Professional Development for Educational Continuity in Emergencies: The Response of Two Urban School Districts During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is a worldwide disruptor that impacts the foundation of education as professionals know it. The structural soundness and stability of the nation’s public education system was on display, exposing the varying antiquated practices in place and the inability of many school districts to pivot to a digital platform as the nation’s public schools closed their school buildings to K-12 students. Public K-12 schools did not have readily available systems nor protocols in place to continue educating the nation’s kids. Parents, grandparents, older siblings, etc, became the teachers of these children as the teachers attempted to educate via a computer screen. Research dictates that public school districts need to reexamine their educational continuity plans and structure to succeed. The goal of this research was to study two large, urban public school districts in the Southeastern United States for educational continuity during the COVID-19 Pandemic and employ a product that would lend itself to sustainable educational continuity. Based on the research from this study, quantitative and qualitative results, educators are seeking professional development (PD) to implement tools and best practices as well as a systemic approach to educational continuity. Through research and survey results, Educational Continuity Solutions was formed as a digital resource to develop any school district\u27s varied needs throughout the year to mitigate school disruption by a natural disaster, pandemic, school safety, mass school violence, etc. The model ensures that a system for educational continuity is at the forefront of the planning process

Dairy Product Consumption and Prostate Cancer Risk in the United States

An ongoing controversy exists regarding the effect of dairy products on prostate cancer risk in observational studies. We prospectively investigated the associations between dairy product consumption and prostate cancer risk among men in the United States. After calculating pre-diagnostic intake of individual or subgroups of dairy products using a validated food frequency questionnaire, we estimated hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for pathologically-verified cases of incident prostate cancer among men, overall, or stratified by severity. Among 49,472 men, 4134 were diagnosed with prostate cancer during an average follow-up period of 11.2 years. The median total dairy intake was 101 g/1000 kcal. Consumption of total, individual, or subgroups of dairy products was not statistically significantly associated with prostate cancer risk overall (HR = 1.05, 95% CI = 0.96–1.15 comparing the highest with lowest quartile) or stratified by severity, except for regular-fat dairy product intake with late-stage prostate cancer risk (HR = 1.37, 95% CI = 1.04–1.82 comparing the highest with lowest quartile) and 2%-fat milk intake with advanced prostate cancer risk (HR = 1.14, 95% CI = 1.02–1.28 comparing the higher than median intake with no intake group). Our findings do not support the previously reported harmful impact of dairy consumption on overall prostate cancer risk among men in the United States