Expanding the Latino Market Niche: Developing Capacity and Meeting Critical Needs

As Extension competes to secure a place in serving Latino populations across the nation, it is critical to assess its overall capacity to serve Spanish-speaking clients. Extension must also evaluate how well current educational programming is meeting the needs of this population. This article describes a statewide assessment of 97 North Carolina counties via online surveys and 12 Spanish-language focus groups. Survey respondents noted the need for bilingual staff in their county offices, and specific types of Spanish-language materials. Focus groups with Spanish-speaking clients, demonstrated the need for hands-on training, collaboration, marketing, and improved delivery of critical information

Dropout Prevention with Latino Families The Juntos Program

Presentation made at Latinos in the Heartland (10th : 2011 : Kansas City, Mo.) and published in the annual conference proceedings.Attendees will learn about the educational challenges and opportunities of Latino youth. They will be introduced to the program Juntos para una Mejor Educación/Together for a Better Education: an experiential program that provides Latino parents and youth with knowledge and resources to prevent students from dropping out and to encourage families to work together to gain access to postsecondary education. This workshop will share the free curriculum with participants and allow them to experience the research and some of the activities that make Juntos Program effective. The educational challenges of Latino youth are popularly associated with language and cultural differences while research has shown that there are many other factors involved. The Juntos Program was created three years ago to address the educational challenges of Latino youth while providing Latino parents and youth in the 8th through 12th grades with knowledge and resources to prevent students from dropping out and to encourage families to work together to gain access to postsecondary education. The program brings together families with partners from schools, local community agencies, college-age mentors, and Cooperative Extension staff to make graduation a reality. Juntos also uses success coaches and college-age mentors to provide weekly afterschool clubs and activities with the target students before and after the 6-week program. The 2-hour workshops meet once a week for six weeks and focus on experiential activities that help the parents and youth work towards their educational goals. Weekly topics covered are: making education a family goal, communicating with teachers and guidance counselors, knowing how to succeed in the current school system, financing college and money matters, getting ready for the college application process, and being an advocate for your teen. The program has been held in 30 schools around North Carolina and is being piloted in ten schools in Nevada. Juntos has served over 700 Latino parents and youth and pre- and post-test evaluation data from Latino youth and parents that have completed the program showed significant increases in learning, attitudes, and skills gained. Results from these evaluations using a Wilcoxon sign test have revealed significant mean differences from pre- to post-tests. Parents and youth reported an increased understanding of NC graduation requirements, classes needed, higher education options, financial aid options, and necessary tests. Parents report a significant increase in their monitoring their child’s homework, meeting with school staff, and increased skills and knowledge about the college application process. Youth reported significant increase in their planning for after high school and sharing those goals with their parents. In addition to statistics, 92% of parents increased confidence in working with their child’s school and 93% of parents reported that they felt they had the information they needed to help their teenager successfully complete high school. In addition, 72% of participants attended all of the workshop sessions, and more than 60% of the families had a father present. We will share our models for funding and expanding the outreach of this program. We also will discuss how we have incorporated 4-H and the Youth and Families with Promise (YFP) mentoring program to serve younger elementary and middle school Latino students and their families

Medical Error Recognition and Teamwork during Simulated Asystole

A discussion of LUCOM research with first-year medical students applying teamwork training from aviation to mitigate errors during a simulated cardiac arrest event. The presenters will review training, debrief their research findings, and engage in a roundtable discussion of next steps

Creative Solutions for Emerging Child Care Needs

Harnett County has one of the fastest growing populations of families with children ages birth to 5 among rural counties in North Carolina. Collaborative partnerships have addressed this emerging need through the creation of Cooperative Extension\u27s Child Care Resource and Referral Program. This progressive, educational effort meets the unique needs of Harnett County families through six initiatives: comprehensive training; referral line; child care data base; resource library; development of new child care; and newsletters. Results include 11,033 providers trained, 4,707 new child care spaces created, and 81 family child care homes increasing quality indicators

NASA's Earth Observing Data and Information System - Near-Term Challenges

NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) has been a central component of the NASA Earth observation program since the 1990's. EOSDIS manages data covering a wide range of Earth science disciplines including cryosphere, land cover change, polar processes, field campaigns, ocean surface, digital elevation, atmosphere dynamics and composition, and inter-disciplinary research, and many others. One of the key components of EOSDIS is a set of twelve discipline-based Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) distributed across the United States. Managed by NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project at Goddard Space Flight Center, these DAACs serve over 3 million users globally. The ESDIS Project provides the infrastructure support for EOSDIS, which includes other components such as the Science Investigator-led Processing systems (SIPS), common metadata and metrics management systems, specialized network systems, standards management, and centralized support for use of commercial cloud capabilities. Given the long-term requirements, and the rapid pace of information technology and changing expectations of the user community, EOSDIS has evolved continually over the past three decades. However, many challenges remain. Challenges addressed in this paper include: growing volume and variety, achieving consistency across a diverse set of data producers, managing information about a large number of datasets, migration to a cloud computing environment, optimizing data discovery and access, incorporating user feedback from a diverse community, keeping metadata updated as data collections grow and age, and ensuring that all the content needed for understanding datasets by future users is identified and preserved

Health and Safety Events for Latino Families: Collaborating to Create \u3ci\u3eEl Día de los Niños Celebración\u3c/i\u3e

Latino immigrants to rural counties within North Carolina are at an increased risk for experiencing injury, health complications, and chronic illness. This is due largely to the fact that many new immigrants arrive with limited knowledge of the health and safety risks that are present in their communities. To reduce the incidence of injury and health complications, programs must be developed to increase local awareness of these risks. This article outlines the collaborative efforts of one rural North Carolina community to develop and implement a community-based health and safety event for Latino families

Evaluation of Juntos 4-H: A Wraparound Program Helping Latinx High Schoolers Succeed

Preprogram and postprogram surveys of 241 Latinx 4-H youths from five counties in North Carolina provided a snapshot of their experiences in the Juntos 4-H program. The study findings demonstrate that Juntos 4-H has positive impacts on academics, college readiness, parent engagement, and community engagement. Suggestions are made to help Extension professionals elsewhere develop effective programs for Latinx youths

Reaching Families through Social Media: Training Extension Professionals to Implement Technology in Their Work

Cooperative Extension professionals have a long tradition of helping improve the lives of the families they serve by sharing research-based information. More than ever, families are getting their information online, creating a need for Extension professionals to deliver content via technology. This article describes a training designed to teach Extension professionals ways to increase their reach to families through the use of technology in their work. Extension professionals attended an 8-hour, face-to-face training in which they completed a pre, post, and follow-up survey. Results from the training indicated that this training was effective in changing attitudes about the usefulness of technology and increasing their use of social media to reach families

Managing Sustainable Data Infrastructures: The Gestalt of EOSDIS

EOSDIS epitomizes a System of Systems, whose many varied and distributed parts are integrated into a single, highly functional organized science data system. A distributed architecture was adopted to ensure discipline-specific support for the science data, while also leveraging standards and establishing policies and tools to enable interdisciplinary research, and analysis across multiple scientific instruments. The EOSDIS is composed of system elements such as geographically distributed archive centers used to manage the stewardship of data. The infrastructure consists of underlying capabilities connections that enable the primary system elements to function together. For example, one key infrastructure component is the common metadata repository, which enables discovery of all data within the EOSDIS system. EOSDIS employs processes and standards to ensure partners can work together effectively, and provide coherent services to users

Spatial and temporal variation in macroparasite communities of three-spined stickleback

Patterns in parasite community structure are often observed in natural systems and an important question in parasite ecology is whether such patterns are repeatable across time and space. Field studies commonly look at spatial or temporal repeatability of patterns, but they are rarely investigated in conjunction. We use a large dataset on the macroparasites of the three-spined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus L., collected from 14 locations on North Uist, Scotland over an 8-year period to investigate: (1) repeatability of patterns in parasite communities among populations and whether variation is consistent across years, (2) whether variation between years can be explained by climatic variation and progression of the season and (3) whether variation in habitat characteristics explain population differences. Differences in relative abundance and prevalence across populations were observed in a number of parasites investigated indicating a lack of consistency across years in numerous parasite community measures; however, differences between populations in the prevalence and abundance of some parasites were consistent throughout the study. Average temperature did not affect parasite community, and progression of the season was only significant for two of 13 community measures. Two of the six habitat characteristics investigated (pH and calcium concentration) significantly affected parasite presence