There is a major debate on the significance of getting a technical college degree and whether it enables one to get a job. More importantly, people are interested in knowing about the academic significance of these degrees. Technical colleges, which are more popularly known as community colleges, offer two-year associate degrees as compared to four-year degree at standard colleges.

Aside from the difference in duration of education, technical colleges are also distinguishable as they offer specialized degrees, diplomas and certificates. A student can enroll at a technical college after completing high school. Spending two years will earn one degree in aviation, mechanics, electrical engineering, manufacturing, and dozens of other fields.

In these two years of education, the first six months are for the basic training in science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, mechanics and other fields. After the first semester, one has the choice to select a particular field of education. The method of instruction at a technical college differs from a traditional one as it pays more attention to experiment than course work.

A student enrolled at a technical college will be spending more time in the laboratory, workshops, warehouses and other establishments to gain experience needed for the degree or certificate.Academic course work is also included in the associate degree but generally with a ratio of 40% to 60%.

Some courses involve an equal ratio of academic and laboratory/workshop depending on the requirements of certification or diploma. Admissions in technical colleges follow the same route as traditional four-year institutions. A student is eligible for admission after completing a high school diploma. SAT or ACT scores along with accredited GED scores are required for admission.

Our Minneapolis technical school also offers an opportunity for home-schooled students to take admission as long as their studies have followed an accredited arrangement with their local school district. If a student is applying for a single course rather than a certificate or diploma then he or she will not need these accreditations.

According to data extracted from National Center for Education Statistics, there are 1,045 community colleges in the United States with many states having dozens of them. This makes it easier for students to seek admission at an institution that is closer to their home.

Some community colleges do not offer residential facilities so it is highly important that a student makes accommodation arrangements on one’s own. Tuition fees and other charges are taken at the start of the academic year. These charges can be as much as ten times lower than that of their traditional counterpart. Affordability and shorter duration has made these colleges ideal for those students who do not want to commit to a four year degree or do not have the financial means to support their education.

Employment rates for technical college graduates are at par with traditional colleges and higher in some cases. Specialized courses in aviation, mechanics, dentistry, medicine, and chemical engineering enable students to find employment rather quickly given the high demand in these sectors. On an aggregate scale, the specialized education in technical colleges can be good for those who want to join workforce in the shortest possible time.

Photo courtesy of tonrulkens on flickr

With the release of and subsequent media frenzy surrounding Pope Benedict XVI’s published comments on condom use has come a renewed debate about religion, sexuality and public health. And it’s not just about “male prostitutes.” While the Pope’s original declaration referred to the fact that condom use may be a moral act for male prostitutes wishing to prevent against sexually transmitted infections, the Vatican later clarified that — oh, wait a minute — women, men and transsexuals also may use condoms to protect themselves against transmission of disease, thank you very much.

Many progressive Catholics and organizations say these statements have opened the door to the potential to have a more realistic conversation about the role condoms play in protecting the health and lives of women, men and young people globally.

But, of course, the conversation has been happening for years between public health experts, advocates and those who use condoms. We already know that condoms are the only sure-fire contraceptive method for women who want to prevent both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. However, Catholics for Choice say that many Catholic health providers working for Catholic aid agencies in developing nations are secretly handing out condoms while fearing for their jobs since condom use is still unacceptable as a tenet of the Church. Catholic groups like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States have stood in the way of ensuring access to condoms, as well as to the funding of other HIV/AIDS prevention strategies that work — like comprehensive sex education in developing nations — for too long.

The best way we can “use” the Pope’s comments on condoms, in this country, is to put pressure on Catholic health agencies working on the ground in these poor nations to formally integrate condoms into their prevention strategies.

The Catholic Church is one of the largest providers of AIDS relief services in developing nations. Agencies like the U.S. based Catholic Relief Services (CRS), that provide crucial health services but will not promote condom use or distribute condoms, are funded mostly by the U.S. government. Andrew Green on Change.org writes that CRS spent upwards of $170 million on HIV/AIDS related programming in 2009. As Jodi Jacobson writes on RH Reality Check, HIV positive women in primarily Catholic countries who can only access health care from these Catholic agencies, do not have access to the means to protect themselves from pregnancy or re-infection without condoms.

That is entirely unacceptable.

Tell Catholic Relief Services (CRS) that if it’s good enough for the Pope, it’s good enough for the women, men, and young people around the world who have the right to access the public health proven strategies, like condom use, to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS. Pope Benedict’s opinion that condoms may be the most moral course of action in certain circumstances shines a new light on the way Catholic aid agencies may approach HIV/AIDS prevention. Join public health advocates in saving lives and tell Catholic Relief Services to start distributing condoms — because including condoms in any prevention programs is necessary and moral.

Spread the Pope’s Condom Message To Catholic Health Workers

According to Warren Throckmorton, a Christian psychologist and blogger covering Uganda’s efforts to criminalize homosexuality, Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati is set to attend a December 6-8 conference in D.C. held by the International Consortium on Government Financial Management. The conference is set to take place at the Enrique Iglesias Conference Center at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Throckmorton spoke to Bahati in mid-November. At the time, Bahati said that his Anti-Homosexuality Bill would not face a vote in parliament until after February 2011 elections. But Bahati is still very confident that the bill will pass.

“Bahati said that due to the upcoming elections no significant legislative work is anticipated. He continues to believe that the bill will be considered and debated in Parliament after the elections,” Throckmorton reports. “Mr. Bahati said that the delay should not be taken as a sign of lack of support by the committee chair or his peers in the Ugandan Parliament.”

So there you have it. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill — which would criminalize homosexuality with the death penalty or life imprisonment, and even throw in jail straight people who work on behalf of LGBT rights, or straight people who do not disclose to the government people they know who are LGBT — won’t become law before February 2011. But it is still very much on the table, and something that Bahati continues to champion every chance he gets.

And the International Consortium on Governmental Financial Management, as well as all their sponsors for the upcoming December 6-8 conference, are comfortable with someone like Bahati attending?

Indeed, the conference is sponsored by a cadre of corporate players. There’s Grant Thornton, an international accounting and consulting firm; Casals & Associates, an international development company; FreeBalance, a global software solutions company; Mosley & Associates, a management consulting outfit; and Graduate School, a worldwide group running government-centered education programs. These corporate cats are all OK with having their name attached to a conference where a politician like Bahati, who wants to literally kill gay people and look straight allies in jail, will participate?

That’s hard to believe. Send these companies a message that their name shouldn’t be attached to anything that a politician like Bahati is participating in, and send a message to the organizers of the International Consortium on Governmental Financial Management that they should not welcome the participation of Bahati. This is a man who, if his legislation passes, would stand by and let a genocide against LGBT people take place in his country. He does not belong at the table of world political and business leaders.

Photo credit: YouTube

Ugandan Politician Behind "Kill the Gays" Bill To Attend U.S. Conference?

“This is a pretty significant development. It’s historic. The TDSB as an entity has never taken this on system-wide, so it’s having huge ripple effects,” says Michelle Cho, student equity program advisor for the TDSB. “We know that homophobia and transphobia have existed in our schools for a long time. It’s just being highlighted much more in the media now. There’s a real crisis that’s gone unnamed in our schools. This needs to be talked about.”

The Positive Space campaign will see middle school and secondary teachers trained by a positive space representative in order to become official points of contact for students suffering with issues stemming from homophobia or transphobia. According to Cho, the new initiatives are a first in Canada. There has never before been a system-wide promotion of gender-based violence prevention.

“[Students] will be able to contact this person in the school and look for support,” says Vladimir Vallecilla, a gender-based violence prevention work for the school board. “Obviously, that teacher wouldn’t have the expertise of a principal or social worker, but they will be trained to direct that information to the social worker or the administrator, and then to our office for greater school-wide support.”

But Positive Space isn’t the only campaign being rolled out by the TDSB. They are also unveiling the Peer Support Network, an idea based around education that will see students in grades eight, nine and ten will be trained as peer educators through the TDSB.

“The idea is to teach students how to make creative media and facilitate workshops for other students on gender-based violence prevention,” says Vallecilla. “An example would be taking images from current media, Disney, pop culture, then discussing and breaking down how gender has been socialized into students.”

Lastly, the school board is starting a campaign that will recognize gay-straight alliances that are making a positive impact. There are currently twenty-five GSAs in Toronto, give or take a few, and the hope is that highlighting great ones will create interest in starting new alliances.

“It’s addressing gender-based violence. That means every teacher, support staff member, guidance counselor, teaching assistant, administrative staff member, principal or vice-principal must report any incident that can be viewed as unsafe to the school community, which now includes homophobia, transphobia, sexual harassment or sexual misconduct,” says Michelle Cho. “At the end of the day, this isn’t just about policies. There are people being affected.”

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Toronto School Board Unleashes Three Groundbreaking Pro-Gay Initiatives

Twenty-two years ago, Fredd’s family fled their native Guatemala in the face of death threats and persecution. Needless to say, they haven’t been back since. Despite the clear danger they faced back in Guatemala, an immigration judge denied their bid for asylum in 2000.

Fredd worked hard and earned his Associates Degree from Davidson County Community College and transferred to Guilford Tech to continue his education. As a result, he is eligible for the federal DREAM Act, which would give undocumented youth like him a pathway to citizenship, expected to come up for a vote in the House and Senate before the end of this year. Fredd aspires to utilize his acting and singing skills to become a professional actor and renowned singer, and he’s quite good (see video below). He is neither a criminal nor a threat to this country, and completely undeserving of detention, let alone deportation from the only country he calls his home.

Like others who have faced the injustice of our immigration system and the Stewart Facility, Fredd has an approved green card awaiting him on the other side of the walls that now deprive him of his freedom. The only thing stopping him from being at home with his family during Thanksgiving is a stubborn refusal to open his case.

No family should be ripped apart due to the failure of Congress to pass immigration reform or the DREAM Act in due time. Don’t deprive a family of their son this holiday season. Take action now to bring Fredd home for Thanksgiving.

Photo and Video Credit: Support Fredd Reyes Facebook Group / stanleyreysa21

Student Locked Up for Spending 22 Years in the United States

The lawsuit presents a laundry list of abuse at the 1,400-bed Walnut Grove Correctional Facility in north Mississippi. And it goes straight after GEO for allowing assaults and denying medical care and education while racking up healthy profits at the prison. The facility was built with $41 million in taxpayer dollars, while GEO has now earned more than $100 million in profit from its management, the suit estimates. The 1,400 boys and young men held there were all sentenced as adults, but two-thirds of them were convicted of non-violent crimes.

Among the abuses listed in the lawsuit:

• A young man who was held in his cell for 24 hours and raped while prison staff failed to act.
• Boys forced into drug trafficking operations inside the facility by guards
• A young man who was beaten by GEO staff while handcuffed
• Several prisoners who have been denied critical mental health treatment, putting their lives in danger.

Less than half of the boys and young men at the facility go to school. Many are denied mental health treatment and special education they need.While the prisoner population grew in 2010, the security staff shrunk. The list goes on, and these aren’t vague, unfounded accusations. Cases are described by name in the ACLU / SPLC lawsuit. Download the full complaint here.

GEO is the same group that paid more than $112,000 in consulting fees to President Obama’s nominee to head the U.S. Marshals, Stacia Hylton. Numerous human rights and prison reform groups are opposing her nomination, alleging a conflict of interest.

As long as prisons are run for profit, the bottom line will trump safety and critical services like education and health care. Lawsuits like this one are critical to eroding the grip of private prison operators on our cycle of crime, incarceration and recidivism. We can urge legislators to stop sending our tax dollars to private prison companies, but as long as companies like GEO line legislative pockets and dance through a revolving door with government jobs, it won’t end. Calling them out in court on their unconstitutional behavior is a critical ingredient in the fight against private prison abuse.

Photo Credit: GEO Group

Via: Real Cost of Prison

Private Mississippi Prison Faces Lawsuit over Treatment of Youth

When a 16-year-girl told an assistant principal on Tuesday that she had just been dragged into a school bathroom and raped, administrators had her sit in the principal’s office for over two hours and told to write down what had occurred. They didn’t bother calling the police or a victim’s advocate, to the dismay of the Indiana Coalition Against Sexual Assault (InCASA). When administrators did call the girl’s guardian, she was taken to the hospital and staff there finally called the police. It was then about four hours since the assault had been reported.

Superintendent Eric King defended the school’s irresponsible decision in a television interview by claiming that the girl’s story wasn’t completely consistent and school administrators doubted the allegation, that “the facts in the case were somewhat vague,” and they wanted to investigate themselves. Nothing like attacking rape victims for making up their story without any evidence except that they’re female and girls lie, right? The school officials didn’t even bother notifying any one of the four school police officers. Why bother having school police if you don’t tell them anything? It’s so much better to play make-believe detective and screw up the real investigation.

School administrators had no business deciding not to report a student’s rape charge because they were “vague” on the details. Rape is a serious crime and should be reported to police immediately: the student also should have been transported straight to the hospital, rather than made to wait in the principal’s office for hours. Delaware County deputy prosecutor Eric Hoffman commented that he was “uncomfortable” with school officials deciding to usurp the role of police, which is perhaps a massive understatement. And Detective George Hooper pointed out that there was a serious cost to the unwarranted delay: other students and probably a cleaning crew had been through the bathroom since the rape occurred, so any evidence that could have been available at the crime scene was lost to police.

No matter what the circumstances, the point is this: when a student reports being raped on school grounds, police get called immediately. School pencil-pushers don’t get to make the decision as to whether the rape allegation is true or not and deny the victim a chance at justice. Even if the story seems “vague” or inconsistent, especially since a teen who has just been raped might not have her thoughts at their most coherent or collected. (Police, by the way, say the girl’s story of what occurred has been consistent whenever they’ve spoken to her, once they got the chance.)

The school’s incompetence and lack of regard for the well-being of a student could have cost this girl a chance to have her rapist caught and committed. And the administrators who made that decision have no place running a high school. Central High School Principal Christopher Smith and the assistant principal involved in the failure to report the crime to police should be immediately removed from their positions for demonstrating such an utter lack of good decision-making ability. This isn’t a frivolous error: it seriously undermined a rape investigation.

Despite his defense of the officials decision not to bother notifying police, Superintendent King is considering policy changes in the wake of outrage over the school’s failure. King must apologize to the victim for the school’s action and his own defense of questioning her charge rather than reporting it, and issue a statement of policy that crimes occurring on school grounds, especially something as serious as rape, will promptly be reported to police.

Photo credit: Svadilfari

Police Criticize School’s Failure to Report Student Rape for Undermining Investigation

In an interview with CityBeat, Webber said exotic pet ownership may be shocking, but it’s not an obscure phenomenon. “I started paying attention and that’s when I realized this was the elephant in the living room. This big, enormous thing that’s going on in our country and no one is really recognizing it.”

Until now.

It’s no coincidence that the Dayton, Ohio, filmmaker aimed the camera at his own state. Ohio has some of the weakest exotic animal laws in the country, a flaw which gained national attention this summer when a bear killed his caretaker. Despite obvious and repeated negligence on the part of the bear’s owner, Sam Mazzola, authorities’ hands were tied because you can pretty much own whatever you want in Ohio. And Mazzola isn’t the only one whose choice of pets has caused problems.

“It’s like the wild, wild west in the State of Ohio,” Tim Harrison of Outreach for Animals told WKRC Local 12 in Cincinnati. Harrison is a police officer, firefighter and paramedic from the city of Oakwood. He’s also the go-to guy when it comes to exotic animals, fielding as many as 200 calls a year, and he’s one of the stars of The Elephant in the Living Room.

On the other side of the equation, the film follows Terry Brumfield, who keeps two African lions, hand-raised since they were cubs.

Webber says following the personal stories of Harrison and Brumfield “has a completely different effect on people from an entertainment standpoint, from an education and awareness standpoint, you take it personally. When people get affected in that way, that’s when the awareness starts to explode.”

The explosion of The Elephant in the Living Room comes just in time. Although this issue plays out across the country, it’s been stampeding across Ohio politics lately, especially since Governor Ted Strickland promised an exotic pets ban as part of a package deal of animal welfare reforms negotiated with the Humane Society of the United States and Ohio’s Farm Bureau.

The proposal was applauded by several animal welfare groups, but various contingents protested, from reptile enthusiasts to schools with wild mascots. Some, like Brumfield, feel their wild animals are their children; others feel they simply have a right to own whatever animal they want.

It’s likely that an exotic pet ban in Ohio would grandfather in existing animals, with the caveat that troublemakers like Mazzola could finally be held accountable. This Midwest state has been the wild west for too long; it’s dangerous for people and unfair to the animals. Tell Ohio legislators to pass the exotic pet ban.

Harrison’s opinion is clear: “When you bring a dangerous large predator, snake, bear, crocodile, anything of that nature, you’re signing a death warrant for either you or the animal … one of you is going to die.”

The website for the documentary calls it “a movie too big to ignore.” Let’s hope so.

The Elephant in the Living Room is currently screening in Cincinnati, Ohio. If you’re not in The Buckeye State, don’t worry: the movie is due for nationwide release in early 2011.

Photo credit: eMaringolo

Documentary Brings Ohio’s Elephant in the Room Out of the Shadows

But if a school holds an anti-bullying assembly, and the students do nothing more than just laugh it off or make jokes about it, does it have any real teeth?

That’s a question that has particular relevance today, with the word that a 14-year-old Pennsylvania student committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a tractor trailer to escape bullying at his school. The day before his suicide, the school had held an anti-bullying assembly, but as The Daily Item reports in their coverage of the suicide, many students just laughed the program off and wasted the opportunity to really look at the consequences of bullying.

And now another student is dead.

That student is Brandon Bitner, from Mount Pleasant Mills in Pennsylvania. Over the weekend, Bitner walked about 13 miles away from his home, to the intersection of two busy highways, and ran in front of a tractor-trailer. He left a suicide note, and now his classmates are weighing in with commentary on why Bitner was driven to suicide.

“It was because of bullying,” friend Takara Jo Folk wrote in a letter to The Daily Item. “It was not about race, or gender, but they bullied him for his sexual preferences and the way he dressed.”

Other students sent letters to The Daily Item saying that the school district, Midd-West School District, has typically not done enough to combat bullying and homophobia inside schools.

“Nothing is done,” said former Midd-West student Erin Barnett. “Bullying should be addressed in every school, and should have a punishment.”

The Superintendent of the Midd-West District, Wesley Knapp, said that the district does take bullying seriously, and that the principal at Bitner’s school, Cynthia Hutchinson, feels very strongly about fighting bullying. That’s partly why the school had an official assembly to discuss the subject.

But again, the question comes up: if students aren’t taking anti-bullying assemblies seriously, are they any more than just a waste of time? And who should be held accountable to make sure that anti-bullying programs are constructive, and not something that students can just laugh off as unimportant?

Right now, the Midd-West School District’s Web site has nary any resources on it to discuss bullying in schools. Instead, there’s just a quick nod on their mission statement to providing a safe space for all students.

“Our schools’ effective learning environments require safety, discipline, respect, organization and high expectations for all,” the district says. Great words, but they also require action, too.

Friends of Brandon Bitner have created a Facebook page for him here, to memorialize him. He was a talented musician with a gift for the violin, and judging from the number of letters that people sent speaking out about his death and bullying in local schools, it’s clear he made a huge impact on a number of people.

Take a moment to write the Midd-West School District, and urge them to place a higher priority on combating bullying rooted in homophobia. No student should feel like their only option to escape bullying is suicide. And students should not be allowed to just laugh off anti-bullying programs as if they don’t make a difference.

Photo credit: juliejordanscott

After Students Laugh Off Anti-Bullying Assembly, a 14-Year-Old Commits Suicide