| By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor Congressional members charged with overseeing the interests of former American service members have asked the Department of Veterans Affairs for a briefing to explain why its "work study" program is often months late paying many of its employees: college students who served in the military.  Kami Fluetsch Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Ashley Metcalf, now a student at the University of Colorado Denver, says he and other students employed by the VA to help fellow vets transition into college frequently wait months for VA wages to arrive. The House Committee on Veterans Affairs issued that request of VA officials on Wednesday, one day after NBC News reported student veterans hired by the VA to help fellow ex-service members transition into college have routinely waited one to two months — and, in one case, four months — for unpaid wages. Delayed compensation from the VA has caused eviction worries and mounting debt among some of those student veterans. A call by NBC News to VA media relations officials Wednesday seeking comment on the Congressional briefing was not returned by Thursday morning. Rep. Jeff Miller, R. Fla., chairman of the committee on veterans affairs, said the VA's sluggish payment-pipeline seems to be "just another example" of a federal agency purposely sticking to outmoded practices versus modernizing its approach in order to help veterans. He also called for a wholesale streamlining in the way student veterans who work for the VA on campuses across the nation are reimbursed for their hours logged on the job. "It is my understanding that VA's policy is to have student veterans accumulate 50 to 100 hours of work before submitting their claim for payment to VA. That payment schedule is counterintuitive to how people pay their living expenses," Miller said. "Therefore, GI Bill work study participants should be able to verify their working hours on a calendar basis, similar to the way Montgomery GI Bill students verify their enrollment on a monthly basis, as they have for decades," Miller added. "VA has the technology to set up the system in this way already. So, this problem appears to be just another example of government bureaucracy being satisfied with business as usual instead of evolving to serve veterans more efficiently." Ashley Metcalf, a student veteran — and a "work study" employee who uncovered the scope of the payment snags via a survey of 18 colleges — said Miller's plan to fix the issue would solve the VA's payment snags. "He's absolutely correct," said Metcalf, an Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I started school under the Montgomery GI bill in 2007 and used that online system to verify my school attendance. This option seems like a solution that simply requires reallocating resources and tweaking the system a bit to fit work study requirements." Metcalf, a student at the University of Colorado Denver, told NBC News he's been living on credit cards since June and was forced to obtain an emergency loan because the VA has failed to compensate him for about 100 hours he's logged in the VA work study program. According to the VA website, the "work-study allowance" is available through the post-9/11 GI Bill. Student veterans employed by the program earn the minimum wage from the VA for devoting hours to specified, on-campus jobs such as "providing assistance to veteran students with general inquiries about veteran benefits," the site says, adding: "VA will pay you each time you complete 50 hours of service." But Metcalf's survey earlier this year found VA work-study employees at five campuses who reported waiting one month to two months for payments — and a student in North Dakota who was not compensated for four months. (Among the 18 schools represented in the survey were Texas A&M, Florida State and the University of Kentucky). Survey participants also revealed that a number of student veterans have quit their work-study jobs due to the chronic payment delays, hamstringing veteran-services departments at some campuses. On Wednesday, a VA spokesperson offered an e-mailed reaction to Metcalf's survey results, in part putting the onus back on colleges where work-study employees have been hired to help fellow vets: "VA will review any issues with the work-study to ensure payments are delivered in a timely manner. To allow more timely payments to work-study students, our regional processing offices recommend that employers submit time records to the work-study coordinator once 50 work hours have been accrued. In some cases, time records are submitted after a student has accrued 100 or more hours." The same e-mail from VA added: "VA regional processing offices for work-study typically process time cards quickly, on average less than a week." "The word 'typically' would suggest that we are an anomaly. And that's not by any means the case," Metcalf responded. Beyond finding delayed VA payments to student veterans at more than a dozen campuses covered by his survey, Metcalf said student veterans in two additional states — Michigan and Washington — contacted him after NBC News reported the glitches and added their late-payment complaints to the growing list. "If we were an anomaly, it would only be happening to us," Metcalf said. "Before we even sent out the survey, we called different schools and different organizations. We went online to find out if other schools are having the same issue. That's the reason we started the survey — we were talking to student veterans who were all having the same problems in different states." He also responded to the VA's claim of "typically" processing time cards in less than a week with one word: "preposterous." According to Metcalf and many of the students he surveyed at the 18 other colleges, the VA has frequently failed to respond to calls and e-mails from student veterans seeking to learn when their owed wages would be arriving and asking for explanations for the compensation holdups. "We've been trying to tell them," Metcalf said, "and no one there is listening." More content from NBCNews.com:
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10/04/2012
Congress asks VA to explain late payments to student vets
Chunk of mountain falls on students
7 bears killed in Mont. after becoming human dependent
| By Miguel Llanos, NBC News It was unusual even by standards in Montana, where black bears have to be euthanized every so often after incidents with humans: 7 bears, including 2 cubs, had to be put down over the last week because an individual had been feeding them and many others -- reportedly for years. "The last thing we wanted to do is remove these bears," Lee Anderson, a warden with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, said in a statement Wednesday by the agency after five bears were killed in recent days. "But we had no choice because of the danger they pose to local residents." Two more were found and euthanized later Wednesday. "This was very unusual," spokesman John Fraley told NBC News. "I can't remember this many bears euthanized in such a short period of time in the past decade or more in our area." The agency responded after getting reports that a resident of Heron, a town close to the border with Idaho, was feeding bears. "One male black bear weighed 485 pounds, and one female weighed nearly 300 pounds," the agency stated. "These are unusually heavy for black bears, reflecting their condition in response to artificial feeding." A woman told the local newspaper, the Sanders County Ledger, that she had been feeding the bears, many of them orphans, as a way of "teaching them to survive in the wild." "I taught them to run from outfitters and pickups," said Barbara Sweeney, who added that she and her late husband had run an animal refuge at their property for 22 years. "I taught them how to hibernate, too," she said. "People have known I've been doing this for years" and without any problems, she added. "If they would have said something, I would have stopped." The case is under investigation, and the local county attorney could press charges. Montana law bars the feeding of bears and other wildlife. Montana does allow seasonal hunting of black bears, which are not an endangered species. The department said it could not find a zoo willing to take the bears and that releasing them somewhere else could pose new problems. "It would be irresponsible to release these potentially dangerous bears somewhere else when the bears are in such a food-conditioned state," said Department Wildlife Manager Jim Williams. Such bears have a history of attacking humans, including an attack in late September in Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, he added. "This is a very unfortunate example of how feeding bears directly leads to their death," noted Jim Satterfield, supervisor for the area where the bears were fed. "This is why we tell the public that feeding a bear is the same as signing its death warrant." The euthanized bears were buried in a landfill to prevent contact with humans or wildlife, the agency said. A black bear nicknamed 'Meatball' that roamed and foraged numerous California neighborhoods is tranquilized and safely released into the woods. TODAY.com's Dara Brown reports. More content from NBCNews.com: |
Obeidallah: Save Big Bird
Prepping kids for school: Solution in poorest state?
| MOORHEAD, Miss. — JeMira Nichols entered kindergarten in this sleepy Delta town way ahead of her classmates. She knew colors, letters and numbers. She spoke in full sentences. She could discuss books comfortably. Until she started school in August, JeMira spent nine hours each week day at Little Angels Day Care, a well-equipped one-story center that participates in a largely privately funded school-readiness program called Mississippi Building Blocks. "She would not be where she is right now if it weren't for Little Angels," said JeMira's 43-year-old grandmother, Mary Davis, who assembles tools at a nearby factory and helps raise JeMira and her younger sister while their mother attends college out of state. "They have an instructor just like regular school. They do math and reading and they color and draw. And they write all the time." In this poorest region of the poorest state in the country, where there's little industry, few job prospects and many obstacles for children, Building Blocks has helped transform a wildly uneven and scattered network of some 1,685 early childhood centers — including Little Angels.
Mississippi needs the help: It has the highest rate of child poverty in the nation and some of the lowest standardized test scores. Licensing and oversight of small, family child care homes in Mississippi rank dead last in the country. And it's the only state in the South that doesn't fund pre-kindergarten. Nationally, children from low-income families are also lagging; almost half are unready for school by the time they enter kindergarten, according to Child Care Aware of America, a nonprofit organization that promotes quality care. Story: Q&A: What will it take to improve school readiness in Mississippi?'These kids are going to have a better shot' "Thanks to this program — which is scalable — these kids are going to have a better shot when they walk into kindergarten," said Jim Barksdale, the former president and CEO of Netscape Communications, who helped fund Building Blocks. Early results are promising, and the program's backers now plan to ask the state legislature for $5 million to expand. The proposed expansion, though, comes at a time of yet another early childhood crisis in Mississippi. Only 35 percent of low-income, working families who qualify for state and federally subsidized child care, including Head Start, are being served. There's a waiting list of 8,050 children who would love to attend a center like Little Angels, but their families cannot afford the rates and they can't get a voucher from the state, said Carol Burnett, founder and director of Mississippi's Low-Income Child Care Initiative. 'Digital toolkit': Early education leaves daycare in its dustThe price Mary Davis pays for her granddaughter JeMira's full-time care—$78.50 a week, including three hot meals — is out of reach for many in the Delta. It is only slightly less, annualized, than the $4,620 average fee for an infant in a full-time child care center in Mississippi. Median family income hovers around $25,000 a year. Celia Ward, owner of Little Angels, gets choked up when she looks at her well-equipped—but partially empty — rooms. She remembers the day she opened a letter from Building Blocks three years ago that promised unheard-of resources for the needy population she serves.
"It said we would get a mentor and materials, and I said, 'Oh my goodness, thank you, Lord,' " Ward recalled on a recent steamy afternoon. While she talked, trained mentors helped her staff guide toddlers through seven carefully labeled learning areas in a classroom, each one emphasizing different numbers and letters. The children recited the five words of the week — "interview," "enormous," "gigantic," "teamwork" and "thankful" — and sounded out new ones. They also sang songs, finger-painted and listened to The Lion and the Mouse, the book of the day. Weaving in literacy Countless reports have shown that the first five years in a child's life are the most critical for learning and developing language skills, Smith said. Conditions in centers that have not benefited from Building Blocks support can be abysmal. During a reporter's recent unannounced visit to one such center in the Delta, toddlers sat in a darkened room watching television news surrounded by a dirty mop, a bucket of water, and used diapers sitting in an open pail. A stench of rotten food permeated the room. "I find this the most sad part of my job," said Smith, who sees many families choose substandard centers because they cost less and because they don't receive state vouchers that subsidize child care. While families earning below 85 percent of the state median income all qualify for vouchers, the program doesn't have enough money to serve anyone earning more than 50 percent of the state median income. Smith is optimistic that deficient centers can be turned around. She shared notes from Keri Wright, a former Building Blocks mentor charged with training teachers in the southeastern part of the state, documenting frightful conditions that improved over time with help. "I can't believe the unsanitary practices I witnessed," wrote Wright, who spent three years working for Building Blocks. Children seemed bored, few of their toys operated properly, they had no access to books or blocks, and they were never taken outside, Wright reported. "The teacher did not converse with the children, or even sing," Wright wrote. "She did not interact with the children other than to help them in the bathroom and say a blessing before eating." Skinning catfish pays more Indeed, those who skin catfish in a Delta processing plant can earn more money than the state's early child care providers, whose mean wage is $8.69 per hour. To get hired, they need only to be 18, have three years of experience caring for children under the age of 13, or obtain 15 hours of training. Few receive health or retirement benefits, or paid vacation. Poor or non-existent early childhood education experiences contribute to an unbroken cycle of poverty in Mississippi, where thousands of white families decamped long ago for private institutions, leaving highly segregated schools. One in four Mississippi public high-school students will drop out before graduation—and rates are even higher in the Delta. In recent years, one of every 14 kindergarteners and one of every 15 first-graders in Mississippi were deemed unready for the next grade-level, according to the Southern Education Foundation. Between 1998 and 2008, the state spent over $2 billion because thousands of unprepared school children had to repeat a grade. Mississippi would save almost $37 million a year in community-college remediation and lost earnings if all high-school students who graduated were ready for college, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington D.C.-based research and advocacy group. Story: Q&A: What will it take to improve school readiness in Mississippi?If the state funds Building Blocks, the program could add more materials, mentors, teacher training and scholarships, parenting classes and a literacy curriculum for as many as 2,500 additional children, Smith said. Preliminary results from the first three years of Building Blocks as measured against a control group are promising, both in gains on school-readiness measures and in social and emotional development. A push to expand Building Blocks comes as momentum is building to improve early childhood education in the state. The Mississippi Education Department recently proposed an unprecedented $2.5 million program to establish model early childhood classrooms with priority given to high-poverty areas in public-school districts. Video: Tough standards create buzz at Education NationEarly childhood advocates are gathering this week in Jackson, Miss., to talk about ways to improve early learning at a summit sponsored by Excel By 5, another privately funded effort to help communities boost educational opportunities for the state's littlest learners. Also this week, the Mississippi Early Childhood Association is holding a conference to discuss an array of solutions and ways to improve early learning. 'Digital toolkit': Early education leaves daycare in its dust'This is not a policy solution' Even some who praise Building Blocks wonder if the program can go far enough to make a dent in school readiness throughout the state. "To me, this is not a policy solution. It's not a direct service to children like a pre-k program,'' said Cathy Grace, a national early childhood expert who helped craft Building Blocks and now oversees early childhood programs for the Gilmore Early Learning Initiative. "State dollars need to improve and impact systems." The state is also going to have to find a way to reduce the waiting list for working families in need of child care, Burnett said. "If Building Blocks helps the [child care] centers, but no parents can afford to send their kids there, what have we accomplished?" Jill Dent, director of the office for children and youth at the Mississippi Department of Human Services, said the waiting list of 8,000-plus children is due to both federal cuts and the loss of stimulus funding. "We are trying to serve as many children as we possibly can," she said. "We want to get them back in care." The state currently finances early childhood care for 18,000 children a month. Education Nation: Read more and make your voice heardSmith said advocates of Building Blocks, including business advisers and military leaders, will fight to keep centers open by speaking out in favor of reducing waiting lists to serve more families, and set an example by constantly improving quality. At Little Angels, that fight can't come quickly enough. Ward cannot keep her doors open if more parents don't sign up. "I would love to take in more children. We have the room for them and a great program, but they [the families] don't have the money," Ward said. "And if children can't get in a program, they are lost." This story, "A solution to lost early childhood opportunities in Mississippi?" was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. Copyright © 2012 The Hechinger Report |
What's Tim Cook done to Apple?
First big snow of season due in Upper Midwest
| CHICAGO — The first major snowfall of the year and a cold snap set to sweep into the northern Midwest could harm some late-maturing corn and soybeans crops and delay the harvest, an agricultural meteorologist and the National Weather Service said on Thursday. The storm is centered in a small area across northeastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota, including the fertile Red River Valley, where farmers are still harvesting their corn and soybean crops after the worst drought in half a century devastated U.S. grain this year. Minnesota is the third largest soybean producing state in the United States and the fourth largest corn state, based on its harvest last year. North Dakota ranks number 10 in soybean production. "There is rain changing to snow in the upper Red River Valley of eastern North Dakota and northwest Minnesota," said John Dee, meteorologist for Global Weather Monitoring. "It's a small geographical area that grows mainly spring wheat and soybeans," Dee said. He said from 5 to 8 inches of snow was expected by late Thursday with locally heavier amounts. "It's an isolated storm and unique for this time of year. The snow should begin melting beginning Friday through the weekend," he said. As of Monday, 36 percent of North Dakota's corn crop had been harvested and 80 percent of the soybean crop had been harvested, according to the state crop progress report. In Minnesota, 53 percent of the corn crop had been harvested and 76 percent of the soybean crop. The National Weather Service on Thursday said that a rapidly intensifying storm is expected to bring snow along with strong gusty winds in northwestern Minnesota today. Following the storm, cold air will plunge farther to the south and east during the next few days dropping temperatures well below normal especially in the northern high plains and the nearby mountains where light snow is expected to linger, according to the NWS. Cold weather was moving into the Midwest as well and the first major freeze of the season is expected by the weekend. "I can't say for sure there won't be any damage at all, there may be some late fields that are damaged, but the majority is mature and this isn't really an early frost anyway," Dee said. Dee said the cold air mass was moving into the Midwest and roughly the northern two-thirds of the crop region will experience freezing to below-freezing temperatures early Sunday and Monday mornings. "Temperatures should be in the 28- to 32- degree range (Fahrenheit) in the central Midwest and colder north of there," he said. (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp |