Chilling headlines about school shootings, hate crime rampages, and crime on our streets have stopped America in its tracks this year. Innovative and effective grass roots answers to teen violence and crime problems will be the focus of a special webcast symposium at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Tuesday, September 14, 1999 from 9-11 a.m. Featuring Education Secretary Richard Riley, Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, (Harvard School of Public Health), James Burch (youth gang director, U.S. Department of Justice), Dr. Robert J. Bursik, Jr. (University of Missouri-St. Louis), and Dr. Jack Levin (Northeastern University), the symposium will also include community activists who have sparked grass roots action in their own home towns and journalists who have written about hate crime. The moderator is Hedrick Smith, host of Seeking Solutions on PBS.

PBS will devote an entire evening in September to Seeking Solutions, a special three-hour broadcast showing grass roots answers to teen violence, random street crime and hate crime developed by towns and cities across America. The program, which airs nationwide on Wednesday, September 22, 1999 from 8 -11 pm Eastern Time (check local listings), takes viewers from rural South Carolina and inner city Washington, DC to Orange County, California, stopping en route in Chicago; Kansas City, Missouri; and central Oregon. In each community, Seeking Solutions, hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, highlights ordinary heroes who are making schools and streets safe again. Local PBS stations are doing spinoff programs as part of the broadcast.