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Vol. 34 No. 8
FEBRUARY 16 - 22, 2023
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Town Board faces backlash over new map By ANA BoRRUTo aborruto@liherald.com
Courtesy Valley Stream District 13
Color us kind Willow Road Elementary School students, from left, Victoria Melendez, Luca Gabriele, Adriana Pagnotta, Valentina DeFalco and Leilani-Renae Wiggins took up the Great Kindness Challenge, sponsored by Kids for Peace, with their kindness poster to promote the values of friendship, environmental stewardship, and community service. Story, additional photo, page 9.
“Change the boundary, redraw the lines” was the message dozens of community members tried to articulate to the Hempstead Town Board last week. But in the end, many felt their pleas were completely ignored. Don Clavin faced some heat from the crowd after the town supervisor decided to cut the microphone feed for each speaker off exactly at the required three minutes they were allotted to speak. When Deputy Town Supervisor Dorothy Goosby — who notably challenged Hempstead’s discriminatory at-large voting system in 1988 — was
asked if she had anything to say about the redistricting process, she declined to comment. The Hempstead redistricting saga is nearing its end, and opponents of the proposed maps are not giving up without a fight. A group of angry voters rallied outside Hempstead Town Hall minutes before the Feb. 7 meeting to air their frustrations. Former County Legislator Dave Denenberg, who organized the rally, said there is an ulterior motive behind the elected officials drawing the district lines they way they’re doing it. “Whenever there’s redistricting, you see a political machine do exactly what they always do: Continued on page 4
These young sisters’ vision? Helping kids in the hospital. By JUAN lASSo jlasso@liherald.com
The hallways at Temple Hillel were abuzz with Hebrew School students last Sunday morning. About two dozen of them filed into a small classroom with their teacher and program director in tow. The children were greeted with tables equipped with kits stuffed with clay and glass beads, jewelry wire, and paper plates — the ingredients needed to make a customized bracelet. But not for themselves. Their handiwork would be given as getwell gifts to other children stricken with cancer more than 5,000 miles away at the Hadassah Med-
ical Center in Jerusalem and Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital in Tel Aviv. Making it all possible was selfconfident, bubbly 12-year-old Gabriella Vernov, who introduced herself and her little sister Sarina as the founders of Glow4Kids. The organization is aimed at gifting handmade, individually unique, and kidapproved beaded bracelets to kids suffering from cancer in the United States and abroad. The sisters came up with the idea for their company when Sarina was gifted with a beaded bracelet kit on her sixth birthday. They saw the kit’s potential to spread compassion and hope in
How to get involved For more information about Glow4Kid’s mission, visit Glow4Kids.com. the lives of others and inspire kids like them to make it happen. At first, the sisters confined their bracelet-making base of operations to their home, with everyone in the family chipping in. For every bracelet purchased, three of its kind would be given to kids with cancer, with the
earnings from the sale funding the supplies to make more bracelets. But the business was already coming in fast. “Within the first week, we were asked to do about 200 bracelets for all these hospitals and organizations,” said their mom Inna Vernov, who helped the girls launch the organization earlier
this year. “So we were just a little overwhelmed. And we figured we can’t do it alone.” To scale up their efforts and get the Glow4Kids movement off the ground, the girls knew they needed to push ahead with recruiting kids from various school and service organizations across Valley Stream and neighContinued on page 16