State Fiscal Impact of the Succeed Scholarship Program 2016-2017

This report will address the fiscal impact of the SSP for the 2016-17 school year, the first year the program is available for students. As of February 2017 there were 22 students from 13 districts using the program to attend one of the 17 accredited private schools currently participating in the program. For 20 of the students we know which public school district he/she attended in 2015-16. All students must be attending a public school, relocating from out of state, or be members of an active duty military family in order to participate in the program. To estimate the fiscal effect of the program we compare the additional funding the local district would have received from the state if the SSP did not exist and compare it to the tuition cost covered thru the SSP. The difference is the net fiscal effect on the state

Squeezing the Public School Districts: The Fiscal Effect of Eliminating the Louisiana Scholarship Program on State Education Expenditures

Eliminating the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) was proposed as a way to improve the financial situation of the Louisiana Department of Education budget in the current fiscal environment. A study released by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) found that the net fiscal impact on the Louisiana Department of Education budget would likely be an overall cost increase. In this study, we consider the effects that the removal or reduction of the program would have on individual districts. Districts would receive additional revenue from the state for affected students, but districts would also incur additional costs to educate these students. For each district, we compare the additional costs incurred to the additional funding received from the state. We conclude that the overall fiscal impact on districts will be negative; in other words, the overall additional variable costs incurred by the districts will be greater than the overall additional funding provided to the districts. In fact, we find that only 2 to 7 of the 69 school districts would benefit from the elimination of the program. For the affected districts, the average outcome would be a financial loss of about $1,500 per returning voucher student in 2016. In each scenario, we find that over 80% of student transfers would result in a financial loss for the local district. While we have framed this discussion in terms of the elimination of the LSP, the same analysis would be applicable to any situation that causes students to move from private schools to public schools in Louisiana, including the current funding cap which may force some current LSP students out of the program and has already generated a waitlist of over 400 students for next year

Silencing disease genes in the laboratory and the clinic

Synthetic nucleic acids are commonly used laboratory tools for modulating gene expression and have the potential to be widely used in the clinic. Progress towards nucleic acid drugs, however, has been slow and many challenges remain to be overcome before their full impact on patient care can be understood. Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are the two most widely used strategies for silencing gene expression. We first describe these two approaches and contrast their relative strengths and weaknesses for laboratory applications. We then review the choices faced during development of clinical candidates and the current state of clinical trials. Attitudes towards clinical development of nucleic acid silencing strategies have repeatedly swung from optimism to depression during the past 20 years. Our goal is to provide the information needed to design robust studies with oligonucleotides, making use of the strengths of each oligonucleotide technology

Continued strength at Tenth District banks

Commercial banks in Tenth District states continued to perform well in the first half of 1994. Profitability leveled off at a high level, asset quality improved, and loan growth accelerated. Based on these performance measures, banks in district states once again outperformed banks in the rest of the nation.Bank profits ; Federal Reserve District, 10th

Free Agents, Fire Sales, and Fungoes: An Econometric Examination of Team Success in Major League Baseball

This paper explores what good organizational strategies baseball teams use to put themselves into the group of those that win more often than they lose, and conversely, what poor strategies cause teams to fall into the group of those who lose more than they win

Marriage Games: A Game Theory Exploration of Marital Relationships

The prisoners’ dilemma may be one of the most studied games in economic strategy due to its application to reality and its implications for cooperation. Despite the inherent alignment between the game and marital relationships, very little research has been conducted on married partners in a PD game. We wanted to observe the extent to which behavior in a PD game predicted marital satisfaction. Participants were recruited from a church couple’s group in Abilene, Texas (n = 40). Results of this preliminary research indicate that a couple’s competitiveness in the PD game has a positive relationship to marital satisfaction. The length of an individual’s marriage and how often individuals cooperate with one another are negatively correlated with an individual’s marital satisfaction. Results further indicate that a respondent’s likelihood to forgive his partner for defection had no relationship to their marital satisfaction. We provide some possible reasons for these divergent findings. This study adds to current research on game theory and current research on marital satisfaction and relationships, while filling a gap in the current research on these topics

Foreigners United: Foreign Influence in American Elections After Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

This Note argues that the majority’s decision in Citizens United allows foreign nationals to circumvent the Congressional ban on influencing American elections, and that Citizens United should be reconsidered in light of this fact, as well as the compelling government interest in preventing such circumvention, and preserving the integrity of the electoral process. Part II provides an overview of the Congressional ban and Citizens United’s relationship to its circumvention. Part III.A analyzes the methods by which foreign nationals can circumvent the ban in order to influence American elections. Part III.B proposes both judicial and legislative solutions to the problem of foreign election influence created by Citizens United. Part III.C presents and analyzes a representative sample of other existing solutions to foreign election influence. Part IV identifies and refutes counterarguments that would support the decision in Citizens United and its progeny

Identifying Partnership Opportunities at Air Force Installations: A Geographic Information Systems Approach

The excess capacity found in the Department of Defense real property portfolio creates challenges for leaders to provide resilient installations. Combining this fact with current funding trends makes decisions on how to properly maintain infrastructure even more challenging. The Air Force Partnership Initiative provides tools for installations to leverage community capabilities and resources to achieve savings and improve quality on Air Force installations and can reduce the real property footprint. This research proposes a method for assessing the viability of a partnership between Air Force installations and their nearby communities.This research effort created a tool capable of investigating off-base communities and discovering partnership opportunities worthy of exploration by nearby Air Force installations. The scope of this research will be limited to exploring library partnership opportunities at Air Force installations located in the Continental United States. This research investigates the facilitators, or environmental factors, to identify where greater opportunities for creating partnerships may exist. The result of this research is a tool which produces a relative measure for each off-base community, where higher values indicate a greater potential for partnerships. This relative measure utilizes inverse distance weighting between an installation and each service location in the surrounding community

Race vs. threat: how teens perceive violence as a function of race

The relationship between race students’ perceptions of threat was examined using an examiner-made questionnaire with WV 6th, 9th, and 12th grade students. Eleven ambiguous scenarios and eight demographic questions were rated to measure the level of threat perceived by subjects. The results indicated that both Minority and Caucasian students found both black and white students the threatening

Land of the Blues

In this reflection essay and subsequent documentation, the creation of my thesis film will be detailed from inception through completion. I will discuss my educational and filmmaking experiences at the University of New Orleans with an emphasis on documentary filmmaking. Production forms will provide an understanding of the work which has gone into this production