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ARAMARK Corporation comes to Frankford

From Foxbusiness.com:

As part of the partnership kickoff, this week in Philadelphia, ARAMARK’s global headquarters, over 100 ARAMARK employees will work with City Year Corps members to enhance the physical environment of the Frankford Group Ministries, a community based organization that provides human services to residents of Frankford, a neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia. Together they will update kitchens, build shelves, paint murals and sort clothing for donations to local families.

Read the entire story here.

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Third graders go to college

From the Daily News:

The pupils who used to attend teacher Kristin Palmer’s third-grade class at a charter school in Frankford would go to Room 118.

Not anymore.

Now they go into Room Temple.

It’s the same room at the First Philadelphia Charter School for Literacy, at Tacony and Church streets, only the name has been changed as part of a program to instill in the 8-and-9-year-olds the concept of college.

“Many of the students live in poverty, and I believe if young children are exposed to college, even at the conceptual level, there’s more of a chance that they’ll attend college when they’re finished high school,” Palmer said.

“It puts the idea on their radar: They know that college comes after 12th grade and after college, a good job.”

Read the entire story by TOM SCHMIDT here.

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Main Street Frankford

We’ve spent the last few days going over the BRT web site to see what it shows about real estate activity on Frankford Avenue last year. It took some time but now we can report that 25 properties were transferred in 2007. One of them was transferred twice. This runs from the 4200 block through the 5200 block. $ of those transfers only were title changes. The remaining 21 were valued from $32,000 to $3,732,000. 8 of the new owners gave addresses outside of Philadelphia. 2 of those 8 are located in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2006 there were 37 transfers between $15,000 and $550,000.
In 2005 there were 39 transfers between $20,000 and $750,000.
In 2004 there were 30 transfers between $9,000 and $310,000.

This is the first of a series where we will take a look at those properties transferred in 2007.

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ex-offenders

“We either have to get comfortable with ex-offenders in the workplace, or you’ll meet some of these folks in an alley, somewhere. You decide.”

You have to love that quote but there is truth to it. It has nothing to do with being a bleeding heart and everything to do with cold, hard reality.

The point is that we don’t want Frankford to be a dumping ground for repeat criminals or the permanent home of chronically indigent drug users. Thanks but we’ll pass on that.

But we do support helping those folks who get out of jail and want to go straight, to get jobs and keep out of trouble. It just makes so much sense.

Read the rest of the story at kyw1060.com by following this link.