D.C. officials aim for a strong start to the school year by encouraging students and their parents to get vaccinated.

The city’s youth vaccination incentive program kicked off Saturday at three local middle schools.

“We are doing so much this year to ensure that our school buildings are safe, that our school communities will be safe as we return to the vital in-person schooling we all know is essential for our young learners,” Paul Kihn, the District’s Deputy Mayor for Education, said.

Kihn, alongside other D.C. officials, attended the Saturday immunization event at Souza Middle School as parents and their children walked in and signed up for free routine immunizations and the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine.

Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools Lewis D. Ferebee was also at the event.

“I have a teenager myself, who’s a DCPS student and made the decision to show that he was vaccinated,”  Ferebee said.

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Students, 12 years old and up, who got the vaccine on Saturday walked away with free prizes such as Air Pods, gift cards and the chance to win a $25,000 scholarship.

Other participating schools include Brooklyn Middle School and Johnson Middle School.

“The data is really clear, the science is clear,” Chancellor Ferebee said. “Of those individuals who are testing positive and vaccinated, the symptoms have been minimal.”

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The City of Fairfax brought the community together to celebrate Asian heritage through art, food and entertainment. The event was hosted in the heart of Old Town Fairfax between Chain Bridge Road and University Drive. What was expected to be a small gathering turned into a sold out event.

“It’s insane,” said event organizer Wendy Wong. “The overwhelming amount of people that wanted to attended is shocking.”

The celebration kicked off with remarks from the city’s first Asian American elected official, Councilmember Sang Yi.

“This is the true nature of the City of Fairfax and how we celebrate our people, and the types of heritages we represent here,” Yi said. “Might be a small town, but we have a big heart. We have a big heart of a lot of people. This is our inaugural Asian festival, we’ve never had anything like it before.”

The event included family games, raffles, performances of Japanese and Hawaiian dance, and a demonstration of traditional Tai Chi Sword Fighting.

“We have representatives from lot of different Asian cultures, from China, to Vietnam and I believe we have people from Tibet and other places,” event sponsor Mike Moran said.

Through arts, crafts, entertainment and exhibits, visitors were able to learn about Asian heritage and history. The fashion show was one of the main attractions. One attendee even dressed up like her favorite Japanese “vocaloid,” Hatsune Miku.

Yi called the event a huge success, and said he hopes it will become an annual event for years to come. It was organized and sponsored by Old Town Fairfax Business Association.

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Eight days after the drive-by shooting that took the life of 6-year-old Nyiah Courtney and wounded five others, community leaders are calling for action.

One hundred Black fathers, uncles, brothers and sons marched around Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X avenues, where Nyiah and her mother were gunned down, with a strong message for listeners: “There is no honor in protecting murderers.”

The “street code” or “code of silence” is an unwritten rule that discourages community members from reporting crimes to police. The strained relationship between law enforcement and communities of color makes the rule a difficult one to break. Activists are urging residents to hold themselves accountable.

“When you got people in our community, killing Black people, you need to tell it,” one activist who attended the march told �鶹����’s news partners .

Residents were also connected with some of the workforce development programs at the University of the District of Columbia.

“I often hear ‘we didn’t know about this’ or ‘no one ever tells us’ so I want to bridge that gap,” said Salim Adofo, the chairperson for Advisory Neighborhoods Commission 8C.

He says Saturday’s event will have lasting effects on residents as volunteers continue the work of creating more access and bringing up role models.

“People don’t join organizations, they join people, so if we have brothers that are out there doing great things, then they’ll start to come out and want to engage more,” he said.

Adofo said the plan is to get back out into the community next weekend.

Volunteers marched door-to-door and met the residents face-to-face, handing out flyers on gun violence and community resources for food, finances and mental health. Adolfo said it’s an effort to rebuild the relationships between neighbors.

“We’ve been in the pandemic for that last year-and-a-half about this point, and we want to move out of the digital space and talk to people and build that relationship and get back to being an actual neighborhood and know your neighbors,” he said.

As the search for Nyiah’s killer continues, community leaders encourage anyone with information to contact the Metropolitan Police Department at 202-727-9099.

Anonymous information can be submitted to the department’s TEXT TIP LINE by sending a text message to 50411.

A total reward of $60,000 is being offered to anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspects.

�鶹����’s Melissa Howell contributed to this report.

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Days after the massacre that claimed the lives of 59 and injured more than 500, witnesses who lived to tell their story are speaking out. Fighting back tears of sorrow, shooting survivor Brian Claypool questions, “Why do I get to go home and they don’t?”

Another survivor, Heather Gooze, describes holding a man’s hand as he died:

A group of friends who were separated from each other as shots fired, relive their harrowing escape:

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