Many school safe rooms, like this one inside Jeffries Elementary in Springfield, Mo., also serve as gymnasiums. Constructed with a $1.6 million grant from FEMA, which covered 75 percent of the cost, the shelter can hold more than 500 people -- enough to accommodate all the school's students and employees. (KSMU)

Tornado Safe Rooms In Schools A Popular, But Costly Idea

May 24, 2013 (All Things Considered / KSMU-FM) — In the aftermath of the destruction in Moore, Okla., residents throughout Tornado Alley want storm shelters installed in schools. Some schools in the region already have them, but funding to build new ones is hard to come by.

In the days since a tornado ripped through Moore, Okla., talk of constructing safe rooms in public schools has become commonplace.

In southwest Missouri, officials have built a few of them already, and they are seeking funding to build more.

'A Sense Of Peace'

Karina O'Connell is preparing dinner tonight under the pavilion at Phelps Grove Park in Springfield, Mo., where she's eating with her 9-year-old twin sons, Samuel and John Patrick.

A mixture of curiosity and fear has the boys often going online to track big storms. Their mother says the family's recent addition of a safe room at home helped ease a lot of concerns, especially for John Patrick.

"Now that we have our storm shelter, he was just, I mean he was still upset, but once we were in there, you know, we were playing games, he was very calm," O'Connell says. "It was ... a sense of peace for us that we actually have this now."

But when at school at Sunshine Elementary, the O'Connell boys don't have the safest place to ride out a storm. While Springfield has more than 50 school buildings, so far only three are equipped with a safe room that meets FEMA 361 standards, a room that can withstand the impact of an EF-5 tornado.

'Some Peace Of Mind'

Dave Bishop is the district's director of facilities. He says when FEMA awarded funding to the district, safe rooms were built at three schools.

One of them is at Jeffries Elementary, where Bishop shows off a safe room that was built from pre-stressed concrete, with straps at the ceiling capable of withstanding wind shear. FEMA's $1.6 million grant paid for 75 percent of the cost of this room, which also serves as the school's gymnasium and can protect about 500 people. When school's not in session, it serves as a shelter for residents within a half-mile radius.

"We were able to take up a matching grant of 25 percent and build this room, which I think speaks for itself. It's a very nice facility and I think provides some peace of mind," Bishop says.

Springfield Public Schools has applied for additional FEMA funds to build safe rooms in another three schools.

As for the buildings that don't have active safe rooms, Bishop says the district has a crisis plan tailored to each site, placing students where structure and building materials are the strongest. But after the storm in Oklahoma, O'Connell is considering a different plan for her children.

"I think I might be looking at the weather a little closer and then possibly taking them out of school in order to get them in my shelter," O'Connell says.

'Find A Way To Pay For This'

Helen Grant didn't have that option.

Her two daughters attend Central Elementary in Moore, Okla., which has no safe room and was placed on lockdown before Grant ever had a chance to pick them up. After seeing the destruction at Plaza Towers and Briarwood Elementary, she decided to sign a petition that calls on Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin to require all schools in the state to build safe rooms.

"And even if the money is hard to come by, I'm sure people could pay for it. Our state has given tax breaks to big businesses. I'm sure they can find a way to pay for this," Grant says.

Bob Roberts, the emergency manager for Tulsa Public Schools, hopes to someday have safe rooms in all Oklahoma schools, but he's concerned about how to pay for them.

"We have to look at what's the most effective thing we can do with the money we have available," he says.

If nothing else, says Roberts, he believes schools should be reinforced to better withstand a storm's impact.

Too Expensive?

Back in Springfield, Mo., Storm Shelters' founder Jeff Olsen is in his showroom, pointing out the damage to a steel shelter caused when a two-by-four was shot at 100 mph, part of testing performed on the safe rooms he builds for homeowners.

These are the kinds of shelters that Moore's mayor says he'd now like to require in every new home built there.

But when Joplin, Mo., officials tried to do just that following the devastating tornado there two years ago, the City Council deemed that making that mandatory would be too expensive for homebuilders.

Copyright 2013 KSMU-FM. To see more, visit http://ksmu.org.

A sign in a New York City market window advertises that it accepts food stamps. (Getty Images)

Episode 217: The Art Of Living At The Poverty Line

May 24, 2013 (KSMU-FM) — Meet a single mother who makes $16,000 a year -- and who managed to fund a vacation at a Caribbean resort with an interest-free loan from one of the world's largest banks.

On today's Planet Money, we meet a single mother who makes $16,000 a year — and who managed to fund a vacation at a Caribbean resort with an interest-free loan from one of the world's largest banks.

Edith Calzado gets credit cards with teaser zero-percent interest rates — then transfers her balance before the rate ticks up. She signs up for store cards to get discounts — then pays off her bill on time. She gets food stamps and lives in subsidized housing. Her son is doing well in school.

She may be the single most successful and productive beneficiary of government assistance you'll ever meet.

Note: This podcast was originally posted in 2010. Music: Stars' "Fixed." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Paul Tudor Jones (left) at an National Audubon Society function in January. (Invision for the National Audubon Society)

Hedge Fund Manager Apologizes For Comments On Female Traders

May 24, 2013 (KSMU-FM) — Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones says he's sorry for his comments at a university symposium that motherhood causes women to lose the focus needed to be good traders.

Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones is back-peddling from remarks he made at a symposium last month that motherhood causes women to lose the necessary focus to be successful traders.

"As soon as that baby's lips touched that girl's bosom, forget it," Jones told an audience at the University of Virginia on April 26.

"Every single investment idea ... every desire to understand what is going to make this go up or go down is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience ... which a man will never share, about a mode of connection between that mother and that baby," he said. "And I've just seen it happen over and over."

But in a statement released Friday, Jones apologized for what he has called "off the cuff" remarks:

"Much of my adult life has been spent fighting for equal opportunity, and the idea that I would support limiting opportunity for any segment of society, particularly women, is antithetical to who I am and what I have done," he said. "My remarks offended, and I am sorry."

The offending comments were made as Jones, the founder of Tudor Investment Corp., a $13 billion hedge-fund firm based in Greenwich, Conn., participated in a question-and-answer symposium at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. Prominent investors Julian Robertson of Tiger Management and John Griffin of Blue Ridge Capital were also part of the panel.

The video was obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request. You can skip to Jones' controversial remarks in the video below beginning at about 2:30.

Not surprisingly, the comments haven't gone over well with some women. Writing for Time magazine, columnist Rana Foroohar shot back at what she called Jones' "convoluted argument":

"He's saying that women can't be good traders because they are too much at the mercy of their emotions. Actually, plenty of research has shown just the opposite. In the bestselling book, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, John Coates, a former trader who is now a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, looks at just how emotionally influenced traders — mainly men — are."

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Actress Marla Gibbs (as maid Florence Johnston) and actor Sherman Hemsley (as her boss, George Jefferson), appear together in the "Mr. Piano Man" episode of The Jeffersons. (CBS/Landov)

History Makes Hiring Household Help A Complex Choice

May 24, 2013 (All Things Considered / KSMU-FM) — Many black women in the U.S. have or know someone who has done domestic work. With an expanding black middle class, some find themselves conflicted: To hire help or not?

Sheryl Sandberg's best-seller Lean In has sparked a national debate among women about reaching for success in the workplace. But in order for women to lean in to their ambition and spend the arduous hours embracing the success Sandberg urges them to, they need to lean on support at home. That often comes in the form of household help — the housekeeper or nanny. But because being the help has figured large in the history of African-American women, some who are in the position to lean in are torn about hiring domestic employees.

That ambivalence was reflected back in 1975, when America met George and Louise Jefferson. In the maiden episode of their now-iconic TV series, the Jeffersons were, as the title song indicated, "movin' on up ... to that dee-luxe apartment in the sky." The black middle class had begun to expand, and George and Weezy, now affluent from several dry cleaning businesses, were moving into a high rise on Manhattan's swank Upper East Side.

The tension in that first show revolved around who was going to clean the shiny new palace. George pressed hard for Louise to hire a black maid she'd met in the elevator; Louise refused. She reminded George that when they were a young married couple, she did domestic work a couple of times a week, and had to "yes ma'am, no ma'am" the white woman who employed her. "How can I ask Diane to say 'yes ma'am to me?' " she fretted.

"Easy," George replied. " 'Cause now you're the ma'am!"

Louise Jefferson was reflecting the real-life ambivalence many African-American women have about being the ma'am.

After more than a century of working as domestics because of restricted employment options, black women's communal memory of often being taken advantage of economically and sometimes sexually can still be painful.

It doesn't help that the media images of black maids and nannies through the ages tended to run a narrow gamut: self-sacrificing mammy figure at one end, eye-rolling sass pot at the other. (From Hattie McDaniel's patient Beulah to Marla Gibbs as the Jeffersons' wisecracking Florence.)

Duchess Harris, a professor of American studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., says history haunts many black women who might want household help but hesitate to hire it.

From the end of slavery to the end of World War I, Harris says, "the job that black American women could get was being domestics. They were often incredibly disrespected." She knows this because Harris has heard the tales firsthand: "My paternal grandmother was a domestic," she says. "So for a lot of black American women, we can't let [the memories of] that go."

Harris definitely needs help. In addition to teaching history at Macalester, she also lectures at a nearby law school and is on the speakers' circuit. Her husband is a surgeon and spends long hours at the hospital. Their domestics have been au pairs from Europe who are part of an exchange program, and they're part of the team that watches over the Harris' three children.

The au pair arrangement works well for Harris and her immediate family, but, she says, her extended family and friends are not shy about telling her what they think. "I find that black Americans are open with how uncomfortable it would make them to have someone living in their home of a different race," she admits.

Solange Bumbaugh isn't as worried about race or ethnicity as she is about class. She and her husband agreed to hire a housekeeper several years ago to ensure domestic tranquility — no more fighting over who cleans what. But Bumbaugh still feels bad sometimes about asking for specific chores to be done. Knowing that communal history, "It feels uncomfortable, being on this side of the divide."

Then Bumbaugh shakes herself, and acknowledges reality: "That's clearly why [the housekeeper] is here, to make money for her children."

Maria Reyes has some advice for Bumbaugh: How you treat your housekeeper is more important than the fact that you have one. Reyes is a former housekeeper and nanny who now works on the staff of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the union for household staff, many of whom are immigrants. She's had good and bad employers of all ethnicities, Reyes says, and that doesn't matter: "What matters is that as an employee, you be treated with dignity and respect."

But sometimes respect is a subjective thing. Natalie Preston-Washington is a marketing and communications specialist at a university in Florida, and when she had her first baby, she looked for someone to come to her home monthly for large-scale cleaning. She hired a husband-and-wife team who were African-American and about her age. They had a cordial relationship — until she couldn't be home one day and left a to-do list for the couple.

"My list was not well-received," Preston-Washington sighs.

Looking back on it, Preston-Washington says the problem might have been boundaries: "I feel like they treated me like it was a personal relationship, rather than a professional one." She figured the cleaning arrangement was business; they might have thought the commonalities — same race, same age — made a bond.

Through history, though, when black women had help, it often was of a personal nature — maybe a cousin came to help out, or a neighbor from down the street, or a friend of a friend. These women were paid, but they weren't referred to as housekeepers. They were just folk who came and "did" for the family. But that was then. The new generation doesn't seem to mind a little distance.

Most social observers agree that the era of the black housekeeper has faded away. The duster has been passed to a new generation: Latinas now dominate the household and personal services industry. But just as the black middle class expanded in the '70s, the Latino middle class is expanding now. Which means Latinas in the position to hire a housekeeper or nanny are going to have to ask themselves the same questions their African-American sisters did: "Can I hire someone who looks like me? Is it OK for me to be the ma'am?"

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The Congressional Gold Medal has been posthumously awarded to four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. President Obama signed the legislation Friday, as (from left) Birmingham Mayor William Bell, Dr. Sharon Malone Holder, Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Terri Sewell, and relatives of Denise McNair and Carole Robertson look on. (Getty Images)

'Four Little Girls' Awarded Congressional Gold Medal

May 24, 2013 (KSMU-FM) — They were just little girls when they were killed in what came to be known as the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. And now Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley have been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, nearly 50 years after the attack in Birmingham, Ala.

They were just little girls when they were killed in 1963, in what came to be known as the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. And now Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley have been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, nearly 50 years after the attack in Birmingham, Ala.

President Obama signed the legislation Friday to award the girls — all of them 14, except for McNair, who was 11 — with the highest honor Congress can bestow upon a civilian.

The girls' deaths, from dynamite hidden under a bathroom by white supremacists, helped propel the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress. They were eulogized by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who famously asked, "What murdered these little girls?" — a sentiment echoed in director Spike Lee's film about the incident, 4 Little Girls.

The prosecution of those responsible stretched out over decades. The last living defendant, former Ku Klux Klansman Thomas Blanton Jr., was convicted of four counts of murder in 2001.

In recent weeks, both the House and Senate passed the bill honoring the girls with unanimous votes. One of the bill's sponsors was Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, who attended the signing of the legislation in the Oval Office on Friday.

"It's a very proud moment for me, both as an American and as an Alabamian," Sewell tells WBUR's Meghna Chakrabarti on Friday's Here & Now. "I grew up in Selma, Ala., and it was because of the sacrifices that were made by so many, including the families of these four little girls, that I get an opportunity to walk the halls of Congress as the first African-American woman from Alabama."

As Melanie Peeples reported for NPR back in 2003, the bombing is part of a violent legacy with which Birmingham is still coping. And as Tanya Ott reported earlier this year, bombing survivor Sarah Collins Rudolph, Addie Mae's sister, continues to struggle with the lingering and painful effects of the attack.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.