Year: 2011

  • New Roadblock for Reviving Refugee Farm

    Photo Credit: Sam Hodgson By Adrian Florido A year ago, Ourn Lun, a grandmotherly 60-year-old, was evicted from a piece of city-owned land where she and a group of fellow Cambodian refugees had grown crops like bitter melon, red peppers and green beans in peaceful obscurity for nearly three decades. The refugees, all of them…

  • Chronically Absent Students Cost City Heights Schools More Than 3 Million

    Photo Credit: KPBS News By Joanne Faryon and Kevin Crowe Student 114 is a sophomore at Lincoln High in Southeast San Diego. What makes her exceptional is the number of school days she missed last year – 87, or nearly half the 10th grade. She cost her school $2,464.71. A KPBS-Watchdog Institute investigation found there…

  • Tweet City Heights: Feral Dogs, Fried Brain Cells and Free Lunch

    By Megan Burks While we’re out researching and writing full-length features, 140 characters can go a long way in helping us keep readers up-to-date. But some tweets deserve more than that. That’s why I’m beginning a weekly feature here on SpeakCityHeights.org called Tweet City Heights. Each Friday, I’ll bring you the week’s Twitter chatter as…

  • Photo Feature: Your Neighbor, the Refugee, Celebrated

    Photo Credit: Sam Hodgson By Sam Hodgson I had the honor of presenting a photo essay at the Museum of Photographic Arts to help commemorate World Refugee Day Sunday. I presented images from the project we completed last year about Har Sin, a refugee from Burma who is deaf and learning formal communication for the…

  • Citizens’ Commission on State Redistricting Gets An Earful

    By Alison St John Residents from Imperial Valley to the coast turned out to a public hearing in San Diego Monday night on state and congressional redistricting. Some drove almost two hours to present their case to the Redistricting Commission. It was the last opportunity to give the 14 member Citizens’ Commission oral testimony before the…