Tag Archive: school


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.

Mike Curb has given more than $10 million to Belmont University, and an event center on campus even bears his name. Now, Curb is calling on the University to make amends for decisions by school officials that have branded gay Christian students “disruptive,” and have resulted in a lesbian soccer coach being fired because she chose to have a child with her same-sex partner.

“It’s time for Belmont to change and to recognize that we have gay students, faculty and staff,” said Curb, who is also a trustee emeritus at Belmont. “I want to see this board and the school leadership act like Christians.”

It’s probably the harshest criticism that has been leveled at Belmont University to date. And there’s been quite a bit. Students and alumni have protested outside of Belmont buildings. The Faculty Senate passed a resolution saying that employees shouldn’t be fired on the basis of sexual orientation. And local columnists have said that the school is fostering a culture of intolerance and discrimination, cloaked in a misinterpretation of religious values.

But the power of having a major donor to the University call attention to the LGBT problem on campus is pretty significant. Nothing quite catches the ears of administrators like a man with a $10 million wallet.

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Hot dogs and chicken patties and greasy pizza — oh my! Those are the entrees most kids currently get in their school cafeterias. If school lunch reform legislation doesn’t pass this week, those meals are unlikely to get any better in the future.

The Child Nutrition Act, legislation that would improve both the quality and accessibility of school lunches, has been kicking around in Congress for months on end. While the Senate passed its version of the school lunch reform bill — the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act — back in August, the House has yet to vote on the bill. That will change this Wednesday, December 1st, as representatives will finally weigh in on the legislation.

The House can do a number of things with the pending legislation. For one, it could neg the bill entirely, meaning kids wouldn’t see any increased funding for school lunches. The House could also delay the bill through a motion to commit, which would essentially kill the legislation for the rest of the year. With Republican lawmakers taking control of the House of Representatives this January, it’s unlikely that increased funding for school lunches will get enough support from Congress next year. Unless the House votes in favor of the Child Nutrition Act this week and sends it to President Obama’s desk for approval, this may be the last chance in the foreseeable future for federal school lunch reform.

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With an LGBT-specific school and a bunch of diversity workers, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is ahead of the curve on gay rights. But now they are taking their stance on equality and inclusiveness one step further. Board officials have announced three new initiatives to make schools safer for all students that fall outside the heterosexual label.

“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.

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When a person gets married, they often want to share it with the world — or at least their city. So Laine Tadlock’s decision to run a wedding announcement in her local paper, the State Journal-Register, seems like nothing out of the ordinary.

Unfortunately, Michael Jones reports on Gay Rights that this particular wedding announcement cost her a job. Is her employer just really anti-marriage? Not exactly. The issue at stake was that she was getting married to another woman.

Her employer, the Catholic Benedictine University in Springfield, IL, was not pleased to discover that “here come the brides” was the name of the game at Tadlock’s wedding. While Tadlock has been out about her sexual orientation since the beginning of her job, and many of her coworkers knew about the upcoming nuptials — and the sex of her intended — and had offered their congratulations, the higher-ups alerted to her plans via wedding announcement weren’t so happy for her.

Tadlock was pushed to take early retirement, a move which would have allowed the University to save face, but she had no intention of helping them shove her out of a job over her marriage. So, effective October 28, Benedictine University went ahead and gave her the boot anyway, writing, “By publicizing the marriage ceremony in which she participated in Iowa she has significantly disregarded and flouted core religious beliefs which, as a Catholic institution, it is our mission to uphold.”

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Holding anti-bullying assemblies at middle and high schools is certainly a noble effort to try and turn the tide of harassment in the classroom. Whether that harassment is based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or more, schools should be looking at ways to make combating bullying a central part of the education experience.

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.

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Article directories

An article directory is a form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With these, people are able to submit articles based on specific context. Article directories are abundances of information that help you find that information quickly and with ease. It can also lead you to finding answers in a fraction of the time that standard research usually takes. You can find these directories just about anywhere. Search engines used to find any kinds of information can bring you to other directories with different, and more information. What these directories do, gives people the ability to title their own articles that come up in search engines with a higher rank.  Because articles have many ways they can host thousands of articles on one specific subject, they can also be classified as Ezines or Online Magazines.

The material found within article directories are going to be subject to that of which the person is looking for. It’s made to be used for guests visiting one of these sites to find information quickly and efficiently. Just about anyone can find use to use an article directory; people can do basic research, on music, cooking, gardening, photography etc. Article directories will help people find articles on the specific subject they are looking for and can also direct you to more places. It can bring you to articles that point to other articles and blogs that can help you research a similar, but completely new topic. Finding these other websites and articles that you might also be able to find helpful can give you a bunch of new ideas to read and research, that you may not have thought of before.

pc pro schools

The uses of article directories are becoming more widely used, because more people are finding use for them. People who work from home, or work 9-5 types of jobs in research or just adding content to directories, can do a whole day’s work without having to leave their homes. These directories are able to serve as a virtual article library within their own computer. The research can all be put into one central location on your desktop or within other folders on your computer.

Article directories can be a great source of quickly locating information for those who are looking, or have already started building their own websites and blogs. Another fun way to make some extra cash would be to write for these directories. There are a lot of people that need someone to write for them to help get their business and their articles seen. Researching and finding a company that has a good rep to work for may take some time, but it can be fun, easy, and it’s extra money, right? One of the best ways to start searching for all different types of information is to write for these directories. Use the articles that are out there to help you with your research. They will not disappoint you in what they’re able to find and can then help you with writing your articles.

Many of us have had student teachers, those juniors and seniors in college who step into elementary school, middle school and high school classrooms to get some ‘on-the-job’ training. For anyone getting their degree in education, student teaching is practically a requirement; a time to put what you learned in the classroom into practice.

But for at least one Oregon college student, the student teaching process seemed to be a reminder that in some school districts, it’s still not OK to acknowledge the existence of LGBT people.

Head on over to Beaverton School District, in the suburbs of Portland. There, Seth Stambaugh, a 23-year-old graduate teaching student at Lewis and Clark College, was told by school district administrators that he was no longer allowed to student teach in the district. They told him he had made “inappropriate” comments, and that he would have to find another school district to student teach in.

So just what were those “inappropriate” comments? According to the Portland Mercury, Stambaugh was asked by a student whether he was married. Stambaugh, openly gay, said that he was not, adding that it would be illegal for him to be married in the state of Oregon because he “would choose to marry another guy.” Asked by the same student whether that meant that Stambaugh liked hanging out with men, Stambaugh replied “Yeah.”

They say that honesty is the best policy. But in this case, a parent in the school district caught wind of the conversation and went to school administrators telling them that if they didn’t remove Stambaugh from the classroom, the parent would remove his child.

So the school district called up Stambaugh and Lewis and Clark College, and said that these comments were “inappropriate,” and that Stambaugh would have to student teach elsewhere.

Yes, apparently in the Beaverton School District, just saying that you may want to marry someone of the same gender could get you removed from the classroom. Sound awful? Send a note to the Beaverton School District demanding that they explain the rationale for removing a student teacher on the basis of his sexual orientation.

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No new taxes in Miami-Dade County

Dear fellow taxpayers,

Please take the time to sign this online petition to stop Miami-Dade County governments from raising our taxes.

A quick look at my tax notices for Miami-Dade County shocked me to find that my property taxes were increasing 10%.

What I can see is that, at least with regard to the Miami-Dade County School Board, Metro-Dade, and the City of Miami, government entities wish to raise taxes by increasing debt or raising the taxable millage rate on that debt or our properties.? Your local government may be doing the same.

This is unacceptable because government is wasteful.? The School Board, for example, in the depth of the Great Recession, had a budget averaging $14-15,000 per student.? While I did attend public elementary at West Lab, my alma mater, the highly-regarded Belen Jesuit Prep, charged $10K per student last year, and has state-of-the-art sports and science facilities, and interactive, internet-connected Smart Boards in every classroom.? Of the $14-15,000 per student budgeted to the School Board, only $3K actually reaches schools for salaries and maintenance.? Where the rest goes is anyone%u2019s guess.

For confirmation of these numbers, please visit:

http://teachdade.wikispaces.com/Effective education spending

We don%u2019t need more taxes from government entities, which are the sort of institutions that got us into this economic mess in the first place.? We need fewer taxes so that we can have the freedom to make the right decisions and improve our lives one neighborhood, one household, and one person at a time.??

Please sign the petition.? Thank you.

No new taxes in Miami-Dade County

Have you ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain? Neither had I, despite its being the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War and the largest labor confrontation ever.

Well the Appalachian coal industry wants to keep it that way, as the Los Angeles Times reports. In fact, not only does the coal industry not want you to know about this particularly dark piece of its history, it wants to rub salt into the wound by blasting away the historic battlegrounds to…wait for it… mine for more coal.

And, lately, it has the help of the National Park Service in accomplishing this task.

To start at the beginning, the Battle of Blair Mountain took place in 1921 in Logan County, West Virginia. Over the course of one week, more than 10,000 coal miners confronted an industry-backed army in their struggle to unionize and demand better treatment. It was a watershed moment in the history of the labor movement. The battle ended after some 1 million rounds were fired and the U.S. Army stepped in (check out some historic photos here.)

Ever since, state authorities have resisted highlighting the battle in history books and have denied commemoration attempts. For one, the episode doesn’t exactly shine a positive light on what West Virginia last year declared to be its state rock. It’s also pretty clear, based on today’s expose from Think Progress, that the coal industry has a firm interest in indoctrinating the state’s youth through the school curriculum.

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