The U.S. Department of Education has awarded a $1.5 million grant to Southern’s Training All Teachers (TAT) program, which prepares educators to teach students who are not native English speakers. Last fall, a group of nine New Haven teachers began pursuing master’s degrees, tuition free, through the support of the grant. They are the first of some 300 Connecticut educators who will be trained in innovative, effective approaches to educating students whose native language is not English. The training will be offered in a variety of formats, including a master’s degree program, workshops, certification, and participation in a three-credit course. It will allow teachers to be trained with no tuition or fees assessed to them.

The grant, which will be awarded over a five-year period, will primarily benefit teachers in the New Haven School District, as well as those in the Windham, New London, and Norwich school districts. While these districts will receive priority, some components of the program will be open to teachers from other districts in Connecticut.

The grant proposal was written by Lorrie Verplaetse, professor of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) in the Foreign Language Department and TAT project director. It is the largest award that the TAT program has ever received.

President Cheryl J. Norton has signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, a document that calls for educational institutions to bolster their schools’ environmental efforts through improved energy efficiency, conservation, and other steps in pursuit of “climate neutrality.” The agreement also calls for an inventory of all greenhouse gas emissions. Dr. Norton became a “charter signatory” by signing the document before Sept. 15, when implementation officially began. At press time, more than 480 colleges and universities had signed the agreement.

“Being a good steward of the environment is an important part of being a good citizen,” says Norton. “Southern has been and will continue to be a leader in environmental responsibility. It is only natural, therefore, for us to become one of the pioneer members of this program.”

Southern’s commitment to creating a “green campus” will be highlighted in a future issue of Southern Alumni Magazine.

Teams of students, administrators, members of the community, and New Haven police officers took part in Southern’s Day of Service on Sept. 8. Ten buses took groups from campus to various New Haven neighborhoods, where service projects ranged from collecting trash on the street to painting over graffiti and cleaning up a school. A total of six tons of trash was collected overall. Below, a happy group, including President Cheryl J. Norton, Provost Selase Williams, Vice President for Student and University Affairs Ronald Herron, and Assistant Director of Student Life Sal Rizza, celebrates a successful day.

Southern has unveiled a new Emergency Management Plan that provides detailed response procedures for a multitude of unlikely but potentially dangerous scenarios, such as weather emergencies, bomb threats, pandemic illnesses, and hostile threats on campus. The comprehensive plan, which was submitted to the state, complies with management approaches endorsed by the National Incident Management System and Incident Command System. “As such,” says Ronald Herron, vice president for student and university affairs, “it assures coordination between our university police and local, state, and federal law enforcement and emergency management personnel for incidents of the highest magnitude. In addition, the plan requires timely and open disclosure of the details of the incident to the university community through a multi-pronged communication plan.”

Numerous steps to enhance campus safety recently have been implemented or are in the planning phases. Among them are:

• A siren/public address system that is scheduled to be installed atop Buley Library.
• A user-friendly reference guide outlining what to do in various emergencies, which is being prepared for distribution to faculty, staff, and students.
• The incorporation of a text messaging system that will be used to notify individuals of an emergency via cell phone.
• Enhancement of the university’s Web site to enable it to deliver high-profile emergency information.
• Enhanced campus lighting and trimming of shrubbery to create safer walkways.

The increased visibility of the University Police Department throughout campus. Midnight patrols now include bicycle officers, and individual officers are also assigned to residence hall through a new program called LEARN (Law Enforcement and Resident Network).

Gregory J. Paveza

Gregory J. Paveza has been named dean of the School of Health and Human Services, which includes the Department of Nursing, the Department of Public Health, the Department of Social Work, the Department of Communication Disorders, the Department of Marriage and Family Therapy, and the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies. Paveza comes to Southern from the University of South Florida, where he held numerous administrative positions, among them interim associate dean at the Tampa campus, a position similar to that of a vice provost.

Among Paveza’s short-term goals for the school are the launch of an emergency disaster management program and the creation of a B.S. program in health science, designed for those who want to become health care administrators.

“My long-term goal would be for us to become the premier accessible professional school in Connecticut,” says Paveza. With that agenda in mind, the new dean stresses the importance of long-term building upgrades. Southern’s master facilities plan calls for the eventual creation of a center for the School of Health and Human Services, contingent upon the availability of state funding. The school’s various departments are currently divided among about a half a dozen buildings across campus.

A personal response system used in some Southern classrooms.

Several Southern professors are bolstering classroom learning via a cutting-edge technological device called a “personal response system.” Each student is assigned a clicker that is hooked up to a PowerPoint computer program. Faculty members may then pose questions to the class using the PowerPoint program, with each student asked to click on the answer he or she believes is correct.

In addition to encouraging participation among all students, the system provides teachers with a wealth of information about how many students understand the lesson, what is the more difficult subject matter, and so on. The system also can be used to view the responses of individual students.

“It makes a huge difference with some students,” says Adam Hott, assistant professor of psychology. “They can see — and we can see — what the problem areas are right away.”

Professor of Psychology Jerry Hauselt concurs: “The system allows every student to answer every question. A shy student can be anonymous, yet still participate in the class discussion.”

The technology, originally used by executives in business meetings with staff members, has begun to spread to the educational arena. Southern faculty members are using a device produced by Turning Technologies, a Youngstown, Ohio-based company, that produces interactive response systems.

Jean Breny Bontempi and John Nwangwu of the Department of Public Health attended a press conference in Hartford to present the results of the study.

The health of Connecticut’s African American population is not what it should be. In fact, African Americans “lead the state in the prevalence of most chronic illnesses reported,” according to the results of a study recently published by the Connecticut State Conference of the NAACP Branches. Two Southern public health professors, John Nwangwu and Jean Breny Bontempi, worked on the study — Nwangwu as the principal investigator consultant and Breny Bontempi as a health researcher.

The year-long study indicates that African Americans in Connecticut are three times more likely than the general population to suffer avoidable and preventable illnesses, which are defined as medical conditions that result from unmet health needs, gaps in local health service, and primary care system quality issues. Other findings outlined in the study are equally disturbing.

• Compared with whites, African American and Hispanics were more likely to be in fair or poor health.
• African American and Hispanic mothers were more likely to bear low birth weight and premature babies.
• White women are slightly more likely to develop breast cancer than African American women, but the latter group is more likely to die from this cancer.

The study incorporated existing data that had been collected and validated by the state and federal governments, as well as new information gathered through statewide focus groups.

“Communities are very ready to take the next step in partnership with policymakers and other leaders in the state to address the root causes of these disparities,” says Breny Bontempi, who conducted the focus groups.

The report calls for numerous steps to address health disparities, including creating a state office of minority health and merging the state Department of Public Health and the Department of Social Services. The study was conducted as part of a research project commissioned by the Connecticut Health Foundation.

For more information, see www.naacpct.org.

Dr. Thomas Fleming

There are more than 43 million people with disabilities in the United States, which means that the need to make higher education accessible and comfortable for students with a wide range of needs has never been more important.

On Oct. 12, the university hosted a conference to explore ways to improve educational opportunities for students with disabilities, especially in areas related to technology. The conference, which took place in the Michael J. Adanti Student Center, was titled “Technology Accessibility in Higher Education: Facilitating Learning for All Students — A Day for Exploring the Possibilities.”

Among the topics covered in the day-long workshop were making campus and instructional technology accessible to all, meeting legal requirements for technology accessibility, and fostering campus climates that respect and celebrate diversity.

Virginia W. Stern, who directs the Project on Science, Technology, and Disability at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was among the day’s speakers. Also delivering a keynote address was Terry Thompson, senior computer specialist with the University of Washington (UW) and technology specialist with AccessComputing, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.

The conference was sponsored by the Access Computing Team (ACT), Southern’s Disability Resource Center, the

Office of Institutional Advancement, and the University of Washington’s Project Do-It.

Ruben Pelayo's forthcoming biography of Colobian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez will take its place alongside other critical works on the Nobel Prize-winning writer.

Widely considered one of the world’s greatest writers, Nobel rize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps best known for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a novel that has been translated into more than two dozen languages. “It’s a literary phenomenon,” says Professor of Foreign Languages Ruben Pelayo of the novel, which he says sells a copy every 15 seconds. “Anything García Márquez does will sell, and anything he publishes is immediately translated into English.”

Pelayo’s near-lifelong passion for García Márquez is now coming to fruition, as he writes the author’s biography at the invitation of Greenwood Press, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, one of the world’s leading publishers of reference titles, academic and general interest books, and electronic resources. Pelayo’s critical work, “Gabriel García Márquez: A Critical Companion,” was published by Greenwood in 2001 and has been extremely well received, prompting the publisher to invite Pelayo to write García Márquez’s biography. The book will hit store shelves in spring 2009.

“His writing really gets to people,” says Pelayo, of the Colombian-born artist. “He writes about love, and everyone is interested in that.” His writings also deal with magic and memory, the supernatural, and with Latin American politics.

As part of his research for the biography, Pelayo traveled to Aracataca, in northern Colombia, where he met with the director of the Gabriel García Márquez House-Museum, located in the house where the novelist was born in 1928. The tourism department of Magdalena, the state where Aracataca is located, provided Pelayo with a bodyguard and an armed car while he was there. “It is truly an odyssey to go there, as it is very remote from civilization. Some people like myself make this pilgrimage,” says Pelayo. “It is like a religious feeling to go there.”

Court was in session at Southern on Oct. 17, when the Connecticut Supreme Court traveled to the university as part of an ongoing educational initiative designed to introduce students, educators, and the general public to the role and responsibilities of the appellate court. Classes from area high schools were among the more than 400 people who gathered in Southern’s Michael J. Adanti Student Center to watch the Court hear arguments in two actual cases, one civil and one criminal. Attorneys also met with students before the oral arguments, and after each session. The program is organized through the Connecticut Judicial Branch.