The National Center on Secondary Education and Transition (NCSET) was established two years ago to provide resources for educators, policymakers, community service professionals, families and young people with disabilities. It is intended to help improve the experiences of youth with disabilities in secondary education, transition, postsecondary education and employment.
In October, NCSET announced the launch of its new Web site, which now includes topical information, an online newsletter, briefs, policy updates and a calendar of national events.
?This new Web site brings together a wealth of information that has historically been difficult to access,? says NCSET Director David R. Johnson. ?Now teachers, parents, community agency professionals, youth with disabilities and others all have somewhere to turn for answers.?
NCSET is a partnership of six organizations: The Institute on Community Integration, the National Center for the Study of Postsecondary Educational Supports, TransCen, Inc., the Institute for Educational Leadership, the PACER Center and the National Association of State Directors of Special Education. It is headquartered at the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota and is funded by a five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.
For more information, visit www.ncset.org.
The U.S. Department of Education funds 10 equity assistance centers to provide assistance for school districts in areas of race, gender and national origin equity in order to promote equal education opportunities.
These centers help teachers, administrators and other school staff deal with concerns such as minority students being underrepresented in AP courses, gender fairness, hate crimes and language learning.
Here is a list of the 10 equity assistance centers and their Web site addresses.
- The New England Equity Assistance Center serves Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
http://www.alliance.brown.edu/eac
- The Equity Assistance Center serves New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
http://www.nyu.edu/education/metrocenter/EAC.html
The Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium serves the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
www.maec.org
The Southeastern Equity Center serves Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
www.southeastequity.org
Programs for Educational Opportunity serves Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.
http://www.umich.edu/~eqtynet/eac.html
- The South Central Collaborative for Equity serves Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
www.idra.org/scce
The Midwest Equity Assistance Center serves Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
http://mdac.educ.ksu.edu
The Interwest Equity Assistance Center serves Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.
http://www.colostate.edu/programs/EAC/index.html
The WestEd Center for Educational Equity serves Arizona, California and Nevada.
http://web.wested.org/cs/wew/view/pj/188
The Equity Center serves Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, American Samoa Micronesia, Guam, Marshall Islands, Northern Mariana Islands and the Republic of Palau.
http://www.nwrel.org/cnorse
The University of Vermont?s Division of Continuing Education will offer three credits for the National Gardening Association?s online course for educators, From Seed to Seed: Plant Science for K-8 Educators.
According to the National Gardening Association (NGA), over the past five years there has been a surge of interest among educators and administrators in using schoolyard gardens and habitats to enrich learning.
From Seed to Seed is a professional development course designed for K-8 teachers who already incorporate botany and gardening into their science curriculum and for teachers who would like to start doing so. The course includes core botanical information, activities and experiments that address K-8 national standards in various disciplines.
For more information, visit http://learn.uvm.edu/ap/focus/index.html.
NGA also has a new Gardening with Kids video for K-8 teachers who are interested in creating ?living classrooms? in schoolyards. The association describes it as an ?inspirational? video with stories of school gardens that changed the learning process and lives of students. It is packaged with a companion workbook, Steps to a Bountiful Kids? Garden, and is for sale through NGA.
For more information, visit www.nationalgardening.org.
If you?ve always wanted to know more about the advanced gardening technique of grafting, Cornell University?s Department of Horticulture offers an online grafting course. The How, When and Why of Grafting for Gardeners is a noncredit distance-learning course that includes Web-based lectures, quizzes, video demonstrations and hands-on grafting with live plants.
The 10-week course is being offered from March 17 to May 23, 2003, and requires about four to eight hours of work per week. The last day for registration is March 10, 2003.
To view a sample lecture and to see a listing of all lectures and lab exercises, visit http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/hort494/mg/events/registration.html
The U.S. Department of Education produced a 180-page desktop reference manual to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 that was made available to educators attending a series of four regional meetings on effective implementation of the legislation?s programs.
The publication, No Child Left Behind: A Desktop Reference, details what?s new in the law, how each program works, key requirements, how to achieve quality, how performance is measured, and key activities and responsibilities for state education departments.
For more information, call 1-877-4ED-PUBS or visit http://www.ed.gov/pubs/edpubs.html. The full report is also available for download at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/reference.html.
If you?re not sure about the new tax law changes and how they affect teachers, IRS Publication 3991 can help.
Last spring, the IRS advised teachers to save their receipts from their purchases of books and classroom supplies, because a recent change in the law may mean those out-of-pocket expenses could lower their taxes. The new deduction is available to eligible educators in both public and private elementary and secondary schools. They must work at least 900 hours during a school year as a teacher, instructor, counselor, principal or aide.
Taxpayers now may subtract up to $250 of qualified expenses when figuring their adjusted gross income, and they will not need to itemize deductions to get this benefit.
According to the May 2002 IRS news release advising teachers to save their receipts for the new tax deduction, ?Educators who excluded education savings bond interest or payments from qualified tuition programs, or made tax-free withdrawals from an education savings account, will be able to claim the new deduction only to the extent their qualified expenses exceed the tax-free amounts.?
IRS Publication 3991, ?Highlights of the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002,? is available on the IRS Web site at www.irs.gov or by calling 800-TAX-FORM.
http://questionpoint.org
QuestionPoint is a collaborative reference service that was developed by the Library of Congress and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) with input from participating members of the Global Reference Network.
www.ciconline.org
Cable in the Classroom?s recently redesigned Web site offers more online resources for educators, which the organization says is part of its rededication to forging stronger links between education and technology to promote teaching and learning.
