Category: News

The Lincoln County School District on Friday announced changes to the administration at two Newport elementary schools.

Marty Pérez, current assistant principal at Sam Case Elementary School in Newport, will assume the principalship starting July 1. New to the Lincoln County School District from Portland for the 2020-21 school year, Pérez quickly ingrained himself into the community. As its first bicultural and bilingual principal, the district says it is proud to realize efforts to make the administrative team more reflective of the student population.

Marty Pérez is a COE alumnus.

Online learning laid bare many of cracks in our technological infrastructure, but it also provided a laboratory of innovation, creation and community. Educators worked collaboratively to select the most essential curriculum. And students and families, as best they could, learned to learn online. Our teachers, and our students, are to be applauded.

Guest post by Jennifer L. Ruef, Ph.D., an assistant professor of mathematics education at the University of Oregon.

When people rose up a year ago against the murder of George Floyd and other Black Americans killed by police, it reignited a racial justice movement in Oregon and across the world with calls for change in every corner of our communities. 

Schools were specifically challenged for perpetuating racism through whitewashed and incomplete histories and were called on to play a new role: to teach the next generation to be anti-racist.

Eugene School District 4J also has made changes, in large part due to school board decisions.

Misael Flores Gutierrez, the district’s equity, instruction and partnerships administrator, is a COE alumnus.

Returning to school in person after a year’s worth of pandemic-induced absence is sure to spark a range of challenges and stresses for students, teachers, and parents.

Leaving the safety of Zoom and being among masked-up peers and others, along with the stimuli that accompanies being in public for the first time in a year in a classroom setting, will affect everyone differently.

Jennifer Ruef and Sarah Stapleton, both from the College of Education at the University of Oregon, have advice for parents and teachers to help address some of those concerns, how to approach the coming summer, and what opportunities on how to do things better may have emerged over the past year.

Returning to the classroom after a year’s worth of pandemic-induced absence is sure to spark a range of challenges and stresses for students, teachers and parents alike.

Leaving the safety of Zoom and being among masked-up peers and others, along with the stimuli that accompanies being in public for the first time in a year in a classroom setting, will affect everyone differently.

However, College of Education faculty members Jennifer Ruef and Sarah Stapleton have advice for parents and teachers to help address some of those concerns, how to approach the coming summer and what opportunities to do things better may have emerged over the past year.

Editor’s note: Duck of the Week is a section in Around the O Workplace that highlights UO employees and their work. Each story features an interview with one employee, in his or her own words, with light editing for clarity and length only.

I have worked at the UO since 2012. I started at the Child and Family Center as the front desk receptionist and then as that evolved into what is now the Prevention Science Institute, I became the human resources and operations manager.

A shared home environment is the strongest predictor of human microbiome similarity, or the commonalities between the communities of microbes that live within us, researchers report.

“Our results demonstrate that the early life home environment can significantly alter the gut microbiome in childhood,” says lead author Hannah Tavalire, a research associate at the University of Oregon’s Prevention Science Institute.

Susan Cole, a teacher turned lawyer, gravitated toward a special type of client: children in trouble.

While working for a Boston nonprofit in the early 1990s, she saw a surge of expulsions of students from schools enforcing a zero-tolerance policy for behavior seen as threatening the safety of classmates or teachers. Among her clients was a 15-year-old boy, neglected by his mother and abused by his father, who was banished from school and a regular in juvenile court. She took him to a psychologist, who offered a surprising diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

The experience spurred Ms. Cole to look for ways to help schools embrace traumatized students—afflicted by such things as neglect or domestic violence—rather than kicking them out. That would be more humane, she thought, and cheaper for society in the long run than endless cycles of prosecution and incarceration.

Cole is a COE alumna.

Being teased in elementary school paved the way to an illustrious career for the newly hired Executive Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Anselmo Villanueva.

Villanueva found his passion for diversity while immersing himself with other non-white students in high school and at Santa Barbara City College which allowed him to see things through a different lens.

Villanueva is a COE alumnus.

Please take a quiet moment to reflect on the powerful submissions that we received.

Submissions were invited from across the UO campus and the content displayed here are the true experiences of faculty, students, and staff. Some of the experiences shared by our community colleagues are difficult to read but they reflect resilience, strength, and a commitment to support shared healing.

We offer our gratitude to those who have submitted so far and want to acknowledge the courage it took to submit and the effort necessary to re-live these experiences for the purpose of engaging the community in this opportunity for self-reflection.