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Update: Middle School Readers Need More Precise RTI Screenings, Study Finds

Assessment for reading interventions in response-to-intervention models may be too narrow to identify students struggling in different aspects of reading.




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Absenteeism

Response-to-intervention models may help schools better support students who repeatedly miss school, finds a study in the Justice Evaluation Journal.




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Do Teachers Need Response to Intervention?

Response to Intervention (RTI) has been proven to work with students. Why don't we use it with teachers?




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Quiz Yourself: How Are Schools Helping Struggling Learners?

Quiz Yourself! How can Response to Intervention help struggling learners, what factors are important in raising student achievement, and what impact does the Every Student Succeeds Act have on students with disabilities who are lagging behind their peers?




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Disability, Literacy Groups Unite On Common Reading Goal

Having all children reading on grade level by third grade must include students with disabilities such as dyslexia, say organization leaders.




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Response to Intervention Policy and Practice Inconsistent Across States

Data from a soon-to-be published report on RTI implementation shows that some states don't have a framework for evaluating program effectiveness.




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Quiz Yourself: How Much Do You Know About Response to Intervention

Quiz Yourself! What are the essential components of response to intervention (RTI) initiatives, how are schools struggling to implement RTI, and what factors are contributing to school improvement?




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Your Response-to-Intervention Questions Answered

Education Week will be hosting a live web chat March 24 with three response-to-intervention experts.




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Leaders Can Improve Student Performance by Identifying Effective Evidence

There is a direct connection between the leader's actions and the students' success or failure.




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Report Looks at How Some States Use Response to Intervention

The approach was used to support struggling students in general education and to determine eligibility for special education services.




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Here's What Makes or Breaks RTI and Other School Support Systems

With a lot of moving parts, schools often struggle to make response-to-intervention and positive-behavior-interventions-and-support systems effective in the long run, but an early focus on school teaming and data can improve their odds, according to a new study.




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Feds Invest $10 Million Into Research for Severe Learning Disabilities

The funding will establish a center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. that will focus on instructional strategies in reading and math for students with persistent learning struggles.




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Quiz Yourself: How Much Do You Know About RTI?

Quiz Yourself: What are the essential components of response to intervention (RTI) initiatives, how have schools struggled to implement RTI, and what factors have contributed to school improvement?




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Quiz Yourself: How Much Do You Know About Response to Intervention?

Quiz Yourself: What are the essential components of response to intervention (RTI) initiatives, how have schools struggled to implement RTI, and what factors have contributed to school improvement?




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A Synopsis of the Synopses, 2013-2014




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About This Synopsis Book




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Section on Allergy and Immunology




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Soccer, snacks and a Bible lesson

OM Ecuador recently began a sport clinic and league. The outreach is designed to connect with children in the poor San Francisco district of Guayaquil, Ecuador.




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Mission school begins

Fourteen students from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru participate in an intensive mission training to gain insight and skill for cross-cultural work.




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A time for harvest on Santay Island

OM Ecuador experiences God’s awesome hand as they witness the transformation in people’s lives on Santay Island.




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God has His way in southern Ecuador

OM Ecuador team members and volunteers see God open doors and protect the team during a recent trip to the highlands of Ecuador.




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Taking sports ministry to the next level

Three hundred people interested in sports ministry gathered in Ecuador in April for a forum organised by the Coalición Internacional del Deporte.




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Three men taking big steps

After ministering for many years on Santay Island, the OM Ecuador team saw three men come to Christ.




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It’s not just about the fish

A team of 18 people from Guatemala recently joined forces with OM Ecuador in an outreach to the little-evangelised southern parts of Ecuador.




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Robbers flee in the name of Jesus

Members of OM Ecuador are robbed when arriving at the weekly prayer meeting. But the robbers flee upon hearing the name of Jesus.




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Fruit on Santay Island

After many years of ministry and much prayer, men are coming to Christ on Santay Island in Ecuador.




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Not just a pair of glasses

From a bus break down to the relentless spread of a stomach virus: nothing deterred the medical team from carrying out Gods work.




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Fighting human trafficking in Ecuador

Human trafficking grows like a cancer in Ecuador. Boris and Fernanda Salinas are destined to fight it.




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Impacting survivours of trafficking one climb at a time

“I climb in the name of the young women we serve,” said Boris Salinas, who will participate in a Freedom Climb event on 26 April.




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OM Ecuador Medical Brigade: A narrative of change

God heals physical and spiritual lives during OM Ecuador’s 2014 Medical Brigade in the Saraguro Canton region of Ecuador.




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Impacting lives, changing a community

OM Ecuador's annual mission school (ECTM) impacts 13 lives, while changing one community.




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Impacting youth in Cañar

“Jesus really died for me?” asks one child during a recent outreach in Cañar, where OM witnesses God impact many through sports and Bible study.




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Honouring the Lord, answering the call

Dr. Eddie and Jeanette Moore share testimonies and lessons in faith as newly appointed OM Ecuador interim country leaders.




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Salvation comes while waiting for healing

OM Ecuador team member Candy Arteaga shares a story that demonstrates how God leads us to Himself, even while we wait for healing.




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Taking the leap

The lives of children in a small Ecuadorian community are changed through the love of an OM and short-term team during a week of VBS.




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While in His presence

The figures of impact were impressive during a recent medical outreach in the indigenous region of Guamote in Ecuador. But only because He showed up.




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Shoulders to work alongside and to cry on

Carmita from the city of Pedernales and Rosita from the community of La Estancia acknowledge God's work through the OM teams sent to their people affected by the earthquake.




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Bringing hope and love to children

Candy Arteaga, serving with OM Ecuador, brings the love and hope of Jesus to children in a local hospital.




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No one too small to be a mobiliser

Nathan Schmutz, an OMer working in Latin America, shares how a five year-old girl embodies OM's new mission statement.




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Awakening Latin America

Doulos had a transforming impact on Latin America and its church. To this day, it is remembered as the initiator of the mission movement in Latin America.




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A Child's answered prayer

Jean Pierre's prayer was answered during a Christmas celebration with OM in La Estancia/Simón Bolívar which was impacted by the 2016 earthquake.




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God instead of a gun

A story of God's grace and the life changing transformation of Juan and his family in Santay Island, Ecuador.




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Impact from near and far

Manta, Ecuador :: Logos Hope's volunteers visit an area affected by the 2016 earthquake and share hope with children there.




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Clowns bringing Good News

Guayaquil, Ecuador :: Logos Hope's crewmembers visit children living with HIV, to tell them about their value in God's eyes and the power of prayer.




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St. Damien of Moloka'i

The Catholic Church remembers St. Damien of Molokai on May 10. The Belgian priest sacrificed his life and health to become a spiritual father to the victims of leprosy quarantined on a Hawaiian island.Joseph de Veuser, who later took the name Damien in religious life, was born into a farming family in the Belgian town of Tremlo in 1840. During his youth he felt a calling to become a Catholic missionary, an urge that prompted him to join the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.Damien's final vows to the congregation involved a dramatic ceremony in which his superiors draped him in the cloth that would be used to cover his coffin after death. The custom was meant to symbolize the young man's solemn commitment, and his identification with Christ's own death. For Damien, the event would become more significant, as he would go on to lay down his life for the lepers of Molokai.His superiors originally intended to send Damien's brother, a member of the same congregation, to Hawaii. But he became sick, and Damien arranged to take his place. Damien arrived in Honolulu in 1864, less than a century after Europeans had begun to establish a presence in Hawaii. He was ordained a priest the same year.During his ninth year of the priesthood, Father Damien responded to his bishop's call for priests to serve on the leper colony of Molokai. A lack of previous exposure to leprosy, which had no treatment at the time, made the Hawaiian natives especially susceptible to the infection. Molokai became a quarantine center for the victims, who became disfigured and debilitated as the disease progressed.The island had become a wasteland in human terms, despite its natural beauty. The leprosy victims of Molokai faced hopeless conditions and extreme deprivation, sometimes lacking not only basic palliative care but even the means of survival.Inwardly, Fr. Damien was terrified by the prospect of contracting leprosy himself. However, he knew that he would have to set aside this fear in order to convey God's love to the lepers in the most authentic way. Other missionaries had kept the lepers at arms' length, but Fr. Damien chose to immerse himself in their common life and leave the outcome to God.The inhabitants of Molokai saw the difference in the new priest's approach, and embraced his efforts to improve their living conditions. A strong man, accustomed to physical labor, he performed the Church's traditional works of mercy – such as feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and giving proper burial to the dead – in the face of suffering that others could hardly even bear to see.Fr. Damien's work helped to raise the lepers up from their physical sufferings, while also making them aware of their worth as beloved children of God. Although he could not take away the constant presence of death in the leper colony, he could change its meaning and inspire hope. The death-sentence of leprosy could, and often did, become a painful yet redemptive path toward eternal life.The priest's devotion to his people, and his activism on their behalf, sometimes alienated him from officials of the Hawaiian kingdom and from his religious superiors in Europe. His mission was not only fateful, but also lonely. He drew strength from Eucharistic adoration and the celebration of the Mass, but longed for another priest to arrive so that he could receive the sacrament of confession regularly.In December of 1884, Fr. Damien discovered that he had lost all feeling in his feet. It was an early, but unmistakable sign that he had contracted leprosy. The priest knew that his time was short. He undertook to finish whatever accomplishments he could, on behalf of his fellow colony residents, before the diseased robbed him of his eyesight, speech and mobility.Fr. Damien suffered humiliations and personal trials during his final years. An American Protestant minister accused him of scandalous behavior, based on the contemporary belief that leprosy was a sexually transmitted disease. He ran into disagreements with his religious superiors, and felt psychologically tormented by the notion that his work had been a failure.In the end, priests of his congregation arrived to administer the last sacraments to the dying priest. During the Spring of 1889, Fr. Damien told his friends that he believed it was God's will for him to spend the upcoming Easter not on Molokai, but in heaven. He died of leprosy during Holy Week, on April 15, 1889.St. Damien of Molokai was beatified in 1995. Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in 2009.



  • Saint of the Day

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Fascination with Figures - Bookkeeper needed!

Since 1 June 2011, OM Belgium has been without a bookkeeper. Since 1991, Andrew Bridges (UK) has served the OM Belgium as bookkeeper, but due to his son's education and Andrew's poor health, they have decided to return home.




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Expressions of God's love

OM Belgium and OM Arts creatively connect with the local community through drawings, song, poetry and flowers.




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Community outreach leads to new church

A new church in Tienen begins as a result of an OM outreach done in partnership with a church in Leuven.




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An opportunity to share Christ at Easter

For a young family in Belgium Easter provided a great opportunity to invite neighbours to church.




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Sharing Christ in Belgium

Personal friendships combined with special events prove effective in sharing Christ with Belgians.