A preferred vision for administering elementary schools : a reflective essay

The principal is the first teacher of the school, the instructional leader of the learning place. He / she has the professional responsibility to bring into action a new form of leadership. The role of principal is essential for creating a school where learning is the center of student experience, and learning how to cause learning will be the central mission of the staff. The principal will need to create communication, decision making, and management approaches which make this kind of learning place possible. Hill (1992) said \u27\u27teachers must be selected who have a talent for leading professional peers and not just students. A vision of the school must be shared by all owners of the school (p.16)

Vernal Pool Conservation: Enhancing Existing Regulation Through the Creation of the Maine Vernal Pool Special Area Management Plan

Conservation of natural resources is challenging given the competing economic and ecological goals humans have for landscapes. Vernal pools in the northeastern US are seasonal, small wetlands that provide critical breeding habitat for amphibians and invertebrates adapted to temporary waters, and are exceptionally hard to conserve as their function is dependent on connections to other wetlands and upland forests. A team of researchers in Maine joined forces with a diverse array of governmental and private stakeholders to develop an alternative to existing top-down vernal pool regulation. Through creative adoption and revision of various resource management tools, they produced a vernal pool conservation mechanism, the Maine Vernal Pool Special Management Area Plan that meets the needs of diverse stakeholders from developers to ecologists. This voluntary mitigation tool uses fees from impacts to vernal pools in locally identified growth areas to fund conservation of “poolscapes” (pools plus appropriate adjacent habitat) in areas locally designated for rural use. In this case study, we identify six key features of this mechanism that illustrate the use of existing tools to balance growth and pool conservation. This case study will provide readers with key concepts that can be applied to any conservation problem: namely, how to work with diverse interests toward a common goal, how to evaluate and use existing policy tools in new ways, and how to approach solutions to sticky problems through a willingness to accept uncertainty and risk

Contesting the neoliberal global agenda: lessons from activists

With the ongoing failure of governments to protect their citizens from impacts of the neoliberal global agenda, civil society groups worldwide have moved into the breach. Social workers, as allies of these groups, are uniquely positioned to help maximise their effectiveness in confronting the threats of corporate globalisation to democracy, economic justice, the environment and protection of the commons. How do activist groups know when they’re making a difference? This chapter builds on a four-year collaboration with nine diverse activist groups to see what we could learn together about effective practice in social/environmental justice work. We report on what activists told us about what ‘success’ means in their work, and what facilitates those successes. Reflecting on the implications of these findings in relation to social work skills and capacities, we suggest how social work educators might enhance our capabilities to contribute to the critical work of challenging and replacing the global neoliberal project

Sociodemographic characteristics, distance to the clinic, and breast cancer screening results

Timely detection and follow-up of abnormal cellular changes can aid in early diagnosis of breast cancer, thus leading to better treatment outcomes. However, despite substantial breast cancer screening initiatives, the proportion of female breast cancer cases diagnosed at late stages remains high. Distance to screening clinics may affect access to care, particularly for women living in impoverished areas with limited means of reliable transportation. Utilizing breast cancer screening data collected by the Illinois Breast and Cervical Cancer Program between 1996 and 2010, we examined the effect of travel distance to the clinic from which women received breast cancer screening tests on stage of diagnosis. The proportion of abnormal mammograms in White women (1.6%) was higher than in Black women (1.1%) or Hispanic women (0.5%). The average distance traveled to a clinic was also farthest among White women (6.7 mi) than for Hispanic (5.3 mi) or Black women (4.4 mi). Distance to a clinic was significantly associated with increased odds of having abnormal results. When distance to clinic was controlled for, the observed disparity in odds of having an abnormal mammogram between White and Black women was no longer statistically significant. Individual and neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics were significantly associated with distance to clinic, but were not associated with increased odds of having an abnormal mammogram, controlling for distance to the clinic. Findings showed that individual and neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics are directly and indirectly associated with abnormal mammogram results, and that distance to a clinic may mediate, in part, the effects of individual characteristics and neighborhood disadvantage on the probability of having an abnormal mammogram

Faculty Recital:Dolores Ivanchich, Soprano

Centennial Lecture Hall April 27, 1969 3:00p.m

Beyond the black box: drug- and device-associated hypersensitivity events

Charles L Bennett1,2, Olatokunbo S Adegboro2, Elizabeth A Calhoun2, Dennis Raisch3,41Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, Chicago, IL, USA; 2University of Illinois School of Public Health, Chicago, IL, USA; 3University of New Mexico College of Pharmacy, Albuquerque, NM, USA; 4Veteran Affairs Cooperative Studies Program, Clinical Research Pharmacy, Albuquerque, NM, USABackground: Drug- and device-associated hypersensitivity reactions are serious toxicities that can result in respiratory failure or acute cardiac ischemic events, or even severe hypersensitivity syndromes such as Stevens–Johnson syndrome. These toxicities are usually poorly described in the “black box” warnings section of the product labels.Methods: Adverse event reports contained in databases maintained by the Project on Medical Research on Adverse Drug Events and Reports (Med-RADAR), product labels, safety advisories disseminated by pharmaceutical manufacturers, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were reviewed.Results: Adverse event reports identified three health care workers who developed nevirapineassociated Stevens–Johnson syndrome following occupational exposure to HIV-infected blood or blood products; four persons with localized hypersensitivity and fatal cardiac events associated with rapamycin- or paclitaxel-coated coronary artery stent placements; and six persons with breast cancer who developed severe or fatal anaphylaxis after receiving adjuvant chemotherapy with Cremophor-EL containing paclitaxel. Safety advisories from the FDA, CDC, and the relevant pharmaceutical manufacturers were ambiguous in their description in “black box” warning sections of package inserts describing these serious and potentially fatal toxicities. Conclusion: Improvements are needed in pharmacovigilance and subsequent dissemination of safety advisories for drug/device-associated hypersensitivity reactions.Keywords: adverse events, hypersensivity, toxicity, dru

Older Adults' Perceptions of Clinical Fall Prevention Programs: A Qualitative Study

Objective. To investigate motivational factors and barriers to participating in fall risk assessment and management programs among diverse, low-income, community-dwelling older adults who had experienced a fall. Methods. Face-to-face interviews with 20 elderly who had accepted and 19 who had not accepted an invitation to an assessment by one of two fall prevention programs. Interviews covered healthy aging, core values, attributions/consequences of the fall, and barriers/benefits of fall prevention strategies and programs. Results. Joiners and nonjoiners of fall prevention programs were similar in their experience of loss associated with aging, core values they expressed, and emotional response to falling. One difference was that those who participated endorsed that they “needed” the program, while those who did not participate expressed a lack of need. Conclusions. Interventions targeted at a high-risk group need to address individual beliefs as well as structural and social factors (transportation issues, social networks) to enhance participation

Multilevel Mapping of Sexual Dimorphism in Intrinsic Functional Brain Networks

Differences in cognitive performance between males and females are well-described, most commonly in certain spatial and language tasks. Sex-related differences in cognition are relevant to the study of the neurotypical brain and to neuropsychiatric disorders, which exhibit prominent disparities in the incidence, prevalence and severity of symptoms between men and women. While structural dimorphism in the human brain is well-described, controversy exists regarding the existence and degree of sex-related differences in brain function. We analyzed resting-state functional MRI from 650 neurotypical young adults matched for age and sex to determine the degree of sexual dimorphism present in intrinsic functional networks. Multilevel modeling was pursued to create 8-, 24-, and 51-network models of whole-brain data to quantify sex-related effects in network activity with increasing resolution. We determined that sexual dimorphism is present in the majority of intrinsic brain networks and affects ∼0.5–2% of brain locations surveyed in the three whole-brain network models. It is particularly common in task-positive control networks and is pervasive among default mode networks. The size of sex-related effects varied by network but can be moderate or even large in size. Female > male effects were on average larger, but male > female effects spread across greater network territory. Using a novel methodology, we mapped dimorphic locations to meta-analytic association test maps derived from task fMRI, demonstrating that the neurocognitive footprint of intrinsic neural correlates is much larger in males. All results were replicated in a motion-matched sub-sample. Our findings argue that sex is an important biological variable in human brain function and suggest that observed differences in neurocognitive performance have identifiable intrinsic neural correlates