Making the Match: Finding Funding for After School Education and Safety Programs

Outlines strategies for California school and community leaders to secure cash and in-kind resources -- including public- and private-sector funding -- for ASES programs

The Cost of Quality Out-of-School-Time Programs, Executive Summary

Funders and program planners need a clear understanding of the costs of quality afterschool or summer programs to make sound investments. With support from The Wallace Foundation, P/PV partnered with The Finance Project to embark on one of the largest and most rigorous out-of-school-time (OST) cost studies to date, collecting detailed data from 111 programs that varied dramatically in their focus, content, location, staffing, management and hours of operation.This executive summary highlights the full report's key findings, summarizes variations in program costs and provides recommendations for policymakers and funders who seek to build and sustain quality OST programs for children and youth in their communities.In addition, a companion online cost calculator that provides stakeholders with estimates for various program options is available atwww.wallacefoundation.org/cost-of-quality

The Cost of Quality Out-of-School-Time Programs

Funders and program planners want to know: What does it cost to operate a high-quality after-school or summer program? This study answers that question, discovering that there is no "right" number. Cost varies substantially, depending on the characteristics of the participants, the goals of the program, who operates it and where it is located. Based on detailed cost data collected from 111 out-of-school-time programs in six cities, this report, along with an online calculator (www.wallacefoundation.org/cost-of-quality), provides cost averages and ranges for many common types of programs

The Costs of Out-of-School Time Programs

Out-of-school-time (OST) programs are a vital component of children's academic and social development. Nationwide, 6.5 million schoolage children participate in OST programs that seek to ensure their safety, develop and nurture their talents, improve their academic behaviors and help them form bonds with adults and youth who are positive role models.1 These programs incorporate a diverse array of organizational models and programmatic approaches.The study provides detailed information on the full cost of quality OST programs, encompassing both out-of-pocket expenditures as well as the value of resources that were contributed in kind (including space), which most other OST studies have not done. Given that in-kind contributions cannot always be counted on when scaling up or building new programs, policymakers, program directors and funders can use the full cost estimates as an upward bound of cost, assuming no donated resources

Opening a networked learning dialogue on postdigital citizen science and humanities

Citizen science, or community science, is generally defined as the involvement of citizens in the collection and analysis of data in collaboration with professional scientists or ecologists. Citizen science initiatives have become more common as technological innovations have increased ways that individuals can participate, enabled larger scale projects and more volunteers to be engaged. Citizen humanities could be said to be a form of citizen science where investigation concerns human values and embedded, diverse, and culturally sensitive knowledge. The development of digital technologies has led to both the field of digital humanities and to new ways to involve citizens in the activities of cultural heritage institutions and academic research. These broad understandings of citizen science and citizen humanities are drawn from disciplinary distinctions concerning how we treat ‘the sciences’ or ‘the humanities’. This is primarily an English language distinction which is much less clear-cut in other languages and cultures, including the ways in which metaphors are adopted as explanatory tools but also carry tacit beliefs and assumptions. In postdigital society it is increasingly hard to separate people’s lives and diverse positionalities from scientific, technological, cultural, linguistic, and political economic changes as these converge to affect communities and individuals. Networked learning is a field that has always shown an active interest in convergences, contribution, and community along with a desire to avoid determinism when examining relationships between learning, technology, and social change. In this paper we draw on this critical networked learning ‘tone’ to explore the activities of citizen science and citizen humanities as they appear to operate as separate fields of research within postdigital society. We argue that discussing the postdigital context surrounding these fields contributes valuable perspectives of knowledge socialism, peer production, collegiality, collaboration, and collective intelligence to help fill certain gaps to meet challenges of the future through community and citizen research. Cross-sector projects that bridge citizen, social, or natural sciences and citizen humanities in diverse locations also need to be community led. This empowers communities not only to acquire new technology enabled capabilities as appropriate to their needs, but also to participate as citizens and activists in the wider political discourse. Therefore, in opening a critically reflexive and relational networked learning dialogue we can locate and occupy important gaps as we grow our understanding of ‘postdigital citizen science’ and ‘postdigital citizen humanities’ as dialectically intertwined fields of cross-sector community research

An Iterative Association Rule Mining Framework to K-Anonymize a Dataset

Preserving and maintaining client privacy and anonymity is of utmost importance in any domain and specially so in healthcare, as loss of either of these can result in legal and ethical implications. Further, it is sometimes important to extract meaningful and useful information from existing data for research or management purposes. In this case it is necessary for the organization who manages the dataset to be certain that no attributes can identify individuals or group of individuals. This paper proposes an extendable and generalized framework to anonymize a dataset using an iterative association rule mining approach. The proposed framework also makes use of optional domain rules and filter rules to help customize the filtering process. The outcome of the proposed framework is a preprocessed dataset which can be used in further research with confidence that anonymity of individuals is conserved. Evaluation of this research will also be described in the form of a case study using a test dataset provided by the Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, Canada as a part of their Mental Health Engagement Network (MHEN) study

High-Performance Liquid Chromatography Determination of Meloxicam and Piroxicam with Ultraviolet Detection

A simple accurate and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatographic method for the determination of meloxicam and piroxicam concentrations in small volume plasma samples has been developed. Following a liquid extraction using chloroform, samples were separated by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography on an XBridge C18 column (4.6 × 250 mm) and quantified using ultraviolet detection at 360 nm. The mobile phase was a mixture of water with glacial acetic acid (pH 3.0) and acetonitrile (50 : 50), with a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. The standard curve ranged from 5 to 10,000 ng/mL for meloxicam in bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps) plasma and piroxicam in crane (Grus rubicunda) plasma. Intra- and interassay variability for meloxicam and piroxicam were less than 10% and the average recovery was greater than 90% for both drugs. This method was developed in bearded dragon and crane plasma and should be applicable to any species, making it useful for those investigators dealing with small sample volumes, particularly when conducting pharmacokinetics studies which require multiple sampling from the same animal

Climate-driven regime shifts in a mangrove-salt marsh ecotone over the past 250 years.

Climate change is driving the tropicalization of temperate ecosystems by shifting the range edges of numerous species poleward. Over the past few decades, mangroves have rapidly displaced salt marshes near multiple poleward mangrove range limits, including in northeast Florida. It is uncertain whether such mangrove expansions are due to anthropogenic climate change or natural climate variability. We combined historical accounts from books, personal journals, scientific articles, logbooks, photographs, and maps with climate data to show that the current ecotone between mangroves and salt marshes in northeast Florida has shifted between mangrove and salt marsh dominance at least 6 times between the late 1700s and 2017 due to decadal-scale fluctuations in the frequency and intensity of extreme cold events. Model projections of daily minimum temperature from 2000 through 2100 indicate an increase in annual minimum temperature by 0.5 °C/decade. Thus, although recent mangrove range expansion should indeed be placed into a broader historical context of an oscillating system, climate projections suggest that the recent trend may represent a more permanent regime shift due to the effects of climate change

Investments in Building Citywide Out-of-School-Time Systems: A Six-City Study

This report is the last in a series funded by The Wallace Foundation and developed by P/PV and The Finance Project to document the costs of out-of-school-time (OST) programs and the city-level systems that support them. The report examines the development of OST systems in six cities across the country and summarizes the strategies and activities commonly pursued, their associated investments and options for financing such system-building efforts. These findings can provide OST stakeholders with critical information to help guide their investments in system planning, start-up and ongoing operations. The report serves as a companion to two previous resources: The Cost of Quality Out-of-School-Time Programs, which provides information on both the average out-of-pocket expenditures and the average full cost of a wide range of quality OST programs; and an online cost calculator that enables users to generate tailored cost estimates for many different types of OST programs

To be young, Black, and living with breast cancer: a systematic review of health-related quality of life in young Black breast cancer survivors

Compared with young White women, young Black women are more likely to present with aggressive breast cancer (BC) subtypes that are potentially linked to worse health-related quality of life (HRQOL); however, there is limited consensus regarding HRQOL needs among young Black BC survivors. Employing Ferrell's framework on QOL in BC (i.e., physical, psychological, social, and spiritual well-being), we conducted a systematic review on HRQOL among Black BC survivors aged <50 years and proposed recommendations for advancing HRQOL research and care for this population