News, Events, and Community for COE Alumni
Greater Oregon Behavioral Health, Inc. has selected a longtime Hermiston resident to lead community health engagement work in eastern Oregon.
Effective Monday, Lourdes Reyna Alcala will fill the role of the Community Health Development Manager.
Reyna Alcala is fluent in Spanish and English, holds a Bachelor’s degree from Washington State University, and is completing a Master’s degree in Special Education from the University of Oregon.
It is a rare and special thing to conceive of something that will transform lives. And rarer still to bring such a concept to life.
That’s what the University of Oregon has done with the creation of The Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health. Thanks to a gift of more than $425 million from Connie and Steve Ballmer, the UO will establish a new approach to addressing the behavioral and mental health crisis facing youth today.
Laura Lee McIntyre, Ph.D., BCBA-D, is the Castle-McIntosh-Knight Professor and Interim Dean for the College of Education at the University of Oregon. She is known for her work in autism, family-centered interventions, and family–school partnerships for children with disabilities.
Myrna Beth Haskell, executive editor, spoke with Laura Lee about how autism presents in girls, the special challenges faced by many adolescents and adult women on the spectrum, and what parents can do to help with life’s transitions.
Even where donor dollars have gone to education, money has tended to go to K-12 or higher education. According to a study by Grantmakers for Education, only 4% of education grant dollars were going to early care and education in 2019. The same applies to education technology funding, with only 6% edtech funding going to early childhood education and care.
Connie Ballmer, Jackie Bezos, Susie Buffett, Priscilla Chan, Melinda French Gates, Lisa Mennet, Pam Omidyar, Signe Ostby, Laura Overdeck, Liz Simons, to name a few, are all supporting early childhood education and care. They are pushing the boundaries of philanthropy to transform the face of early childhood education and care.
Congratulations to Interim Dean & Castle-McIntosh-Knight Professor Laura Lee McIntyre for her article, “Examining the impact of COVID-19 in ethnically diverse families with young children with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” being recognized as a top-cited article in The Journal for Intellectual Disability Research.
Ten UO researchers and scholars whose work focuses on subjects including digital stewardship, pulmonary hypertension and literature in imperial China have received 2022 Faculty Research Awards.
Distributed annually by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, Faculty Research Awards support scholarship, creative projects and quantitative or qualitative research from all disciplinary backgrounds.
The University of Oregon’s graduate programs in education, law and business are once again highly regarded by U.S. News & World Report in the 2023 graduate school rankings.
The UO College of Education’s special education program is ranked No. 3 in the nation for the 23rd year in a row and is No. 2 among public schools. The college’s overall graduate program is ranked No. 7 among public institutions and No. 14 among all schools nationwide, a standing boosted in part due to the college’s record-high year in funded research: $53.6 million.
While The Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health at the University of Oregon took a big step forward with the recent approval of the purchase of the institute’s future site, other details are beginning to take shape.
Randy Kamphaus, acting executive director for the Ballmer Institute and most recently the dean of the UO College of Education, said the institute will be at the forefront in addressing an issue that has worsened and become more apparent over the past two years.
“Trauma” refers to an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful, or life threatening, and that has lasting adverse effects. “Event, experience, effects” are often referred to as “the Es of trauma.” The National Council on Mental Wellbeing reports that 70% of adult Americans have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives. In public behavioral health, over 90% of clients have experienced trauma.
Dan Isaacson is the Board President of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Lane County and a Co-Chair of the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Lane County, a grass-roots advocacy group that supports suicide prevention initiatives in cooperation with the Suicide Prevention Program at Lane County Public Health. Isaacson is also CEO of OneGro, Inc., and a Eugene Planning Commissioner. He earned a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Arizona and a BA in Political Science and PhD in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Oregon.
In the push to screen all California students for dyslexia, some worry English learners will be mislabeled, making it harder for them to become fluent in the language.
Hernandez and many others opposing the screening are not yet familiar with the assessment tools being developed in English, Spanish and Mandarin by UCSF. The tools have been partially funded by the state of California, and UCSF plans to make them available to all school districts for free. If the Legislature makes it mandatory for all districts to screen students for dyslexia, this would be one tool that could be used.
Lillian Durán, associate professor in the Department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences at the University of Oregon, is leading the team at UCSF in creating the tool in Spanish.