Families & Community

Parents and students in Benton Harbor are getting ready for the upcoming school year.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration had proposed closing Benton Harbor high school next year. But the state backed down from that proposal last week.

The Discovery Pier in Traverse City is hoping to attract cruise ships around the Great Lakes. The United States Coast Guard certified the pier as a cruise port back in December, and the newly formed Traverse City Cruise Consortium is hoping to capitalize on the trend of smaller cruise ships in the Great Lakes.

Food, music and heritage are the focus at the annual Grand Rapids Hispanic Festival this weekend.

But this year, there will also be added security.

Organizers with the Hispanic Center of Western Michigan say about 25,000 people showed up for the festival last year, and they’re hoping for more this year.

Police departments in Michigan are urging people to call them when they see online claims of mass shooting events.

That’s after an online hoax spread across social media in Michigan on Tuesday.

The online hoax claimed that active shooters were going door to door in and around five Michigan cities. None of it happened in any of the cities. The hoax is based on the plot of a movie.

Vanessa Burt is an officer with the Detroit Police Department. She says spreading false information about shootings is malicious, reckless and irresponsible.

The number of homeless kids under the age of four in Michigan could be much higher than reported by homeless service agencies.

That's according to a report from researchers at the Michigan League for Public Policy and Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan.

The Great Lakes Water Authority is allocating more than $1.2 million to help customers cover their current and overdue water bills. About $794,000 is being given to Detroit residents and about $427,700 to Flint residents.

Jonathan Wheatley, public finance manager at the Great Lakes Water Authority, says they've assisted residents with funds from their Water Residential Assistance Program (WRAP) over the past two years. This year, the funding is from the 2018 bill assistance funds for Wayne, Macomb and Oakland counties. 

Michigan households that receive food stamps can apply for replacement Food Assistance Program benefits if they have food that was spoiled due to recent power outages in Michigan.

The outages occurred after heavy storms rolled through southeast Michigan on Friday and Saturday. Outages continued through the weekend, with some residents without power as late as Wednesday

Census tracts in Detroit, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Flint, Saginaw and Grand Rapids scored high on an evaluation of environmental injustices, according to a University of Michigan study released Thursday.

People who visit Tecumseh for the first time usually come for one of three reasons: antiques, destination dining, or as just a stop on Route 50 on the way to the Irish Hills area or a Michigan International Speedway event.

Corey and Victoria Lord think the people from out of town are missing a lot.

The restaurant was conceived by co-owners Rhonda Callahan and Sarah Ruddle who have been operating a food truck that gives out free meals in mid-Michigan since 2012. The restaurant will be called The Torch 180. Callahan and Ruddle are partnering with the Michigan Career and Technical Institute to train adults with disabilities in customer service, food preparation, cooking, sanitation and other transferable skills. 

The Federal Communications Commission has authorized nearly $33 million to expand broadband access to rural communities in Michigan over the next 10 years. The money will cover 21,073 homes and businesses.

Mark Wigfield, spokesman for the FCC, says making sure rural communities can be economically competitive is a priority.

“The costs are high in rural areas of deploying it because you have more sparse populations, so you have many miles of wire and few customers to pay for it,” he says.

The eviction notice arrived last month at William Nunley’s modest two-story house in Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, one of the hottest real-estate markets in the city. He had lived in the house for three years with his wife and their three children and had hoped to buy it from their landlord.

The Michigan Department of Corrections has partnered with DTE Energy and IBEW Local 17 to train inmates in trimming trees.

MDOC worked very closely with DTE and IBEW Local 17 to develop the curriculum for the program, located at Parnall Correctional Facility in Jackson. It allows inmates to get hands-on experience. 

Detroit’s Fourth of July long weekend is off to a violent start, with police reporting at least ten shooting incidents across the city Thursday night into Friday morning.

Most of the shootings appear to have resulted from interpersonal disputes. They started with a non-fatal shooting during an argument at a fireworks display around 11:30 p.m.

More than 100 people showed up at Detroit’s immigration office on Thursday to protest conditions at migrant detention camps along the southern U.S. border.

Just down the street from the Michigan Radio office is an iconic Ann Arbor destination: Washtenaw Dairy. It didn’t come by the label of “icon” lightly; the dairy is celebrating its 85th anniversary this week.

Today, Washtenaw Dairy is known for ice cream, doughnuts, and coffee. But when Edwin Laubengayer opened the shop in the middle of the Great Depression, it was one of the state’s many dairy shops.

Bethany Christian Services is looking for short-term foster care families in Holland and East Lansing as the Grand Rapids-based social services agency expands its transitional foster care program in those cities.

Bethany is looking to place migrant children who arrived in the U.S. unaccompanied, and are waiting to be reunited with family members or other sponsors. The agency has operated the transitional services in Grand Rapids, Muskegon and Paw Paw since 2012.

A lot of Michiganders have hometown pride. It’s the reason you see so many locals sporting everything from bumper stickers to tattoos celebrating their home. But in some cities, hometown pride is a bit more complicated.

Cities like Dearborn, Michigan.

Dearborn native Rima Fadlallah says many people from her city see being “too Dearborn” as a negative thing. Being associated with the city's large Arab American community, she says, "in some ways is an unpopular thing to do."