Parenting

On Father's Day, a disgruntled citizen complains about a broken streetlight on Melnea Cass Boulevard:

My daughter was very excited when our broken light was fixed. On our Father's Day walk we went to see the repairs. As you can see, nothing has been done. Please restore my 4 year old's faith in city government and her trust in her daddy.

Georgy Cohen has started a list of places that are particularly accommodating for breastfeeding mothers.

Updated.

A boy kidnapped by his father at gunpoint in Roxbury tonight was recovered safely by Cambridge Police a few hours later, around 10:30 p.m., at the home of a relative.

Boston Police issued an Amber Alert after the 13-year-old, Jonathan Moore, Jr., was taken.

They continue to search for his father, Jonathan Moore.

Police are looking for a red 1997 Camry. Mass plates 634RH4.

He might be making a run for Georgia.

Parents at the Curley School hold a fundraiser on Saturday afternoon to try to raise $200,000 to convert an old asphalt "field" at the school into a three-season, multi-use playing field. The original goal was $250,000, but somebody recently and anonymously donated $50,000 toward the goal.

The North End/Waterfront Mothers Association says fight-happy homeless people in Christopher Columbus Park are becoming a menace to their children and that one answer is a six-foot-tall fence around the park's playground - locked every night from May through November.

In an e-mail to members, organizers say they reached their breaking point last month after a fatally injured man was pulled out of the harbor near the park, possibly as the result of a fight in the park.

The e-mail is a call to action to have members show up in force at a community meeting on Tuesday with city councilors. The session starts at 6:30 p.m. at the Pilot House, 2 Atlantic Ave.

We have to let the councilors know that protecting children is our first priority as a neighborhood. A packed room of concerned, involved residents will do that.

NBC News reports on the turnaround of the Orchard Gardens K-8 pilot schools 10 years after it opened.

Luis Matos, who inadvertently left 17-month-old Gabriel Pierre to die in a van will face no criminal charges, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office says.

With the exception only of misdemeanor motor vehicle homicide, Massachusetts law leaves issues of negligence in the hands of civil courts and precludes the criminal prosecution of an accident, even one as terrible and tragic in its consequences as this one.

DA Dan Conley's office says it will work with Gabriel's parents for legislation:

UPDATE, 8:42 p.m.: Our phone rang and the kidlet picked it up. As soon as she began jumping and yelling, I knew: School is canceled in Boston tomorrow. Barring any more snow days, this means Boston Public Schools will get out for the year on June 28. All Boston Centers for Youth and Families sites will be open tomorrow, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Somerville announced this afternoon it's cancelled school, but America's Toughest City says school is still on. Parents who do get their kids to school will no doubt get really, really annoyed if they get robo-calls at noon again that absent kids won't be marked absent.

Parent Imperfect describes the choice his daughter faces now that she's gotten into both BLS and BLA:

Connie's Mom, to her unending credit, will challenge Connie to remember that both schools have the same curriculum and to think about who she'll be going to school with and to imagine how she will feel in the two schools. She'll do all that challenging, and then she'll listen to what Connie wants and we'll make a decision ... hopefully the right one. Help!

The School Committee tonight voted to approval an overhaul of student assignment for elementary schools that will give parents a choice of six schools - at least two of which have to have among the highest standardized test scores in the city.

The new system, which will go into effect in the 2014-2015 school year, will end the city's current three-zone system - and walk zones.

Students already in the system will be grandfathered in their current schools.

• Supt. Carol Johnson's letter on student assignment
• Profile of Peng Shi - the MIT grad student who came up with the new system.
• Home-based assignment proposals
• Partial victory for those seeking a fair assignment policy - One parent's reaction.

The Supreme Judicial Court today vacated an order that had prevented a British man from seeing the then 16-year-old Massachusetts girl with whom he had had a dalliance while she and her family were on a European vacation.

After the family returned to the US, the two continued exchanging romantic messages via e-mail and Skype - even after the girl admitted she was only 16 and not 18 - and Gregory James Compton, then 24, eventually booked a flight to Boston in October, 2011, to spend more time with his stateside sweetie.

But when the Essex County girl's father found out about that, he went to court and obtained a "prevention order" under the state's law on domestic abuse that barred the swain from going anywhere near the girl - an order served on him not long after he landed at Logan.

The judge who issued the order shouldn't have, the state's highest court ruled today.

Protest outside Longy School of Music this morning.

The venerable Longy School of Music, which merged with Bard College in New York last year, told parents this week that programs for children - and adults not seeking degrees - no longer fit its new mission of becoming a world-class "institution for advanced musical study." So, school President Karen Zorn wrote parents, they'll have to find new places to send their kids for the sort of programs the school has long offered.

In a letter to parents, Zorn said the school would work with them to find alternate programs.

Parents, who say the decision came as a complete surprise to them, protested outside the Harvard Square conservatory this morning. One Jamaica Plain mother tells UHub:

What they offer simply can't be replicated by private instruction or at other local institutions - otherwise we might be studying elsewhere. For example we live in JP but take our 12 year old daughter there for a chorus ensemble every weekend, because the hassle is worth the great experience she is having.

An advisory committee tonight approved a proposal to replace the current school-assignment zones with a new system in which each family gets a choice of up to six schools guaranteed to include two that are at the top of standardized-test scores as well as schools within a mile of their homes.

But for now, Boston Public School students can rejoice: No school on Tuesday.

Lola Bean and friends weren't going to let the snow barre them from ballet practice in Watertown today.

Chris Adams, meanwhile, reports his son decided that once some of the driveway was clear, it was hockey time:

Boston Public Schools are shut. All extracurricular and sporting events canceled as well. The city is opening community centers in Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, East Boston and Mission Hill for parents who aren't as lucky as their kids to drop them off for the day.

At least, in Boston, for BPS kiddies.

The Swellesley Report alerts us to the five-month agreement - under which she also has to give him her password so he can change it. On his blog, dad says it was all her idea.

Philip Borenstein is aghast:

That guy's getting quite a deal. I'd be embarrassed if my son did it for less than $400. And I live in Natick.

The Dorchester Reporter gets a copy of his letter to the advisory committee looking at changes in how to assign students in lower grades to public schools.

A Roxbury man was ordered held in lieu of $50,500 bail at his arraignment on charges he abused an infant and beat the baby's mother in the woman's apartment on Old Colony Avenue in South Boston, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.

According to prosecutors, Steven Velazquez, 19, assaulted the two-month-old in his mother's sometime between Jan. 12 and 14, breaking his rib and leaving him with two bite marks on his right arm, and a third bite mark on the inner left leg. However, the child received no medical care until Jan. 22, when police arrived at the apartment to investigate a report of child abuse. EMTs then took the infant to Children's hospital. Prosecutors said that Velasquez broke the boy's rib by squeezing him.

UPDATE, 10:40 p.m. He called his mom from the KFC in Edward Everett Square in Dorchester. Police quickly found him; EMTs were called to take him to the hospital for evaluation.

Police officers from across the city are now combing Dorchester and Mattapan, looking for Leland Corning, a 12-year-old with Asperger's Syndrome who has been missing since 8:30 a.m. on Glenway Street.

Leland is 12, black, with freckles on his left side, and is about 5'5" and about 209 lbs. He was last seen wearing a red baseball cap, khaki fleece jacket, black pants and black boots. He does not like being touched.

If you see him, call B-3 detectives at District B-3 detectives at 617-343-4712 or 911.

Playground Hopping is "a playground hopper's guide to the coolest playgrounds in and around Boston."

H/t Bill Ritchotte.

Because Boston doesn't have enough quality schools, the External Advisory Committee on School Choice tonight released three proposals to try to give as many elementary-school students a shot at entry to one of the ones it does have: A proposal to split the city into ten assignment zones and two that would do away with zones altogether but let parents apply to either six or nine schools that include at least two that have standardized test stores near the top of city rankings.

Whichever plan is approved by the School Committee, possibly next month, would replace the current three-zone assignment system in the 2015-15 school year.

Whichever plan is picked would preserve sibling preference.

• Ten-zone proposal
• Home-based proposals

Bad enough for the headmaster to robocall parents tonight to urge them to talk to their kids about "inappropriate" messages on social media, although she didn't specify just how the offending message was inappropriate.

Our own eeka reports that while the state health-insurance system properly accounts for her spouse as her spouse, it's decided said spouse is the "stepmother" of their kid:

They also have me listed as our child's "mother" and spousal unit as child's "stepmother." "Stepparent," while often someone who provides amazing parenting to a child, is not someone who is fully a legal parent to said child.

We jointly adopted said child in Massachusetts, as a married couple. On our health insurance application, we listed ourselves as spouses and our child as our child.

Apparently the people who manage the healthcare benefits decided that the family relationships we have that are backed up by a bunch of legal paperwork aren't actually real.