Somewhere under the rainbow

After a dismal and rainy day on Tuesday, November 6, the skies began clearing around 4 p.m. As the sun broke through the clouds, a supernumerary rainbow could be seen arching across campus. A second, fainter rainbow can be seen on the outside of the first.

UMD receives grants from Department of Education

North Dartmouth, Mass. —UMass Dartmouth’s Center For University and School Partnerships has received two U.S. Department of Education grants totaling $3.5 million to attract, retain and support K-12 teachers in high need subject areas as identified by partner districts Fall River, New Bedford and Wareham.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to be given this opportunity to provide alternative pathways into teaching to individuals who may never have thought about teaching as a profession,” said Karen O’Connor, director of the Center for University, School and Community Partnerships (CUSP), which will coordinate the grant programs.

In September, UMass Dartmouth’s James J. Kaput Center for Research and Innovation in Mathematics Education received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to examine new strategies to excite students about learning math, and increase the number and diversity of students in the math, science, and engineering pipeline. The combined total of the Kaput Center and CUSP grants is $5.5 million.

One CUSP grant—$1.9 million over five years—will support the SouthCoast Partnership for the Journey into Education and Teaching (JET). It was one of nine such grants awarded across the country. The grant’s purpose is to prepare paraprofessionals (teacher aides) in partner schools for full-time classroom teaching positions in elementary and special education.

Course work will be offered by UMass Dartmouth and Bristol Community College along with Lesley University. JET Program Director Pam Herrup said the partnership will address the shortages of highly qualified educators with special education competencies to teach in high needs elementary schools.

“The paraprofessionals have first-hand experience working in inclusion classrooms. JET will enable them to build on that, stay in the profession and in the community long-term,” Herrup said. “One teacher said, ‘in my first year, I taught special ed with an amazing paraprofessional who taught me what I needed to do.’”

The class structure will accommodate the candidates’ work schedules with distance learning and weekend offerings. The grant will provide on-going academic advisement and tuition support for paraprofessionals to obtain a teaching license. It is anticipated that the program will train  200 new classroom teachers.

The second, the Teacher Quality Enhancement-Recruitment Program (TQE-R), totals $1.6 million over four years and is designed to attract math, science and foreign language teachers to middle school classrooms in Wareham, New Bedford and Fall River.

Tyra Lopes, TQE-R program director, said that recruitment efforts will target three populations: career changers, college juniors and seniors majoring in the target fields who are “on the fence” about teaching and long-term substitutes with preliminary licenses who need to obtain full licensure.

Lopes explained that the grant funds would provide scholarships and tuition to ultimately attract 50 individuals into the profession. In addition to recruitment, her job involves preparation (for licensure) and support, Lopes said.

Online programs and webcams will be used to connect first-to-third year teachers with more experienced mentors across the state. They will also have the opportunity to access lesson plans and communicate with scientists and mathematicians via the “E-Mentoring for Student Success,” tool funded by the National Science Foundation.

“Mentoring is the key to the retention of teachers, especially in high need schools,” O’Connor said. “If beginning teachers are not supported in their first few years, there is a very good chance that we will lose them from the profession.” As new teachers, they will be provided with professional support on-site and also through a Beginning Teacher Network sponsored by CUSP.

“Each of these grant programs will attract students to UMass Dartmouth who may not have thought about teaching as a profession, but who possess valuable skills and experience combined with a strong desire to teach. Engineers, business executives, retired bankers and retired military personnel are examples. The teacher candidates will gain authentic and relevant urban teaching experience during a one-year residency that will help them be successful once they get a full-time job,” O’Connor added.

Alpert joins Charlton College of Business

North Dartmouth, Mass. — Hershel Alpert, former President/CEO of Alperts Furniture in Seekonk, has been appointed the Charlton Executive-in-Residence at UMass Dartmouth’s Charlton College of Business for this academic year. He will serve as a guest speaker, manage the college’s executive-on-campus program and assist with the branding efforts of the Charlton College of Business.

Dr. Eileen Peacock, Dean of the Charlton College of Business said, “Mr. Alpert will be a great addition to our faculty, bringing the perspective of a successful entrepreneur. We are looking forward to having him work with our students and faculty.”

Alpert has had a long and successful career in business. He is currently the Principal of Alpert Consulting and is a consultant to the President of Serta International Mattress Company. The Alperts Furniture showroom produced substantially more dollars per square foot than other stores of its size and was amongst the most productive in the industry.

From 1964 to 1972, Alpert was President of Arlan’s Furniture with stores in Massachusetts, New York, and Florida. From 1972 to 1985, Alpert was President of Alperts Furniture Warehouse and Showroom, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Cinema Corporation (formerly Harcourt General Corp.) with 15 stores in New York, Ohio, Florida and Massachusetts.

Alperts was a highly systemic company, was fully computerized since 1972, and had radio frequency bar coding since 1990. Its sales system was P.O.S. and it employed computer-aided design systems for its sales associates. All systems were created internally.

Alpert was President and Chairman of the National Home Furnishing Association (NHFA), founded in 1919 the leading trade association, with 3,000 members having over 10,000 stores, serving the specific needs of home furnishings retailers. NHFA provides essential information, government representation, professional education and training, and business and operating tools to its members, in addition to providing industry-wide leadership on key issues affecting retailers. Alpert also serves on the boards of the Buttonwood Park Zoological Society, the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, the United WayFund (New Bedford area) and was a member of the City of New Bedford Industrial Development Financing Authority. He currently serves on the City of New Bedford Airport Commission.

Alpert is an authority and expert on the furniture business and retailing and has been quoted in a variety of business publications including: Inc. Magazine, Furniture Today, and the Boston Business Journal. Mr. Alpert holds a BA degree in Business from Colby College where he was awarded the Congdon Medal as the outstanding senior of his class.

UMD professor begins third decade of monthly sampling

North Dartmouth, Mass. —University of Massachusetts Professor Jefferson Turner has been sampling the waters of Buzzards Bay since the Dukakis administration — and when he embarked aboard the R/V Lucky Lady last week, he began his third decade of monthly sampling, a record of perseverance rare in environmental science.

“There are few coastal environmental studies that have sampled as many parameters simultaneously for as long as we have,” said Turner, who holds a joint appointment in UMass Dartmouth’s Biology Department and School for Marine Science and Technology. “There are some that have sampled for a few years — five, even 10 — but only a few dozen such multi-decadal studies in the whole world.”

Month after month for twenty years, Turner — along with an evolving cast of students, technicians and volunteers — has toured eight stations throughout the bay, sampling for water quality, nutrient levels, and plankton demographics. While a few measurements are made on board, most samples yield up their data only upon painstaking analysis back in the laboratory. For every six-hour cruise, many times that amount of laboratory work remains to be done before the measurements can begin to be assembled into a recent history of bay water quality.

What stories these samples have to tell, we still don’t know, because a lot of the samples have sat for years on the shelf, awaiting analysis.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering (now Department of Environmental Protection, (DEP)) started funding Turner’s water quality project in 1987, shortly after Governor Michael Dukakis declared UMass Dartmouth a “center of excellence in marine science.” For the first decade, the state supported the sampling cruises and laboratory analysis, but in the 1990s, the funding became intermittent and then evaporated altogether.

For years thereafter, Turner was able to cobble together enough support to maintain the monthly cruise schedule, but lab work was financially out of the question. So he stored the samples against a hoped-for restoration of funding, freezing or otherwise preserving them to prevent decomposition.

When the late 1990s brought a crash in the Buzzards Bay lobster harvest, the Bay’s water quality was suspected to have played a role. Brian Rothschild, then Dean of SMAST, recognized that Turner’s dataset was the only one that could address that suspicion: it was year-round and in the right place, and it spanned sufficient time to capture crucial changes in water quality. Rothschild secured support for Turner’s work through a mixed-species grant from NOAA Fisheries.

The first decade-plus of analysis was completed and summarized in the report “Plankton and Water Quality Monitoring in Buzzards Bay, 1987-2000. “Now, with the NOAA funding, processing has been completed on the full twenty years of environmental samples, leaving the remaining years of plankton samples to identify and count.

Aside from Turner himself, there have been two constants throughout the project. UMass Dartmouth’s R/V Lucky Lady, which had been acquired by the University just months before Turner’s first Buzzards Bay sampling cruise, has been the project’s exclusive research platform ever since. The other constant is that the same two captains, the father-son team of Ron and Ray Rock, have been in charge of the vessel for the last 12 years. The captains not only operate the vessel, but also do most of the maintenance on it. These two factors have led to an extraordinary record of safety and successful operation of the boat.

Only one month was missed over the 20 years of the project. A quick cold snap in January 2004 froze the harbor, and the Lucky Lady was stuck in the ice for the month—a month that included the coldest night for 50 years.

The original DEQE grant bought the necessary equipment and funded graduate students as research assistants for the project. Volunteer students — some 100 or more over the 20 years of the project — have also played a significant role. Turner noted that “a student often learns more marine science in a few hours aboard the boat than might be learned in several days in a classroom.”

The data generated to date, explained Turner, show Buzzards Bay environmental parameters to have been highly variable over the past two decades, but with no significant long-term change in most places. However, with the changeover in New Bedford to secondary sewage treatment in 1996, the station off Fort Rodman near the sewage outfall showed almost immediate improvement in several parameters. There have also been signs of improved water quality in New Bedford Harbor, and Turner expects that the sewage treatment upgrade likely had some role in that.

“But we don’t know yet about subtle changes in plankton communities,” Turner pointed out. “We need more analysis; the environmental parameters are done, but not the biological parameters. But now at least we have numbers instead of frozen samples.”

“We also don’t know yet about possible signals related to climate change.  We’ve had a lack of icy winters recently; will we see the changes in timing — of spring algae blooms, for instance — that Europe has seen?”

“This is the kind of data you need to answer the questions people are asking about fisheries and climate change. We needed a baseline to get a handle on what is normal so that we could recognize what is abnormal. We started monitoring related to sewage treatment issues; no one anticipated that 20 years later we’d be using the data to address lobster fishery questions.”