February 2010 Archives

And his name is Ken Millar, currently dean of the College of Professional Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University. Miller will start his new gig June 1.

Prior to Gulf Coast, he worked as director of the School of Social Work at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and dean of the School of Social Work at Louisiana State University. Millar received a doctorate at the University of Texas at Arlington, a master's in social work from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a bachelor's degree at Sir George Williams University in Montreal.

According to this USA Today story reporting an academic study that tracked people over a 24-year-period:

Children who were the heaviest  ... were more than twice as likely to die early from natural causes, such as alcoholic liver disease, cardiovascular disease, infections, cancer and diabetes, as children whose weight put them in the lowest quarter of the population.

Most of the heaviest children were obese, which is defined as a body mass index (BMI) in the 95th percentile or higher on growth charts.

Maybe the Los Angeles Unified School District will fare better than its Long Beach counterpart in getting voters to agree to a parcel tax to support education. The LBUSD's parcel tax measure failed at the polls next year. LAUSD is now pursuing its own parcel tax on the June ballot. The four-year, $100 parcel tax would raise $92.5 million a year. I'm curious to see if any reader living in LA Unified boundaries has an opinion about the parcel tax. Will you vote for it?

President Obama pushed federal education reform proposals in his meeting with the nation's governors, including requiring "states to adopt "college- and career-ready standards" in reading and math to qualify for federal money from a $14 billion program that concentrates on impoverished students," according to this New York Times story.