Yale astrophysicist bringing AP classes to rural Miss.
MSU
Rural school districts gain access to AP classes
Mississippi State University is helping facilitate a program that will allow students in rural school districts to take Advanced Placement courses from leading American scholars.
Beginning in the 2017-2018 school year, the Mississippi Public School Consortium for Educational Access is implementing a pilot program to teach Advanced Placement subject matter in select rural and low-income school districts that do not offer the courses.
As part of the program, over 20 students from seven participating districts participated in a two-week preparatory summer academy for AP physics at MSU. When they return to school in August, they will take an AP physics course taught by Meg Urry of Yale College, an internationally renowned astrophysicist and director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Program participants were selected from the school districts of Aberdeen, Booneville and Coahoma, Holmes, Pontotoc, Quitman and Scott counties.
The AP classes this school year will be online along with in-person instruction from teachers within the students’ schools and from Urry.
The consortium was able to provide the preparatory summer academy and the advanced courses free of charge through private support, including a $200,000 grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. MSU faculty members and researchers, with input from local high school math and physics teachers, designed the curriculum.
According to the College Board, approximately 85 percent of selective colleges report that a student’s AP experience favorably impacts admissions decisions, and millions of students have been able to graduate from college more quickly and at significantly lower costs because of colleges and universities awarding credit for AP scores. Additionally, AP courses help prepare students for higher education by providing access to rigorous college-level work.
USM
College of Nursing receives workforce grant
The College of Nursing at the University of Southern Mississippi has been awarded a $1.2 million federal grant to provide specialized training for students in the Family Nurse Practitioner or Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner programs.
The Advanced Nursing Education Workforce grant through the Health Resources and Services Administration will enable the college to distribute traineeship funds for students who plan to work in underserved areas after completing the advanced programs.
The grant is focused toward students already certified in one of these specialties and who are seeking a second certification, along with a doctor of nursing practice degree.
“Both programs are intensive, and for nurse practitioners who are already in practice, it is difficult for them to give up their full-time practice to return to school,” said Melanie Gilmore, FNP program director and director of the grant project. “The traineeships will allow NPs to return to school with financial assistance to allow them to seek a second certification and a doctoral degree.”
The two-year grant is the first of its kind for the USM College of Nursing. The grant proposal stemmed from an identified need in Mississippi — to produce advanced practice nurses prepared at the highest degree level who are dually certified for health care providers delivering holistic care.
Ole Miss
Librarian leaves database legacy
University of Mississippi librarian Laura Harper retired after 45 years at the J.D. Williams Library but has left a legacy of information older than the Titanic and far below the surface of Google.
Harper personally paid for subscriptions to databases that contain such documents as the unpublished transcripts of congressional hearings dating back to 1824, congressional research from 1830 forward and interactive, digital maps of Mississippi as early as 1867 through 1970.
The recent database subscriptions plus her previous financial support for the library's Information Commons, Art Store, STUDIOone and Friends of the Library bring Harper's total giving to Ole Miss to more than $150,000.
Colleagues recommended Harper for the prestigious 2011 Bernadine Abbott Hoduski Founders Award, which she won.
The American Library Association's award recognizes librarians who may not be known at the national level but have made significant contributions to the field of government documents.
What Harper has made available covers Oliver North, Iran-Contra, the different impeachment investigations, Watergate, Supreme Court nomination hearings, and the Lincoln, Kennedy and McKinley assassinations, just for starters.
"Even the documentary, day-by-day, most detailed history and correspondence of the Civil War is there in full text," Harper said in an Ole Miss news story. "All of the words in the reports are searchable — people, places, battles.
"By searching the text of hearings in the early 1950s, for instance, you can trace the rise of McCarthyism … and its fall in 1954 during the historic, 36-day live telecast of the Army McCarthy hearings, when the senator was asked by lawyer Joseph Welch, 'Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?' You can also type in the names of witnesses such as Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett or Will Geer to read their testimony in earlier investigations of communism in Hollywood."
The Laura G. Harper Government Publications Fund is open to receive gifts from individuals and organizations; mail a check with the name of the fund noted in the memo line to the University of Mississippi Foundation, 406 University Ave., Oxford, MS 38655 or visit online at http://www.umfoundation.com/makeagift. For more information, contact Angela Barlow Brown, development officer for the J.D. Williams Library, at ambarlow@olemiss.edu or 662-915-3181.
Mississippi College
Blues, Elvis enthusiast to lead worship program
William Bishop, whose diverse musical tastes run from Elvis Presley to the blues and timeless church hymns dating to the Renaissance, will join the Mississippi College Music Department in August as the first director of the new worship leadership program.
The multidisciplinary degree will give students a grasp of church music along with biblical studies, graphic arts and theater techniques. Undergraduates will learn about contemporary Christian music and the sounds of church choirs. At the same time, students will build their creative social media skills to promote church activities year-round.
Mississippi College’s new degree program responds to the rapidly changing needs of churches in the 21st century, Bishop says in a news release. “It’s what best for your church” from one season to the next.
A native of Cordova, Tennessee, Bishop, 32, has a bachelor’s in music from the University of Memphis. His master’s in music ministry came from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and he received his doctorate from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
For the past seven years, he has served as associate minister of worship at Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview, Texas, where he led its Academy of Performing Arts with more than 100 students and 10 teachers. He joined the East Texas Baptist University faculty in Marshall, Texas, in 2012.