Getting It Right: Strategies for After-School Success

This report synthesizes the last 10 years of findings from P/PV's and other researchers' work to address one of the most demanding challenges facing today's after-school programs -- how to create and manage programs that stand the best chance of producing specific, policy-relevant outcomes. It examines recruitment strategies that attract young people to activities, the qualities that make activities engaging and motivate participants to attend regularly, and the infrastructure -- staffing, management and monitoring -- needed to support such activities. The report's final chapter explores the fiscal realities of after-school programming, considering how administrators might stretch existing dollars to enhance services

Challenges and Opportunities in After-School Programs: Lessons for Policymakers and Funders

School-based after-school programs are increasingly becoming the solution policymakers suggest for many youth problems: unsupervised time, poor academic achievement, gang participation, violence and drug use. As federal spending increases, policymakers, funders and the public must balance their optimism about the programs' potential with the realities of what they might ultimately achieve. As this report describes, locating these programs in schools brings many benefits, but as the experience of at least one broad-based initiative is demonstrating, it also brings challenges that should be taken into consideration as programs are planned and funded

Extended-Service Schools: Putting Programming in Place

Spurred by the desire to provide youth with safe havens in non-school hours, enhanced educational experiences, and other developmental opportunities, a movement to open up schools has taken root in cities across the country. More than just an attempt to take advantage of schools' resources and facilities, the movement aims to build a new kind of institution -- one that unites schools and community-based organizations to create vital centers of activity for children, youth, and their families. This interim evaluation report of the Wallace-Readers Digest Funds Extended-Service Schools Adaptation examines what it takes to get a community-oriented school-based youth program off the ground, the early challenges that can be expected, and how the ESS sites addressed their challenges

Multiple Choices After School: Findings from the Extended-Service Schools Initiative

In the summer of 2002, every state became eligible to receive federal funds for after-school programs. With this opportunity came the need to make decisions about the goals, design and content of after-school programming -- decisions that will influence which youth participate, what they experience and how they may benefit. This report aims to put policymakers and program operators on firmer ground as they grapple with these decisions; it shares lessons from existing school-based after-school programs

Combined HIV-1 sequence and integration site analysis informs viral dynamics and allows reconstruction of replicating viral ancestors

Understanding HIV-1 persistence despite antiretroviral therapy (ART) is of paramount importance. Both single-genome sequencing (SGS) and integration site analysis (ISA) provide useful information regarding the structure of persistent HIV DNA populations; however, until recently, there was no way to link integration sites to their cognate proviral sequences. Here, we used multiple-displacement amplification (MDA) of cellular DNA diluted to a proviral endpoint to obtain full-length proviral sequences and their corresponding sites of integration. We applied this method to lymph node and peripheral blood mononuclear cells from 5 ART-treated donors to determine whether groups of identical subgenomic sequences in the 2 compartments are the result of clonal expansion of infected cells or a viral genetic bottleneck. We found that identical proviral sequences can result from both cellular expansion and viral genetic bottlenecks occurring prior to ART initiation and following ART failure. We identified an expanded T cell clone carrying an intact provirus that matched a variant previously detected by viral outgrowth assays and expanded clones with wild-type and drug-resistant defective proviruses. We also found 2 clones from 1 donor that carried identical proviruses except for nonoverlapping deletions, from which we could infer the sequence of the intact parental virus. Thus, MDA-SGS can be used for "viral reconstruction" to better understand intrapatient HIV-1 evolution and to determine the clonality and structure of proviruses within expanded clones, including those with drug-resistant mutations. Importantly, we demonstrate that identical sequences observed by standard SGS are not always sufficient to establish proviral clonality

Unmarried cohabitation and parenthood in Britain and Europe

This paper focuses on cohabitation and unmarried parenthood across a range of European nations. It includes a brief outline of the history of cohabitation, reviews recent trends in cohabitation and unmarried parenthood, compares the stability of marital and cohabiting unions, examines the extent to which cohabiting couples are regarded as families, and the final sections include a review of the policy responses to date, as well as a discussion of the impetuses that may lie behind the rise in cohabitation and unmarried parenthood

Genome analysis of three Pneumocystis species reveals adaptation mechanisms to life exclusively in mammalian hosts

Pneumocystis jirovecii is a major cause of life-threatening pneumonia in immunosuppressed patients including transplant recipients and those with HIV/AIDS, yet surprisingly little is known about the biology of this fungal pathogen. Here we report near complete genome assemblies for three Pneumocystis species that infect humans, rats and mice. Pneumocystis genomes are highly compact relative to other fungi, with substantial reductions of ribosomal RNA genes, transporters, transcription factors and many metabolic pathways, but contain expansions of surface proteins, especially a unique and complex surface glycoprotein superfamily, as well as proteases and RNA processing proteins. Unexpectedly, the key fungal cell wall components chitin and outer chain N-mannans are absent, based on genome content and experimental validation. Our findings suggest that Pneumocystis has developed unique mechanisms of adaptation to life exclusively in mammalian hosts, including dependence on the lungs for gas and nutrients and highly efficient strategies to escape both host innate and acquired immune defenses