You'll find a wide range of toys, puzzles, clothes, legos, books, games and so much more at Kid's Center. Just walking it will make you feel like a kid again. Stop by the shop, 1725 N. Swan Road, to pick something up for someone you love or to make a last-minute donation to one of the toy drives around town. Check them out online here.

Anyone who follows education nationally knows that TUSD's problems with desegregation aren't unique. You find segregated schools across the country in places where, like Tucson, there is enough of an ethnic mix to create schools with diverse student populations. The question is, what are effective ways to get more children of different races and ethnicities attending the same schools? TUSD has a court-ordered plan to increase desegregation which includes attracting Anglo students to magnet schools in predominantly Hispanic areas. It hasn't worked out well. Recriminations fly in all directions.

For me, one of the most troubling questions is, can Anglo parents with middle class incomes be convinced to send their children to schools with a majority of Hispanic children, many of whom come from families at the poverty level?

A study out of New York indicates how difficult the problem of desegregating schools is. New York is known to have some of the most segregated public schools in the country. Part of that has to do with living patterns, of course, with people separated geographically by race, ethnicity and income. But according to a study by the Center for New York City Affairs, even when geography isn't a factor, school segregation often persists.

“We see a lot of areas where income is more mixed, and ethnicity is more mixed, but the schools are not,” said Nicole Mader, an education policy analyst at the center.

The analysts’ maps provide stark evidence of something many New Yorkers know intuitively: Middle-class families, often white, are happy to live in areas where their neighbors are less well-off and are a different color; this is the very tide of gentrification. But they are less willing to send their children to schools where most of their classmates are likely to be poor and either black or Hispanic.

This impulse creates pockets of extremes. More affluent families cluster in schools with reputations for good academics. Many middle-class families zoned for high-poverty schools send their children to charter schools or gifted and talented programs, rather than to a local school.

The study cites a school where the neighborhood's average income is $69,000 and 37 percent of the people living there are African American or Hispanic. Yet the school is 96 percent African American and Hispanic, and the average income of the school's families is $36,000.

We've been wrestling with integrating schools since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. We've tried a variety of approaches with mixed results, at best. Sixty-one years later, it's hard to see much progress. Tried, tested solutions are hard to find.

The Human Rights Campaign gave Tucson a score of 100 for being LGBT inclusive, despite being located in a state that not too long ago promoted legislation that would have allowed businesses to deny service based on sexual orientation.

The country's largest LGBT civil rights organization released its 2015 Municipal Equality Index Thursday, which every year measures cities' progression in ensuring LGBT equality.

The group looks at things like a municipality's employment non-discrimination policies—including transgender-inclusive health insurance coverage, which neither the City of Tucson or Pima County currently provide, but Tucson's good performance in other areas helped it score a 100, such as offering same-sex domestic partner registry, and civil union certificates, long before same-sex marriage was legalized in Arizona. Law enforcement relationship with LGBT people, and the equality advocacy are also considered in the equality index.

Phoenix and Tempe were the only other cities that got a perfect score. Then there were towns like Glendale that received a sad 29/100.

"While this has been an historic year for equality, we are constantly reminded of just how far we still have to go,” said HRC President Chad Griffin in a statement. “In too many communities, LGBT Americans continue to face barriers to equality, overt discrimination, and even violence. We believe those challenges make full equality and strong legal protections all the more important, and today's report makes clear that hundreds of local communities throughout all 50 states wholeheartedly agree.”

“Across the nation, cities and towns are leading the way on equality for millions of LGBT Americans. This year, a record number of communities have earned top scores in our Municipal Equality Index because they’ve extended fully-inclusive benefits and protections to LGBT people and their families. What makes this progress especially remarkable is that these cities and towns are often going above and beyond state and federal laws to ensure LGBT residents and visitors are protected and treated equally."

In total, 47 cities earned a perfect score, up from 38 last year.

Doesn't everyone get sick the week before Christmas? It's freezing, everyone in the retail world are working long and stressful shifts, and the rest of us are overwhelmed trying to figure out last minute gifts for the family members we don't know very well. That's rough, and spending an entire Saturday on the couch watching movies and eating pho is obviously the best way to handle the weekend.

Or maybe you're in the mood for a movie but not willing to brave a jedi-packed movie theater. Either way, Casa Video has you covered. Here's our weekly list of DVDs you and everyone else want to rent this weekend:

1. Ant-Man

2. Minions

3. Knock Knock

Etherton Gallery's current exhibition, Danny Lyon: Conversations with the Dead, highlights a collection of photographs that Lyon took of the grim realities that inmates in Texas prisons faced back in the late 1960s.

I'm moderating a panel discussion at the gallery tomorrow night on the increase in inmates in Arizona prisons, the rise in private prisons and the challenges that inmates face when reentering society after their release. Panelists will include:

• Longtime Tucson Weekly contributor Margaret Regan, who's newest book, Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire, digs into what happens when undocumented immigrants end up behind bars—and often in private prisons. Detained and Deported was named one of the Pima County Public Library's Southwest Books of the Year; it has also received high praise from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly and Booklist, which noted that "with other horrifying case studies, Regan provides discomfiting statistics to document the rise of the detention-industrial complex."

• State Sen. Steve Farley, who has long been a critic of privatized prisons.

• Lisette Flores, who serves as general counsel and policy advisor the Senate Democratic Caucus. Flores has also served as a prosecutor for the city of Phoenix and as the director of the Immigration and Legal Services Department of Friendly House, a Phoenix nonprofit that provides social and legal services.

• Grace Gámez of the American Friends Service Committee, who specializes in helping mothers readjust to society after being released from prison.

The panel is at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 18 at Etherton, 135 S. Sixth Ave.

When the legislature opens for business in January and Republicans stonewall the idea of a substantial increase to the K-12 education budget—a fairly safe prediction—they'll remind us how generous they were when they decided to add $350 million a year to the school budget. Actually, they haven't added the money yet. The voters have to OK the deal first. And most of it doesn't come from the state budget since the legislature plans to make a big draw on the state land trust money that belongs to the schools already. And it's not really new money, since the state is legally bound to provide it to the schools—really, it's only 70 percent of what the state owe the schools. But still, Republicans will argue, $350 million is a serious chunk of change. The schools should be happy to get such a hefty increase.

But really, how much does a $350 million addition to the Arizona school budget amount to? It's not enough to move us out of 48th or 49th or 50th place (depending on who's doing the counting) in per student funding. It amounts to a measly 5 percent increase in our woefully inadequate education budget. Still, when you look at that dollar figure, it seems like a lot of money. So let's take a look at what $350 million will buy.

There's nearly universal agreement that Arizona teachers deserve a raise. We're losing teachers who leave the profession or move to other states because our salary schedule is so low—45th in the nation. Our average teacher salary, $45,300, is more than $10,000 below the national average. Even if we limit the comparison to the eight states closest to us in per capita income, Arizona teacher salary levels are $3,300 below theirs.

So what would happen if we used some of the $350 million to increase average teacher salaries by, say, $3,000? That adds up to $180 million. And if we add in the money the districts spend on things like Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, etc.—say, an added 20 percent—we're at $215 million.

For the moment, let's forget about boosting the salaries of staff other than teachers to make up for their years of stagnant wages. We'll leave that for some other time. Let's see what else we can do with the rest of the money. We've spent $215 million of the $350 million total on the salary boost for teachers, so we have $135 million left. Let's see. There are 2,000 public schools in Arizona, counting district and charter schools. If we divvied up what's left among them, that would be $67,500 per school. That doesn't make sense, of course, since school sizes vary widely. So let's divide the money equally between the million Arizona students and give each school an extra $135 per student. A school with 200 students would get $27,000, about a half of an average teacher's salary. A 2,000 student school would get $135,000, which would buy it two-and-a-half new teachers. Using up all the $135 million to pay for more teachers would mean lowering average class sizes statewide by two or three students.

Of course, schools could spend the $135 per student on books, computers, supplies—anything on their wish list. But a small, 200 student elementary school isn't going to get much for $27,000, what with the cost of things these days, and a large high school won't be able to make $135,000 go very far either.

No matter how you slice it, $350 million spread over a million students at 2,000 schools, while it's money no school wants to refuse, doesn't move the educational needle much. Remember, our schools were hurting financially before that money was cut in 2010. This would just get them back to the sorry financial state they were in before.
 

Robots! Books! Sea Monkeys! Local art! This is where we're shopping today. Brighten someone's holiday season and shop local with a visit to perennial Best of Tucson winner  Yike's Toys, 2930 E. Broadway. 

The people over at our long-time sister paper Inside Tucson Business are wrapping up their annual call for Women of Influence nominations.

I've said it before: Tucson women are endlessly inspiring. ITB's event has 18 different award categories, celebrating women for their business prowess, their mentoring skills and their career-long accomplishments. The honorees are decided by reader nominations, and finalists and winners are selected by an independent panel of judges.

Get a look at the categories, do some brainstorming and take the time to include thoughtful notes about the people you're nominating.

Tucson is filled with incredible women. Help ITB honor someone you know makes a difference in the Old Pueblo—Nominations close Friday. 

An analysis by the website Apartment List says more than half of Tucson renters spend more than one-third of their (our) income on rent.

The site used U.S. Census data from 2007 to 2014 to look into which cities and states have the most "cost-burdened renters," meaning people who give more than 30 percent of their monthly income to a landlord to pay for a roof over their heads. Nationwide, 52 percent of people are "cost-burdened." In Tucson, the number is even higher at 55.6 percent—rent prices continue to increase, but salaries remain low. Employers have high demands, but don't think workers deserve a living wage.

Apparently, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Austin did well, because incomes have "increased in line with rent growth." Well, at least Tucson is doing better than Miami, Detroit and Los Angeles, where more than 60 percent of the population is spending a big chunk of their income on rent. 

Read the entire report on Apartment List's website.

With the U.S. homeownership rate at its lowest since 1967, the U.S. renter population is the largest it has ever been, and now stands at 43 million households. The share of U.S. renters facing cost burdens, however, has risen steadily in the past 50 years, from 24% in 1960 to 38% in the year 2000. Since then, rents have continued to rise steadily, increasing by 3.2% last year – twice the pace of overall inflation.

The past few years have seen modest increases in renter incomes, but they are still lower than 2001 in inflation adjusted terms. As a result, the share of cost-burdened renters (paying more than 30% of their income on rent) has risen in many cities and states across the nation. According to the census data used in our analysis, the share of cost-burdened renters is 40 percent or higher in all but two states as of 2013.

"We have rights under the Constitution that must be kept meaningful...migration should not be a criminal act!" said long-time immigration rights advocate Isabel Garcia to a group of people at the skirts of the Evo A. DeConcini Federal Courthouse.

"It is shameful that we treat people this way, that we jail them...migration is at an all time high, we are making migrants the international criminals," she told the crowd. And how are we doing this? "...[with U.S.] policies that promote migration, whether it's [the North American Free Trade Agreement], our war on drugs, whether it is [U.S.] intervention in El Salvador..."

It has been exactly 10 years since the criminal immigration proceedings known as Operation Streamline came into effect. To mark its "anniversary," immigration rights and prison reform advocates, as well as religious leaders, have been participating in a series of protests that began on Dec. 9. This Monday, local clergy interrupted Operation Streamline proceedings by reading scriptures from the Bible and praying. Other U.S.-Mexico border communities have also been making noise during this "week of action."

Earlier today outside the federal courthouse downtown, the group End Streamline Coalition—which Garcia is a member of—put together a theater skit, with the help of Borderlands Theater, depicting what goes on within Operation Streamline: who benefits and who loses. 

The proceedings began in Del Rio, Texas on Dec. 16, 2005, and it made its way to Tucson three years later.