Grants for Chemistry Teachers With Innovative Ideas

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American Chemical Society will be awarding grants of up to $1,500. The ACS-Hach High School Chemistry Grant is awarded to U.S. high school chemistry teachers to support ideas that transform classroom learning, foster student development and reveal the wonders of chemistry. Applications are accepted annually February 1 – April 1. Applicants for the 2012-2013 award cycle will be notified of their status by June 30, 2012. 

In the past, awards have been given for laboratory equipment, instructional materials, professional development and field studies.  

No Remorse? One Law Professor Studies the Impact of Emotion in the Juvenile Justice System

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Sitting behind her strikingly barren desk, with the bright, mid-winter sunlight breaking through the trees and streaming through her office windows, Martha Grace Duncan, a professor at the Emory University School of Law, in Atlanta recounts the case of nine-year-old Cameron Kocher. As she speaks her small, compact frame remains nearly motionless, betraying no emotion. But her eyes tell the story, portraying the internal mix-up of sadness, passion and nerdy intensity that she feels about the topic. Duncan may not wear her heart on her sleeve, but if you pay attention it’s not hard to find. In March 1989, on a cold, snowy day in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, Kocher fatally shot a seven-year-old playmate with a high-powered hunting rifle.

Controlling Parents More Likely to Have Delinquent Children, Study Finds

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Demanding, highly controlling, authoritarian parents are more likely to have delinquent, disrespectful children than parents who are seen by their children as legitimate authority figures, according to research from the University of New Hampshire (UNH). Relying on data from the New Hampshire Youth Study, a longitudinal survey of middle and high school children, researchers identified three distinct parenting styles — authoritative, authoritarian and permissive and looked at whether those styles influenced children’s beliefs about the legitimacy of their parents’ authority, according to a press release from UNH. “The style that parents used to rear their children had a direct influence on whether those children perceived their parents as legitimate authority figures,” said Rick Trinkner, a doctoral candidate at UNH and the lead researcher. “Adolescents who perceived parents as legitimate were then less likely to engage in delinquent behavior.”

Authoritative parents, who are demanding and controlling but also warm and receptive, are more likely to raise children who view their parents as having legitimate authority. Children of authoritarian parents, on the other hand, perceived their parents as the least legitimate, according to the study.

Reclaiming Futures Updates Model for Teen Recovery

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Reclaiming Futures' six-step model for helping young people who are struggling with alcohol, drugs and crime is receiving an update. The program began in 10 communities in 2001 with a $21 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The mission was to reinvent how juvenile courts, police, and communities work together in the interests of young people. The six steps in the Reclaiming Futures model were “initial screening,” “initial assessment,” “service coordination,” “initiation,” “engagement” and “transition.” Previously, the final step in the program had been called “completion,” but according to Susan Richardson, Reclaiming Futures’ national executive director, the name wasn’t complete. Writing on the Reclaiming Futures website, Richardson said completion “is an incomplete and sometimes inaccurate term for the complex work of transitioning out of ‘systems’ and into successful community life.”

Transition, she writes, more accurately portrays the “representative and interactive phase of transitioning youth to life outside of the justice system.”

Currently, the Reclaiming Futures model is used in 29 communities across the country.

Communities are Critical in Aiding Criminal Justice System, Experts Say

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NEW YORK – Community was the word on everyone’s lips at the Symposium on Crime in America at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. More police engagement with the community is needed to win the war against gangs, and communities need to be more receptive to those returning from prison, according to experts speaking at the conference. According to FBI data provided by Jeffrey Butts, Director of the John Jay Center on Research and Evaluation, violent crime arrests are at a 30-year low. But "as violence has dropped," Butts said, "arrests for other crimes increased since the 1990s." One reason may be that gangs are still a serious problem across the country and according to Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck, gang violence has changed.

At Symposium, Experts and Advocates Hope to Reform the Criminal Justice System

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NEW YORK - On Monday, the first day of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America, held at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a standing-room-only crowd of criminal justice experts, academics, advocates and journalists spilled out of the small conference room and into the large, modern glass and metal entry hall. They were there to discuss how to fix the United States’ rapidly growing prison population, among other problems.

The conference, titled “The Problem That Won’t Go Away: How drugs, race and mass incarceration have distorted American justice (and what to do about it)," featured six panels over two days tackling areas of the criminal justice system that, the panelists say, are ripe for reform and critically important. But the two subjects discussed most were drugs and prisons. Panels Monday included “America’s Addictions,” "Gangs, Drugs and Urban Violence” and “Crime and Criminal Justice Trends 2011-2012.”

Within the juvenile justice field, Dr. Jeffrey Butts, Director of the John Jay Center on Research and Evaluation said there was some good news. “National trends in youth crime show that juvenile arrests are down since the 90s,” he said.

Photographer of Juvenile Detention Centers Featured on PBS NewsHour

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Watch Photographer Captures Young Faces of Juvenile Detention on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour. The PBS Newshour aired an interview Thursday with noted photographer and regular Bokeh contributor Richard Ross. For the last five years, Ross has been visiting youth detention centers across the United States, more than 300 so far, and documenting what he sees. In addition to his photographic work, part of a project he calls Juvenile-in-Justice, Ross has interviewed more than 1,000 detained youth.

Indictment in Beating Death at Georgia Youth Detention Center

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Michael Everidge was indicted this week in the November beating death of an inmate at an Augusta, Ga. youth detention center. The Richmond County District Attorney brought felony murder charges against 17-year-old Everidge for the death of 19-year-old Jade Holder. Everidge was charged as an adult.

The Department of Juvenile Justice and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation launched a joint investigation in November after Holder was beaten in his cell at the YDC. He died in the hospital the next day.

Florida Symposium Focuses on Legal Representation for Abused and Neglected Children

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In Florida, a two-day symposium will bring together leading national advocates and experts to discuss the legal representation of abused and neglected children. Organizers of the symposium, sponsored by the American Bar Association, say there is an urgent need to raise public awareness that abused children need to have lawyers protecting them in all court proceedings. The program begins with a media briefing Thursday, Feb. 9 followed by a symposium Friday, Feb. 10.

Teaching the Teachers How to Fight Sex Trafficking

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Teachers can be the first line of defense against child sex trafficking, according to Maria Velikonja, a former FBI agent who has worked on human trafficking issues for the United Nations. During a two-day conference on sex trafficking at Georgia State University, in Atlanta, Velikonja spoke about the warning signs educators should watch for in their students and what teachers can do to keep their students safe. The conference, Not in Georgia: Combating Human Sex Trafficking, organized by the Georgia Department of Education, was the third part of an ongoing series of lectures on the sex trade. In a lecture titled, “Combating Human Sex Trafficking in Georgia: What Public School Educators Can Do,” Velikonja began by outlining some of the basics of sex trafficking for teachers. “What does a potential sex trafficking victim look like?” she asked the small crowd.