New initiative aims to boost kindergarten readiness with free developmental screenings in Johnstown
Screen2Succeed, launched by The Learning Lamp, is a free community-based initiative focused on early developmental screenings for children ages 2 to 5 in the Greater Johnstown School District.
The program seeks to identify developmental delays and connect families with resources to help their children meet key milestones before starting school. The effort, supported by the 1889 Foundation and other partners, is expected to expand to the rest of Cambria County in its second year.
'Early identification and intervention are key to a child's success,' Nicki Sliko, program manager for Screen2Succeed, said. The initiative uses the Ages & Stages Questionnaire (ASQ-3), a 10–15 minute screening tool that helps parents and caregivers track developmental progress.
Only 20–30% of children with developmental delays receive early screenings, according to the U.S. Office of Early Childhood Development. Research shows that early intervention improves long-term outcomes, including higher graduation rates and better job prospects.
Screen2Succeed offers one-on-one assistance to help families complete the screenings and access free resources. Parents in the Greater Johnstown area can expect billboards and flyers raising awareness about the initiative over the next two weeks.
For more information, visit The Learning Lamp's website or contact Nicki Sliko at (814) 262-0732 ext. 249.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Chicago Tribune
23-06-2025
- Chicago Tribune
La Grange Juneteenth event features recollections of cousin of Emmett Till
The 75 or so people who gathered June 19 for the annual Juneteenth commemoration in La Grange had a chance to hear the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. tell of some personal history. 'My story's not a pleasant story and it's not a pretty story, but it's history,' said Parker, the keynote speaker at the event at The Corral at Lyons Township High School South Campus. Parker grew up in nearby Summit and was the cousin of Emmett Till, who was murdered by Southern racists in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. He described the night Till was abducted and murdered, taken from their grandfather's house in the middle of the night. 'That was the last time we saw Emmett alive,' Parker said. Juneteenth, now a state and federal holiday, celebrates the day in 1865 that Union General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 troops and issued General Order No. 3, informing enslaved Texans of their freedom. Although President Abraham Lincoln officially freed all those held in slavery with the Jan. 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, the actual end of the 'peculiar institution' didn't happen all at once. The actual freeing of enslaved people occurred at varying times throughout the territories where slavery existed, depending on how far the Union Army had advanced. Texas, being in what was then the far Southwest portion of the United States, was the last territory under federal command to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. While the original celebrations of Juneteenth took place in Galveston, the holiday spread over time until it became the eleventh federal holiday in 2021. In La Grange, the commemoration also featured speeches from Billy 'Che' Brooks, former deputy minister of education for the Black Panther Party; Poshlyn Nicholson, of ChaseYouth; and Ramon Lacey, of Lace Up Athletics, the organizer and sponsor of the event. 'We support the community by building complete athletes for building a stronger community,' Lacey said. 'We use physical fitness, mentorship, and community service to combat things like childhood obesity and the opportunity gap. We provide community service events like this and others.' There were poetry readings by Nicholson and students from Nazareth Academy as well as a Juneteenth trivia game involving members of the audience. Actor Corin Rogers, of 'Cooley High' had a Black history exhibit and took questions from the audience. Nicholson was passionate in her discussion of the importance of celebrating the day. 'Juneteenth is a time of remembering what happened to our people and how we were disenfranchised,' she said. … 'Myself, I was not aware of how much Juneteenth meant to our community until about five years ago.' Brian Waterman, superintendent of Lyons Township High School District 204, welcomed the visitors to the temporary home of the Juneteenth celebration. 'I'm really excited that LT is the host school for it, I've went to it the last couple years,' he said. It's usually at the Community Center, so we're happy to step up and host this amazing event. It's always an event that a wide variety of our community comes out to support. I think the organizers did a great job.' Trustee Beth Augustine was among village leaders attending the event. 'It's extremely moving and I look forward to it going forward,' she said.
Chicago Tribune
19-06-2025
- Chicago Tribune
David Wright Faladé: Black Texans were not ignorant of their freedom before June 19, 1865
At the end of the Civil War, Union Army Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to establish a base of operations for his occupying troops, and soon after, he read General Order No. 3 at a public meeting, proclaiming all enslaved people to be free. African Americans in the crowd responded with cheers and rejoicing. In the reporting at the time and in common retellings since, the event, known as Juneteenth, has been described as the day in 1865 the enslaved people of Texas finally 'learned' that they were free. Public figures and news outlets, then and now, have characterized it this way. I want to quibble with this depiction, as it suggests that enslaved Texans had been ignorant of the fact of their own freedom. This strikes me as improbable — impossible, even. By Southern law, enslaved people were property, like a plow horse or a prized settee, bought and sold or passed down from one family member to another. But they always knew themselves to be fully human, and they were everywhere present in the lives of those who owned them. They served drinks as their masters discussed the issues of the day with visiting guests and stood at hand during meals, overhearing conversations. They knew what their owners knew, oftentimes without the owners realizing. And they shared the information among each other — in the slave quarters and in those of nearby plantations, and also beyond, as enslaved people worked on docks and at rail depots. This became apparent during the war, when runaways fleeing into Union lines became sources of valuable intelligence to the invading army. So, the enslaved people of Texas had surely followed the progress of the war elsewhere in the South, including the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, just as their owners did, and very likely just as quickly. The problem was that, acting on this knowledge was exceedingly difficult. As Union victories mounted in the east, die-hard secessionists fled to Texas, the westernmost state in the Confederacy, far from the fighting, with as many as 150,000 enslaved people in tow. Slavery continued fairly uninterrupted there throughout the entirety of the war, and even after. Violence was the means by which slaveholders were able to get fellow human beings to submit to servitude, and Texans were willing to use it liberally. The arrival of the Union Army in the summer of 1865 did little to change this. The first sentences of Granger's order, which proclaimed that 'all slaves are free' and that future engagement between 'former masters and slaves' should be as 'employer and hired labor,' are often cited when telling the story of Juneteenth. But later ones bear closer scrutiny, particularly given the blatant racism suggested in them. General Order No. 3 goes on: 'The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.' Granger's evocation of a potential 'idleness' on the part of the formerly enslaved and his command to restrict their freedom of movement illustrate a widely held ambivalence toward Black freedom at the time, by Northern white people as much as Southern ones. His order was not the panacea that we, today, might construe it to have been. African Americans, who for some time had likely known themselves to be legally free, were hardly free, in point of fact. To the contrary, in order to prevent the feared chaos that too much disruption of the status quo might incite, General Order No. 3 insisted on restricting their movement and on maintaining a historically fraught overseer-laborer relationship between white and Black. And though Granger declared that wages should be paid, his soldiers provided little enforcement. Despite the constraints, though, Black Texans attempted to claim their freedom. In an example from T.J. Stiles' book 'Custer's Trials,' in which he describes George Armstrong Custer's experience as part of Granger's occupying army, Stiles recounts a story from October 1865, more than three months into the Union presence. A 9-year-old Black girl quit the plantation on which she had been kept in bondage before emancipation and made her way 23 miles to Hempstead, northwest of Houston, to rejoin her mother, from whom she had been separated during slavery. Upon learning of the girl's departure, the wife of the plantation's owner dispatched their teen son to bring her back. The boy tracked the girl down, at her mother's side, and when she refused to return with him, he 'tied her hands behind her and then tied a rope around her waist, pulled her out, and tied her to a ring in his saddle, mounted and put spurs to the horse,' according to a Union Army surgeon. The surgeon reported that, by the time they arrived, the girl was just 'a mass of broken flesh and bones.' The boy was arrested, but Custer, the officer in charge, chose not to prosecute and sent him home. Persisting subjugation was a real and present threat for the formerly enslaved, even after Juneteenth. Black people knew they were free. They were struggling to find a way to actually live freely — to enjoy the promise of America that they and their forbears had toiled to help construct. How we understand the legacy of Juneteenth reflects how we understand the indispensable, foundational role of African Americans in American history. Black folks were not passive players in the drama of slavery and freedom. They militated as best they could, against extraordinary odds and even greater resistance. To characterize Juneteenth as the moment African Americans only first 'learned' of their emancipation risks perpetuating the false idea, broadly believed during slavery and recently resuscitated through efforts to ban books and scrub curricula, that they were merely victims, benighted and lesser, incapable of significant action for themselves.
Axios
18-06-2025
- Axios
Dallas has only copy of Juneteenth handbill
The only known remaining copy of General Order No. 3, the document that announced the end of slavery in Texas, is in Dallas. Why it matters: Texas was the last Confederate state with institutional slavery — even after the Civil War ended. The general order was issued in Galveston on June 19, 1865, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Flashback: An estimated 250,000 Black people remained enslaved in Texas when 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston. Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued Order No. 3, stating "all slaves are free." Troops posted handbills, and newspapers published the order. News of freedom then spread by word of mouth across the state. Driving the news: Starting Wednesday, the Dallas Historical Society will display the handbill as part of an exhibit to commemorate Juneteenth, the nation's second independence day. " Juneteenth: A Celebration of Freedom" runs until Aug. 31 at the Hall of State in Fair Park. The exhibit will reopen for the State Fair of Texas on Sept. 26. State of play: George Bannerman Dealey brought the handbill from Galveston to Dallas, where he oversaw the launch of the Dallas Morning News in 1885. He founded the Dallas Historical Society in 1922 and later donated the document to the group's archives. The original signed order is in the National Archives. Reality check: The general order also told freedmen "to remain at their present homes, and work for wages" for the people who had enslaved them. They were told not to gather at military outposts because they would "not be supported in idleness." The intrigue: The Dallas Morning News, under Dealey's leadership, warned of the Ku Klux Klan's rapid growth in the city. Dallas had the most Klan members per capita of any U.S. city. What's next: The historical society is hosting a panel discussion featuring civil rights leader Rev. Peter Johnson, historian W. Marvin Dulaney and Levi Davis, the city's first Black assistant city manager.
