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Posts by Paul Costello1

PEACE CORPS AT 60:INSIDE THE VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE

Birnholz.jpeg

On January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued a challenge to all Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”


Two months later American University hosted a National Conference on Youth Service Abroad, organized by students from AU, the University of Michigan, and the National Student Association. Nearly 500 participants, representing 300 schools in 45 states, gathered in Washington, DC, to discuss the goals, mission, and methods of a new Peace Corps.  

Two months later American University hosted a National Conference on Youth Service Abroad, organized by students from AU, the University of Michigan, and the National Student Association. Nearly 500 participants, representing 300 schools in 45 states, gathered in Washington, DC, to discuss the goals, mission, and methods of a new Peace Corps.   The original 1961 legislation that created the Peace Corps laid out three goals:  

1. Help the people of interested countries meet their need for trained men and women. 
2. Help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served. 
3. Help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.  
The 30 individuals whose objects and stories we showcase here represent a sampling of the nearly 240,000 volunteers who have answered Kennedy’s call to serve since 1961. This exhibition illuminates how the Peace Corps has offered alternative ways to advance peace and promote international friendship. 
Today we confront unprecedented global challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, and an immigration crisis. In March 2020 the Peace Corps evacuated 7,300 volunteers from 61 countries. Now the agency has an opportunity to return volunteers to the field with a new sense of purpose. How will the Peace Corps, at 60, create positive change in our complex world? How should it address concerns around racial, economic, and asymmetrical power dynamics? The Peace Corps must find a way to remain relevant in an ever changing environment.  
Peace Corps at 60: Inside the Volunteer Experience explores these challenges through the lens of the third Peace Corps goal. The objects these volunteers chose to keep embody memories of their Peace Corps experiences. The stories behind those objects reveal the reciprocal relationships between volunteers and their country hosts. These relationships have always been central to the Peace Corps experience and essential to the agency’s role and service. Micro-memoirs accompanying each object tell these stories, providing a window into the agency’s past and lessons for its future. 

Go to Full Exhibit

Serve America. Together. Our Vision for the Future

The Serve America Together Presidential Challenge - Serve America. Together.

Serve America Together is a campaign to make national service part of growing up in America.

For too long, national service has not been an option for most young Americans. The college affordability crisis has left too many students with debt that they’re struggling to repay. Millions of young people are out of work, their talents untapped. Communities across the country face significant unmet challenges including education inequity, disaster relief, aging populations, and substance abuse issues. Americans are more profoundly polarized than any moment in recent history. We are beginning to truly confront the systemic racism of our institutions and society. And our country is grappling with public health, economic, social, and educational crises as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Imagine a future in which young people earn college tuition by addressing our communities’ greatest challenges — where they are empowered to shape their own destinies and those of their communities, regardless of zip code. Imagine a future in which empathy trumps apathy and participation and problem-solving outmatch indifference. Imagine a shared experience far stronger than anything that may seek to divide us.

This future is entirely achievable if a year of service is part of growing up in America. The White House, Congress, state and local leaders, business, community and philanthropic leaders, and every American should be working to make this future a reality. America has been at crossroads like this before. If we are going to achieve this bold vision, we must be audacious in our call to action and make national service a national priority. National service can transform lives, strengthen communities, and fuel civic renewal. Our country can do big things together. And Service Year Alliance is organizing the stakeholders, the strategy, and the movement we need to bring this vision to life.

We believe civilian national service should:

1. Exist at scale, engaging at least one million young Americans in civilian national service annually

2. Address America’s unmet needs

3. Bridge divides and fuel civic renewal

4. Be an opportunity for all

5. Build pathways to long-term success for individuals who serve through benefits and connectivity to future education and careers.

Our campaign platform is detailed below. Read More

Impact Of Service Years

Service years transform lives, strengthen communities, and fuel civic renewal.


Service Year Alliance - Service Year

Service Years Transform Lives ( from Service Year)

Service years create pathways to opportunity for young people and allow them to develop real-world experience as well as valued professional and leadership skills. 

Service years helps young people of all backgrounds advance on career and college pathways. For example:

  • National service is backed by over 600 “Employers of National Service” who highly value the skills individuals gain during their service.
  • 200 higher education institutions match the AmeriCorps education award because they value the national service experience.
  • 79% say that their service year was a defining professional experience.
  • 74% of YouthBuild graduates earn a GED or high school diploma through the program and more than half go on to further education or employment.
  • AmeriCorps alumni are more likely to attain a bachelor’s or graduate degree than the average American adult.

Learn more:

Service Years as a Workforce Development Strategy

Service Years + Higher Education


Service Years Strengthen Communities

Service years provide cost-effective human capital that can be utilized by local communities to tackle our biggest challenges, like educational equity, disaster response, health, conservation, and more.

Service years help communities tackle local problems. For example:

  • In 2017, 2,000 AmeriCorps members from all 50 states were deployed to Texas, Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in response to hurricanes.
  • Students tutored by Reading Corps AmeriCorps members increase their reading levels, saving millions in special education and academic remediation costs.
  • AmeriCorps Urban Safety corps members reduced crime in midtown Detroit by more than 50%.
  • Youth corps conduct energy audits and weatherize homes, reducing energy usage by millions of kWh per year and saving low-income residents hundreds of dollars annually.

Learn more: 

Service years as a strategy to respond to COVID-19

The Case for National Service as a Solution to Critical Contact Tracing Needs

Service Years Improve Education Outcomes


Service Years Fuel Civic Renewal

Service years bring people together across lines of difference around a shared experience that builds cultural competency and enhances civic engagement. 

Service years develop better citizens. For example:

  • 9 out of 10 AmeriCorps alums report that their service year experience improved their ability to solve problems, and 8 out of 10 report that if they were confronted with a community issue, they could develop a plan to address it and get others to care.
  • YouthBuild increases social trust and community orientation among the low-income youth who serve in the program.
  • AmeriCorps, YouthBuild, and Peace Corps alumni vote and volunteer throughout their lives at higher rates than their peers.

After months in lockdown, we need some new memories. But can you ‘make’ them?

By Roxanne RobertsJuly 25, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT14

If 2020 was unforgettable for all the wrong reasons, then the pressure is on to make 2021 unforgettable for the right ones. We want to get out, have fun, and, of course,“make memories,” in the words of advertisers and inspirational wooden signs in gift shops everywhere: the milestone birthday party, the postponed wedding, that special family vacation.

These memories will become, we hope, stories we will tell and retell, cherished flashbacks that will become part of our personal history. Maybe we’ll splurge a little (life is too short to drink cheap wine, isn’t it?) or finally book that round-the-world cruise. After the year we’ve all had, the bucket list just got longer, and companies are eager to stoke that yearning with promises of “making” magical moments and life-changing experiences.

But memory is a tricky thing. What we expect to remember and what we actually remember don’t always match. Two people in the same place at the same time can have very different feelings and very different recollections. Or you plan, say, the perfect wedding and what everyone remembers is that the best man broke his leg on the dance floor. The best laid plans of moms and men often go awry.

Can you make memories? The answer is … maybe.

It all starts in the brain, which decides what to keep and what to discard using a process called “encoding,” where chemical reactions link different networks. Important facts are referred to as “semantic” memory; the vivid stories — the who, what, and when — are called “episodic memory.”

“If you’re having a good time, there are regions of the brain that will be more active, like the prefrontal cortex, during both the encoding of that memory and also trying to retrieve all that memory later,” says Scott Slotnick, a professor at Boston College and author of “Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory.”

There’s a specific kind of episodic memory called an autobiographical memory — a formative moment that becomescentral to our sense of self. The brain gives priority to emotions, good and bad. Sensory triggers (sights, smells, sounds) can cause what is known as “involuntary memory” — for example, the madeleines in Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.”

But there are other ways to boost the chances that the carefully planned event will make the memory book: focus and repetition.

“If you’re paying attention to a sunset or a great experience at Disneyland, then the brain is going to be more active,” says Slotnick. “So then you’re going to be more likely to sort of encode those as a good memory. If somebody is not paying attention to the experience — they’re on their smartphone or distracted — they’re not going to form those memories.”

And here’s another trick: a good night’s rest.

“Sleep is also really important for laying down solid memory of the events that occurred the day before,” says Slotnick. It’s not the lighter state when we dream, but the deeper sleep where long-term memories are pruned or strengthened.

There’s a growing scientific consensus that we change a memory in every retelling, omitting and adding details until the original experience is significantly transformed. That doesn’t stop people from repeating them, and memories become family history.

“One of the things that’s important is that memory is kind of social exchange,” says Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University. Traditionally, “part of a female role is creating social cohesion, family cohesion — it’s pretty well-known that families with sisters, when the parents die, end up more cohesive than families with just brothers. The emotional work of women is very often actually creating and sharing these sort of memories.”

But all the parents who are convinced that their children will have lifelong memories of that very special trip or birthday party? Not so fast.

Infants and toddlers are not going to have distinct, individual memories, she says. Children have a harder time remembering what they don’t understand and don’t really begin to create episodic memories until about 8 years old. What kids do remember is anything unexpected — say, no cake at a birthday party or running into a teacher outside the classroom.

Which means, she says, that parents should cut themselves some slack. “Kids are as likely to remember a store-bought birthday cake as one lovingly homemade,” she says, adding: “As with most things, I think ‘relax’ is the message.”

When asked what they would grab if their house was on fire, people list people, pets, phones and then old family photographs, the most tangible manifestation of memories. Photos trigger our brains to remember not just the moment captured on film, but the stories behind the image. Because personal photos are almost always taken at social gatherings, the memories tend to skew positive.

Scrapbooking — memories on steroids — enjoyed a decade of glory before everyone had a cellphone and therefore a personal, portable collection of photos. And now the irony: Having so many photos on our phones makes it harder to distinguish the memorable from the mundane.

How to organize your travel photos

But the promise of creating special moments is a constant in advertising. You can — for $32 — score a sign explaining your errant housekeeping: “Please Excuse The Mess, Our Children Are Making Memories.”

The trick is convincing consumers that a car, food or vacation will become part of their personal narrative. Subaru scored big with its 2015 “Making Memories” commercial: A dad cleans out his old car while replaying highlights of his daughter’s childhood, then tosses her the keys. The tagline? “You can pass down a Subaru Forrester, but you get to keep the memories.” Lexus wants you to believe in “a December to remember,” with the car front and center in special family moments. And McCormick built an ad in its “Making Memories” series around the idea that a properly spiced lasagna will become a cherished family tradition.

But nowhere is the lure of memory-making as pervasive as it is in the travel industry. Carnival Cruise Lines used family photos for its “Moments That Matter” campaign; the Belle of Louisville, the oldest continuously operating river steamboat, introduced its “Making Memories Since 1914” campaign this spring.

And, of course, the mouse that roared: Is there any company better than Disney at tugging our heartstrings while picking our pockets? In 2011, it launched “Let the Memories Begin,” a three-year promotion using customer photos and videos in television and print ads. The memories start when the kids find out they’re going to Disney World and last, according to the ads, “a lifetime.” Maybe for the parents, who pay thousands of dollars for the trip; what kids remember might be the $17.99 mouse ears.

The hope is that these moments might evenbecome touchstones of nostalgia, what Don Draper in “Mad Men” called “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” In an iconic scene of theSeason 1 finale, the legendary advertising executive pitches his campaign for a Kodak Carousel slide projector. “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine,” he explains. “It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. To a place where we know we are loved.”

And so we come full circle. Google’s 2020 Super Bowl ad was a sentimental tear-jerker about the longing to hold on to the good times. The commercial features a voice-over by an older man using his Google Assistant to store specific memories of his beloved late wife. The Assistant replies, “Okay, I’ll remember that.”

Remembrance of Things Past, 2.0.

Read more:

Aromas can evoke beloved journeys — or voyages not yet taken

Go ahead and post your old travel photos. Experts say it can improve your mood.

Twelve Mental Resets I Learned from the Book “Skip the Line”

Life is a series of queues you can skip.
Tim Denning Medium June 28th 2021

Thinking can become stale.

I discovered that gem not long ago. My thoughts had become, well, useless and the good insights were lost. These are times I need a mental reset. In the 1990s, desktop computers had a shutdown and reset button. Whenever my computer was making me rage, I simply hit the reset button. Somehow, like magic, after a slow reboot, the computer would work again.

I’ve taken the idea of a reset button and applied it to my thinking. It involves reading a random book. Books give me ideas. Ideas can lead to mental resets.

The book I read during this odd period in my life is called “Skip The Line” by James Altucher. Many of the takeaways from the book pushed the reset button in different areas of my life. Here are the best mental resets.

Become comfortable with the land of not knowing

The key to skipping the line is to consistently live in a world of “not knowing.” To constantly be curious but not threatened by what’s next. To live in the world where everyone else is scared but you are so comfortable with the land of not knowing that you can still navigate the rough waters.

I’m a certainty addict. Practicing discomfort has helped me mentally reset. It’s why I do public speaking in front of a room full of strangers. The slight vomit feeling I get before jumping on stage reminds me I don’t have it all figured out, and have a long way to go.

It’s easy to write on the internet and think you have life all figured out.

Comfort is a threat that creates many stops and starts. Curiosity is a compass towards gentle upwards progress.

Skipping the line in life is backwards

I always thought self-improvement was the way to skip the line in life. So do many people. James provided a mental reset by teaching me that helping people who are lost is not the end of the line but the beginning.

An obsession with ourselves causes us to go off course. We start becoming so obsessed with what we’re doing in life that we trample on the hopes and dreams of others. But you get what you want by helping other people get what they want.

The individualism cult has got it wrong.

Individualism that turns into collectivism allows you to skip many spots in the line to achieve life goals. ‘Help others’ is a timeless, cliche way to get out of your own head.

Tap into the mind’s time-traveling ability

Right now may be a disaster. James taught me to use the mind’s memory to go back in time to a period when life worked.

Once I’m back in a moment of significant achievement, it feels as if it’s happening to me all over again. The brain can’t tell the difference between the past and present. I use the dysfunctional body clock to create a mental reset. What if it’s 2016 all over again? I say.

What feels impossible becomes possible when you unlock the power of your memory. You can sort through the memories and find the ones that act as a reset and even inspire you to rethink the stage of life you’re at.

Opportunities to exit the comfort zone are limited

‘Asks’ that scare the pants off you don’t come around often. When I get one I try to grab it by the curly ones. You can do the same. There is nothing to lose by accepting an uncomfortable opportunity. The worst case is it doesn’t work out and you get to try again in the future.

Humans have tiny goldfish memories, according to research. Our need to survive is so great that we can’t remember all of your failures.

The hard drive in our head is running on 58 megabytes of disk space from thousands of years ago. Your small failure is a 4K Youtube video that takes up gigabytes of mental disk space. Sorry, pal. Disk full. This is a great mental reset to remind yourself of.

You’ve got nothing to lose from fear that makes your pants fall down.

Purpose = Obsession

The word purpose is thrown around a lot. “What is my purpose in life?” is a question we’ve all asked through our lives. If the question is avoided for too long you find yourself lost, needing a mental reset. What about instead of what do you love, the question became what are you obsessed with?

I’m obsessed with writing. I quit my job for my obsession. I think about it before bed, while sleeping, while in the bathroom, on my birthday, and even during job interviews.

Every spare minute I have is spent writing something, somewhere on the internet — Twitter, Substack, LinkedIn, News Break, Quora. The worst thing I did is ignore this purpose and try to place 9–5 job band-aids over it. James helped me focus on my obsessions and less on hard to explain love or passion.

Obsessions steal time in your calendar.

When one interest suffers a cardiac arrest, switch to another interest

Amongst online writers right now, I hear the word burnout a lot.

I’ve certainly burned out from writing obsessively too. James gave me a simple mental reset: switch interests when one has become stale. For example, I’m going to switch to doing slightly more teaching than writing to let my writing freshen up. Too much of a good thing is bad.

Give an interest a rest to unlock the next level.

Writing down ideas fires up your brain

James describes dying to wake up and get to the local cafe in 2002 after losing everything. Ideas took his mind into all sorts of alternate realities.

Ideas help you skip the line in life. But what ideas really do is unlock your potential muscle, which gets you excited and pumped to wake up. Even if the ideas are trash the feeling outweighs the few seconds it takes to write each one down.

Writing ideas down is starting up your imagination. Once the imagination engine is running, it interrupts your mind’s sad story playing on repeat, causing you to become solution-focused. The question that follows is “What can I do about this?” Your idea habit answers the question for you.

One bizarre thing leads to another

The book Skip The Line tells the story of well-known podcaster Lewis Howes. Many of us think podcasting was how Lewis became who he is. James shared the real story.

Lewis learned how to send direct messages on LinkedIn and network. He used messages to get people to his in-person events. It became such a successful habit that he started running online courses. The scope of the course was narrow. All he taught was how to network in messages like he did. This led Lewis to make millions from his course and eventually start a podcast.

Sending a message on LinkedIn looks like an insignificant task. Most of us would disregard this small act. Lewis trusted where this might lead him. The result isn’t something anybody could have mapped out, not even a prestigious university.

Joining the dots makes sense looking back. Trust that one bizarre thing will lead you to the sequence of events you’ll look back on and be proud of.

A paycheck is an addiction

I, Tim Denning, am a paycheck-aholic. Paychecks make you feel safe. Most jobs pay you to never fail. This resistance to failure hurts long term. You expect for things to work out. Then if you try a side hustle and there are setbacks, you erupt like a volcano on Twitter.

What if a job is holding you back? What if taking risks and failing at work took your life in a different direction.

Here’s the mental reset I learned: you can always get another job again. So you’ve got nothing to lose.

Vulnerability is a new beginning

James’ writing career is fascinating. He started writing about finance and got nowhere. At one point he switched into writing with vulnerability. That’s the moment everybody started to know who James is.

Real success happens when you dare to be vulnerable. The same happened to me. When I stopped hiding behind writing startup press releases and dared to talk about taboo subjects like mental illness, everything changed.

Vulnerability is relatability. Without it, our words become cobwebs.

Become an energy minimalist

Many of us think energy comes from food and exercise. That’s true. But energy also comes from people, writing, books, places, finance. I’m writing a whole book on energy right now.

The mental reset I borrowed from James is this: Where are the energy leaks?

Plug the leaks and be a minimalist with your energy. Blowing up at a driver who cut you off costs precious energy. Spend energy like you spend money and then you won’t waste it on crap.

Use this superhero trait more often

Being secretly good to people = superhero

My parent’s generation was taught to chase fame. James resets your ego by boldly stating fame is for losers.

Being good to people looks pointless. What I learned is that you can’t see what being good does for you behind closed doors. Every day people are reference checking you without you knowing. Those reference checks are glowing 5-star reviews if you’ve been caught offloading goodness on everybody.

Your life has an Uber rating. Make it 5 out of 5 by treating people ridiculously well for the hell of it.

Skipping the line in life involves embracing mental resets. Our operating system gets selfishness viruses that infect every area of life. Even a good night’s sleep or a prescription for a cold shower can’t erase the virus. The best thing to do is use James’ ideas to create mental resets that act like a vaccine. Question your self-talk. Push the reset button if lies become visibly noticeable.

The most powerful way to skip the line is to remember it’s all backwards. Individualism puts you at the back of the queue. You get to the front of the queue by quietly helping others who give you 5-star references that unlock doors others believe are invisible.

The possible is always a function of the impossible


Dare The Impossible - Home | Facebook

People said it was impossible to fly like a bird but one visionary said “why not try?”

To that end, 
they discovered it was possible to invent a kite, and a balloon, and even a parachute
until eventually, on a remote beach in Kitty Hawk
two brothers, bike mechanics, made what looked so impossible became possible,
because the possible is a function of the impossible.

What's in a name? | Kitty Hawk, North Carolina - The Virginian-Pilot


People said that they could never reach the moon but poets said, at least we might imagine what we cannot do.

To that end,
they wrote novels about the face in the moon and cheese and lunatics, and space wars and setting up a satellite city circling the sky,
until eventually a man called Armstrong leapt from the lunar landing module to make one small step, one giant leap.

Smithsonian Channel Crafts Augmented Reality Game for Apollo Moon Landing  Fans | Space

What looked so impossible and only a dream became real
because the possible is always a function of the impossible.



People said that we would never invent a cure for cancer,
but scientists said that cannot be the final answer, so “why not try?”

To that end,
They dared to imagine a world where they already had,
and discovered along the way, cures and treatments and vaccines for flu and polio and for TB,
while a team mapped the genome and the DNA sequence.
What once seemed so utterly beyond what they thought was achievable
is something we know today will become possible tomorrow,
because one day along the way, they made a way,

DNA sequencing | genetics | Britannica

and it was a way that was leading them on,
into what their not-knowing already knew,
that the possible is always a function of the impossible.



Unless mankind dared to fly when they knew it was impossible,
Unless womenkind dared to demand a vote, when they knew that no one would give them a chance,
Unless slaves dared to imagine fighting to win their freedom,
when all they had was their chains,
There would have been no progress of the human spirit.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screen-Shot-2020-04-14-at-7.35.51-AM-300x155.jpg

Unless leaders dare to do the unthinkable,
and risk moving beyond the outer limits of their certainty,
Challenge the powers that be into a new becoming
and invent a new imagination for the territory of the possible,
Then change cannot happen.

Unless we all embark on the hazardous journey to go,
over the horizon of all that we can see, or feel, or know,
we humans would never have left our caves or risen from our graves.
The human race would still be locked inside prisons of impossibility,
en-darkened by the decisions of our self imposed fears.

Suffragette - Wikipedia

We must always embrace the impossible
We must always reach out to solve the insoluble
We must always stretch our certainty beyond what’s recognizable,
because
The possible is always a function of the impossible.

(To Ahmed July 29th 2021)
Paul Costello

MCPS requires masks for start of new school year

By Donna St. George  July 28th at 7:00 p.m. EDT16

With the start of classes weeks away and debate intensifying about mask mandates in schools, Maryland’s largest district opted for the cautious way forward, requiring that face coverings be worn by all.

The decision in Montgomery County Tuesday comes a day after neighboring Prince George’s County did the same, requiring masks regardless of vaccination status.

School leaders in Montgomery County cited a string of reasons for the decision, including emerging variants, a rise in coronavirus cases and advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has recommended universal masking in schools for everyone over age 2.

Shortly after the county school board voted to support the approach, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a change in federal guidance: Now guidelines recommend face coverings be required inside schools in the fall.

The shift by the CDC follows the rise of the highly contagious delta variant, which is said to account for the vast majority of new cases nationally.

“I believe they should still wear masks, especially with this delta variant,” said Brenda Wolff, school board president. “I think that’s going to be the safest position for everybody.”

Wolff pointed out at the Tuesday board meeting that the school system brought 26,000 students back into school buildings over the summer and — with a mask mandate — counted only 13 positive cases as of last Friday, a ratio she considered excellent.

“I think that’s actually due to the mask-wearing,” she said.

The rollout of vaccinations also figured into the 161,000-student school system’s decision. While vaccinations are available for those ages 12 and older, not everyone has received shots — and the youngest children at school are not yet eligible.

When school begins on Aug. 30, Montgomery County — and school systems across Maryland and the country — expect to be open five days a week for full-time instruction inside bricks-and-mortar schools.

Under the new guidance, Montgomery County students would not have to wear masks when they are outdoors, but those who are unvaccinated are strongly encouraged to keep covered anyway. Everyone must wear masks while riding on school buses.

“I know the community is eagerly awaiting a full return to five days a week as normal as possible, and I realize masks are not 100 percent normal in the way we operated before, but health and safety needs to be a priority,” said school board member Patricia B. O’Neill (District 3).

Board Vice President Karla Silvestre pointed out that the decision doesn’t mean that the requirements won’t change during the 2021-2022 school year. Working with health officials, school leaders will continue to evaluate the issue, she said.

“As things improve and our health agencies and experts give us advice, then we can change this mandate,” she said.

The decisions this week arrived on the heels of state health and education department guidance issued Friday that left each school system to decide the question but “strongly” recommended unvaccinated students protect themselves with masks.

The state leaned heavily on CDC guidance for its guidelines. With the shift by the CDC on Tuesday, it was unclear whether there would also be a shift by the state.

Maryland health officials said Tuesday that they are reviewing the most recent iteration of CDC guidance and will continue to closely monitor key health metrics.

Maryland ‘strongly recommending’ — but not requiring — masks for unvaccinated students returning to class this fall

Some parents have opposed requiring masks for students in the fall, saying that transmission in schools is low and that students who have gotten vaccinations should be rewarded for their efforts.

On the other side, some parents have said that they would only feel comfortable with children back at school if masks were required to offer another layer of protection against the spread of the virus as cases climb and as a full return to school means less physical distancing.

Montgomery officials said they recognize that the county has had great success with vaccinations, but at the same time many thousands of students do not have shots.

They also said they lack an effective system for monitoring vaccination status of students, teachers and staff members, and then enforcing mask requirements according to whether each person is immunized.

The countywide council of PTAs was advocating an evidence-based, transparent approach to the decision-making, based on expert advice and health metrics.

Even if teens are vaccinated, their younger siblings may not be inoculated, said Cynthia Simonson, president of the countywide PTA council. “We should reevaluate at regular intervals,” she said.

Let’s tap into all students’ potential

  • 26 Jul 2021 The Washington Post Jay.mathews@washpost.com
Critical race theory or not, let's tap into all students' potential -  Flipboard

To those battling over critical race theory, here is my plea: Don’t stop teachers from seeking the hidden potential of impoverished and minority children, the most important educational movement of the past 40 years.

I have gotten emotional over this because of a just-released University of Virginia doctoral dissertation by Beverly A. Knupp Rudolph: “The Relationship of School Leader Values and Practices to Participation of Black and Latinx Students in Advanced Placement Courses.”

There is some complicated academic verbiage in its 298 pages. But it provides a deep and moving description of how an average suburban high school conquered American education’s widespread bias against students whose families don’t have much money or education.

I have been writing about that problem since 1982. Some would call the issue racism, but it also applies to the inadequate teaching of poor White kids in rural America. A better term might be “classism,” a word I don’t hear or read often.

Rudolph is a North Carolina public high school principal who investigated the transformation of what she describes as “one racially diverse Mid-atlantic high school.” Following the standard academic approach to sourcing, she gives the school a pseudonym, Trailwood High. She uses madeup names for the educators who over 24 years significantly increased the enrollment in college-level Advanced Placement classes of what she calls “traditionally marginalized populations, including Black and Latinx students.”

According to my data, by 2018 Trailwood had risen to the top 2 percent of U.S. schools in AP and International Baccalaureate test participation despite half of its students being from low-income families. Its enrollment of more than 2,300 is about 44 percent Hispanic, 24 percent White, 19 percent Black and 8 percent Asian.

I stumbled across that school in 1997. I wrote about it often. I thought I had a good idea of what those educators were up to. Rudolph has gone deeper. She describes deft, sometimes ruthless, moves by three successive principals to nudge classists, if I may use that word, out of the way of student progress.

Trailwood students up to then had to pass a test or an interview and get a teacher recommendation to get into AP. Those are among many common barriers to AP participation that signal an emphasis on sorting, not teaching. Some teachers at the school would tell some students to their faces that they were incapable of learning enough to succeed in the class.

In 1987, a new principal arrived who was determined to change that. She was a fearless, shrewd former nun. Her first move was to make the campus disciplined and safe, and collect data on potentially capable students who weren’t being put in courses that led to AP. “When I first got there, I inherited all the assistant principals,” many of whom resisted her ideas, she told Rudolph. So she recruited teachers to help.

They found kids like Katrina Harpe, the real name of a student I knew then. Her parents hadn’t gone to college and did not press that option on their daughter. Her African American father was a computer technician. Her Korean American mother was a retail clerk. Harpe got okay grades in elementary and middle school but was not challenged until the Trailwood High people got hold of her. She took AP and went to Yale. If you are looking for a family physician in Fredericksburg, Va., you will find Dr. Harpe’s website on Google.

At the beginning of the school’s transformation, parents of children long designated gifted expressed fears that the lessadvantaged kids coming into AP would lower standards. One staffer told Rudolph that “the superintendent’s office called me and said, “We just want you to know that some people — parents — are saying this isn’t fair to other kids and therefore, they are seeking an attorney.”

There was pressure for teachers to spend more time with students who were already designated gifted than with children who had mere potential. Some parents feared the changes “would subsequently diminish Trailwood’s reputation as a good school,” Rudolph said in her paper.

Her dissertation emphasizes the risks in trying to change that attitude. A staffer told of skepticism “that these kids aren’t able to do the work, that this is all a numbers game, or that all you’re doing is putting kids [in AP classes] just to get higher enrollment — so you look better.”

The principal said at the beginning she didn’t care how the new students scored on the AP exams. “What we cared about is they would take a step into challenging coursework,” she told Rudolph. The difficult lessons produced results. By 2018, Trailwood’s percentage of graduating seniors passing AP tests was nearly three times the national average.

Low-income minority boys triggered even more skepticism than girls like Harpe. “The teacher would say, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, who are you? Why again are you in this class?’ ” a staffer said. A Black counselor organized a weekly lunch, with pizza, for underestimated boys seeking advice and encouragement from peers. A weekly lunch for girls was also organized.

One staffer told Rudolph, “I had to spend a lot of time, not just with the students, but with the teachers, with the counselors, figuring out who my allies were.”

The principal gave the job of guidance head to a counselor from D.C. committed to the plan. That was a way to neutralize Trailwood counselors who were trying to keep students out of AP. Better counselors were recruited. The principal made the head counselor an assistant principal, and made sure that person replaced her as principal when she retired.

The staffers trying to help students into AP found many were reluctant. There were few people with their backgrounds in those classes. They were getting good grades in regular courses, so why make trouble?

The counselor would say, “Hey, the teacher has said you should be in AP English,” and then not take no for an answer. “Here’s the deal,” a counselor said. “We’re going to register you in AP English. And if you have a problem, I’m going to be checking up on you.” The new team provided tutoring and summer classes and persuaded recalcitrant teachers to change their minds or transfer to another school.

This is the heart of what our best schools are doing: showing students how to learn more than we have asked them to learn before.

The resistance to such change may deserve harsh labels such as racism. But in some cases it could be an excessive desire to be kind. Some teachers struggle with a fear that hard lessons hurt kids of all backgrounds.

However we define racism, we should recognize that children of every ethnicity have hidden potential that deserves encouragement. The story of Trailwood shows how difficult, but potentially liberating, that effort can be.P

The Anastasi Scholarships

When our Founder,  Dr Anastasi  passed away earlier this year, the family asked instead of flowers that friends send donations to Saturday School in his name. For many years, Bob worked closely with Dr. George Thomas who was a pioneer in education in the County. From the donations given in Bob’s name, Saturday School has created a scholarship fund.

We met with Bob’s family about how best to use it over the next three years, and they suggested 30% be given to Saturday school to be awarded to outstanding students and 70% to AmeriCorps Project CHANGE, the program Bob devoted the last years of his life. It will be divided into two types of awards.

First, the Fund will be used to give scholarships in the form of 2 “Members of the Year” awards each year ( $500 each) One award is to be nominated by the members themselves and the other to be awarded by the program.

Second, Project CHANGE members are invited to nominate one or two of their most outstanding students from their respective programs to give a Member generated award in Bob’s name. The criteria for the award is below, based on the legacy of Bob Anastasi:

The member of the year that you nominate to be awarded the Anastasi scholarship would have displayed some or all of the following traits that epitomized Bob:

1.Connects people to people to meet the needs of others

2-Treats people in a personable way, with respectful listening

3-Displays courage and resilience, not giving up in the hardest times

4-Humble and not ever wanting or doing it for credit, never seeking the limelight

5-The Disney factor, that we said was doing things with an infectious sense of joy and play


For the Member to Student awards, members will single out the most dedicated students they worked with and decide on one or two who have given outstanding service with little or no recognition.

The awards will be announced at each Graduation Ceremony that concludes each year’s program.

How family stories help children weather hard times

Story image

By Carol Clark | eScienceCommons | April 29, 2020 Emory News Center

In times of great stress, stories sustain us, says Robyn Fivush, director of the Family Narratives Lab in Emory’s Department of Psychology.

Family reminiscing is especially important, says Fivush, who is also director of Emory’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. When children learn family stories it creates a shared history, strengthens emotional bonds and helps them make sense of their experiences when something senseless happens — like the current global pandemic.

“When we don’t know what to do, we look for stories about how people have coped in the past,” Fivush says. “You can see that happening in the media now, in articles comparing today to historical events, like the 1918 flu pandemic and 9/11.”

She sums up the 9/11 narrative in the United States: “A horrific event happened; we were attacked. But we came together as a nation, persevered and rose back up together.”

Such narratives help build a shared capacity for resilience. “That’s true for nations and it’s true for families,” Fivush says.

Over decades of research, Fivush and Emory psychologist Marshall Duke developed a scale to measure how much children know about their family histories. Using this scale, they conducted a study that began just before 9/11 and continued for two years. “We found that in families that talked in more coherent and emotionally open ways about challenging family events with 10- to 12-year-olds, the children coped better over the two-year period than in families telling less emotionally expressive and coherent stories about their challenges,” Fivush says.

The families in the study were all comparable, middle-class, two-parent households.

Standardized measures showed that children in the families that told the more coherent family narratives had better self-esteem, higher levels of social competence, higher quality friendships, and less anxiety and stress. They also had fewer behavioral problems, as reported by parents.

Tips for telling family stories

For families under quarantine together, opportunities abound to weave family stories into conversation, Fivush says. The stories need to be tailored to different ages, she adds, so that children are emotionally and cognitively able to understand them.

Elementary school children, for example, are not ready to digest complex family stories. “With younger kids, it’s really more about helping them structure their own experiences into stories that help them process their feelings,” Fivush says. “You want to start by asking them non-judgmental, open-ended questions like: ‘Why do you think you were upset yesterday? What could you have done to make yourself feel better? What can we do about this?'”

She uses an example of a little girl who left her favorite storybook at her school and was worried that it wasn’t going to be there when she went back. A mother could tell a story about how she left a favorite toy somewhere when she was little but later her father took her back and they found it.

“Tell them a story from your own life that provides a model for how everybody forgets things, but you can get them back,” Fivush says. “Or, ‘My brother used to tease me a lot, too. But now he’s your Uncle Bill and we love each other.’ Parents are identity figures. Little kids are fascinated by stories about their parents when they were little.”

Ultimately, the goal is to help children construct a coherent story that validates their feelings while helping them think of resolutions.

“Particularly with very young kids, don’t make assumptions about what they may be upset or sad about,” Fivush says. “You may be surprised. Stay open to what your children of all ages may be experiencing.”

Middle school children are starting to have more of an ability to understand the bigger picture. “By the age of 10, children are thinking in the abstract and because of that, they are likely to be anxious about the future,” Fivush says.

By this stage, children begin to understand stories on a deeper level. It’s not that every story needs a happy ending or a silver lining, Fivush stresses. “You can explain to your child, ‘We don’t know yet how this story is going to end but let me tell you about some challenging times I got through, or your grandparents got through.’”

Examples of family members — who preserved by simply putting one foot in front of the other and by maintaining loving bonds — reassure children that their family will also find a way to get through a situation.

When they reach adolescence, children are especially vulnerable. “High school is a time when children start to really think about themselves as a person and what their life is going to be like,” Fivush says. “They are mulling big questions, like ‘Who am I? What are my passions?’ And now the pandemic has pulled the rug out from under them.”

By the age of 16, parents can start talking to a teen-ager about their own vulnerabilities as people and as parents. “Emphasize how you can build strength together, as a family,” Fivush says. She suggests finding ways of giving teen-agers a role in supporting younger children in positive ways.

“Human beings are really altruistic and empathetic. We feel good when we help other people, particularly people that we love,” Fivush says. “That’s going to make every family member feel better about themselves and about each other.”

Silly, funny family stories are also valuable, along with small touchpoints about the past that emerge spontaneously, Fivush says. “When you’re cooking together with your children it’s a perfect time to say, ‘When I was a little girl, my mother taught me how to cook this dish. We used to have post roast every Friday and I would peel the carrots.’”

Adolescents are especially hungry for these kinds of stories, she adds. “If they roll their eyes, so be it, they’re still listening,” Fivush says. “It’s the really mundane, everyday stories that reassure them that life is stable. It provides a sense of continuity, of enduring relationships and values. They need to know that they come from a long line of people who are strong, who are resilient, who are brave. And who can cook. The definition of who they are is not just something independent and autonomous, spun from nowhere. It’s embedded in a long, intergenerational family story.”