News and Information Blog
Daily News: West African brothers’ bumpy life smoothed by move to SCO Family of Services group home
Jan 17th
- Efosa Idemudia, the program manager of the SCO Family of Services, is flanked by Amara (left) and Mamadou Toure. The brothers credit Idemudia with rescuing them from the foster care system.
Mamadou and Amara Toure on road to success after rescue from foster care
Published: Friday, January 13 2012, 6:00 AM
Updated: Friday, January 13 2012, 6:00 AM
This is the story of two brothers, a tale with a somewhat happy ending in progress.
Let’s get the somewhat happy out of the way first.
Mamadou Toure, 19, will start his first year tomorrow at Lincoln College of New England, in Southington, Conn. He wants to be a film maker and perhaps play professional soccer.
Amara Toure, 20, is in his second year at Kingsborough Community College but is hoping to transfer soon to Brooklyn College and continue his studies. His goal is to become a physician.
These are happy, hopeful times for the siblings from Conakry in Guinea, West Africa, especially given the arduous path they’ve taken to get there.
Since 2009 they have called home an SCO Family of Services group home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after being placed there by the city Administration for Children’s Services.
ACS entered their lives after Mamadou spent some time living on the street and Amara had to work seven days a week in a clothing store — while still in high school — to make the rent a relative demanded to allow him sleep on his living room floor.
Daily Record: Baby boomers at community colleges trying to make new start
Jan 4th
- After spending years working on Wall Street, Ralph Casbarro of Ocean Township, a lifelong cooking enthusiast, is going back to school at Brookdale Community Colleges Culinary Education Center in Asbury Park. Casbarro cooks lamb osso buco in his home kitchen. / Mike McLaughlin/Special to NJ PRESS MEDIA
Written by
Bill Bowman
Staff Writer
OCEAN TOWNSHIP — Ralph Casbarro loves to cook.
So much so that last year, when the 50-year-old township resident was trying to decide on his second career, his wife steered him to the answer.
Knowing that her husband was considering returning to college to study the culinary arts, Leslee Casbarro told him that if he didn’t do it now, he never would.
So, six months ago, he began taking culinary classes at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County.
“I find it interesting because for me, it’s not hard,” Ralph Casbarro said of his studies. “I just wanted something that I like to do.”
Casbarro is not alone. In 2009, the last year for which figures are available, nearly 21,000 of the more than 414,000 students enrolled in New Jersey’s 19 community colleges were 50 or older, according to statistics from the New Jersey Council of Community Colleges.
Completion Comes First
Dec 13th
December 13, 2011 – 3:00am
By Paul Fain
WASHINGTON — Community colleges are no longer the “best-kept secret” in higher education. The colleges are getting plenty of attention for their role in workforce training, and at the same time feeling growing pressure to improve low graduation rates — a trend that continued Monday with the naming of Valencia College as the first winner of the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence.
Valencia, a large two-year institution in Florida that is widely considered a top community college, edged out the competition in part for its strides on completion rates.
“Valencia reworked many traditional processes that other colleges view as immutable,” according to an Aspen-produced pamphlet describing the 10 finalists for the award. By giving students earlier advising and orientation, as well as offering a “Student Success” course, the college has tried “new things where they’ll matter most, for the neediest students.”
The three-year, full-time graduation and transfer rate for minority students at Valencia is 43 percent, which outpaces the national average of 33 percent. And the completion rate for Valencia’s career programs has grown 44 percent over four years.
With the selection of Valencia, the prize committee has reinforced a strong Beltway focus on student outcomes in a sector where access has traditionally come first. In addition to weighing graduation rates, the award process involved intensive data-gathering on colleges’ labor market success, learning outcomes and performance with underserved student populations. Funding the prize was the Lumina Foundation for Education, a major force for the completion agenda, as well as the Joyce Foundation, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan.
“It can’t be just about getting in the door” at community colleges, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, said at the event. “We have to take community college outcomes to the next level.”
Joshua Wyner, executive director of the Aspen College Excellence Program, told Inside Higher Ed that the group plans to make the award an annual affair. And he confirmed that the $1 million-total prize pot would be replenished each year, at least for the foreseeable future.
One of the goals of the prize is to create better metrics to track community college performance. And all the better if colleges try to change how they do business to win, said Wyner, because unlike other rankings efforts, this process can only lead to changes that will help students.
“We would like them to game this system,” he said.
Valencia received $600,000 for winning. Four colleges were named runners-up “with distinction,” each earning $100,000. They were Lake Area Technical Institute (S.D.), Miami Dade College, Walla Walla Community College (Wash.), and West Kentucky Community and Technical College.
The prize was culled from an initial list of “120” best community colleges. (There are about 1,200 two-year colleges in the U.S.) Those colleges had to submit detailed applications to be considered for the final 10. That group included Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, Mott Community College (Mich.), Northeast Iowa Community College at Calmar, Santa Barbara City College (Calif.) and Southwest Texas Junior College.
Inside Higher Ed: At the White House Roundtable
Dec 6th
December 6, 2011 – 3:00am
WASHINGTON — A meeting Monday between President Obama, university chancellors and presidents, and experts on higher education cost and productivity appears to mark a shift in policy for the administration, which will focus more on college affordability in the coming months.
Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and several domestic policy advisers met Monday afternoon with chancellors and presidents from 10 institutions, including public universities, two private nonprofit colleges, and one statewide community college. The discussion lasted about two hours, with the president in the meeting for more than an hour, and the conversation was wide-ranging, participants said. (Officials from various sectors, including public comprehensive colleges and for-profit colleges, complained that they had no, or insufficient, representation at the meeting.)
In general, Obama and the college leaders focused on a few key questions: how colleges can become more affordable while producing more graduates, and how new efforts in affordability or productivity can be “scaled up” from one college to large state systems or the nation as a whole.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle: The Brooklyn VLP Presses On With Another Year of Honoring Volunteers
Dec 5th
VLP Board President James P. Slattery (left) presents the 2011 Christopher Slattery Young Professional Award to Joanne Reece (center), as she receives a bouquet of flowers from VLP Supervising Attorney Sidney Cherubin.
Brooklyn Law School Recent Graduate Honored With Slattery Award From Volunteer Lawyers Project
By Samuel Newhouse
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — The nation’s economic recession may not be ending, but pro bono work on behalf of needy litigants continues at the Brooklyn Volunteer Lawyers Project.
Over the past 15 months, 400 attorneys have volunteered 9,513 hours — an all-time high for the Brooklyn Bar Association’s Volunteer Lawyers Project (VLP) — while providing almost 6,000 Brooklyn individuals and families with direct legal representation, and advice and legal counsel to 8,805 others. An additional 452 attorneys have been trained at CLE courses led by the VLP this year.
These achievements were celebrated at the VLP’s annual Volunteer Recognition Event last week, held at TD Bank in Brooklyn Heights. Caterers with trays of succulent mini-steaks and shrimp cocktails traveled around recently replanted greenery throughout the event space in the basement of the bank on Montague Street. A chef served sliders grilled to order for the distinguished guests, including local attorneys and Brooklyn judges.
Brooklyn Daily: Kingsborough walk puts the ‘fun’ in fundraising!
Nov 29th
By Shavana Abruzzo
Brooklyn Daily
Food for thought was trumped by food for action at Kingsborough Community College on Wednesday as a “plate of mac and cheese” roamed the hallways alongside “Mickey’s Mouseketeers” and the “Numerical Navigators” to raise money for cash-strapped students.
The zany crew was among more than 600 resourceful faculty, staff, students and supporters — many of them also in costume — who showed no signs of dampened spirits after rain forced them to take the benefit trek indoors.
“It was hard trying to walk inside the campus with a table!” chuckled Mille Burke, a secretary with the Marine and Academic Center’s Krafty Macs, who received rousing cheers for her comfort food cozzie — an eye-popping recreation of a plate of pasta with Burke’s head poking out of the top on a cardboard table covered by a checkered cloth and set with a posy of flowers.
“We go a little overboard!” added the fundraiser.
Harder still was making up the 2.5-mile schlepp indoors — the equivalent of traversing the exterior of the 70-acre, waterfront campus twice — but the highly-charged walkers took it in stride.
Other quirk-pots, also in a class of their own, included Continuing Education Dean Saul Katz, who led the “Seaside Pirates” decked out as a buccaneer, and legging-clad college President Regina Peruggi, who stopped sporadically to flex muscle with her “President’s Pacers.”
Would-Be Engineers Hit Books the Hardest, a Study Finds
Nov 17th
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: November 17, 2011
Business majors spend less time on course work than other college students, but they devote more hours to nonschool duties, like earning money and caring for family members. In contrast, engineering students spend the most time studying and the least on outside demands.
Those are among the findings released on Thursday from the annual National Survey of Student Engagement, a project that tries to measure how hard, and how effectively, students are working. This year’s results are based on forms filled out last school year by more than 400,000 undergraduates, all of them freshmen or seniors, at nearly 700 colleges and universities in the United States.
Grouping students into seven academic disciplines, the study shows wide differences in the number of hours they put into schoolwork outside the classroom. Among students concentrating in engineering, 42 percent say they spend at least 20 hours per week on such study, well ahead of any other group.
They are followed, in descending order, by students studying physical sciences, biological sciences, arts and humanities, education and social sciences. Business majors ranked last, with 19 percent saying they spend 20 hours or more each week on schoolwork.
Daily News: Only the veggie best for these Kingsborough Community College cooking class students
Nov 3rd
Students at Kingsborough’s Culinary Improv class learn with vegetables picked from a campus garden
BY Katie Nelson
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, November 3 2011, 2:05 PM
An innovative farm-to-table cooking class at Kingsborough Community College is teaching future chefs how to cook with the freshest ingredients possible.
Most of the vegetables are so locally-sourced that they are grown in a garden on campus that’s only a short walk from the college kitchen.
This week, more than a dozen “culinary improv” students started their day plucking lettuce, kale, broccoli, tomatoes and other green goodies from the school’s half-acre plot.
Other classes use the land as a living-breathing-classroom, too: Biology classes take samples to examine with microscopes. Early childhood education classes learn about creating kiddie vegetable patches.
But today, this culinary arts class used the land as a starting point for soups, salads, side-dishes and pizzas.
Harvesting veggies was a teaching moment. One student yanked a whole cabbage out of the ground – roots and all – rather than cut the head out so the rest of the plant could keep growing.
Others learned what vegetables looked like before they are packaged and stacked on grocery store shelves.
“It tastes like peas!” exclaimed Jason Bynes, 21, of Far Rockaway, Queens, while chewing a leafy stem.
President to Ease Student Loan Burden for Low-Income Graduates
Oct 26th
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: October 25, 2011
President Obama will announce new programs Wednesday to lower monthly loan payments for some students graduating next year and thereafter and to let borrowers who have a mix of direct federal loans and loans under the old Federal Family Education Loan Program consolidate them at a slightly lower interest rate.
At a press briefing Tuesday afternoon, Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council, said the president would use his executive authority to expand the existing income-based repayment program with a “Pay as You Earn” option that would allow graduates to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 20 years and have the rest of their federal student loan debt forgiven. That plan would start next year.
The New York Times: In College, Working Hard to Learn High School Material
Oct 24th
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: October 23, 2011
In June, Desiree Smith was graduated from Murry Bergtraum High. Her grades were in the 90s, she said, and she had passed the four state Regents exams. Since enrolling last month at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, Ms. Smith, 19, has come to realize that graduating from a New York City public high school is not the same as learning.
She failed all three placement tests for LaGuardia and is now taking remediation in reading, writing and math. So are Nikita Thomas, of Bedford Stuyvesant Prep; Sade Washington, of the Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem; Stacey Sumulong, of Queens Vocational and Technical; Lucrecia Woolford of John Adams High; and Juan Rodriguez of Grover Cleveland High. “Passing the Regents don’t mean nothing,” Ms. Thomas said. “The main focus in high school is to get you to graduate; it makes the school look good. They get you in and get you out.