Making their Way: Helping Kentucky's Immigrant Youth Successfully Transition into Adulthood

All youth in Kentucky need high quality educational experiences to become successful adults. Children must have access to educational opportunities at every stage of development, from early child care and preschool to post-secondary education or vocational training.Education improves each young person's ability to get a good job and become self-sustaining community members. Education also creates a strong workforce, which contributes to the overall growth and productivity of Kentucky's economy.In Kentucky, as across the nation, children in immigrant families represent a small but growing part of the population and future workforce. Currently, children in immigrant families make up 5 percent of the total child population in Kentucky. In a highly globalized world, educated bilingual and multicultural youth in immigrant families will be an enormous future asset to businesses, service providers and government agencies.1Many immigrant families in Kentucky possess positive child well-being influences, including high rates of parent educational attainment, strong rates of home ownership and low rates of poverty.2On the other hand, there are also some immigrant families living in low-income households and parents who do not have a high school degree. Kentucky's older immigrant youth sometimes face additional challenges to completing high school and pursuing higher education, including English language acquisition, cultural skills and social adaptation.3English proficiency, for example, is the greatest predictor of the success of older immigrant youth. The lack of adequate English language and education programs for older immigrant youth prevents Kentucky from taking advantage of a great resource for our future workforce.This brief presents a snapshot of older immigrant youth ages 16 to19 and will examine how well they are being prepared to successfully transition into higher education and the workforce.4To better understand how this population is faring, data on school drop out rates and on disconnected youth who are not in school and do not have a job is presented. The data compares Kentucky's immigrant youth born outside the U.S. to all youth born in the U.S. (which includes U.S.-born youth with immigrant parents).

Ensuring a Healthy Start: Prenatal Care and Outcomes among Newborn Kentuckians

All children need a healthy start in life. A child's health at birth can impact educational outcomes, and compromised health can have far-reaching effects into adulthood. Kentucky can offer all children a strong start by ensuring every mother have access to appropriate and frequent health care both before conception and during pregnancy. Kentucky babies, regardless of their parents' circumstances, need appropriate care in utero to set the foundation for a healthy and productive life. The Commonwealth as a whole benefits from improved health across communities. Kentucky's economic viability also depends on healthy children, starting at birth, because they represent our future workforce.The brief includes data on access to prenatal care, low-weight births and preterm births, as well as solutions to improve access to care and birth outcomes. For the purposes of this report, comparisons will be made between Kentucky births to U.S.-born mothers and Kentucky births to mothers born outside the U.S. across six geographic regions of the Commonwealth and by race and Hispanic ethnicity.

DETERMINANTS OF KANSAS FARMERS' PARTICIPATION IN ON-FARM RESEARCH

On-farm research (OFR) has increased in popularity in the U.S. in recent years due to heightened interest in sustainability issues, the likely decline in resources available for agricultural research, and increasing pressures for accountability and responsiveness to state and local needs. Information relating to OFR was obtained from 431 commercial Kansas farmers. Data were analyzed to determine the degree of OFR being implemented, and three models were estimated to identify which farmer/farm characteristics influenced its implementation. The results indicate that OFR is commonly implemented, and that several farm/farmer characteristics are related to the degree of OFR initiated. It is proposed that to maximize the return from externally initiated OFR, there would be merit in focusing attention on farms/farmers with those characteristics.Farmer attitudes, Farmer participation, Farming systems research, On-farm research, Sustainable agriculture, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Globalising assessment: an ethnography of literacy assessment, camels and fast food in the Mongolian Gobi

What happens when standardised literacy assessments travel globally? The paper presents an ethnographic account of adult literacy assessment events in rural Mongolia. It examines the dynamics of literacy assessment in terms of the movement and re-contextualisation of test items as they travel globally and are received locally by Mongolian respondents. The analysis of literacy assessment events is informed by Goodwin’s ‘participation framework’ on language as embodied and situated interactive phenomena and by Actor Network Theory. Actor Network Theory (ANT) is applied to examine literacy assessment events as processes of translation shaped by an ‘assemblage’ of human and non-human actors (including the assessment texts)

FGF21 Increases Water Intake, Urine Output and Blood Pressure in Rats

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) is a hormone secreted by the liver in response to metabolic stress. In addition to its well-characterized effects on energy homeostasis, FGF21 has been shown to increase water intake in animals. In this study, we sought to further explore the effects of FGF21 on fluid homeostasis in rats. A single dose of a long-acting FGF21 analog, PF-05231023, significantly increased water consumption, which was accompanied by an elevation in urine output that appeared prior to a significant change in water intake. We observed that FGF21 rapidly and significantly increased heart rate and blood pressure in telemeter-implanted rats, before changes in urine output and water intake were observed. Our data suggest that sympathetic activation may contribute to the pathogenesis by which FGF21 increases blood pressure as the baroreceptor unloading induced reflex tachycardia was significantly elevated in FGF21-treated animals. However, FGF21 was still capable of causing hypertension in animals in which approximately 40% of the sympathetic post-ganglionic neurons were ablated. Our data suggest that FGF21-induced water intake is in fact secondary to diuresis, which we propose to be a compensatory mechanism engaged to alleviate the acute hypertension caused by FGF21

Ecological study of the tidal segment of the James River encompassing Hog Point : 1975 final technical report

Volume 1: Technical Reports Section 1: River Biota and Phytoplankton Entrainment Studies at the VEPCO Surry Nuclear Power Station Section 2: Zooplankton Entrainment at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant, James River, Virginia by G. C. Grant and B. B. Bryan Section 3: a. Plant Entrainment of Ichthyoplankton at the VEPCO Nuclear Power Station by J. V. Merriner and A. D. Estes b: Thermal Plume Entrainment of Ichthyoplankton at the· VEPCO Nuclear Power Station by J. V. Merriner and A. D. Este

Report of the Committee on Resolutions- Declaration

Pamphlet concerning a declaration made by the National Educational Association at the forty-fourth annual convention

To promote or not to promote fundamental British values? Teachers' standards, diversity and teacher education

In this article we seek to problematize the presence of the requirement within the teachers’ standards (DfE, 2012), that they ‘should not undermine fundamental British values’ in the context of initial teacher education in England. The inclusion of this statement within the teachers’ code of conduct has made its way from the counter-terrorism strategy, Prevent and raises questions about Britishness, values and the relationship between the state and the profession more generally. We argue that the inclusion of the phrase within a statutory document that regulates the profession is de facto a politicization of the profession by the state thereby instilling the expectation that teachers are state instruments of surveillance. The absence of any wider debate around the inclusion of the statement is also problematic as is the lack of training for pre-service and inservice teachers since it means this concept of fundamental British values is unchallenged and its insidious racialising implications are unrecognised by most teachers