Brian Drum, one of the supervisors of the Catawba County 911 Communications Center, who has been called upon to increase his supervising duties over the past year and has a record of dedication to 911 dispatch that spans more than ten years, has been recognized by his peers in the North Carolina Chapter of the National Emergency Number Association (NC NENA) as Supervisor of the Year.

As it continues to note National Emergency Preparedness Month, Catawba County Emergency Services reminds citizens who have family members with special needs, and caregivers of those with special needs, that it�s very important to be prepared in advance to help those with special needs cope with an emergency or disastrous situation.

Residents and businesses affected by severe storms and tornado on Oct. 26 in Catawba County can apply for low-interest disaster loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, SBA Administrator Karen G. Mills announced today. Mills made the loans available in response to a letter from North Carolina Gov. Beverly E. Perdue on Nov. 12, requesting a disaster declaration by the SBA. The declaration covers Lincoln County and the adjacent counties of Burke, Catawba, Cleveland, Gaston, Iredell and Mecklenburg in North Carolina.

Between February 16 and 24, 2011, more than 2,500 students in Catawba County�s three public school systems received the 2010-11 flu vaccine due to a successful partnership between the schools and Catawba County Public Health. School nurses collected permission forms from parents and coordinated flu vaccine mini-clinics at 43 schools.

The committee compiled existing information about the status of children in the county. It also held public meetings and surveyed members of the public about their priorities and ideas. The committee found that most children in the county are well-cared for, but that a substantial number are falling through the cracks. A major cause of concern is the large number of children living in poverty.

A new Seniors Morning Out location has opened at Bethlehem United Methodist Church in Claremont. This program, which is operated by Catawba County Social Services, provides a nutritious lunch, plus social activities, for persons age 60 or older.

Senior Nutrition Services is now housed at 507 Boundary Street in Conover. Senior Nutrition Services includes Home Delivered Meals (Meals on Wheels), Seniors Morning Out, Nutritional Supplements (Ensure and Boost), Frozen Meals, and In Home Aide Services.

The facility is now testing biodiesel fuel being produced by several companies in the region and from the harvest of crops growing around the landfill to test which ones grow best in the local climate while producing the best oils for biodiesel.

Vaccines will be administered on a first-come, first-serve basis, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., or until the supply is depleted on September 21, World Rabies Day, thanks to 250 vaccines provided by the World Rabies Organization and Pfizer Animal Health.

Work is under way to ready the Conover Branch Library for re-opening on Tuesday, September 20. Staff and volunteers are unpacking boxes of library materials and arranging furniture. The new branch address is 403 Conover Station, SE, in the Warlong Building on the former Broyhill plant property along the railroad tracks downtown.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation has released recommendations on widening of Highway 16 South in Catawba County (within the minutes of public meetings). Link to project maps: http://www.ncdot.org/doh/preconstruct/highway/roadway/hearingmaps_by_county/county/Catawba.html

The expansion will more than double clinic space. It will allow the clinic to provide routine dental services, such as cleanings, fillings, sealants, and extractions, to an additional 1,500 children and young adults. During the renovation, the current dental practice will remain open and operate under current hours

Approximately 100 community leaders learned about two programs designed to protect area children at the Children's Advocacy and Protection Center's second annual Children's Breakfast.

The Catawba County Public Health Dental Practice celebrated a �grand re-opening� on May 31 by welcoming visitors to an open house at its new space inside the Public Health building. Located just down the hall from its former location, the practice has doubled in size and capacity in order to provide a comprehensive dental home for children ages 1-21 in Catawba County.

Smart Electric North America, LLC is opening its North American headquarters in Conover, NC at 1550 Deborah Herman Road SW. SENA plans to build market share by supplying quality components and finished goods to the top tier lighting companies in the US first; then abroad.

The Institute for Conservation Leadership has chosen to honor the Catawba-Wateree Relicensing Coalition for their exemplary collaboration to accomplish outstanding environmental protection. The Coalition is being recognized for collaborative work that is creative, visionary, and highly effective and that their respective coalition members could not have achieved by acting alone

Catawba County Assistant Planning Director, Mary George, has been named 2012 Outstanding Contributor to Agriculture by the Hickory Kiwanis Club

Catawba County offers electronics and paint recycling, year round, at Blackburn Landfill during regular landfill operating hours, as of July 1.

Many Catawba County residents will be able to recycle more items beginning November 4.

Charter Communications' Government Channel for Catawba County will move from Channel 3 to Channel 192 effective January 28, 2014.

; Credit: /The Washington Post via Getty Images

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According to the National Institute For Early Childhood Research, nearly half of all three-year-olds and a third of all four-year-olds in the United States were not enrolled in preschool in 2019. That's in large part because many parents can't afford it. Imagine a future where we changed that. A future where every American child had access to two years of preschool during a critical period of their mental development. How would their lives change? How would society change? If President Biden gets his way, and Congress agrees to spend $200 billion on his proposal for universal preschool, then we may begin to find out.

But it turns out, we kind of already know. In fact, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research gives us a glimpse of what that world could look like. It adds to a burgeoning amount of high-quality research that shows just how valuable preschool is — and maybe not for the reasons you might think.

An Accidental Experiment

The story begins back in the mid-to-late 1990s. The Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, wanted to improve the city's schools. One of his big goals was to provide universal, full-day kindergarten for Boston's kids. But the budget was tight, and following a task force's recommendations, he and local lawmakers decided to move resources from preschool (for four-year-olds) to kindergarten (for five-year-olds) in order to achieve it.

The result was an even more limited number of slots for city-funded preschool, and the city officials had to figure out how to fairly divvy up those slots. They resorted to a lottery system, randomly selecting kids who would get in.

Fast forward two decades later, and the economists Christopher R. Walters, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, and Parag A. Pathak saw this as a golden opportunity to see how preschool can affect people's lives. The fact that Boston's school administrators randomized who got admitted meant there were two virtually identical groups of kids with only one difference: one group got an extra year of education by going to preschool. That gave the researchers the opportunity to compare and contrast the two groups of kids and credibly see how kids' lives changed as a result of getting into preschool.

Four thousand four-year-olds took part in Boston's preschool lottery between 1997 and 2003. Walters, Gray-Lobe, and Pathak acquired data on them from the Boston school system. And then they were able to get additional data from other sources that gave them insight into ways that the childrens' lives might have benefited from an additional year of preschool education. These kids are now all twentysomethings — a fact that should make you feel old.

Consistent with other studies that find preschool has a huge effect on kids, Walters, Gray-Lobe, and Pathak find that the kids lucky enough to get accepted into preschools in Boston saw meaningful changes to their lives. These kids were less likely to get suspended from school, less likely to skip class, and less likely to get in trouble and be placed in a juvenile detention facility. They were more likely to take the SATs and prepare for college.

The most eye-popping effects the researchers find are on high school graduation and college enrollment rates. The kids who got accepted into preschool ended up having a high-school graduation rate of 70% — six percentage points higher than the kids who were denied preschool, who saw a graduation rate of only 64%. And 54% of the preschoolers ended up going to college after they graduated — eight percentage points higher than their counterparts who didn't go to preschool. These effects were bigger for boys than for girls. And they're all the more remarkable because the researchers only looked at the effects of a single year of preschool, as opposed to two years of preschool (as President Biden is now proposing for the nation's youth). Moreover, in many cases, the classes were only half-day.

Intriguingly, while attending preschool at age four had clear effects on these kids' entire lives, it did not improve their performance on standardized tests. These findings fit into a large body of research that suggests the true value of preschool is helping little ones to develop "non-cognitive skills," like emotional and social intelligence, grit, and respect for the rules.

"The combination of findings — that we don't see an impact on test scores, but we do see an impact on these behavioral outcomes and the likelihood of attending college — is consistent with this idea that there's some kind of behavioral or socio-emotional, non-cognitive impact from preschool," says Christopher Walters, an economist at UC Berkeley who co-authored the study.

In other words, there's growing evidence that preschool can permanently improve kids lives — but it's not necessarily because it makes them smarter. It seems more related to making them more disciplined and motivated, which is just as important (or perhaps even more important) for their future livelihoods as how well they perform on reading or math tests.

The Bigger Picture

This latest study isn't the first to show the outsized effects of providing a preschool education. The Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has spent many years studying the results of small, randomized experiments with preschool in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous such experiment was The Perry Preschool Project, which was conducted in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The program provided two years of high-quality preschool for disadvantaged three- and four-year-olds.

Heckman and his colleagues found that the Perry Preschool had seismic effects on the kids who participated. They were much less likely to get arrested, go on welfare, or be unemployed as adults. They earned significantly more. In a recent study, Heckman and his team found that even the kids of the kids who went to the Perry preschool had significantly better outcomes in life.

All in all, Heckman and his team estimate that every dollar the Perry Preschool project invested in kids had a return on investment of 7-10 percent per year, through increased economic gains for the kids and decreased public spending on them through other social programs when they got older. That's a substantial return, equal to or greater than the average annual return from the stock market, and much greater than most other things our government spends money on.

Other preschool programs studied by Heckman and his colleagues have had even greater benefits. In the 1970s, a couple of programs in North Carolina experimented with high-quality childcare centers for kids. The centers offered kids aged zero to five education, medical checkups, and nutritious food. Heckman and his team found these centers delivered a 13 percent annual return on investment to the public for every dollar they invested. The program helped Heckman develop what's known as "the Heckman Curve," which asserts that the government gets more bang for the buck the earlier it provides resources to educate people. Educating toddlers, Heckman says, is much more powerful than educating high-schoolers, college students, or adults in, for example, job-training programs.

As astounding as Heckman's findings about preschool have been, naysayers have long questioned whether such effects could be replicated with larger scale programs, like the one President Biden is now proposing. This new study out of Boston, which looks at a large-scale program conducted across the entire city, is another brick in the growing edifice of evidence that shows preschool is a worthy investment, not just for kids, but for society overall.

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This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The Supreme Court found that a law that allowed farmworkers union organizers onto farm property during nonworking hours unconstitutionally appropriates private land.; Credit: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

The Supreme Court on Wednesday tightened the leash on union representatives and their ability to organize farmworkers in California and elsewhere. At issue in the case was a California law that allows union organizers to enter farms to speak to workers during nonworking hours — before and after work, as well as during lunch — for a set a number of days each year.

By a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the court ruled that the law — enacted nearly 50 years ago after a campaign by famed organizer Cesar Chavez — unconstitutionally appropriates private land by allowing organizers to go on farm property to drum up union support.

"The regulation appropriates a right to physically invade the growers' property," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court's conservative majority. "The access regulation amounts to simple appropriation of private property."

The decision is a potentially mortal blow that threatens the very existence of the farmworkers union. However, the ruling stopped short of upending other laws that allow government officials to enter private property to inspect and enforce health and safety rules that cover everything restaurants to toxic chemical sites.

Indeed, as Roberts wrote: "Under this framework, government health and safety inspection regimes will generally not constitute takings."

The court's decision on Wednesday was only the latest in a series of decisions that have aimed directly at the heart of organized labor in the United States. In 2018, the court hamstrung public-sector unions' efforts to raise money for collective bargaining. In that decision, the court by a 5-4 vote overturned a 40-year precedent that had allowed unions to collect limited "fair share" fees from workers not in the union but who benefited from the terms of the contract that the union negotiated.

The case decided by the court on Wednesday began in 2015 at Cedar Point Nursery, near the Oregon border. The nursery's owner, Mike Fahner, said union organizers entered the farm at 5 a.m. one morning, without the required notice, and began harassing his workers with bullhorns. The general counsel for the United Farm Workers, Mario Martinez, countered that the people with bullhorns were striking workers, not union organizers.

When Cedar Point filed a complaint with the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, the board found no illegal behavior and dismissed the complaint. Cedar Point, joined by another California grower, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing they should be able to exclude organizers from their farms.

Writing for the court's three liberals, Justice Stephen Breyer said the access in the case was "temporary" and so did not constitute a "taking" under the law.

The rule, he wrote , is "not functionally equivalent to the classic taking in which government directly appropriates private property or ousts the owner from his domain."

"In my view, the majority's conclusion threatens to make many ordinary forms of regulation unusually complex or impractical," he wrote.

The court's decision could be disastrous for unions in general, but especially those that represent low-income workers. The growers asserted that unions should have no problem organizing workers in the era of the internet. But many of the workers at Cedar Point don't own smartphones and don't have internet access. What's more, many speak Spanish or indigenous languages and live scattered throughout the area, in motels, in labor camps or with friends and family, often moving after just a few weeks when the seasonal harvest is over.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Many public school students receive little or no exposure to the theory of evolution, the most important concept in understanding biology, says a new guidebook from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Bacteria that resist antibiotics can be passed from food animals to humans, but not enough is known to determine the public health risks posed by such transmission, says a new report by a committee of the National Research Council.

Outdated food safety laws and a fragmented federal structure serve as barriers to improving protection of the nations food supply from contamination or other hazards, according to Ensuring Safe Food From Production to Consumption.

Increased research is the key to developing more widely applicable detection systems to find pipe bombs before they explode and to help catch the perpetrators when a bomb has gone off, says a new report from a committee of the National Research Council.

Marijuanas active components are potentially effective in treating pain, nausea, the anorexia of AIDS wasting, and other symptoms, and should be tested rigorously in clinical trials.

Good morning and welcome. There has been unprecedented interest in recent years about whether marijuana or its constituent compounds should be used as medicine. Since 1996, voters in seven states have approved the medical use of marijuana.

Insufficient evidence exists to support claims that taking megadoses of dietary antioxidants, such as selenium and vitamins C and E, or carotenoids, including beta-carotene, can prevent chronic diseases, says the latest report on Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

Darkly colored, carotene-rich fruits and vegetables -- such as carrots, sweet potatoes, and broccoli -- provide the body with half as much vitamin A as previously thought.

Focused attention by world leaders is needed to address the substantial challenges posed by disposal of spent nuclear fuel from reactors and high-level radioactive waste from processing such fuel for military or energy purposes.

To ensure that minority students who are poorly prepared for school are not assigned to special education for that reason, educators should be required to first provide them with high-quality instruction and social support in a general education classroom before making a determination that special education is needed.

The United States should ban human reproductive cloning aimed at creating a child.

To meet the bodys daily energy and nutritional needs while minimizing risk for chronic disease, adults should get 45 percent to 65 percent of their calories from carbohydrates, 20 percent to 35 percent from fat, and 10 percent to 35 percent from protein.

The federal government should not rely on polygraph examinations for screening prospective or current employees to identify spies or other national-security risks because the test results are too inaccurate when used this way.

Good morning. I am Richard Bonnie, chair of the Committee on Developing a Strategy to Reduce and Prevent Underage Drinking.

Welcome to the public release of the latest Institute of Medicine report on the quality of health care in America.

The vast majority of healthy people adequately meet their daily hydration needs by letting thirst be their guide, says the newest report on nutrient recommendations from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

Based on a thorough review of clinical and epidemiological studies, neither the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal nor the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine are associated with autism, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

Good afternoon. On behalf of the Institute of Medicine and the entire committee, I would like to welcome reporters and guests to the release of our report, Vaccines and Autism.

The National Academies today recommended guidelines for research involving human embryonic stem cells, and urged all institutions conducting such research to establish oversight committees to ensure that the new guidelines will be followed.

A preponderance of scientific evidence shows that even low doses of ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays and X-rays, are likely to pose some risk of adverse health effects, says a new report from the National Academies National Research Council.

Long-term population trends for some North American pollinators -- bees, birds, bats, and other animals and insects that spread pollen so plant fertilization can occur -- are demonstrably downward, says a new report from the National Research Council.

While every mode of transportation in the U.S. will be affected as the climate changes, potentially the greatest impact on transportation systems will be flooding of roads, railways, transit systems, and airport runways in coastal areas because of rising sea levels and surges brought on by more intense storms, says a new report from the National Research Council.

Good morning. I am Dr. Alice Gast and I am here today with Dr. David Relman as the chair and vice chair of the Committee on the Review of the Scientific Approaches Used During the FBI’s Investigation of the 2001 Bacillus anthracis Mailings.

Each year, tens of millions of Americans, young and old, choose to learn about science in informal ways -- by visiting museums and aquariums, attending after-school programs, pursuing personal hobbies, and watching TV documentaries, for example.

A congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council finds serious deficiencies in the nations forensic science system and calls for major reforms and new research.

Increasing the minimum age of legal access (MLA) to tobacco products will prevent or delay initiation of tobacco use by adolescents and young adults, particularly those ages 15 to 17, and improve the health of Americans across the lifespan, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine.

Educational and business leaders want todays students both to master school subjects and to excel in areas such as problem solving, critical thinking, and communication

Recipients of the 10th annual Communication Awards were announced today by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine.