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West Australian
17-05-2025
- Sport
- West Australian
Adam Selwood: West Coast Eagles great's life in pictures following tragic passing aged 41
The Selwood family has been hit by more tragedy with Adam Selwood passing just three months after his twin brother Troy, as we look back on the Eagles great's best moments. Born on May 1 1984, alongside twin brother Troy, he would be the second Selwood to enter the AFL, with the Bendigo product being taken at pick 53 in the 2002 AFL Draft after Troy was taken at pick 19 by Brisbane. Selwood would play two games in his first season, including the losing elimination final to Adelaide. Selwood will play just a further three matches in 2004, with osteitis pubis ending his season early in a frustrating start to AFL life. But Selwood would announce himself in 2005, playing 21 matches and receiving an AFL Rising Star nomination, putting in a commanding performance in their preliminary final win over Adelaide with 26 touches and a goal. However, he would be kept quiet, a week later gathering just seven touches as West Coast would lose a grand final heartbreaking by four points. Having solidified himself as a defensive midfielder, Selwood would play every single game of the 2006 premiership season, averaging 19 disposals a game. In the qualifying final against Sydney at Subiaco, the Eagles would once again be on the wrong side going down by one point with Selwood shattered after the loss. But three weeks later, the Eagles and Selwood got their revenge, winning by one point in one of the all-time great grand finals with Selwood contributing 26 touches. In one of the more infamous moments of his career, Selwood got in a fight with Fremantle's Des Headland, but neither would be sanctioned. On the back of the premiership, Selwood would reach new heights in 2007, playing the best game of his career against North Melbourne with 34 disposals. While the Eagles would fall short of defending their flag, losing the semi-final to Collingwood despite Selwood's 31-touch performance, there would still be joy at the MCG, celebrating with brother Joel after Geelong beat Port Adelaide. At the end of 2007 Adam would be joined by brother Scott who after he was selected with pick No.22 in the draft, Having finished third in the club champion award, Selwood would do the same in 2008 after playing every single game and despite a tough season, winning just four games would be named vice-captain of Australia in the International Rules series. As West Coast struggled over the subsequent years, Selwood remained a consistent performer, averaging more than 20 disposals across the 2009 and 2010 seasons. In 2010, Selwood became an ambassador for the Meningitis Centre having contracted HIB meningitis at two years old. Selwood would bring up game 150 in 2011, celebrating with a win against the Western Bulldogs. With his powers waning, his brother Scott became the dominant brother, taking home the John Worsfold medal in 2012. Selwood announced his retirement ahead of West Coast's final game against Adelaide in 2013, alongside fellow Eagle Mark Nicoski, having won the best clubman award. There would be no fairytale ending in a loss to the Crows, but Selwood finished his career having played 187 games with 43 goals and a premiership medal to his name. Selwood would remain with the Eagles, taking over as development coach. He would also play an integral role in launching West Coast's AFLW side becoming the inuagral head of football to set up the side. After spending nearly two decades with the Eagles, Selwood stepped away from football to focus on a different professional path. But there would be one more moment in the sun for the Selwood family with all four brothers present as they celebrated Geelong's premiership win in 2022 in what would be Joel's final game. Earlier this year the brothers would be reunited by tragedy following the passing of his twin, Troy, as they farewelled him at a ceremony in Geelong. In his final act before his passing Selwood was on hand to present Malakai Champion with his jumper at the Eagles season launch in March. VALE ADAM HUNTER - 187 games - 43 goals - 2005 Rising Star nominee - 2006 premiership winner - 2008 Australian vice-captain - 2013 best clubman award
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Yahoo
Verbal, race-based harassment is up in this Pierce County school district
For months, parents have been coming forward to the Peninsula School District board with stories about their kids being bullied and harassed. One dad said another student threatened and punched his daughter in elementary school. A mom said her son was called slurs after he came out as LGBTQ in his middle school. And concerned parents, who accused the district of ignoring what they say is a pattern, formed an advocacy group called Moms for P.E.A.C.E. Representatives spoke at many board meetings over the last two years. On Tuesday, district staff presented the school board with a long-anticipated report to get to the heart of the issue: what's not working? The complex answer to that question wasn't immediately clear from the presentation, which provided general recommendations for the district to improve their prevention and response to harassment, intimidation and bullying incidents. It found that certain types of incidents have increased in recent years, such as race/ethnicity/nationality-based incidents, but didn't explain how the numbers stack up against other districts or national trends. The report didn't provide measurable goals to tackle the problem, but district officials told the board they will make a plan before next school year. Led by district staff in partnership with Puget Sound Educational Service District, the report was supposed to audit existing school policies, practices and procedures and identify recommendations for change over the long-term, according to Chief of Schools Michael Farmer when he introduced the review at a board meeting in September. Presented by Farmer, Deputy Chief of Schools Julie Schultz-Bartlett and district paralegal and HIB (Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying) Compliance Officer Shelby Morng, the presentation lasted about one and a half hours and covered a slew of areas that staff and members of a separate task force examined to try to find answers: district policies and procedures, reporting and investigation processes and systems, student feedback on school culture and staff support, and more. At the meeting Tuesday, three people spoke during public comment about the presentation. All three said they wanted to see more action from the district to address the issue. One of them was Jud Morris, who said he has worked and volunteered in the school district for the last 20 years. 'I thought about (the) meeting after I left and see one of the issues to be how does PSD connect pain families feel from (harassment, intimidation and bullying) with implementation of effective policies/procedures to stop HIB,' Morris wrote in an email to The News Tribune the next day. 'That's the challenge.' A copy of the full report will be available on the district's new harassment, intimidation and bullying website, Farmer told the board Tuesday. A chart in the presentation showed that reported verbal incidents of harassment, intimidation and bullying took up a larger percentage of total incidents in 2023-2024 than in previous years. Verbal incidents took up 72.16% of total incidents in 2023-2024, up from 60.8% in 2022-2023; 68.69% in 2021-2022; and 45.83% in 2018-2019, according to the chart. Physical incidents decreased, from 47.92% in 2018-2019 to 25.77% in 2023-2024. The data skipped over the years impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The district has previously said publicly that harassment, intimidation and bullying incidents as a whole have increased in recent years. At the March 2024 study session, a district staff member told the board that the number of incidents at the elementary level recorded in PowerSchool, a cloud-based K-12 software provider, increased from 14 incidents in 2018-2019 to 51 in 2022-2023. At the secondary school level, the number went from 24 recorded incidents in 2018-2019 to 53 incidents in 2021-2022, the staff member told the board. Data from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction shows that enrollment numbers were similar in 2018-2019 and 2023-2024 in the Peninsula School District at about 9,000 students. Another chart in Tuesday's presentation showed that harassment, intimidation and bullying incidents related to race, ethnicity, or nationality are also on the rise as a proportion of total incidents reported. Race/ethnicity/nationality-related incidents increased from 11.93% in 2022-2023 to 29.9% in 2023-2024. The presentation recommended that the district look to districts, including the Bellevue, Snoqualmie Valley and Vancouver School Districts, to emulate their systems and policies. Deputy Chief of Schools Julie Schultz-Bartlett told the board the district's Bullying Action and Prevention Task Force, which she headed, found a gap in curriculum educating students about discriminatory harassment. Students are already learning from curricula like Second Step and CharacterStrong, which teach students life skills and address bullying, but the district lacks training around racial language, homophobic language and identity-based harassment, according to Schultz-Bartlett. There's now a central location on the district's website for information about harassment, intimidation and bullying, as well as where to report concerns, through the efforts of the Bullying Action and Prevention Task Force. 'One of the pieces that we heard repeatedly from family and community members was that they don't know how to report when something has happened,' Schultz-Bartlet told the board. 'So we've made two pages.' The harassment, intimidation and bullying page, explains definitions, how to report an incident, the district's prevention efforts, and related policies. It also features buttons to report a concern directly to school administrators or to the state-sponsored platform, HearMeWA. Another page, can be found under 'Report a Concern' from the district's Quick Links tab on the homepage. That page also features buttons to report a concern or tip, as well as a dropdown list showing who to contact for specific topics including school-related concerns, disability discrimination, sexual harassment and other issues. The Bullying Action and Prevention Task Force met five times over six months for a total of about 10 hours in-person, and examined a variety of materials including student handbooks, social and emotional learning curricula, school board procedures and more to identify gaps in the district's anti-bullying strategies, Schultz-Bartlett said at the meeting. One of their exercises included looking at write-ups of real student behavior incidents requiring discipline and categorizing them as harassment, intimidation and bullying or something else, such as inappropriate conduct or violence. All the incidents were inappropriate, but the task force decided some that staff may have deemed harassment, intimidation or bullying didn't actually fit into that category, according to Schultz-Bartlett. The district's Policy 3207 defines harassment, intimidation and bullying as any intentional act that 'physically harms a student or damages the student's property,' 'has the effect of substantially interfering with a student's education,' 'is so severe, persistent, or pervasive that it creates an intimidating or threatening educational environment,' or 'has the effect of substantially disrupting the orderly operation of the school.' 'We know transparency is important, but we also experienced it ourselves how hard it is to categorize some of these activities that we're seeing,' Schultz-Bartlett said. Asked by board member Jennifer Butler to speak to the challenges of coding incidents more consistently, Schultz-Bartlett said that the district's principals and assistant principals are already working on aligning their schools' student handbooks to consistently decide what types of behavior fall under which categories. That work will likely continue through next year, she said. Responding to a question from board President Natalie Wimberly, Schultz-Bartlett said the task force hasn't set any measurable goals to target the issues studied at this point. 'Mostly we set forward actions that we wanted to take with the goal that we would decrease overall (harassment, intimidation and bullying) incidents within our buildings and increase our sense of belonging,' Schultz-Bartlett said. She added that existing data for tracking bullying-related incidents 'is not very clean,' in part because the district recently switched data collection systems. Now that the district is using Navigate360 to track incidents, they'll have some benchmark data later this year that they can use to identify metrics to track, she said. The district superintendent and cabinet will review the report and recommendations and make a plan for 2025-2026 and beyond, Farmer said near the end of the presentation. He also said focus groups with students, school principals' work to streamline discipline processes and monitoring the effectiveness of staff training and professional development will continue.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Core public health functions that we really need
The success of public health victories means that people have forgotten the horrors of disease. (Photo by) I am a retired public health nurse with 27 years experience in communicable disease surveillance. I hunted down scary diseases to prevent others from getting sick. I worked with dreaded diseases such as meningitis, tuberculosis, measles, and syphilis. I witnessed the suffering and death of infectious diseases. But good things happened, too. With awe and amazement, I watched vaccination programs eliminate common diseases. When I became a nurse in 1982, the most common form of infant meningitis was from a bacteria called Haemophilis influenza type b, or HIB. HIB disease causes severe infections, hospitalizations and death. If the baby survived, they were often left with neurological problems. Introduced in 1987, the HIB vaccine virtually eliminated this condition. Medical schools lamented that their interns would complete their entire training without ever having the chance to treat a case of HIB meningitis! I worked in the Texas School for the Blind, which cared for children damaged by rubella. Mexico did not have the rubella vaccine until 1985. If contracted in the first sixteen weeks of pregnancy, rubella causes severe birth defects such as profound intellectual impairment, blindness and deafness. The kids I saw in Texas had microcephaly, or abnormally small heads. It marked me forever to sit in a room full of disabled children knowing it was only lack of political will which sealed their fate. The public health laws are effective! School vaccination requirements have given us a society where we are not afraid of dying from a plague. Polio has become a distant memory in our grandparents lives. Congenital rubella is very rare. Measles was eradicated from the US in the year 2000. But this can break down if we are not vigilant. Measles is burning through the country. We have handicapped ourselves by firing the people who respond to public health emergencies. We need epidemiologists and nurses on the ground coordinating efforts. Success of public health victories means that people have forgotten the horrors of disease. No one has seen the lockjaw of tetanus, or infants choking from pertussis, or malformed skulls of congenital rubella. Our very success has opened the door to complacency. Parents are misled by conspiracy theorists. Pockets of susceptible populations combined with malpractice of cutting our essential public health programs puts our country in a precarious position. It is just a matter of time before measles comes to your day care, your school, your church. This comes at a time when access to health care is being curtailed. Cuts to Medicaid will leave children and pregnant women uninsured. Rural hospitals will be forced to close. Clinics will be shuttered. Nursing Homes will be emptied. This administration is taking us backwards to an unkind past. An example of what we should not do is from the state of Idaho. A new law prohibits publicly funded medical services to undocumented persons. The law forbids prenatal care, immunizations, and communicable disease testing to 'illegals.' This is in direct contradiction to the guidelines of the CDC. The cruel law makes Idahoans less safe, and thereby, surrounding states such as Utah less safe. By not immunizing everyone, you create a reservoir of susceptible people where measles can thrive. By prohibiting communicable disease testing, you hamstring public health investigators who seek out deadly diseases like tuberculosis. I was a TB nurse for eight years. We treated people who had been contagious for months before diagnosis. A single case of TB can infect hundreds of others. By refusing prenatal care, women can die from gestational diabetes or eclampsia, a dangerous complication of pregnancy. Idaho will have blood on its hands. We need a coherent, comprehensive public health policy. The drastic cuts to the CDC, NIH, and the safety net programs will adversely affect us all. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has turned his back on expert advice of the public health pioneers who have wrought health victories that were unimaginable to our grandparents. We must demand that our legislators carry out their responsibility to provide essential services to their constituents.
