Implementing School-Based Mental Health Centers to Increase Academic Outcomes for Students

Although there have been many attempts to close the achievement gap through academic interventions, achievement gaps among African-American, Hispanic, and Economically Disadvantaged students continues to be prevalent in public schools in the United States. As a part of a school turnaround strategy, school-based mental health centers were installed in high schools throughout an urban school district to address severe mental health challenges of some of its students. Students from three of the high schools that utilized a school-based mental health center at least five times were compared with students in a computer-generated comparison group to determine whether the school-based mental health counseling affected student academic performance. Attendance, discipline records, grade point averages, and standardized examination scores of students during the year prior and during the treatment year were analyzed. A descriptive analysis found that students treated in a school-based mental health center had improved attendance, reduced disciplinary infractions, improved grade point averages, and better standardized examination scores than the comparison group. This Record of Study recommends practices to implement and monitor a school-based mental health center successfully. School administrators need to consider strategies to identify students who need mental health services, provide professional development for staff on mental health issues, the plan to promote the services provided in the mental health center to the school community, and support systems required to fully realize the potential of providing counseling on a school campus. Recommendations for further study include measuring the effectiveness of the school-based mental health center based on cohorts of students, using students who refuse treatment as a control group, determining the effects of the school-based mental health center on the culture and climate of a school community, and using questionnaires to document feedback from students, parents and staff

Bacterial protein secretion — a target for new antibiotics?

AbstractThe heavy use of antibiotics over recent decades has resulted in widespread resistance of bacteria to many drugs. Overcoming resistance requires new approaches to antibiotic development, including the exploitation of new targets in the bacterial cell. Protein secretion is essential for bacterial cell growth and virulence, so it could be a suitable target for new therapeutic agents

Coordinate Cell Cycle Control of a Caulobacter DNA Methyltransferase and the Flagellar Genetic Hierarchy

The expression of the Caulobacter ccrM gene and the activity of its product, the M.Ccr II DNA methyltransferase, are limited to a discrete portion of the cell cycle (G. Zweiger, G. Marczynski, and L. Shapiro, J. Mol. Biol. 235:472-485, 1994). Temporal control of DNA methylation has been shown to be critical for normal development in the dimorphic Caulobacter life cycle. To understand the mechanism by which ccrM expression is regulated during the cell cycle, we have identified and characterized the ccrM promoter region. We have found that it belongs to an unusual promoter family used by several Caulobacter class II flagellar genes. The expression of these class II genes initiates assembly of the flagellum just prior to activation of the ccrM promoter in the predivisional cell. Mutational analysis of two M.Ccr II methylation sites located 3\u27 to the ccrM promoter suggests that methylation might influence the temporally controlled inactivation of ccrM transcription. An additional parallel between the ccrM and class II flagellar promoters is that their transcription responds to a cell cycle DNA replication checkpoint. We propose that a common regulatory system coordinates the expression of functionally diverse genes during the Caulobacter cell cycle

Implementing School-Based Mental Health Centers to Increase Academic Outcomes for Students

Although there have been many attempts to close the achievement gap through academic interventions, achievement gaps among African-American, Hispanic, and Economically Disadvantaged students continues to be prevalent in public schools in the United States. As a part of a school turnaround strategy, school-based mental health centers were installed in high schools throughout an urban school district to address severe mental health challenges of some of its students. Students from three of the high schools that utilized a school-based mental health center at least five times were compared with students in a computer-generated comparison group to determine whether the school-based mental health counseling affected student academic performance. Attendance, discipline records, grade point averages, and standardized examination scores of students during the year prior and during the treatment year were analyzed. A descriptive analysis found that students treated in a school-based mental health center had improved attendance, reduced disciplinary infractions, improved grade point averages, and better standardized examination scores than the comparison group. This Record of Study recommends practices to implement and monitor a school-based mental health center successfully. School administrators need to consider strategies to identify students who need mental health services, provide professional development for staff on mental health issues, the plan to promote the services provided in the mental health center to the school community, and support systems required to fully realize the potential of providing counseling on a school campus. Recommendations for further study include measuring the effectiveness of the school-based mental health center based on cohorts of students, using students who refuse treatment as a control group, determining the effects of the school-based mental health center on the culture and climate of a school community, and using questionnaires to document feedback from students, parents and staff

Caulobacter Lon protease has a critical role in cell-cvcle cbntrol of DNA I methylation

CcrM, an adenine DNA methyltransferase, is essential for viability in Caulobacter crescentus. The CcrM protein is present only in the predivisional stage of the cell cycle, resulting in cell-cycle-dependent variation of the DNA methylation state of the chromosome. The availability of CcrM is controlled in two ways: (1) the ccrM gene is transcribed only in the predivisional cell, and (2) the CcrM protein is rapidly degraded prior to cell division. We demonstrate here that CcrM is an important target of the Lon protease pathway in C. crescentus. In a lon null mutant, ccrM transcription is still temporally regulated, but the CcrM protein is present throughout the cell cycle because of a dramatic increase in its stability that results in a fully methylated chromosome throughout the cell cycle. Because the Lon protease is present throughout the cell cycle, it is likely that the level of CcrM in the cell is controlled by a dynamic balance between temporally varied transcription and constitutive degradation. We have shown previously that restriction of CcrM to the C. crescentus predivisional cell is essential for normal morphogenesis and progression through the cell cycle. Comparison of the lon null mutant strain with a strain whose DNA remains fully methylated as a result of constitutive expression of ccrM suggests that the effect of Lon on DNA methylation contributes to several developmental defects observed in the lon mutant. These defects include a frequent failure to complete cell division and loss of precise cell-cycle control of initiation of DNA replication. Other developmental abnormalities exhibited by the lon null mutant, such as the formation of abnormally long stalks, appear to be unrelated to altered chromosome methylation state. The Lon protease thus exhibits pleiotropic effects in C. crescentus growth and development

Identification of the fliI and fliJ Components of the Caulobacter Flagellar Type III Protein Secretion System

Caulobacter crescentus is motile by virtue of a polar flagellum assembled during the predivisional stage of the cell cycle. Three mutant strains in which flagellar assembly was blocked at an early stage were isolated. The mutations in these strains mapped to an operon of two genes, fliI and fliJ, both of which are necessary for motility. fliI encodes a 50-kDa polypeptide whose sequence is closely related to that of the Salmonella typhimurium FliI protein, an ATPase thought to energize the export of flagellar subunits across the cytoplasmic membrane through a type III protein secretion system. fliJ encodes a 16-kDa hydrophilic protein of unknown function. Epistasis experiments demonstrated that the fliIJ operon is located in class II of the C. crescentus flagellar regulatory hierarchy, suggesting that the gene products act at an early stage in flagellar assembly. The expression of fliIJ is induced midway through the cell cycle, coincident with other class II operons, but the FliI protein remains present throughout the cell cycle. Subcellular fractionation showed that FliI is present both in the cytoplasm and in association with the membrane. Mutational analysis of FliI showed that two highly conserved amino acid residues in a bipartite ATP binding motif are necessary for flagellar assembly

Athletic Ticket Pricing in the Collegiate Environment: An Agenda for Research

s pressure mounts for intercollegiate athletic departments to be more selfsufficient, administrators must respond by increasing generated revenues. Despite the importance of ticket sales in this endeavor, however, little is known about the underlying ticket pricing structures and policies used by National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) institutions. Of the limited existing scholarship focused on managerial pricing decisions in the field of sport management, only professional sports settings have been addressed. Given the unique operational differences between professional and intercollegiate sport, this paper is designed to establish a foundation from which to build future research concerning the pricing of college sport tickets. The frameworks of stakeholder theory and institutional theory are proposed to ground future study in an attempt to strengthen our understanding of the process and behavior of price setting in intercollegiate athletics

A Qualitative Exploration of Ticket-Pricing Decisions in Intercollegiate Athletics

Ticket sales represent a significant revenue stream for NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision athletic departments, yet little is known about how administrators determine prices for those tickets. Utilizing strategic planning as the primary framework and supplemented by stakeholder theory, this study examines ticket-pricing decisions from the viewpoint of athletic administrators with various departmental responsibilities to better understand the role of ticket pricing in intercollegiate sport. Twenty athletic administrators, representing two Power 5 and two Group of 5 institutions, were interviewed about their experiences with ticket pricing. In addition to common pricing objectives related to revenue, patronage, and operations, administrators also suggested attendance-oriented pricing objectives unique to college sport pricing theory. However, findings suggest no well-defined organizational objective for ticket pricing exists within the departments sampled. The factors athletic administrators consider when contemplating pricing decisions can be categorized into seven areas: (a) scheduling, (b) research, (c) team performance, (d) stakeholders, (e) discrimination, (f) fan experience, and (g) competitive comparisons

Athletic Ticket Pricing in the Collegiate Environment: An Agenda for Research

As pressure mounts for intercollegiate athletic departments to be more selfsufficient, administrators must respond by increasing generated revenues. Despite the importance of ticket sales in this endeavor, however, little is known about the underlying ticket pricing structures and policies used by National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) institutions. Of the limited existing scholarship focused on managerial pricing decisions in the field of sport management, only professional sports settings have been addressed. Given the unique operational differences between professional and intercollegiate sport, this paper is designed to establish a foundation from which to build future research concerning the pricing of college sport tickets. The frameworks of stakeholder theory and institutional theory are proposed to ground future study in an attempt to strengthen our understanding of the process and behavior of price setting in intercollegiate athletics