Star Tribune
Roosevelt High School’s Operation Holiday Basket delivers 300 holiday meals to Minneapolis families
Roosevelt High School’s gymnasium turned into a festive assembly line Friday. Students and alumni, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, formed what is affectionally dubbed the “turkey tunnel” to efficiently place hundreds of frozen turkeys into boxes filled with all the fixings for a holiday meal.
The ritual is a time-honored one. This week marked the 52nd year of Operation Holiday Basket, the Minneapolis high school’s holiday-season event to gather donations and raise money to provide food for families in need.
The event started back in 1970 when a group of teachers set out to provide meals for about 50 families. Since then, the mission has grown to serve hundreds of families while drumming up school spirit and holiday cheer.
This year, students and alumni packed and delivered 300 boxes of food — each included a turkey as well as carrots, potatoes, dessert and other staples — to neighborhood families, most of whom have students who attend or will attend Roosevelt.
“This has such a long history and it’s powerful to be a part of the tradition,” said senior Erin Grube.
About 100 students helped pack and deliver the boxes Friday morning. Joining them was Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox, the high school’s teddy bear mascot and more than a dozen alumni. Many of them were from the class of 1968, a group whose members call themselves the ROMEOs, which stands for “Roosevelt Old Men Eating Out Socially,” and typically meet up a couple of times a month.
Most of the group’s members first met Gary Lewis, who has been instrumental in building and continuing the tradition of Operation Holiday Basket, when they were young men. He’s 84 now and has been involved since the beginning.
“Gary was the cornerstone of our lives,” said Lee Nelson, a member of the ROMEOs. “He re-energized us to get reconnected with this marvelous tradition.”
The ROMEOs raised more than a third of the $15,000 collected this year, which will fund the food needed for next year’s baskets. Students and area businesses fundraised and donated the rest.
“This is such a marvelous experience,” Nelson said. “I get to meet these amazing students and find out all about the good work happening in our schools. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Sophomore Rowan Miller signed up to pack the boxes after hearing from a friend about how fun it was last year.
“I didn’t want to miss out,” Miller said.
For the week leading up to holiday break, Roosevelt students have events and competitions to raise funds and bring in donations for Operation Holiday Basket. Homeroom classes compete to raise the most money, collect canned goods and decorate the doors for the holidays.
“There’s a lot of school spirit this week,” Miller said. “It’s all about community-building.”
Christol Schultz, the school’s public relations coordinator, helps organize the event. After more than five decades, she said the process of collecting, sorting and distributing the donations is a “well-oiled machine.”
The students who return year after year know to wear gloves to keep their hands warm as while they pass along hundreds of frozen birds. They know that the “turkey tunnel” is even more fun if you’re singing and dancing to Christmas classics — from “Jingle Bell Rock” to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — blaring from the speakers.
And they know their efforts might make someone else’s holiday season a little bit brighter.
That’s what has kept the tradition alive for more than 50 years, Lewis said.
“I think it says something about the community itself that the kids are so excited about doing this,” Lewis said. “I hope that when I’m 100, I can be here, seeing the students giving back.”
Star Tribune
Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland gets two years of probation for threatening girlfriend
According to the criminal complaint:
Police were twice called on June 28 to an apartment in the 800 block of Front Avenue. During the first call, a woman told officers that everything was fine despite previously reporting that Sutherland had choked her and tried kicking her out of the apartment.
During the second call about 90 minutes later, the woman told police that Sutherland had briefly squeezed her neck with both hands, said “I want you dead,” pointed a gun at her and hit her in the chest with it, and at one point said he would shoot her if she came back after running off. Officers then arrested Sutherland.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Alex Chhith contributed to this story.
Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.
Changes come in the wake of a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches, due to a lack of personnel rather than bad behavior.
In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.
The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parent visits and other privileges to children in their custody.
“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors. “Programming is only cancelled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”
In a Dec. 4 email to the County Board, Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of Hennepin’s Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured elected officials that they had begun taking corrective actions but asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.
Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when multiple correctional officers were sitting in a nearby office. She explained that, during the dates of the inspection earlier this fall, several officers observed in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.
She also contended that while programming has been modified by staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques, or restrictive procedures.”
Tired of surging gun violence across St. Paul, community leaders and police are asking residents to help create a safer city.
The call for community support came Thursday night when officials from the St. Paul NAACP, St. Paul Police Department, Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the African American Leadership Council gathered at Arlington Hills Lutheran Church to talk about ways to decrease gun violence in the city.
St. Paul has recorded 30 homicides so far this year according to a Star Tribune database, two fewer than last year. But four of this year’s homicides happened in the same week, frustrating law enforcement and alarming residents.
St. Paul NAACP President Richard Pittman Sr. said that solutions to gun violence are “right here, in the room.” But without the community’s help, Pittman said their efforts could fall short.
“Over the last several weeks and months, we have experienced an uptick in violent crimes in our communities. [That’s] turned on a light bulb that it’s time [to] not have the police feeling like all the pressure is on them,” Pittman said. “Nobody wants to the responsibility of having to shoot someone down in the street. Nobody wants the responsibility of hurting somebody’s family. We all want the best outcome.”
Attendee Carrie Johnson worried generational trauma is derailing youth’s behavior, adding that she’s seen boys in middle school punch girls in the face. Migdalia Baez said mothers living along Rice Street feel they have nowhere to turn for help in redirecting their children. Some worry that their child would be incarcerated if they ask for help.
Larry McPherson, a violence interrupter for 21 Days of Peace St. Paul, said some issues stem from youth with no guidance. McPherson and others patrol hot spots for crime across the city, including near the Midway neighborhood’s Kimball Court apartments where fentanyl drove a spike in robberies and drug violations.
“We’ve got a lot of mental health [struggles]. We’ve got a lot of doggone drug addiction that’s going on in our neighborhoods. We all got the best interests at hand for all people in our community, but we’re just not working fast enough,” McPherson said. “Until we get feet on the ground, people coming out of their own community and standing up for this real cause to take back the community, we’re going to have the same outcome.”
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