Discover Free Public Art Schools Online
Written by Benjamin Bonython on March 8, 2012.
The 2012 high-school basketball season has come to a close, but there are still a few awards to hand out. I’m working on The Seattle Times’ boys all-state team and I’m asking for input.
Which player deserves to be the state’s MVP?
Written by admin on March 5, 2012.
So you have just Graduated High School and are wondering where the funds will come from for your college education. Or maybe you are working a tireless job, seeking the money to further your education and get into the career you are really passionate about.
Many people find themselves in similar situations, not knowing what options are available to them. Unfortunately, for some, years and even decades pass before they make a step in the right direction. A Navy Scholarship is a practical and easily accessible method in obtaining the funds for college while getting real-world experience in your chosen profession.
Image via Wikipedia
The NROTC Scholarship Program
There are many scholarship opportunities available through the Navy. However, the most prominent opportunity revolves around the NROTC scholarship program. This program offers 100% tuition assistance to students enrolled in the Navy Reserve Officers Training Corps. Additionally, candidates are provided a stipend for book fees and an allowance to help cover cost of living, which increases depending on your current year in school.
Students enrolled in the NROTC scholarship program have the time to focus on school and life without the worries associated with massive tuition debt. They also gain valuable real-world experience as an active member of the Navy during Summer Cruise training.
Scholarship Program Opportunities
Students seeking a Navy NROTC scholarship have many options to choose from in high-demand careers. Below are some of the most notable:
The Navy has a range of educational opportunities for students seeking assistance and advancement in life. Through a Navy Scholarships program, your tuition will not only be covered completely, but you will also gain valuable discipline and priceless real-world experience as an active member of the military.
Written by Dakota Gleadow on March 3, 2012.
If you are interested in pursuing a career in the cosmetology field, Eveline Charles Academy will be holding a high school symposium on Wednesday, April 3 from 11:00 – 2:00 p.m. If you are interested in attending this, please see Mrs. Homeniuk in Student Services by Friday, March 9th.
Written by Archer Dacomb on March 2, 2012.
Outside the only nightly young-adult shelter in the U-District, dozens of people wait — hoping to be taken off the waiting list and given shelter for the night. With the expansion of the shelter, they might not have to hope.
The young-adult shelter Rising Out of the Shadows (ROOTS), located under University Temple United Methodist Church on Northeast 43rd Street, was granted a $500,000 grant this month by the Raynier Institution & Foundation, which will allow the shelter to rebuild and expand its space to accommodate more guests each night.
Brad Trenary, board member of the Raynier Institution & Foundation, said ROOTS makes an important contribution to the Seattle community.
“We are thrilled with what ROOTS does,” Trenary said. “We think ROOTS is one of the greatest gifts to homeless young adults in Seattle.”
About 600 homeless people ages 18 to 25 live in the Seattle area, ROOTS Executive Director Kristine Cunningham said, and this past year ROOTS turned away 2,103 visits due to lack of space.
“We’d be at least a step closer,” Cunningham said about the expansion. “It’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s a good drop in the bucket. It’s moving in the right direction.”
The expansion allows ROOTS to house 45 homeless young adults instead of the previous 27. Currently, if over 27 guests sign up for the shelter, a random selection determines who gets turned away for the night. The construction, which is scheduled to begin in August and last three months, will take place during the day and will not significantly affect ROOTS’ overnight shelter.
While the grant was not enough to buy a new building, Cunningham said the current location near the UW is ideal because most of ROOTS’ volunteers are UW students.
UW senior Amanda Mendoza, a volunteer at ROOTS, said the shelter has been turning down a lot more people over the summer. It’s the regulars, though, who benefit from the ROOTS community the most, she said.
“I’ve made a lot of connections with guests I see every week,” Mendoza said. “When they have something good [happen] in their lives, they can’t wait to share it with us. … We’d know what’s going on. We’d be a substitute for a family member who hasn’t been around.”
Ben Wolzfelt, age 25, is currently homeless and seeks shelter daily at ROOTS. He was placed on the waiting list one night and said the experience was scary because he didn’t know what he was going to do for that night if he didn’t get in.
“I think it’s a wonderful thing,” Wolzfelt said about the expansion. “Especially in this area, it will get a lot more people off the waiting list [and to] just do what they need to [do] to get back on their feet.”
Wolzfelt recently lost his job and said that, like many of the homeless young adults he sees at ROOTS, his situation is a temporary setback.
“You do hear a lot at night … about plans for the future,” Wolzfelt said of the conversations the guests engage in at the shelter. “They’re normally striving towards something.”
Cunningham said many of the homeless youth who seek shelter at ROOTS don’t mind the rules and order that come with the shelter and have ambitions about their futures.
“Just having a predictable place to be safe for one night helps them put the wind in their sails,” Cunningham said. “These are folks that just need a really solid foundation to jump off from.”
With the expansion, the hygiene center will also have four bathrooms instead of three, which Cunningham said is a critical aspect of what the homeless youth need in a shelter.
She added that, while the shelter will not change significantly in appearance, the remodeling will allow the shelter to function more efficiently because of the more open space and improved hygiene center.
“The walls don’t really change that much, but the improvements will be vast as far as how the shelter feels and how it operates,” Cunningham said.
The overnight guests receive accommodations such as toiletries, nursing facilities, underwear and laundry services.
“We are kind of taking it on faith [that we can] grow our income to accommodate the extra people,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham calls ROOTS a community crucial for those who are homeless and don’t have the support they need — a community those who are turned away miss out on.
“They don’t have that circle of support,” Cunningham said. “We’re that circle for these guys. We’re it. That’s a part of how poverty and oppression work. Until the community claims them, that cycle perpetuates.”
Written by Isla Reeve on March 2, 2012.
The state Board of Education today will decide the continued employment of two-year college Chancellor Freida Hill, with a majority of members saying her two years at the helm should come to an end.
The board meets at 2 p.m. to discuss Hill’s future, which has looked anything but promising the last few weeks.
In a recent evaluation, several board members criticized Hill’s leadership style, saying she doesn’t communicate well with the board or the media, focuses too much on workforce development and not enough on academia, and has a fractured relationship with K-12 education.
Five members — Charles Elliott, Stephanie Bell, Betty Peters, Ella Bell and Yvette Richardson — have said either that they supported firing Hill or that they didn’t see how she could continue to lead the system.
Since then, board members have been mum on what, exactly, went wrong.
But former Chancellor Bradley Byrne, who took over after a tumultuous run of corruption and cronyism under a previous chancellor, Roy Johnson, said it boils down to some of the same issues that led to the two-year college system scandal that broke in 2006.
“The central problem I saw when I took over the two-year system is that the presidents were running the system and the chancellor didn’t have any oversight,” he said. “There has to be strong oversight, but there are presidents who don’t want that. And there are some presidents now who want to take it back to that old system.”
The far-reaching scandal of bribery and cronyism led to 18 people being charged in federal court in connection with the case, including Johnson, who is serving 6½ years in prison. Among the others convicted were a college president, the head of the Alabama Fire College and three state legislators who had ties to the system.
When Byrne was appointed chancellor in 2007, he forced out half the college presidents and the majority of vice chancellors. He also pushed through the state Board of Education several policies and regulations that forced community college employees to choose between working in the system and serving in the Legislature, essentially ending the so-called practice of “double-dipping.”
“We did have a pretty good house cleaning, but not all of them are gone,” Byrne said. “Now, are there some issues between the chancellor and some board members? Obviously there are. But the backdrop of this clearly is that presidents want to retake control of the system.”
Hill, who was hired in December 2009 after working as deputy commissioner of Georgia’s technical college system, is under contract until Nov. 30.
Hill on Tuesday declined comment on the advice of her lawyer.
Board issues
Specific issues between Hill and the board vary among board members, who have crossed party lines to get rid of Hill. Republicans Stephanie Bell, Peters and Elliott are aligned with Democrats Ella Bell and Richardson.
Among the problems the Democratic board members point to is a lack of diversity among staff. Hill fired former general counsel Joan Davis, who served a short time as interim chancellor after Byrne resigned to focus on his run for governor. Davis, who was black, was replaced by Lynne Thrower, who is white. She had worked in the legal department and was moved up after Davis left.
In another case, a black president who resigned at J.F. Ingram State Technical College in Montgomery was replaced by an interim president who is white.
Peters said problems with a land purchase deal for Calhoun Community College in Huntsville are part of her beef with Hill.
The state board in September voted down a proposed $3.8 million land purchase for a second Calhoun campus to ease crowding on the Wynn Drive campus. Among other things, board members said they were afraid it would hurt J.F. Drake State Technical College in Huntsville and Madison County. Drake is seeking accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which would allow it to become a full-fledged community college.
Peters told The Birmingham News recently that the way Hill conducted herself with the media on the Calhoun situation was unacceptable.
Peters said students at Calhoun were allowed to demonstrate and even encouraged to do so.
“The TV shots of the ruckus at Calhoun were embarrassing, and I was offended that students were encouraged to protest by college employees,” Peters wrote in her evaluation of Hill.
Elliott said he, too, sees a lack of leadership from Hill. Recently, Elliott said that Hill allowed a school board member to berate college presidents behind closed doors. Hill left the room, he said, and allowed the board member to scold the presidents for not liking Hill.
“That’s inexcusable,” he said. “That is a level of unprofessionalism I’ve never heard of … and it shows an inability to lead on a grand scale.”
Training vs. academics
The issue of job training vs. traditional academic programs is one that two-year college systems around the country are grappling with.
Hill was recruited to Alabama from Georgia for her experience dealing with workforce development. Former Gov. Bob Riley and current Gov. Robert Bentley have stressed worker training programs as vital to the state’s economic well-being.
Gregory Fitch, director of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, said there has to be a balance between the two. Hill seems to have balanced them well, he said.
Without an emphasis on workforce development, Alabama wouldn’t grow and prosper in manufacturing jobs, he said.
“Without strong work-force development, would we be able to court businesses to come to rural areas? Would we have Mercedes and Hyundai here without workforce development?” Fitch said.
Byrne said that when he became chancellor, that issue was an afterthought.
“When I came into the mix, (the system) was heavily against workforce development. They wanted to turn the two-year colleges into mini four-year colleges. They didn’t like anything to do with workforce development or adult education. They thought it was beneath them.
“The easier thing to do is academics, but without any doubt, it’s critical to the state that we have a strong technical and workforce development program,” he said.
Hill is the sixth person to lead Alabama’s two-year college network since it was hit with the corruption scandal in 2006. Fitch said the turnover in that seat could hurt the system.
“I’ve seen people come and go in that position since I came here 5½ years ago,” he said. “It’s difficult to recover from something like that, especially when it was so widespread. Unfortunately, people remember the negative — that’s why continuity is so important in that role.”
Inappropriate post? Alert us.
Written by Archer Dacomb on March 1, 2012.
The authors of Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience recount their experiences with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). In particular they focus on some of the practical and frequently difficult experience of having to work with unfriendly governments or warring factions. While Doctors Without Borders is committed to providing medical assistance to all individuals civilian and combatant alike, they must be wary of being used for political purposes.
The following excerpt is from the chapter, Afghanistan: Regaining Leverage, by Xavier Crombe (with Michiel Hofman) describing MSFs return to the country. In this passage Crombe describes MSFs dealings with opposition groups, including the Taliban:
Full compliance with MSF’s “no weapon” policy was to be the starting point for the medical programmes. They were launched officially in Kabul in October, but remained effectively on hold in Lashkar Gah until January 2010. The teams were on the wards, but had to wait for drug supplies to arrive as their transport by truck from Kabul to Helmand depended on obtaining permission from the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan (IEA), the most influential armed opposition group, also known as “Quetta Shura”. This was in essence a sovereignty issue, as most districts in the southern provinces, and consequently road traffic, were under effective control of this group.
Since MSF’s return to Afghanistan, there had been several setbacks in engaging the Taliban leadership. Getting approval for the Kabul project had been relatively straightforward as MSF’s initial opposition contacts judged the selected hospital located in a Pashtun area to be easily accessible by their constituency, and planned surgical activities opened up the prospect of treatment for their wounded combatants. But the scant interest and commitment they had shown from the outset regarding MSF’s intended projects in the southern provinces, including Helmand, known to be the heartland of the IEA, had cast doubts over the breadth of their connections.
Hence, in the spring of 2009, MSF set about establishing different contacts with the opposition, this time relying on its own network of former Afghan staff and, by the summer, had been able to initiate communication with known IEA members. Right from their first discussions, these new interlocutors made clear to MSF that its earlier contacts were not legitimate representatives of their group. Their connections lay instead with the Haqqani Network, whose influence extended over Kabul and Afghanistan’s southeast, as well as the Waziristan region in Pakistan. The IEA was rooted in the south but was also influential in the rising insurgencies in the west and north. The two groups were partner organisations, but they had distinct constituencies and interests. From then on, the two channels should be engaged separately for negotiation, depending on the area at stake.
While MSF had been successful in expanding its network, time had nonetheless been lost in identifying the right contacts to secure guarantees in Helmand. Moreover, soon after a first and promising encounter, the organisation was informed that the IEA council had rejected its two projects, on the grounds that working in MOPH facilities displayed unacceptable support for the Karzai government, derisively referred to as the “Labour Department” of the American forces. This decision effectively prohibited the safe transport of drugs by road from Kabul to Helmand.
It took six more months to resolve the issue. MSF defended its operational choice as a necessary first step to import drugs and insisted that, with its teams already on the ground and drugs waiting in Kabul, it was too late to cut the project short. Assessments for future projects, MSF argued, would consider areas suggested by the IEA. The agency also stressed it had received assurances from foreign and Afghan forces that they would not interfere in the hospitals. On the part of the IEA, security considerations were inseparable from issues of legitimacy and the authorisation for the transport of drugs MSF was asking for was used as a bargaining chip to extract further guarantees and concessions from the organisation. Airing their distrust of the MOPH doctors in Lashkar Gah and of US respect for the Geneva Conventions, the opposition demanded that MSF give a commitment in writing stating that it had control over the hospital staff and provide an official MoU with the US military to prove their compliance with humanitarian law. MSF was careful not to commit itself regarding the behaviour of the international forces, stressing instead its ability to hold them to account through the media.
In January 2010, the IEA eventually gave permission for the drugs to be transported to Helmand. Wishing to be recognised as an able and legitimate government in the regions where they were gradually gaining control, the opposition leadership was seemingly more interested in medical aid as a tool to win “hearts and minds” than as an actual asset for their combatants. When MSF asked if the IEA had suggestions for future projects, one representative answered: “The biggest needs are with civilians, especially maternity care; we can take care of our fighters”.
