Gretna and Chadron, Nebraska, are each home to slightly more than 5,500 residents. That’s where their similarity ends.
The city of Gretna borders a major metropolitan suburb, while—nearly 500 miles away in Nebraska’s Panhandle—Chadron is a short drive from the Badlands of South Dakota.
CYFS research associate professor Gina Kunz led a roundtable discussion of how family-school partnerships can bolster science literacy in rural communities as part of a Feb. 19 Big Idea Seminar co-sponsored by CYFS.
Kunz prefaced the discussion by reviewing the structure, goals and key findings underlying family-school partnerships. She also outlined several partnership-based strategies for enhancing children’s awareness and understanding of science.
Nine doctoral student affiliates of the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools received recognition for their research at the 2013 Rural Futures Conference, earning multiple graduate student poster awards presented Nov. 5 in Lincoln, Neb.
Miles or megabytes? Speed limits or bandwidth? Country roads or fiber optics?
For years, reaching out to families and schools in rural communities has meant long hours of costly travel. This reality has made distance technology an appealing alternative – and the dissertation focus of Michael Coutts, a CYFS doctoral student affiliate.
The CYFS-housed National Center for Research on Rural Education (R2Ed) generated discussion and disseminated findings about factors influencing the academic success of rural K-12 students when it hosted 150 researchers, practitioners and policymakers at a conference held April 3-4 in Omaha, Neb.
With support from the University of Nebraska’s Center for Great Plains Studies and the CYFS-housed National Center for Research on Rural Education (R2Ed), Gov. Dave Heineman has proclaimed April 1-6 as Rural Education Week in the state.
Great Plains director Richard Edwards and R2Ed director Susan Sheridan joined Peter Longo, professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, in requesting the proclamation. Its signing sets the stage for two events that will address education in rural communities throughout the Cornhusker State and beyond.
Congratulations to Drs. Susan M. Sheridan, Todd Glover, Gina Kunz and Jim Bovaird on their recent $3 million, four-year grant, “CBC in Rural Communities,” awarded in March 2010.
Amanda Witte is project manager. The grant, funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), will be housed jointly in the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools (CYFS) and the National Center for Research on Rural Education (R2Ed).