures. How can I remember without words?

But how could I forget? My father would await his father’s return until long after he came to understand death, until he woke staring not at the exposed wooden rafters of his childhood home, but at the tin roof of the military academy where he would inherit Grandfather’s profession. He was 18 when he had this dream for the last time. If my father has 18 years’ worth of dreams from only eight years with his father, then how much more will I dream — how much more will I miss — when he’s gone?

How much have I missed already?

I open my computer and look for the video: on my desktop, in my documents, in the downloads on the computer. There are four small files, each no longer than five minutes; they are just the video tests I used to verify that my program worked. Nothing else. A red record button blinks above the Skype window, waiting to be pressed. I never started recording.

By the time I realize I’m still staring outside my window into the courtyard, it’s evening. I tell myself I can do this again, at home in Kentucky this time. I can borrow my friends’ camera tripod and audio equipment; have questions drafted; do this again, but even better this time. My father lives. It will hurt him, yes, but I know he will not refuse me this. He has already completed the labor of remembering, compressing and flattening his father.

I don’t know how long I stared at my dorm’s whitewashed ceiling before falling asleep, thinking of a story my father told about his military academy with the tin-roofed bunkers. Before my father left the school and went to war, he had interviewed his own father’s former comrade — unlike me, of course, he could not interview his father in the flesh. The old soldier gave my father advice, the particular wording of which would change every time Father retold the story, except for this phrase: “War is the compression of space and time.” From war, the older man explained, one could learn in a week what civilian life took a whole year to teach.

I am my father’s daughter, and, like war, writing necessitates violence. When I hunch over my desk, I dread that the ugliness of my handwriting betrays the ugliness of its actions — because I cannot help but cut some stories short, because every word I write is an erasure of all the others which could have filled that space.

Three lives that have spanned two languages, two cities, half the world and one whole century hold more stories than can fit on paper. But my father says that when I think this way, I should remember that I, too, came close to not existing — he had not met my mother yet when, in 1979, a bullet flew less than one foot above his head. I bow my head to the weight of heritage. Sometimes, with the smile that is not entirely happy, my father tells me that Grandfather would have been proud.

— I do not believe in ghosts, but I cannot deny my memory of those markers disappearing from the box in my hands, and that I am haunted by the stories my father tells of a man I will never know.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 34

BITS & PIECES

A Guide to waving at people at Yale University

BY VERONICA BORATYN GRAPHIC BY REBECCA GOLDBERG

Are they waving to you right

No, but...

They have more than 100 connections on LinkedIn

Yes, but...

They have less than 100 connections on LinkedIn

How are they moving?

Distracted shuffle

Bike

Have you lived together?

Scooter

>1 year

Do they look like they’re

Were they in your section?

Yeah, but they’re They’re actualworking outside ly in a library

Where you did ALL the readings?

As far as height goes...

You’re taller You’re shorter than them than them

Where you did none of the readings?

Are they deep in conversation?

Are they holding the gate for No

<1 year

With people you don’t know, but want to impress

With their parents

With people you know

Yes

What are you wearing?

Have you seen them naked?

Yes

#myCalvins

But are you from the Midwest?

No

Yes

YES

No

Sweater from your high school cross country team

What are they shouting into the bathroom?

“Evolution is fake!”

“Evolution is REAL!”

NO Yale Daily News Magazine | 35