The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation (CACF) is giving $283,000 in grants to ten local non-profits. Two of the grants support access to post-secondary education and are to agencies who have not received grants before: Virginia College Advising Corps: $50,000 will support the placement of college advisers in CACF area high schools to help low-income, under-represented, and first generation students matriculate to post-secondary education.
A White House summit on college opportunity in January featured more than one Cinderella story. A young man named Troy Simon told the invited group of educators and advocates how he lived for a year in an abandoned building in New Orleans and did not learn to read until he was 14, but made his way to Bard College, where he was a sophomore studying American literature. He introduced Michelle Obama, whose journey from her modest Chicago neighborhood to Princeton University serves as the emotional core of the administration’s campaign to broaden college access. … None of the re...
Glucagon, which is produced by a healthy pancreas, isn’t routinely given to diabetics, said Sue Brown, an adult endocrinologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, who works with artificial pancreas technology and wasn’t involved in the trial.
Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, said that in California and elsewhere more is known about who is a good teacher in this age of annual testing of students and more robust teacher evaluations. He said he believes that's spurred the California lawsuit and other movement on the issue. He predicts more states will move toward longer probationary periods to grant tenure and more renewable contracts.
An award-winning poet who writes about God and nature is now America's poet laureate. The Library of Congress announced its choice of Charles Wright on Thursday.
When the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James Billington, announced last week that retired University of Virginia professor Charles Wright would succeed Natasha Trethewey as the U.S. Poet Laureate, he called attention to Wright’s “combination of literary elegance and genuine humility.” But the quiet, spiritually minded, explicitly apolitical Wright is also a sharp choice to serve as “the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans,” perhaps as exemplified by his declaration of purpose as laureate: “I’ll probably stay here at h...
On a snowy morning in 2010, Jolene Morton headed to work early, thinking she would be safer with fewer cars on the roads. Shortly after arriving, she started slurring her words while talking on the phone and then she dropped the receiver. In a flash, everything went blank. “All I saw in my head was a dark room with dust bunnies,” Morton says. She struggled to speak as her supervisor helped her lie down on the floor. Morton, at 33, had suffered a stroke, long considered a rarity in someone so young. … Nina Solenski, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Vir...
The Senate halted a bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that would have allowed students with old government loans to refinance them. Instead of continuing to pay interest at, say, the 6.8 percent rate that prevailed for many years, they could take the 3.86 percent rate the government is offering current borrowers. Ms. Warren’s plan had some appeal, and Democrats will no doubt harp on its rejection in the coming campaign. It seems only fair to let more debtors in on the deal that the government is offering current students. But those paying higher rates already got a good deal, tak...
When President Obama signed an executive order this past week to allow millions of student-loan borrowers to cap payments at 10 percent of their monthly income, he addressed the largest pile of debt burdening Americans: Collectively, we hold more than $1 trillion in student loan debt, more than all the credit card debt in the United States. “It has become clearer and clearer how important higher education is to our economic future,” White House domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz said Tuesday. “It has also never been more expensive.” But in Maryland, public university...
Starbucks will provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and the university will announce on Monday. The program is open to any of the company’s 135,000 United States employees, provided they work at least 20 hours a week and have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State. For a barista with at least two years of college credit, the company will pay full tuition; for those with fewer credits it will pay part of the c...
Starbucks and Arizona State University unveiled more details about their new scholarship partnership on Monday—and in doing so corrected some misinformation that company officials had given in advance of the announcement. They also revealed the limits of the financial contribution Starbucks is making and gave a greater sense of the value of the discount ASU Online is providing. First the misinformation: Last week a Starbucks spokeswoman said that the Starbucks College Achievement Plan would be available only to company employees who enrolled full time and said that was because such stude...
Starbucks has long been a trailblazer in offering company benefits; part-time employees get stock options and health insurance. Schultz has also been one of the few chief executives willing to speak out — and do something — about the need to get people back to work again. A few years ago, I wrote a column about a Starbucks program that turned donations from customers into small business loans.What I hadn’t realized is the extent to which Arizona State is a trailblazer as well. Under Crow’s leadership, it is attempting nothing less than the reinvention of the university....
Affirmative action as we know it is probably doomed. When you ask top Obama administration officials and people in the federal court system about the issue, you often hear a version of that prediction. Five of the Supreme Court’s nine justices have never voted in favor of a race-based affirmative action program. Already, the court has ruled that such programs have the burden of first showing “that available, workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice.” The issue appears to be following a familiar path in Chief Justice John Roberts’s court. On divisive social issu...
AUSTIN, Texas—Since Wallace Hall Jr. was appointed to serve on the board of the University of Texas in 2011, he has sought thousands of pages of records to try to root out potential wrongdoing at the university. Now, the Dallas businessman faces possible impeachment from state lawmakers after a legislative probe concluded Mr. Hall went too far, improperly using confidential student records and filing unduly burdensome document requests.
On a team that racked up 49 wins and featured eight Major League Baseball draft picks, the two student managers tasked with running the newest gadget bestowed on Virginia baseball can be easy to overlook during a typical home game. Drew Bonner sits in the concourse behind home plate in his wheelchair, diligently typing code into an iPad after every pitch. Tyler Slate can usually be found hunkered down with two 60-inch television screens in a dark room beneath the bleachers at Davenport Field, Virginia’s home stadium, splicing together film into the wee hours of the night.
OMAHA — It already had been a memorable Sunday for Joe Papi — a Father’s Day spent watching his son play in front of a packed stadium at the College World Series. He wasn’t sure it could get any better. But with one ninth-inning swing of the bat, it did. From his seat near the concourse behind the third base dugout at TD Ameritrade Park, Joe Papi had a bird’s-eye view of the natural, left-handed stroke he first witnessed in his driveway when Virginia first baseman Mike Papi was 3. His son’s walk-off double gave the Cavaliers a dramatic, 2-1 win over Mi...
A documentary produced by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, “The Kennedy Half Century,” has won an Emmy Award for Best Historical Documentary from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the center announced Monday. Directed by Paul Tait Roberts, the documentary chronicles the influence of former President John F. Kennedy’s life and features interviews with national political and media figures.
The Mother of Presidents is hosting some of Africa’s next generations of leaders. The 25 men and women gathered at the University of Virginia on Monday are a part of the Young African Leaders Initiative, a larger national group of 500 Africans who are in a six-week leadership, academic and mentoring program. It is President Barack Obama’s “signature effort to invest in the next generation of African leaders,” according to the program’s main website, which also notes that nearly 60 percent of Africa’s total population is below age 35.
U.S. Senator Tim Kaine is traveling back to Washington from Charlottesville after leading the University of Virginia's first Conference on National Defense and Intelligence. It was a timely talk considering the violence in Iraq. The senator spoke to nearly 200 military contractors and experts in defense and intelligence during Monday's conference at the UVA Darden School of Business, which focused on advancements in national security technology happening here in Virginia.