Two individuals seemingly stole the employee tips box from Pika Pollo—and were recorded doing it by security cameras. The duo brazenly stole money on Oct. 8 around 7:40 pm, reported Egleston Square Main Street, which shared video of the theft on Facebook. You can see an employee putting an order together while the two stand by the cash register and steal the tips that employees earned. The suspects have not been identified yet.
Jamaica Plain News
A new nonprofit created by Jamaica Plain parents is providing nature-based education during the school day for young Boston Public School students. Think Outside was created by Marie O’Reilly and Ben Strauss in 2025, and Think Outside began offering programming last spring. Both O’Reilly and Strauss have children in BPS, so it’s not just business, it’s personal. O’Reilly and Strauss answered questions about Think Outside and why they created it. Why did you want to…
Jamaica Plain nonprofit Youth Enrichment Services (YES) recently received a three-year, $175,000 grant from Dick’s Sporting Goods Foundation. The grant is specifically given to support communities where access to organized sports, outdoor recreation, and green space remains extremely limited or nonexistent. YES provides opportunities to Boston youth to provide year-round youth programming for skiing, track and field, bicycling, and more. The grant will help support the organization’s new, state-of-the-art headquarters that opened in Jamaica Plain…
The city’s curbside food waste collection program is shifting to collecting every other week instead of every week. The program was launched in 2022 and operated in conjunction with an independent company, Garbage to Garden. Residents wanting to participate are given household buckets that are lined with compostable bags to collect food waste. Food waste and more than food waste of all sorts is accepted, including bones, meat, coffee grinds, pet food, fireplace ash, and…
Parents frustrated with the amount of screen time their students get at Boston Public Schools are petitioning the School Committee to create an official screen time policy. The Los Angeles Unified School District and New York City Public Schools recently created screen time policies for every grade level. Boston parents would like a similar policy to be enacted here. The policy would include removing digital devices from early education classrooms through 2nd grade, block non-traditional…
Jamaica Plain resident and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips will be discussing her newest book, Small Town Girls, at the Jamaica Plain Branch Library on Oct. 8. Small Town Girls is Phillips’ ninth book and first nonfiction title, and is a “writer’s memoir” in essays. Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia, and in the essays “…Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. From the…
A woman who was sitting on a bench was killed when a vehicle crashed into a Faulkner Hospital building on Thursday morning. Video from the scene showed a black SUV had hit the Belkin House after 10 am, according to WCVB. Two people in the vehicle were treated for non-life threatening injuries. The Belkin House was also evacuated after the vehicle hit a gas line outside of the hospital. National Grid crews came to the…
The Margarita Muñiz Academy started in 2012 with a ninth grade class to become Boston’s first public dual-language high school. Grades were added and it was a high school serving ninth to 12th grade until 2024 when it added 7th and 8th grad classes. The school now has more than 470 students. From its building on Child Street, Muñiz Academy “implements a college preparatory, culturally relevant two-way bilingual curriculum that provides students with the 21st century…
America’s oldest community theater company—The Footlight Club—is celebrating its 150th anniversary with a special cocktail gala fundraiser on Oct. 3. Gala goers are encouraged to don creative cocktail attire for an elegant evening that will feature a catered menu, an open bar, and a silent auction on unique items and experiences. Possibly most entertainingly intriguing is that cast members from past productions will return to The Footlight Club’s home at Eliot Hall to provide live…
In 1676, a group of local residents donated corn and land to create a school in Jamaica Plain—and thus became what we know as the Eliot School today. In 1689 Rev. John Eliot endowed the school with an additional 75 acres, and that is where the name Eliot comes from. The school went through many different iterations and styles—from being a Boston Public School, having multiple campuses in Boston, at some point taught plumbing (it…