Latest news with #UniversityofNebraska-Lincoln
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Scientists Developed a Kind of 'Living Concrete' That Heals Its Own Cracks
Concrete is an excellent and versatile material, but it's not without its limitations. One of the biggest problems materials scientists are keen to find a workaround for is its brittleness. Concrete doesn't have very high tensile strength at all, which means it's prone to cracking under stress. One way of resolving this issue would be to develop concrete that can fill in its own cracks, and a new method could be that panacea. A team led by mechanical engineer Congrui Grace Jin of Texas A&M University has developed concrete that can heal itself by harnessing the power of synthetic lichen. It improves on previous attempts at creating self-healing 'living' concrete made using bacteria, the researchers say, by being fully self sustainable. "Microbe-mediated self-healing concrete has been extensively investigated for more than three decades," Jin explains, "but it still suffers from one important limitation – none of the current self-healing approaches are fully autonomous since they require an external supply of nutrients for the healing agents to continuously produce repair materials." Approaches using bacteria, for instance, can require humans to spray nutrients by hand to encourage the organisms to get to work to repair the damaged concrete. In a paper first authored by Nisha Rokaya of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Jin and colleagues take this approach a step further. Lichens are not single organisms, but examples of obligate mutualism, a symbiotic partnership between fungus and cyanobacteria or algae. The researchers designed a bespoke lichen using cyanobacteria that fix carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the atmosphere, and a filamentous fungus that attracts ionized calcium and promotes the precipitation of large amounts of calcium carbonate – the material that makes eggshell, sea shells, coral, and chalk. In laboratory tests, these lichens were able to heal cracks in concrete by depositing large amounts of calcium carbonate, gluing the crack back together and preventing it from spreading further. It's actually not dissimilar to the ancient Roman self-healing concrete that uses chemical reactions to produce the calcium carbonate to repair concrete. Unlike the bacteria approaches, the lichen doesn't need to be fed: it just hangs out, doing its thing, and doesn't need to be tended by humans. It needs to be investigated further – the researchers next plan to see how the lichen deals with pre-existing cracks – but it could present a way to improve the lifespan of a material that has become vital to humanity's way of life. "The results demonstrated the potential of creating a stable phototrophic-heterotrophic system for self-sustained concrete repair," the researchers write, "utilizing the capabilities of two species simultaneously and eliminating the need for exogenous nutrient supplies." The findings have been published in Materials Today Communications. World's First CRISPR-Edited Spiders Shoot Fluoro Red Silk From Their Butts Who Gets Your 'Digital Remains' When You Die? Here's Some Expert Advice. Rubik's Cube Record Smashed in Less Time Than It Takes to Blink
Miami Herald
22-05-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
Money might not grow on trees, but home value does. Find out how much
Every parent who has uttered the immortal words, 'Money doesn't grow on trees,' was dead wrong. According to academic research, money does grow on trees — to the tune of billions of dollars. A study by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Bureau of Business Research found that, nationwide, trees collectively add more than $31.5 billion of value to private homes each year. The research, which was sponsored by the nonprofit Arbor Day Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, also says neighborhood trees provide more than $73 billion worth of environmental benefits yearly. To top it off, the business of growing, selling, planting and maintaining our trees employs more than a half-million people and has an economic benefit of $35 billion. The study doesn't say what trees are worth to individual homeowners, but other studies say 'plenty.' That's why homebuilders charge a premium for wooded lots, and why some buyers will gladly pay extra for mature trees. Whether their place came with large trees or not, one of the first things new homeowners do upon moving in— - after putting up curtains and laying down doormats — is upgrade their landscaping. They might spruce up their flower beds, drop in some bushes and add a tree or two. If you do it right, landscaping can pay off handsomely: The Council of Tree and Landscape Appraisers says the value of mature trees runs between $1,000 and $10,000. A study from the Forest Service found that in Portland, Oregon, trees planted near houses increased their sales price by an average of $8,870. There's an entire science behind establishing the value of individual trees. But you may not need to call in a professional to establish what yours are worth. Casey Trees, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that is 'committed to restoring, enhancing and protecting the tree canopy of the nation's capital,' has developed a tool that can help. Its tree benefit calculator ( can give you an idea of how much value a particular species, at various circumferences, will add to your property. Of course, trees' value isn't only monetary: They also clean the air, provide homes for local wildlife and give us cool shade, beautiful springtime flowers and vibrant fall color. But even these can be translated into dollars, to some extent. In its 1992 book 'Growing Greener Cities,' the American Forestry Association said that each year, a single deciduous tree can provide $73 worth of air conditioning, $75 worth of erosion control, $75 worth of wildlife shelter and $50 worth in air pollution reduction. Casey's tree calculator measures the value of some of these factors as well. Generally, there are four main elements that can be measured in dollars: ▪ Size: Obviously, the larger the tree, the more it's worth. And after many years of growth, trees become literally irreplaceable. ▪ Species: The most valuable trees are hardy, durable, highly adaptable and won't drop debris like nuts or pods everywhere. They will have sturdy, well-shaped branches and pleasing foliage, and require little maintenance. ▪ Condition: Of course, a healthy, well-maintained plant has a higher value. ▪ Location: A tree in the yard is usually worth more than one growing in the woods. Ditto for one standing alone versus growing in a group. A tree near your house, or one serving as a focal point in your landscape, also tends to have more value. If you have a hankering to do some landscaping, the American Society of Landscape Architects suggests investing about 5% to 10% of your home's value. Admittedly, that can be expensive, but it's less costly if you put in multiple trees at once, rather than adding them one at a time. Even so, you don't have to do everything all at once, and you can save big bucks by doing some of the work yourself. Start with smaller trees, say from 5 feet to 15 feet tall, then let them grow in size and value. Anything larger than that will require professional installation. With a realistic budget in hand, start in the front yard with the largest shade tree you can afford. It will quickly give your place an established look that would otherwise take years to create, and will have greater visual impact than several smaller trees. Lew Sichelman has been covering real estate for more than 50 years. He is a regular contributor to numerous shelter magazines and housing and housing-finance industry publications. Readers can contact him at lsichelman@
Miami Herald
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Trump's cuts to teacher training leave rural school districts, aspiring educators in the lurch
Jaci Grado has wanted to be an educator since she was in kindergarten. Her love of teaching solidified in high school when she worked at an after-school program in her hometown of Schuyler, Nebraska. The biggest employer in Schuyler is the Cargill beef processing plant, which relies on immigrant labor. More than 70 percent of the town's 6,500 residents are Hispanic, including Grado, whose parents immigrated from Mexico. The second-biggest employer is the school system, which struggles to find and keep qualified teachers, much like rural communities nationwide. Grado is now wrapping up her sophomore year in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's teacher-training program. The first person in her family to go to college, she has been able to attend thanks to a scholarship program co-directed by UNL and Kansas State University to support aspiring teachers from rural places like Schuyler who could fill vacancies in their hometown schools. "I never would have thought it was possible for me to come to a university like this one," said Grado. "This was kind of like a dream that came true." Now that dream is in jeopardy because the scholarship program supporting Grado - like dozens of other efforts to train and retain rural educators - relies on federal grants eliminated by the Trump administration. In February, the Department of Education abruptly canceled $600 million in grants it said promoted "divisive ideologies" such as diversity, equity and inclusion. Two lawsuits filed in federal court against the cuts - one by the attorneys general of eight Democrat-led states and another by membership organizations of teacher colleges and teacher-residency programs - argued the department did not have the authority to abruptly withhold funds appropriated by Congress and that the cuts would cause "immediate and irreparable harm" to schools and students. In both cases, district courts temporarily restored funding, but in April, those judgments were overruled - one by the U.S. Supreme Court and the other by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit - allowing the cancellations to stay in place until further judicial review. The Education Department, which did not respond to interview requests, has never provided a complete list of the terminated grants, but they included money for more than 200 projects under three programs designed to recruit and train teachers through scholarships, teacher-residency programs, mentoring, professional development and salary bonuses tied to gains in student learning. The funding cuts have forced many of those initiatives to lay off staff, withdraw scholarships and shut down altogether. In some cases, delays in official termination notices combined with emergency funding from universities and foundations have kept programs operating for now, but their long-term prospects are precarious at best, given the Trump administration's efforts to not only cancel the grant programs but the entire Education Department. Grado's program has backfilled some money to cover expenses, but not the scholarship portion, which only has guaranteed funding for the remainder of the semester. Some educators, experts and advocates say the grant cancellations threaten to exacerbate teacher shortages in many rural communities, forcing schools to rely more on underqualified teachers and worsening outcomes for students. Research on earlier teacher-training projects supported by the same federal grant programs suggest they have helped districts stem teacher vacancies and keep educators in classrooms. "These types of teacher support programs are critical to rural schools trying to compete for the best teachers for their students,' said Robert Stafford, executive director of the Kentucky Rural Education Association, a nonprofit that supports rural educators. "When you've made those plans and developed partnerships and understandings with universities and others, and then you have that support pulled out from underneath you, it can be devastating for a small school district." Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. Research consistently shows that high-quality teachers are the most important factor in student achievement - yet there's a chronic shortage of them in low-income schools. The three grant programs targeted in February - the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP), the Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) and the Teacher and School Leader Incentive (TSL) programs - were all established during the Obama administration to bolster the teaching ranks in these high-need districts. The most severe teacher shortages are in rural areas, largely because of high turnover, according to a 2023 study co-authored by Richard Ingersoll, professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. High-poverty rural schools needed to replace 28 percent of their teachers every year, compared with 19 percent in high-poverty urban schools, the study found. Teachers were also twice as likely to move from rural to urban or suburban schools as they were to move in the opposite direction. "It's not a happy story," Ingersoll said. Recent efforts to alleviate teacher shortages have focused on recruiting more local teacher talent. For example, the program supporting Grado, which began in 2023 and was funded by a three-year, $3.4 million federal grant, partners with six rural districts in the region. Dubbed Project RAÍCES (which means roots in Spanish), the program sponsors high school clubs that engage students in local community issues and has awarded 16 full college scholarships to students who plan to pursue teaching with the expectation that they'll return to lead classrooms in their communities. Importantly, Project RAÍCES continues to support new teachers in their first years in the classroom, when quit rates tend to be high, by offering free professional development and paying stipends to experienced educators who serve as mentors, among other ways. Bret Schroder, superintendent of Schuyler Community Schools, said in recent years his district and others have turned to recruiting teachers from overseas; last year, he hired roughly a dozen teachers from the Philippines. "Nothing against these teachers," he said. "But would I rather have a plethora of available teachers who grew up here, know the kids and their families and are already embedded in the community? Absolutely." Many of the imperiled programs support teacher residencies, modeled on medical residencies, that combine coursework with teaching jobs and pair scholarships with a commitment to teach in a district partnering with the program. While many of the specific programs were too new to demonstrate results, studies of other teacher residencies and of programs providing ongoing support for budding educators show the models can help. For example, one report on teacher-residency programs nationwide cited research suggesting that 50 percent of teachers in high-needs schools leave the profession within five years, while 70 to 80 percent of participants in residency programs are not only still in the profession, but in the same district, after five years. At East Carolina University (ECU), a residency program called edPirate supports 10 new teachers a year who commit to spending three years in one of six rural districts. The initiative (named after the East Carolina mascot) began in 2022 with a five-year, $4.8 million federal grant. When their funding was terminated in February, the program's leaders scrambled to find emergency support from university sources to cover their stipends for the remainder of the semester, but they had to let go of project staff, cancel contracts for things like program evaluation and certification support, and stop all recruiting efforts for next year's crop of teachers. One of the rural districts partnering with ECU is Elizabeth City-Pasquotank, in North Carolina, where about 450 teachers serve a coastal town of about 19,000 people. Elizabeth City Superintendent Keith Parker said federal funding has been essential to districts like his with smaller populations and lower tax revenues. He credited the support for helping him attract applicants and reduce vacancies from more than 40 in the summer of 2022 to only four today. (Parker noted that vacancies peak in the summer and said he anticipated them to tick up before the next academic year.) "These grants have allowed us to be competitive," he said. "We've been able to say to a young college graduate, 'Come here and teach, commit to us, because there are opportunities for you to grow here.'" In addition, Parker said the terminated grants paid the salaries of at least four teachers, and the district needed to find a couple hundred thousand dollars immediately to pay them for the remainder of this academic year, requiring the cancellation or postponement of several dozen school maintenance projects, such as repairing leaky roofs. Parker's district also partnered with another teacher-pipeline project funded by a recently terminated grant - an initiative to give rural teachers bonuses based on improved student achievement. That project was led by The Innovation Project (TIP), a collaboration of public school systems across North Carolina. Teachers in Elizabeth City and seven other rural districts were expecting to receive performance-based bonuses of up to $7,500 at the end of this school year, but there's no money now to pay them - a "devastating" loss, according to Parker. TIP had to lay off support staff and four experienced teacher coaches they had hired from across the state to help mentor new teachers in rural partner districts. "It was absolutely heartbreaking, to tell people, 'As of 5 p.m. today, you no longer have a job, and we can't pay you any sort of severance or anything,'" said Sharon Contreras, TIP's chief executive officer. "That's no way to treat this nation's educators." Related: To fight teacher shortages, schools turn to custodians, bus drivers and aides The cuts caught educators by surprise. In mid-February, a wave of form letters from the Department of Education, identical except for the recipients' names and grant numbers, hit the grantees' inboxes. The letters, signed by Mark Washington, the department's deputy assistant secretary for management and planning, informed recipients that their grants were being terminated because they funded "programs that promote or take part in DEI initiatives or other initiatives that unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or another protected characteristic." The letters demanded an immediate stop to all spending and gave recipients 30 days to appeal. "There was a lot of confusion, and a lot of chaos about what does this actually mean," said Ben Seipel, a professor of education and graduate program director at California State University-Chico who leads the GREAT Teachers Pipeline, which received a three-year, $13.4 million grant in 2022 to recruit, train and support hundreds of teachers from a largely rural area of Northern California about the size of Ohio. They were in the final year of their grant when it was terminated. While the university was able to secure enough alternative funding to cover the program's spring semester obligations, recruiting for next fall's teachers went forward without assurances that money would be available to support them. Seipel and his team also scaled back plans for summer professional development workshops for teachers in their partner districts, and they shelved plans to track the longer-term impact of the teachers they trained for rural schools after the Education Department canceled the call for new grant applications. The primary goal of the three federal grant programs at the center of the legal battles is to train and support skilled teachers for districts that need them most, according to the funding priorities published by the Education Department. But all three also focus on increasing teacher diversity as a secondary goal. The grantees interviewed for this story said their projects did not rely on quotas or preferences based on race or other demographic categories, as the termination letter alleged. Instead, they said their efforts increased educator diversity by lowering the barriers to pursuing a teaching career and by recruiting local teacher talent from communities with diverse populations. The legal cases center not on questions of diversity, though, but on whether the Education Department has the authority to terminate the grant programs established by Congress. Related: Waiting for the traveling teacher: Remote rural schools need more hands-on help The decisions of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals to let the cancellations stand for now is not promising for the of what the courts ultimately decide, it appears likely that the Education Department will end most of its support for teacher-training programs going forward. President Donald Trump's executive order to dismantle the department, signed March 20, calls for returning power over education to the states. Already the education agency has lost thousands of staff members through layoffs and resignations, and it is investigating moving some responsibilities, including special education programs, to other agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services. "We currently have our applications open for the fall," said Seipel of Chico State, "but we know that some students are hesitant, because they just can't trust that the money will be there." As for Grado, she's determined to find a way to finish college, even though she's not sure how she might pay for it - maybe loans, maybe taking a job at one of the packing plants to save money for tuition. In addition to her classwork, her training includes teaching periodic lessons at a nearby elementary school. "I love being there, and I constantly think of my kids back home, and how much I would love to return and teach," she said. "I mean, that's what I came here for." Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or on Signal at CarolineP.83 or at preston@ This story about teacher-residency programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. The post Trump's cuts to teacher training leave rural school districts, aspiring educators in the lurch appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's cuts to teacher training leave some rural school districts, aspiring educators in the lurch
Research shows that high-quality teachers are the most important factor in student achievement — yet there's a chronic shortage of them in low-income schools. (Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report) Jaci Grado has wanted to be an educator since she was in kindergarten. Her love of teaching solidified in high school when she worked at an after-school program in her hometown of Schuyler, Nebraska. The biggest employer in Schuyler is the Cargill beef processing plant, which relies on immigrant labor. More than 70 percent of the town's 6,500 residents are Latino, including Grado, whose parents immigrated from Mexico. The second-biggest employer is the school system, which struggles to hire and keep teachers, much like rural communities nationwide. Grado is wrapping up her sophomore year in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's teacher-training program. The first person in her family to go to college, she has been able to attend thanks to a scholarship program co-directed by UNL and Kansas State University to support aspiring teachers from rural places like Schuyler who could fill vacancies in their hometown schools. It's a program the Nebraska Examiner highlighted in February. 'I never would have thought it was possible for me to come to a university like this one,' said Grado. 'This was kind of like a dream that came true.' That dream is in jeopardy because the scholarship program supporting Grado — like dozens of other efforts to train and retain rural educators — relies on federal grants eliminated by the Trump administration. In February, the Department of Education abruptly canceled $600 million in grants it said promoted 'divisive ideologies' such as diversity, equity and inclusion. Two lawsuits filed in federal court against the cuts — one by the attorneys general of eight Democrat-led states and another by membership organizations of teacher colleges and teacher-residency programs — argued the department lacked the authority to abruptly withhold funds appropriated by Congress and that the cuts would cause 'immediate and irreparable harm' to schools and students. In both cases, district courts temporarily restored funding, but in April, those judgments were overruled — one by the U.S. Supreme Court and the other by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit — allowing the cancellations to stay in place until further judicial review. The Education Department, which did not respond to interview requests, has never provided a complete list of the terminated grants, but they included money for more than 200 projects under three programs designed to recruit and train teachers through scholarships, teacher-residency programs, mentoring, professional development and salary bonuses tied to gains in student learning. The funding cuts have forced many of those initiatives to lay off staff, withdraw scholarships and shut down altogether. In some cases, delays in official termination notices combined with emergency funding from universities and foundations have kept programs operating, but long-term prospects are precarious at best, given the Trump administration's efforts to not only cancel the grant programs but eyeing the entire Education Department. Grado's program has backfilled some money to cover expenses, but not the scholarship portion, which only has guaranteed funding for the remainder of the semester. Some educators, experts and advocates say the grant cancellations threaten to exacerbate teacher shortages in many rural communities, forcing schools to rely more on underqualified teachers and worsening outcomes for students. Research on earlier teacher-training projects supported by the same federal grant programs suggest they have helped districts stem teacher vacancies and keep educators in classrooms. 'These types of teacher support programs are critical to rural schools trying to compete for the best teachers for their students,' said Robert Stafford, executive director of the Kentucky Rural Education Association, a nonprofit that supports rural educators. 'When you've made those plans and developed partnerships and understandings with universities and others, and then you have that support pulled out from underneath you, it can be devastating for a small school district.' Research consistently shows that high-quality teachers are the most important factor in student achievement — yet there's a chronic shortage of them in low-income schools. The three grant programs targeted in February — the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP), the Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) and the Teacher and School Leader Incentive (TSL) programs — were established during the Obama administration to bolster the teaching ranks in high-need districts. The most severe teacher shortages are in rural areas, largely because of high turnover, according to a 2023 study co-authored by Richard Ingersoll, professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. High-poverty rural schools needed to replace 28 percent of teachers every year, compared with 19 percent in high-poverty urban schools, the study found. Teachers also were twice as likely to move from rural to urban or suburban schools as they were to move in the opposite direction. 'It's not a happy story,' Ingersoll said. Recent efforts to alleviate teacher shortages have focused on recruiting more local teacher talent. For example, the program supporting Grado, which began in 2023 and was funded by a three-year, $3.4 million federal grant, partners with six rural districts in the region. Dubbed Project RAÍCES, which means roots in Spanish, the program sponsors high school clubs that engage students in community issues and has awarded 16 full college scholarships to students planning to pursue teaching with the expectation that they'll return to lead classrooms in their communities. Importantly, Project RAÍCES continues to support new teachers in their first years in the classroom, when quit rates tend to be high, by offering free professional development and paying stipends to experienced educators who serve as mentors, among other ways. Trump push against 'DEI hires' and diversity efforts hits home in Nebraska Bret Schroder, superintendent of Schuyler Community Schools, said in recent years his district and others have turned to recruiting teachers from overseas; last year, he hired roughly a dozen teachers from the Philippines. 'Nothing against these teachers,' he said. 'But would I rather have a plethora of available teachers who grew up here, know the kids and their families and are already embedded in the community? Absolutely.' Many of the imperiled programs support teacher residencies, modeled on medical residencies, that combine coursework with teaching jobs and pair scholarships with a commitment to teach in a district partnering with the program. While many of the specific programs were too new to demonstrate results, studies of other teacher residencies and of programs providing ongoing support for budding educators show the models can help. For example, one report on teacher-residency programs nationwide cited research suggesting that 50 percent of teachers in high-needs schools leave the profession within five years, while 70 to 80 percent of participants in residency programs are not only still in the profession, but in the same district, after five years. At East Carolina University, a residency program called edPirate supports 10 new teachers a year who commit to spending three years in one of six rural districts. The initiative (named after the East Carolina mascot) began in 2022 with a five-year, $4.8 million federal grant. When the funding was terminated in February, program leaders scrambled to find emergency support from university sources to cover stipends for the remainder of the semester, but they had to let go of project staff, cancel contracts for things like program evaluation and certification support and stop all recruiting efforts for next year's crop of teachers. One of the rural districts partnering with East Carolina is Elizabeth City-Pasquotank, in North Carolina, where about 450 teachers serve a coastal town of about 19,000 people. Elizabeth City Superintendent Keith Parker said federal funding has been essential to districts like his with smaller populations and lower tax revenues. He credited the support for helping him attract applicants and reduce vacancies from more than 40 in the summer of 2022 to only four today. Parker noted that vacancies peak in the summer and said he anticipated them to tick up before the next academic year. 'These grants have allowed us to be competitive,' he said. 'We've been able to say to a young college graduate, 'Come here and teach, commit to us, because there are opportunities for you to grow here.'' In addition, Parker said the terminated grants paid the salaries of at least four teachers, and the district needed to find a couple hundred thousand dollars immediately to pay them for the remainder of this academic year, requiring the cancellation or postponement of several dozen school maintenance projects, such as repairing leaky roofs. Parker's district also partnered with another teacher-pipeline project funded by a recently terminated grant — an initiative to give rural teachers bonuses based on improved student achievement. That project was led by The Innovation Project (TIP), a collaboration of public school systems across North Carolina. Teachers in Elizabeth City and seven other rural districts were expecting to receive performance-based bonuses of up to $7,500 at the end of this school year, but there's no money now to pay them — a 'devastating' loss, according to Parker. TIP had to lay off support staff and four experienced teacher coaches they had hired from across the state to help mentor new teachers in rural partner districts. 'It was absolutely heartbreaking, to tell people, 'As of 5 p.m. today, you no longer have a job, and we can't pay you any sort of severance or anything,'' said Sharon Contreras, TIP's chief executive officer. 'That's no way to treat this nation's educators.' The cuts caught educators by surprise. In mid-February, a wave of form letters from the Department of Education, identical except for the recipients' names and grant numbers, hit the grantees' inboxes. The letters, signed by Mark Washington, the department's deputy assistant secretary for management and planning, informed recipients that their grants were being terminated because they funded 'programs that promote or take part in DEI initiatives or other initiatives that unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or another protected characteristic.' The letters demanded an immediate stop to all spending and gave recipients 30 days to appeal. 'There was a lot of confusion, and a lot of chaos about what does this actually mean,' said Ben Seipel, a professor of education and graduate program director at California State University-Chico who leads the GREAT Teachers Pipeline, which received a three-year, $13.4 million grant in 2022 to recruit, train and support hundreds of teachers from a largely rural area of Northern California about the size of Ohio. The program was in the final year of the grant when it was terminated. While the university was able to secure enough alternative funding to cover the program's spring semester obligations, recruiting for next fall's teachers went forward without assurances that money would be available. Seipel and his team also scaled back plans for summer professional development workshops for teachers in their partner districts and shelved plans to track the longer-term impact of the teachers they trained for rural schools after the Education Department canceled the call for new grant applications. The primary goal of the three federal grant programs at the center of the legal battles is to train and support skilled teachers for districts that need them most, according to the funding priorities published by the Education Department. All three also focus on increasing teacher diversity as a secondary goal. The grantees interviewed for this story said their projects did not rely on quotas or preferences based on race or other demographic categories, as the termination letter alleged. Instead, they said their efforts increased educator diversity by lowering the barriers to pursuing a teaching career and by recruiting local teacher talent from communities with diverse populations. The legal cases center not on questions of diversity, though, but on whether the Education Department has the authority to terminate grant programs established by Congress. The decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals to let the cancellations stand for now is not promising for the plaintiffs. Regardless of what the courts ultimately decide, it appears likely that the Education Department will end most of its support for teacher-training programs going forward. President Donald Trump's executive order to dismantle the department, signed March 20, calls for returning power over education to the states. Already the education agency has lost thousands of staff members through layoffs and resignations, and it is investigating moving some responsibilities, including special education programs, to other agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services. 'We currently have our applications open for the fall,' said Seipel of Chico State, 'but we know that some students are hesitant, because they just can't trust that the money will be there.' As for Grado, she's determined to find a way to finish college, even though she's not sure how she might pay for it — maybe loans, maybe taking a job at one of the packing plants to save money for tuition. In addition to her classwork, her training includes teaching periodic lessons at a nearby elementary school. 'I love being there, and I constantly think of my kids back home, and how much I would love to return and teach,' she said. 'I mean, that's what I came here for.' This story about teacher-residency programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or on Signal at CarolineP.83 or at preston@ SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Hans India
13-05-2025
- Health
- Hans India
New vaccine to protect against swine, human and bird flu, ward off annual shots
US researchers have developed a novel vaccine that protects against H1N1 swine flu and can also protect against influenza in humans and birds. The vaccine strategy developed and tested by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US can also eliminate the need for annual flu shots. "This research sets the stage for developing universal influenza vaccines, so people won't have to go to the doctor and get a flu shot every year," said virologist Eric Weaver at the varsity. "This vaccine will protect you against the different strains that are out there," Weaver said. In the study, published in Nature Communications, swine vaccinated with the immunogens exhibited no signs of illness after being exposed to a commonly circulating flu strain. They also developed antibodies against a multitude of viruses from several decades and multiple species; and maintained their immune response throughout the six-month longitudinal study. Post-experiment regression analysis indicated that the immunity would not dissipate for a decade, Weaver said. The Epigraph vaccine, named after the computer software, used to design it, significantly outperformed a commercial vaccine used by the pork industry and a "wild type" vaccine based on naturally occurring strains with similar immunogens. The study confirms previous research that demonstrated the vaccine design protected against the H3 influenza subtype. The new results are particularly encouraging because H1 swine flu variants are detected twice as often as H3 variants -- and have nearly three times more genetic diversity, Weaver said. "This H1 subtype is the largest and most genetically diverse subtype in pigs," Weaver said. "It's also among the viruses that jumped from swine to humans to cause the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It's a big target and one of the harder targets to hit." The influenza A virus regularly infects as much as 15 per cent of the human population and causes thousands of deaths each year. Current vaccines often fail to provide long-lasting protection because of the genetic diversity and rapid mutation of proteins that help form the virus. Another challenge in controlling influenza is that it infects multiple species: birds, swine, horses, and dogs, along with humans. Swine often act as a mixing vessel because they are susceptible to human and bird flu variants, contributing to the evolution of novel forms of the disease that can be transmitted back to humans. "If we can prevent influenza in swine, we can also prevent zoonotic jumps from avians to swine to humans, or from swine directly to humans. We could basically cut off this evolutionary arsenal or advantage that the virus has," Weaver explained. "The ultimate goal is to eliminate or eradicate influenza."
