Discusses maintenance scheduling in schools that are being used year-round for various purposes. Rethinking maintenance work beyond the traditional summer vacation is described as are school district budgeting for year-round maintenance scheduling and the need for cooperative planning. (GR)

The principal, teachers, custodial staff, parents, and students must cooperatively create a play environment that meets four critical safety requirements: supervised children, age-appropriate design, falls to cushioned surfaces, and equipment and surface maintenance. The National Program for Playground Safety has developed a model incorporating…

Discusses one architect's success in college campus forest management through use of a pragmatic and cost-effective maintenance strategy. (GR)

Shows how properly planned campus landscapes can generate long- term savings and help create rich natural settings. How important good landscaping is to a college campus's image is reviewed. (GR)

Discusses how the Offices of Residence Life and Facility Services at Northern Arizona University joined forces to provide a faster response to maintenance needs. Hints for adopting a similar program are offered. (GR)

Presents a database of the world's languages categorized in terms of their number of mother tongue speakers and their distribution. The database was created by going through the book, "Ethnologue: Languages of the World," page-by-page, analyzing individual language entries, collating them, and cross-checking them between countries. The…

Successful camp repairs require careful planning. Prioritize projects by program needs first, then by cost. Determine the cause of deterioration and address it. Build goodwill with suppliers by knowing what you want and giving them ample time to prepare estimates. Include labor costs, even for staff labor. A cost-estimate table for a sample…

A review of studies since 1980 reporting social interaction interventions for preschool and kindergarten aged children is provided. Focus is on generalization and maintenance efforts. Reviewed studies fall into two categories, peer-mediated and child specific, and are classified by types of generalization strategies used based upon Stokes and…

The Geoffrey Saxe and Esmonde monograph (this issue) offers both fascinating empirical findings and intriguing theoretical insight about cultural change and individual cognition. Cultural and cognitive changes are "reciprocal processes," but how can these be related in research? One obvious way is to conduct longitudinal studies of the mutual…

Poor indoor air quality in school facilities can detract from the health and productivity of students, teachers and other employees. Asthma--often triggered or aggravated by dust--is the No. 1 cause of chronic absenteeism in schools. Using vacuum cleaners equipped with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters to clean education institutions…

Reviews indicate management commitment is vital to maintain behavioral safety processes. Similarly, the impact of observation frequency on safety behaviors is thought to be important. An employee-driven process which encompassed behavioral observations, goal-setting, and feedback was implemented in a paper mill with 55 workgroups using a…

As the concept of "mother-tongue shift," which explicitly compares the first languages learned and spoken by parents and their children, suggests, the language repertoires of family members may differ across generations. In this study, the authors consider the possibility that language repertoires differ within the same generation. The results,…

E-learning systems are used by many universities for both blended learning and distance education. In both cases the success of courses depends, among many other factors, on e-learning applications that work reliably. For e-assessments the expected level of reliability and dependability is even higher. By clearly analyzing technical and…

The "Facilities Performance Indicators Survey" ("FPI") supersedes and builds upon the two major surveys APPA conducted in the past: the Comparative Costs and Staffing (CCAS) survey and the Strategic Assessment Model (SAM). The "FPI" covers all the materials collected in CCAS and SAM, along with some select new data points and improved survey…

Few things are more important for school safety and security than controlling access to buildings and grounds. It is relatively easy to incorporate effective access control measures in new school designs but more difficult in existing schools, where most building and site features cannot be readily altered or reconfigured. The National…