This volume explores whether the nation's early childhood programs are boosting child development and preparing children for schooling and proposes reforms that would improve the programs. The volume contains contrasting papers on the success of Head Start, Early Head Start, and home-visiting programs and on policies that would improve these three…

Starting from the premise that the health status, vulnerability to accidents and disease, and life spans are determined by the organization, delivery, and financing (or lack thereof) of health care, this book explores how educators and community caretakers teach the complex web of inter-connection between the micro level of individual health and…

Twenty-one scholarly papers and fifteen abstracts comprise the content of the tenth annual Brick and Click Libraries Symposium, held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The peer-reviewed proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the symposium, portray the contemporary and future face of…

This paper presents the activities of the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) for 2009. The past year was one of accomplishment for USAC. USAC implemented a host of advances in operations, infrastructure, and outreach in an effort to continue to improve collection and disbursement of the Universal Service Fund (USF) support and to…

The 2009 proceedings of the Association for Continuing Higher Education represent the professional presentations of the keynote sessions, the concurrent sessions, and the business meeting of the association's 71st annual conference, held at the Sheraton Society Hill Hotel in Philadelphia on November 15-18, 2009. The conference provided an engaging…

This is the fourth report of a process evaluation of Palm Beach County Prime Time, Inc., an intermediary organization dedicated to improving the quality of afterschool programs, by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. It covers the 2007-2008 program year, which was the inaugural year of Prime Time's formal Quality Improvement System (QIS)…

Migrant students are among the most disadvantaged of any groups in the United States, yet little is understood about factors that facilitate their college access. College access outreach programs rarely collect data on whether and where their students go to college. This longitudinal study tracked the college-going behaviors of migrant students…

Following the mass shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, the author has repeatedly been asked, as a former director of the Student Counseling and Resource Service at the University of Chicago and clinical associate professor of psychiatry, two questions: "Could this have been prevented?" and "How can we ensure that it…

Researchers and policy makers have questioned the efficacy of family-involvement interventions. They believe that more studies are needed to compare outcomes of students whose families received a partnership intervention with those who did not. The author used data from the state of Ohio to compare student attendance in elementary schools that…

In the context of information and communication technologies in five Newfoundland coastal communities, this article deals with participatory research and outreach. Outreach in these communities, reeling from the near-collapse of the fishery and struggling to survive in a climate of neo-liberal restructuring, is considered to be a holistic…

Communities In Schools (CIS) was introduced to Cormack Trail School District in 1991. Using a whole-school philosophy it offers non-targeted programming to all children through the building of community-based partnerships and community involvement. The purpose of this article is to explore what participants said about their work with CIS: where…

This chapter explores alternative solutions for selective institutions of higher education to reach beyond their traditional admission measures and identify diverse students who might otherwise not be selected by traditional admission criteria.

Many child welfare systems are unable to effectively identify and address co-occurring domestic violence and child maltreatment. In response, the Dependency Court Intervention Program for Family Violence implemented a protocol to identify indicators of domestic violence in families involved with child protection proceedings. This article…

The Los Rios Community College District has proposed to convert its Davis outreach operations to a single, state-approved educational center. The proposal responds to the district's need to expand educational services in the Davis area. The area is marked by high student demand and limited instructional facilities. In the 2006-07 academic year,…

Researchers from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University prepared a case study of CODES (Community Outreach and Development Efforts Save). CODES is a coalition of 35 people and organizations in northern Manhattan committed to promoting safe streets, parks and schools. The case study analyzed the factors that prompted CODES'…