Names and faces
Michelle Obama, the former first lady, surprised Kirsten Perry, the newly named school counselor of the year for
2018, with a phone call last week. Obama congratulated Perry on her award, and
Obama said she would be introducing the counselor at a gala Friday in Washington, during a meeting of all of the state winners of the award. Obama became involved with the counselor of the year project in 2015 when her husband,
Barack Obama, was president. She hosted the ceremony at the White House that year, as well as in 2016 and 2017. The award honors school counselors who devote their careers to advocating for students and to helping them with academic and social and emotional development needs. Perry, the 2018 winner, works at Lawndale Community Academy in Chicago, a pre-kindergarten-through-eighth grade school where she is the sole counselor for more than 400 students. Perry has been a school counselor for six years, moving to Lawndale in 2015 at a time when the school’s ranking in the district was the lowest possible — and had been that way for the previous five years. School officials credit Perry with helping students focus on improving their attendance and for implementing restorative justice and other programs. Those initiatives helped Lawndale’s ranking rise at the end of her first year. Former student Kyla Evans was quoted by the American School Counselor Association as saying: “I would get in a lot of fights, too. Ms. Perry helped us to work on ourselves. … She makes all the kids at Lawndale feel loved and like we can do anything we dream of.”
A woman who claimed the rapper Nelly raped her on his tour bus after a performance in Seattle says he sexually assaulted two other women in England. Attorney Scott Rosenblum said Saturday in an email that the allegations are “completely fabricated” and the lawsuit is a “money grab.” The amended complaint filed Monday in a Seattle court does not list the women by name. It alleges that on separate occasions in June 2016 and December 2017, Nelly invited the women to private after-parties and assaulted them. Nelly was arrested on his tour bus in a suburban Seattle Wal-Mart parking lot in October. Prosecutors said later that month that they weren’t charging him because the woman wasn’t cooperating with the case. She sued Nelly in December seeking unspecified damages.