Beth Adams

Just after noon on a Thursday, eight students are seated at desks spaced out around a large room at the Phillis Wheatley Community Library in Corn Hill.

They range in age from 5 to 12.  Most of them are working on their laptops as several teaching assistants walk around to see if anyone needs help.

"Before this whole program started, I was really doing terrible," said Xavier Johnson, "but since I started coming here, my grades have been getting back up."

With an increasing COVID-19 infection rate, Monroe County's commissioner of public health says it's time to consider how to enforce health guidelines such as mask wearing and social distancing.

Dr. Michael Mendoza tells WXXI  News that County Executive Adam Bello and his team have been  talking with law enforcement leaders about how to do that.

Up until now, Mendoza and Bello have favored education over enforcement.

The Rochester Fireworks Company on Whitney Road in Perinton, like many factories during World War II, had been converted to manufacture war products - in this case, military flares.

On November 6, 1942, at 4:30 p.m., a half hour after the start of the second shift, there was an explosion in one of the dozens of buildings at the plant.

"And that small explosion broke out into a fire and the fire spread quickly through a building where many people were working," said Perinton town historian Bill Poray.

Monroe County's first director of addiction services is working on ways to reach people who she says are traditionally under-served, forgotten, and missing out on treatment.

Tisha Smith was recently appointed to the new position by County Executive Adam Bello.

She's been on the job for about three weeks but Smith is no newcomer to the field of addiction treatment.

She was most recently director of inmate drug and alcohol programs for the county sheriff's office.  Before that, she was an addiction therapist supervisor at Unity Hospital.

A Rochester musician says he was inspired to do something to lift people's spirits during a time of distress and separation.

Billy Goodness, drummer and vocalist for the band "The Klick," says the idea came to him in a dream.

"I literally woke up one night ... I guess, one morning at about 3 a.m.," he says, "and this whole thing was playing it my head, but I heard it with this choir, this chorus."

He probably didn't realize it at the time, but Sanford Coley's life took a dramatic turn in the mid-1990s.

That's when Coley, who is now 66, got a job at CleanCraft, a commercial cleaning company in Rochester.  He had already interviewed for 10 or 15 other jobs before this one came through.

"Being an ex-felon," he said, "other companies just looked over me, and it was tough."  

Feminist, journalist, and social activist Gloria Steinhem has been the face of the women's movement since the 1960s.

The producer of a new play presented by the Jewish Community Center's CenterStage said even a global pandemic can't silence Steinem's voice.