Environmental Awareness Workshop: An Introduction to Green Initiatives at SUNY Brockport

SUNY Brockport has adopted a variety of green initiatives on campus, including a reusable mug program, solar powered parking pay stations, textbook rentals, carpooling programs, and newly constructed buildings meeting LEED certification. Although SUNY Brockport has made progress in becoming more environmentally friendly, the general education program does not include a component on environmental awareness, and freshmen orientation fails to inform students of green initiatives on campus. Students are unlikely to participate in green initiatives without information specific to the SUNY Brockport campus. This was illustrated during the fall 2014 semester when the Honors College almost had to suspend the free printing privilege in the Honors Lounge. An estimated 35,000 sheets of paper were consumed and the cost of printing was much higher than the allotted budget. A required interactive workshop given at freshmen orientation would introduce students to green initiatives on campus. We have designed a workshop titled, “Going Green on Campus” to pilot at the 2015 Honors College Orientation for Honors freshmen. The objectives of the workshop will be to inform students on (1) recycling on campus, (2) carpooling on campus, (3) printing consciously, (4) what the college is doing to make campus more sustainable, and (5) what students can do to make campus more sustainable. There will be a section to address each objective, consisting of a series of modules, videos, and follow-up assessments. To determine if the workshop is successful we will compare paper consumption in the Honors Lounge before and after the workshop is implemented. Data collection began during the fall 2014 semester and will continue through spring 2016. We hope a formal introduction to living environmentally consciously will increase student participation in green initiatives, which will be demonstrated by a decrease in paper consumption in the Honors Lounge after the workshop is given

Hotels as Critical Hubs for Destination Disaster Resilience: An Analysis of Hotel Corporations’ CSR Activities Supporting Disaster Relief and Resilience

Disaster management has begun to examine the unique role of the private sector in disaster relief. The hotel and lodging industry is an especially critical infrastructure for community disaster relief and resilience, providing many lifeline services in addition to core skills and competencies contributing to the community’s social and human capital. Social and human capital empower the community to better cope with disturbance, and companies’ efforts to build social and human capital are often tied to their corporate social responsibility (CSR) management systems. A framework was developed to evaluate the management system maturity of the hotel and lodging industry’s CSR management for disaster relief and resilience. An analysis of three hotel and lodging corporations was performed to understand the current state of the industry. While many hotel properties are engaging in CSR activities during disaster relief, the analysis revealed that corporate management systems have room for maturation and growth to support the resilience of their community

Community Resilience Management : Reflections and Strategies from Corporate Sustainability

Creating community resilience is a daunting task, both in scope and application, therefore it is useful to examine related efforts to inform our strategy. Sustainability, specifically corporate sustainability, has developed through similar challenges and provides insight into the possible trajectory of community resilience management. We find that both concepts reflect similar origins, developmental paths and merging goals at a scale that can be systematically managed. Therefore, we describe four strategies from corporate sustainability management that can be applied to community resilience 1) consider the community context while implementing an increasingly broad view of responsibility; 2) integrate and engage across constructs; 3) employ strategic approaches including performance measurement and assessment of progress; 4) communicate with and engage stakeholders; In doing this, we can leverage our efforts, experience, and successes to transform scorecards into strategies, programs into processes, results into sustained performance and engagement into capable, robust and resilient communities

Experiences of Education, Health and Care plans: A survey of parents and young people

An Education, Health and Care plan (EHC plan) sets out the education, health and care support that is to be provided to a child or young person aged 0-25 years who has Special Educational Needs (SEN) or a disability (SEND). It is drawn up by the local authority after an Education, Health and Care (EHC) needs assessment of the child or young person has determined that an EHC plan is necessary, and after consultation with relevant partner agencies and with children, young people and parents. EHC plans, and the needs assessment process through which these are made, were introduced as part of the Children and Families Act 2014. The Act, and an accompanying SEND Code of Practice1, sets out how local authorities must deliver these, including:• Developing and maintaining these collaboratively with children, young people and parents; • Supporting children, young people and parents to participate fully; • Focusing on securing the best possible outcomes for the child/young person; • Enabling participation by relevant partner agencies, to enable joined-up provision.The SEND accountability framework established in 20152 sets out an approach for assessing SEND provision in conjunction with the Act and SEND Code of Practice. The framework provides structure for improving outcomes and experiences for children, young people and their families and, when applied, seeks to show how the system is performing, hold partners to account and support self-improvement. The framework applies at the local and national levels and to independent assessments of the EHC plan process – such as those carried out by Ofsted. In this context, the Department for Education commissioned a survey of parents and young people with an EHC plan, in order to build a representative national (and, where the data allows, local) picture of how parents and young people in England were experiencing the EHC needs assessment and planning process and the resultant EHC plans. The aim was to assess whether delivery of the EHC needs assessments and planning process and the resultant EHC plans reflected the intentions set out in the Children and Families Act 2014 and the accompanying SEND Code of Practice. The findings would help inform the SEND accountability framework.To achieve these aims the survey sought to answer the following questions: • To what extent do children, young people and families experience the EHC needs assessment and planning process as they are intended to be experienced; • How satisfied are children, young people and families with the EHC needs assessment and planning process and the resultant EHC plan; and • To what extent does this vary by local authority and by groups with different characteristics? The findings presented here and throughout the main report explore parents’ and young people’s responses to the survey questions. The report also explores where experiences of the EHC needs assessment and planning process varied for groups with different characteristics, applying a bivariate analysis approach3. The report only highlights such differences where these are statistically significant4.Department for Educatio

Education, Health and Care plans: A qualitative investigation into service user experiences of the planning process

An Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan sets out the education, health and care support that is to be provided to a child or young person aged 0-25 years who has Special Educational Needs or a Disability (SEND). It is drawn up by the local authority after an EHC needs assessment of the child or young person, in consultation with relevant partner agencies, parents and the child or young person themselves. EHC plans, and the needs assessment process through which they are created, were introduced as part of the Children and Families Act 2014. The Act, and an accompanying SEND Code of Practice, sets out how local authorities must deliver EHC plans. In 2016, a national survey commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE) found variations in how EHC plan recipients experienced the EHC planning process across different local authorities.1 Based on these results, DfE commissioned two further research projects: a multivariate analysis of factors affecting satisfaction with the EHC planning process, and this qualitative investigation of user experiences of the EHC planning process. The qualitative investigation consisted of two distinct exercises: • Twenty-five face-to-face in-depth interviews with parents involved in the 2016 survey, with the aim of better understanding factors that lead to satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the EHC plan process. Thirteen interviews were conducted in local authorities with above average satisfaction, and 12 were conducted in local authority areas with below average satisfaction. • An evaluation of EHC plan quality focussing on plans provided by 18 of the 25 parents interviewed. The evaluation was conducted by a panel of 10 SEND experts with wide experience as SEND policy advisors, strategic leaders in LAs, specialist advisory teachers, officers in SEN statutory services, Special Needs Co-ordinators, teachers in special and mainstream schools and lecturers. There was little evidence of a link between families’ satisfaction with the process of getting the EHC plan and experts’ evaluations of the quality of the plan: this report therefore discusses these two strands of research separately.Department for Educatio

The Panchromatic Afterglow of GW170817: The full uniform dataset, modeling, comparison with previous results and implications

We present the full panchromatic afterglow light curve data of GW170817, including new radio data as well as archival optical and X-ray data, between 0.5 and 940 days post-merger. By compiling all archival data, and reprocessing a subset of it, we have ensured that the panchromatic dataset is uniform and therefore immune to the differences in data processing or flux determination methods used by different groups. Simple power-law fits to the uniform afterglow light curve indicate a t^(0.86±0.04) rise, a t^(−1.90±0.12) decline, and a peak occurring at 155±4 days. The afterglow is optically thin throughout its evolution, consistent with a single spectral index (−0.569±0.002) across all epochs. This gives a precise and updated estimate of the electron power-law index, p=2.138±0.004. By studying the diffuse X-ray emission from the host galaxy, we place a conservative upper limit on the hot ionized ISM density, <0.01 cm⁻³, consistent with previous afterglow studies. Using the late-time afterglow data we rule out any long-lived neutron star remnant having magnetic field strength between 10^(10.4) G and 10¹⁶ G. Our fits to the afterglow data using an analytical model that includes VLBI proper motion from Mooley et al (2018), and a structured jet model that ignores the proper motion, indicates that the proper motion measurement needs to be considered while seeking an accurate estimate of the viewing angle