Seven out of 10 teachers nationwide had at least one student in class who has lost someone close to them in the past year, according to a survey by the American Federation of Teachers and the New York Life Foundation. On average, teachers reported interacting with eight students who’d experienced a loss in the past year.
Of those who had grieving children in their classrooms, 67 percent reported the loss in a child’s life translated to poor academic performance, and 87 percent said the kids had trouble concentrating in class.
Yet only 7 percent of teachers who responded to the survey say they have ever had training in how to deal with a grieving student.
More than two in five teachers said their school pays more attention to how kids are dressed than to students who are grieving, but 93 percent said they would attend training on handling bereaved children if it were offered.
“The fact is our society is uncomfortable with death and uneasy with grief, particularly when it’s a child who is grieving,” said Dr. David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement, who was a consultant on the survey.
Schonfeld said when kids don’t have the tools to express their grief, it can result in emotional, psychological and behavioral issues.
The survey of 1,253 teachers, guidance counselors and school staff was conducted this fall. The AFT, the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement and the New York Life Foundation together are working to evaluate a program for providing bereavement training for educators.

The University of Denver Sturm College of Law has received a $2.25 million gift from Denver Law alumni “Jim” Mulligan (JD ’74) and Joan Burleson (JD ’85), that will go towards establishing the Mulligan Burleson Chair in Modern Learning. This Chair will lead the school’s motivation toward integrating experiential learning across its law curriculum, and ultimately help to develop graduates who are ready to provide value to employers and clients straight out of law school.

Professor Roberto Corrada, a nationally recognized leader in experiential law and teacher of labor, employment, administrative and legal law has been named to the new Chair. Support from the donation will allow Corrada to collaborate with the school’s Modern Learning Committee, to help in both expanding experiential learning opportunities for students, and incorporating new ways of teaching for professors.

This commitment by Denver Law to experiential learning will include increased opportunities in the school’s legal clinics, where students are able to practice as lawyers in real courtrooms, with real cases under the guidance of professors. Law students will also have the chance to engage in more simulations and externships, to help prepare them for the practice of law outside the classroom.

“We ask a lot of our students,” Corrada says. “But students ‘doing’ is the key to this initiative. We’re breaking down barriers, putting what they learn to work. We have a bold vision of building those opportunities into every class.”

They made it official today: Emily Griffith Technical College and Denver Public Schools’ administrative offices will move to a building the district is buying at 1860 Lincoln St.
The new Downtown Denver Expeditionary School will be located in the 13-story building as well.
The building’s $19 million cost will be covered by funds from a bond issue approved last month by voters, said district Superintendent Tom Boasberg.
Beyond that, DPS could earn between $5 million and $15 million by selling the current, overcrowded and aging Emily Griffith building at 14th and Welton and selling the district headquarters at 900 Grant Street. Consolidating administrative offices that are strewn around the city would save another $700,000, he said.
At the same time, the district and the city are hoping to trade a district building on West Fox Street, which currently houses administrative offices, for city land in southeast Denver. That land would be used to build an elementary school, the building that now houses district employees would be converted to the Contemporary Learning Academy.
Finally, a district office at 780 Grant will be transformed into the home of the Contemporary Learning Academy.
Mayor Michael Hancock congratulated anyone who has been able to follow the complex and complicated list of land-swaps, building sales and moves.
But, he said, “It’s all meant to serve the children of Denver.”
“Downtown Denver will finally have an elementary school,”Hancock said. “We have heard the downtown community loud and clear.”
The DPS board approved the downtown expeditionary charter school last year. It will open this fall with three Kindergarten classes, two first-grade and two second-grade classes, said Letia Frandina, enrollment coordinator for the school. After that it will grow by one grade a year, she said.

An East High School Spanish teacher has been named this year’s National Language Teacher of the Year.
Noah Geisel was chosen from among entrants across the country to take home top honors from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. He beat out five regional finalists to win the honor of representing ACTFL at foreign language conferences and of helping promote language education.
Geisel is a graduate of Duke University who got his teaching license through Metro State College of Denver and earned a Master’s in education leadership from Regis University.

A grant aimed at providing assistance for ongoing recovery efforts following the mass shooting at the Century Aurora 16 theater has been awarded to Aurora Public Schools by the U.S. Department of Education.

The district will receive a $50,000 Project School Emergency Response to Violence grant, which is doled out by the office of Safe and Healthy Students — a sector of the DOE. The department awarded more than $29 million to 97 grantees since the grant program began in 2001.

“This senseless attack profoundly impacted students and educators throughout the city, and these resources will help the Aurora community provide special care to those who need it,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a statement.

In a news release, the DOE noted that more than 300 APS students and staff were impacted by the shooting, with several students from Gateway and Hinkley High Schools being directly affected. The mass shooting that left 12 dead and at least 58 injured took place July 20, almost a week before high school registration in the district was scheduled to begin.

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Peter Senge

Hundreds of business people and educators on Wednesday heard one of the world’s top managment gurus talk about what it takes to build a partnership between the two groups to create an environment that will sustain innovation in education.

“Innovation is a process by which we create new sources of value,” said Peter Senge, the founding chair of the Society of Organizational Learning, a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the critically acclaimed book, “The Fifth Discipline:The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.”

Senge noted that innovation and schools are two words that are not often put together — at least in the eyes of business people.

Privately, business people express profound frustration with public education in the United States, he said. But he said in many cases business people don’t understand the complexity of the education system in their demands for measurement, accountability and reform.

“How many of you would like to be reformed?” he asked of the private sector attendees, saying there is a language connotation issue at work in the dynamic. “Schools reform. Businesses innovate.”

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Denver’s list of charter school options is shrinking by two. Northeast Academy has notified Denver Public Schools that it will close its doors in May, and surrender its charter.

The Montbello-area school, which was first granted a charter in 2004, was designed to feature small class sizes and rigorous content, but has been plagued by poor performance since it opened.

For the past three years, DPS had ranked Northeast Academy “accredited on probation”.
In a report submitted to the DPS board this week, the district’s School Improvement and Accountability Council had recommended that the school’s charter contract not be renewed.

In its review, the committee commended the school’s effort, but concluded that “. . .this effort has not been enough to bring about the positive academic achievement level to meet the needs of the students. . . . ”

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On Nov. 1, the College of Engineering and Applied Science at CU Denver’s Anschutz Medical Campus announced that it had been awarded the Grand Challenges Exploration grant, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This grant will allow assistant professor of Civil Engineering, Dr. Arunprakash Karunanithi to pursue an extremely innovative, global health and development research project titled ‘Environmental Impact Minimization of Vaccine Supply Systems.’

“This grant provides us the opportunity to develop and implement much-needed immunization programs in low-and middle-income countries, with minimal resource consumption and environmental impact,” said Dr. Karunanithi.

Millions of children in low-and middle- income countries face limited or no access to vaccines that prevent life threatening diseases, with one of the main reasons being that current vaccine supply systems are inefficient, and less accessible due to high costs and lack of resources. Not only this, they are energy intensive, and cause severe environmental and health impacts as well.

However, because of the opportunity the grant presents, Dr. Karunanithi’s research group will be able to develop a tool that will help to enable public health agencies in developing countries to plan and implement low-cost, localized immunization programs, that will have reduced environmental and health burdens. The programs will be specifically targeted towards the most vulnerable populations.

Grand Challenges Explorations rewards individuals worldwide who are dedicated to pursuing innovative and original approaches to some of the world’s toughest and most persistent global health and development challenges. GCE invests in the early stages of bold ideas that have true potential to solve many of the problems those in developing countries face every day. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization, and requires a short, two-page online application with no preliminary data required.

For more information on Grand Challenges Exploration, visit www.grandchallenges.org

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Colorado State University’s Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory a $1.2 million grant to build a semi-gasifer cookstove; a more efficient biomass cookstove that could further reduce indoor air pollution, a leading cause of death for women and children under age 5.

Currently, CSU engineers use a one-step, rocket elbow stove that reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 65 percent and fuel consumption by 50 percent. A semi-gasifer stove will allow for a two-step process to combust solid biomass, resulting in even lower emissions.

While two-thirds of the world’s population use biomass to cook their food and heat their homes, CSU has focused their efforts on designing the stoves specifically for China and India. “With nearly 360 million and 690 million users respectively, China and India use more wood for cooking than any other countries,” says Morgan DeFoort, CSU laboratory co-director. “As the health data grows, it is more and more apparent that emissions reductions of improved stoves using rocket-elbow technology are not adequate.”

DeFoort will lead a team of researches from CSU, Lawrence Berkely Nation Laboraty, Princeton University and Envirofit International to build the more efficent semi-gasifer cookstove.

CSU’s Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory is one of the most advanced cookstove laboratories in the nation, and its engineers are among the best in the world at developing international cookstove standards and testing protocols. Led by DeFoort, students and faculty at CSU will continue to improve cookstove technology with the help of the Department of Energy grant, by creating generic technology that could be applied to a variety of stove designs.

They may not even have had fall break yet, but it’s time for Denver students – and more precisely, their parents – to start figuring out where to go to school next year.
For those who will be making one of the momentous leaps next fall – as in from elementary to middle school or middle to high school, or starting Kindergarten – Denver Public Schools offers a dizzying array of options.
To cut down on families’ vertigo, the district is hosting its middle and high school expo, Tuesday, Oct. 23 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Infinity Park Event Center, 4400 E. Kentucky Ave., Glendale.
Principals and leaders from 70 charter, magnet and neighborhood schools will be in attendance, handing out pens, balloons—and information about their school’s program.
For parents and students who can’t make the Tuesday event, there will be smaller neighborhood expos offered Dec. 8, from 10 a.m. to noon at the following locations:
Far Northeast Denver – Evie Dennis Campus, 4800 Telluride St.
Near Northeast Denver – Bruce Randolph, 3955 Steele St.
Northwest Denver –North High School, 2960 N. Speer Blvd.
Southeast Denver – South High School, 1700 E. Louisiana Ave.
Southwest Denver – Kepner Middle School, 911 S. Hazel Court
Enrollment for the 2013-14 school year begins in early December, and the first round of SchoolChoice ends Jan. 31, 2013. Denver is one of a handful of districts in the country to offer district-wide open enrollment in its schools.
A new addition to the process this year is the district’s online matchmaking tool, SchoolMatch. The website helps parents narrow their choices by linking them to information about schools closest to them, tells parents which schools require uniforms, which offer after school programs and athletic opportunities, and which are close by. In addition, School Match can provide parents a look at each school’s academic performance.
And if all that isn’t enough, the district also publishes SchoolChoice Enrollment Guides which contain detailed information about DPS’ elementary, middle, and high schools.
The Enrollment Guides will be available at all DPS schools. Ibuprofen is available at most area drugstores.