While the Syracuse City School District is pleased to have obtained $31.5 million in state aid for seven struggling schools, the head of the city’s teacher’s union says that the money, while welcome, isn’t the answer to the problems his members face every day in classrooms and hallways.

“We would walk in somewhere, I’d turn around, and she’d be in this group of people, have no idea who they were, and they’d have their arms around her, hugging her,” friend Erin Colaneri says of Socci’s ability to draw people in with her charismatic presence.

The district is batting 1.000 in its efforts to attain state money for struggling schools. In March, it learned that all seven applications submitted to the state for “Innovation Zones” have been approved by the state Department of Education; $31.5 million will be available beginning with the next school year for seven of the lowest performing schools in the city, designated by the state as “priority schools.”

In an April 19 appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof chatted with guests about the Boston Marathon attacks and the gun control debate.

The Syracuse Fire Fighters Union is pulling out all the stops in its battle against Mayor Stephanie Miner’s plan to reduce Fire Department staffing and to take one fire engine out of service.

 The Roman Catholic nun who in 2012 told the Democratic National Convention that “We Nuns on the Bus care for the 100 percent,” will speak Friday, April 26, 4 p.m., at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Whether you’re thanking the groundhog for predicting an early spring or just grateful to Mother Nature that the sun has found its way to Syracuse, it seems that winter is finally thawing. With warm weather comes fishing season, and for the 17th consecutive year, the Nine Mile Creek Conservation Council will stock the lower section of the river with trout.

 The Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis includes a story in which the patriarch Abraham sees three strangers on the horizon. To protect himself from potential attack, Abraham opens his tent as a sign of welcome and hospitality.After Abraham served a feast of fine bread and meat, the strangers said that his wife, Sarah, would bear a child. A year later, when she was 90 and Abraham 100, they had a son, whom they named Isaac.

It took that long for DeVesty, now 50 and the mother of two young adult boys, to rip that hand from her mouth and speak about what happened to her. In the past three years, she has devoted her life to enabling other abused men and women find their voice and a path to healing through a fast-growing project she calls the Clean Slate Diaries.

 If the crowd attending the Syracuse University spring football game expected to come away with answers about next season’s squad, they exited disappointed. When trying to evaluate a school’s players against each other, the takeaways can be genuinely mixed.