Education notes for the week of March 7
Awards/honors
▪ Alexander Auer, a SCAPA sixth-grader, has been named a National Geographic State Bee semifinalist by National Geographic Society.
He is eligible to compete in the 2016 Kentucky National Geographic State Bee, which will be April 1 at Knicely Conference Center in Bowling Green.
This is the second level of the National Geographic Bee competition, now in its 28th year. School bees were held in schools with fourth- through eighth-grade students throughout the state to determine each school champion. School champions then took an online qualifying test. The National Geographic Society has invited up to 100 of the top-scoring students in each of the 50 states, District of Columbia, Department of Defense Dependents Schools and U.S. territories to compete in the state bees.
▪ Eastern Kentucky University’s Mock Trial Team continued its historic season by finishing first at the American Mock Trial Association Regional Tournament last month in Louisville.
EKU’s first-place squad split first-round ballots against Xavier University before defeating another Xavier team in the second round, followed by victories against the University of Louisville and the University of Cincinnati in the final two rounds.
Three EKU competitors earned recognition for their individual performances in the tournament. Allie Maples, a junior political science major from Mount Sterling, won an Outstanding Attorney Award as the top-ranked attorney in the tournament, earning a double award for her work on both the prosecution and defense sides of the case. Matthew Boggs, a senior political science and history double major from Whitesburg, also won an Outstanding Attorney Award. Anthony Sean Potter, a senior political science major from Whitesburg, received an Outstanding Witness Award for his portrayal of the defendant in the case.
Other members of EKU’s first-place team included Ryan Wiggins, a freshman political science major from Georgetown; Melissa Mahan, a junior anthropology major from Bloomington, Ill.; and Laura Jackson, a sophomore political science major from Artemus.
EKU’s second team also performed well at the tournament, defeating Samford University and splitting ballots with the University of Louisville before falling to the third- and fourth-place teams in the tournament, Indiana University and Xavier University, in the final two rounds. Members of EKU’s second team were Mackenzie DeSpain, Erica Madden, Caridad Echevarria, Chiani Murray, Alicia Gilbert, April Morse, Sarah Lindley, Sophia Chan and Peyton Ratliff.
▪ Ivonne Gonzalez, a student at Eastern Kentucky University, has earned the university’s Martin Luther King Jr. Student Leadership Award for her initiatives within the Hispanic community, promoting inclusion and educating others about her culture.
Gonzalez serves as director of diversity for the EKU Student Government Association, where she is a liaison between the diversity committees and the association. She also serves as vice president of judicial affairs on the Panhellenic Executive Council.
▪ Mekaella Vailu’u, an EKU student with a double major in American Sign Language interpreting and deaf studies and a minor in political science, has been selected for an internship with the Library of Congress’s Interpreting Services Program.
Vailu’u is observing team interpreters while on library assignments, and “our goal is to have her interpreting on her own by the end of the semester,” said Travis Painter, interpreting services program manager for the Library of Congress and a 2010 EKU graduate.
She also is developing profiles of all deaf employees, a project that includes note taking, monitoring, interviewing, recording and compiling professional profiles.
For more information about EKU’s Department of American Sign Language and Interpreter Education, visit Aslie.eku.edu.
▪ Doris Crawford, assistant professor in EKU’s College of Education and the response-to-intervention administrator for PK-12 at Model Laboratory School on Eastern’s campus, was accepted from a national pool of educators to participate in last week’s Women in Education Leadership Institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The institute convenes senior leaders interested in strengthening and leveraging their leadership skills to advance education initiatives, and it provides a unique opportunity for personal growth and renewal with like-minded women.
▪ The University of Kentucky’s Jennifer Ellis and Scoobie Ryan received the 21st annual Ken Freedman Outstanding Advisor Awards at a luncheon on Feb. 12.
Ken Freedman, the award’s namesake, was one of the founders of the UK Advising Network in 1986 and served as a professional adviser at UK until his death in 2001. Each year, the awards are presented by the UK Advising Network to one full-time professional adviser and one faculty adviser for outstanding service.
Ellis, a professional academic adviser at the UK College of Arts and Sciences, was selected as the 2016 professional adviser winner, and Ryan, an associate professor in the UK School of Journalism and Telecommunications, was selected as the faculty adviser winner from fields of 64 and 32 candidates, respectively. In addition to the award, each adviser received a $500 professional development voucher from the UK Division of Undergraduate Education to be used to attend a national or regional advising conference.
▪ The University of Kentucky’s Abby Schroering, a junior from Louisville majoring in theater and English, has been awarded an English-Speaking Union Scholarship by the English-Speaking Union Kentucky Branch. The scholarship will cover Schroering’s expenses for summer study at the University of Cambridge.
The Kentucky Branch of the English-Speaking Union awards a limited number of scholarships to qualified Kentucky college students for courses offered at institutions in the United Kingdom. Scholarship awards include tuition, lodging and two meals daily for three-week courses at the institutions chosen by the scholarship winners. Scholarships also include one week’s lodging in London and a cash allowance.
Schroering’s scholarship will fund three weeks of English literature studies at Cambridge.
Miscellaneous
▪ The Kentucky Coal Academy will host an open house from 4 to 7 p.m. Thursdayat its Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College Harlan Campus, 164 Ball Park Road, to mark the opening of its new Mine Training Facility.
In addition to allowing attendees to tour the outdoor Mine Training Facility (in the Mining Industry Building, second floor) visitors will be able to see classrooms while meeting with faculty and staff; test the program’s state-of-the-art mining training simulators, which make up the largest fleet of simulators in the world along with its equipment at the KCA’s other three facilities across Kentucky; and demo the Success Xpress and smoke trailer mobile training units.
For more information and to RSVP, contact Greg Hiles at greg.hiles@kctcs.edu, or 859-256-3469.
This story was originally published March 7, 2016 at 11:14 AM with the headline "Education notes for the week of March 7."