Environmental Hazards Press Release
June 25, 2004

The latest installment of Tomorrow’s Promise – Helping Children Left Behind is a special broadcast focusing on environmental problems in northeast Ohio and their especially dire consequences for young people. The program, the third installment in the Tomorrow’s Promise series, premieres Thursday, July 8 at 8pm on WVIZ/PBS (re-airing Sunday, July 11, 3pm and Monday, July 19, 10pm).

Environmental hazards are especially harmful to children because their brains and other organs are just developing and their immune systems are not fully mature. Children eat more food, drink more water, and breathe more air than adults, so if something harmful enters their body it tends to be in a bigger dose.

WVIZ/PBS and 90.3 WCPN ideastream and The Plain Dealer in cooperation with the Center for Community Solutions, have collaborated to create the series Tomorrow’s Promise – Helping Children Left Behind. Through newspaper articles, television and radio programming and a series of town hall meetings, ideastream and its partners are taking a proactive approach to increase awareness and evoke conversation on a series of challenges to life (and especially the lives of youths) in northeast Ohio.

Following the pattern established in the prior two installments of Tomorrow’s Promise, in June 2004 three public town hall meetings were conducted in locations across northeast Ohio – at Merrick House in Cleveland, the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine campus in Rootstown Township, and the Otis Moss Jr. – University Hospitals Medical Center in Cleveland.

During the town hall meetings attendees engaged in open-forum, moderated discussions about environmental problems and possible solutions. Excerpts from these town hall meetings serve to guide the panel discussion that is the focus of the July 8 broadcast.

Among specific issues addressed, panelists discuss key factors contributing to lead poisoning, asthma, and other environmental risks for children and the innovative, local solutions that can be implemented to protect young people from these hazards.

Panel participants include: Dr. C. William Keck, Associate Dean of Community Health Sciences at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine; Terry Allan, Health Commissioner for the Cuyahoga County Board of Health; Stuart Greenberg, Executive Director for Environmental Health Watch; Dr. Mark Feingold, Pediatrician at Metro Health Medical Center; and Dr. Cynthia Bearer, Director of Medical Education for the Mary Ann Swetland Center of Environmental Health at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine.

On Tuesday, July 8, in addition to the panel discussion broadcast, 90.3 WCPN will air a special one-hour live radio call-in program about the issues surrounding environmental hazards on 90.3 at 9, beginning at 9am.

Renita Jablonski, producer/reporter for 90.3 WCPN and WVIZ/PBS ideastream, will host the July 8 program. Joe Frolik, associate editor at The Plain Dealer will moderate the panel discussion. The Plain Dealer will publish a column in the Forum section on July 8 and special articles and transcripts of the studio panel discussion in the Forum section of the Sunday, July 11th edition.

A special Citizen’s Tool Kit “Protecting Our Youth from Environmental Hazards” has been published and is available free of charge. This resource guide includes danger signs of residential and other environmental threats and recommendations for avoiding these hazards. The guide is available online, or can be ordered by telephoning ideastream or the Center for Community Solutions. Support for Tomorrow's Promise is provided by The Thomas. H. White Foundation, a Key Bank Trust.

Evolving from the July 2003 The Plain Dealer series of articles called “Children Left Behind,” the Tomorrow’s Promise collaboration was formed to address the important issues that affect children living in northeast Ohio. Among other conclusions, The Plain Dealer analysis found Cleveland to have the second-highest childhood lead poisoning rate among 10 U.S. cities with comparable demographics. It also discovered that nearly half of the city’s children lived in substandard housing. Former topics addressed in the Tomorrow’s Promise series include high school graduation rates and teen pregnancy in northeast Ohio.

For additional information about ideastream, log-on to www.ideastream.com; for The Plain Dealer, log-on to www.plaindealer.com; and for the Center for Community Solutions, log-on to www.communitysolutions.com.