The Daily News
February 16, 2005
X-ray of the future
Technical college’s radiography department gets updated
equipment
Students in Bowling Green Technical College’s radiography department now
come to class knowing they’re learning for the future.
The department has recently installed a new computerized radiography unit that
will help students be up-to-date with hospital technology when they graduate.
It takes two years to complete the program.
The $110,000 unit, which is hooked up to computer software that makes X-rays
appear more clearly, is a welcome replacement for the 20-year-old equipment
the department had been using.
“It’s also filmless,” said Lori Slaughter, associate professor
of radiography. “So we have no cost of film anymore, and it’s compatible
to what hospitals use.”
With the new filmless setup, students can manipulate images and save them so
they can work on the images at their home computers. Different kinds of X-rays
can also be taken with the new equipment, whereas the old technology was limited.
A filmless machine also eliminates the need for film sheets, chemicals and darkroom
development.
Students received a tour of the new lab and lessons in how to use the new equipment
Monday.
“It’ll be increasingly more compatible with hospitals as time goes
on,” said radiography student Elliott Pinson, 47, of Oak Grove. “More
and more hospitals are moving to filmless.”
Students say the new equipment will help them become better radiographers,
who take pictures for radiologists. Radiographers are not trained to read film;
that takes a radiologist, who is a medical doctor.
Pinson said he hopes to get a job at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville,
while Mary Coleman, 28, of Auburn hopes to stay in southcentral Kentucky.
“There’s great job security in the medical field,” Coleman said.
Slaughter said students who come to Bowling Green Technical College’s
radiography department get a unique experience in that they are required to
rotate through different clinics. Exposure to many different types of clinics
will make their education more well-rounded, she said.
“Employers of our students even say they learn the equipment easier,”
Slaughter said. “I think that’s because they’re exposed to different
hospital atmospheres, and they adapt.”
The radiography program accepts just 21 students every fall, so every student
gets individual attention in the equipment.
“It’s a win/win situation all around for us, the students and the
hospitals,” Slaughter said.
Kentucky New Era
February 15, 2005
Endowment serves as HCC students' legacy
HOPKINSVILLE -- Crystal Keenan was a very giving, loving and beautiful person,
according to her mother, and she had hoped to become a nurse.
As a child, she was always taking care of her dolls -- checking their temperatures
and listening to their hearts.
"Mommy, will you come and listen to my baby's heart? Do you think it sounds
OK?" Evelyn Keenan, a resident of Hopkinsville, remembers her young daughter
asking.
When she grew up, Crystal enrolled in the nursing program at Hopkinsville Community
College, but her dreams of becoming a real nurse were cut short when Crystal
was killed last April in a car wreck in Cadiz.
Just seven months later, HCC student Chaquela Kornegay also was killed in a
wreck.
She was smart and good, her mother said, and she too had plans to become a
nurse. She was just preparing to apply for the college's registered nursing
program when she fell asleep at the wheel one night and hit a concrete bridge
railing with her car.
Both girls were only 19 years old, both had an ongoing interest in the nursing
profession, and both will now be memorialized through a scholarship endowment
fund that will benefit future nursing students at the local campus. Crystal
was a graduate of Christian County High School. Chaquela was a graduate of Hopkinsville
High School.
The Student Memorial Scholarship Endowment was unveiled this morning at the
campus, with Chaquela and Crystal's parents on hand to witness the occasion.
Crystal's mother, who had written letters asking people to donate to the endowment,
said she believes Crystal would have been proud of the scholarships.
"I don't really have a whole lot to say except thank you very much,"
Keenan said as she spoke a news conference today at HCC campus.
Keenan said she had been approached earlier about establishing a scholarship
in her daughter's memory, and she helped solicit initial donations for the fund
by contacting hospitals and doctors to see if they would be interested in making
contributions.
"I sent letters to these because Crystal wanted to be a nurse, and I thought
they might be willing to support nurses," she said.
Theresa Kornegay, a lab technician for Pennyrile Family Physicians, points
out that there is a need for nurses in the medical field right now and many
nurses are overworked because of their patient loads, she said.
Kornegay said her daughter also had applied for scholarships as a college student,
and she thinks it's a great honor that Chaquela will now have a scholarship
fund named in her honor.
The endowment fund received initial investments totaling $15,000 from the Fort
Campbell Federal Credit Union and Cayce Mill Supply. Additionally, $1,565 in
memorial contributions honoring both Chaquela and Crystal has also been received
to support the fund.
Contributions may continue to be received throughout the year, and the fund
potentially could be expanded to honor other students as time goes on, according
to college officials.
The fund, according to Dr. Bonnie L. Rogers, HCC president and chief executive
officer, will be a perpetual fund that will continue to provide scholarships
to students who attend the local college.
Rogers said that the fund most likely will be used to benefit nursing students
in its first years, although its scholarships may benefit students pursuing
other career fields later on.
A scholarship committee will determine which students are awarded the scholarships,
she said.
"Endowments are important to the students and the college because they
are an investment in the future," Rogers observe.
"We deeply regret what has happened," she added. "(These students)
did make a contribution while they were here. They were active and well-known,
and they will continue to make a contribution."
Hazard Herald
February 16, 2005
HCTC ninth annual Spring Writers Conference set for April 22
Hazard Community and Technical College will host the ninth annual Spring Writers
Conference on Friday, April 22. The Spring Writers Conference features workshops
conducted by experienced writers of fiction and poetry. The workshop is a free
day-long series of concurrent workshops for writers in the region. Workshop
leaders will be Gurney Norman, Scott Russell Sanders and Frank X. Walker.
Gurney Norman is the author of Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories, a collection of
connected short stories featuring Wilgus Collier—a young man growing up
and coming to terms with his family and his life in Eastern Kentucky. He also
wrote the novel Divine Right’s Trip, and he is a contributing editor of
Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Norman is a longtime advocate
for Appalachian writing and culture, and he has participated in the Hazard Writers
Conference since its inception. He teaches creative writing at the University
of Kentucky. He was born and raised in Hazard.
Scott Russell Sanders is the author of 18 books, including Staying Put, Hunting
for Hope, and The Force of Spirit. For his work in nonfiction, he has won the
Lannan Literary Award and the John Burroughs Essay Award. In all of his books
he is concerned with our place in nature, the pursuit of social justice, the
character of community, and the search for a spiritual path. He is Distinguished
Professor of English at Indiana University. He and his wife Ruth, a biochemist,
have reared two children in their home town of Bloomington, in the hardwood
hill country of the White River Valley.
Frank X. Walker is an award winning poet and a multidisciplinary teaching-artist
who has recently completed two new poetry collections—Black Box (forthcoming,
April 2005) and Buffalo Dance, the Journey of York, published by University
Press of Kentucky. Buffalo Dance is written in the voice of York, the slave
who accompanied his master, William Clark, on the Lewis & Clark Expedition.
For his work in poetry, his collection of poems Affrilachia has recently been
nominated for the Kentucky Public Librarians’ Choice award. He is also
a recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship award. He is currently an assistant professor
of English and Interim Director of African/African-American studies program
at Eastern Kentucky University. He is a native of Danville.
The Conference is sponsored by Hazard Community and Technical College, and
is funded in part by a grant from the Kentucky Humanities Council and the National
Endowment for the Humanities.
The first workshop will begin at 10 a.m., the second at 1 p.m. and the third
at 3 p.m. The workshops are free and open to anyone interested in writing.
For more information about the ninth annual Spring Writers Conference at Hazard
Community and Technical College, contact Scott Lucero at 606/487-3200 or 800/246-7521,
ext. 73200.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 17, 2005
Arguing for a federal program? Bring hard data, education secretary tells
community college leaders
If community college officials want to help students who would be hit by proposed
cuts in federal job-training and adult-education programs, they should come
up with data that prove the programs' value, Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings said on Wednesday.
Speaking at the National Legislative Seminar, a conference that has brought
some 1,200 presidents and trustees of two-year colleges to the nation's capital
this week, Ms. Spellings said the onus is on education leaders to "prove
up the value of these programs."
In his budget proposal last week, President Bush put programs created by the
Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act on the chopping block
and called for a 63-percent cut to adult-education programs. The proposals have
created an uproar among community-college officials, who get some $400-million
annually from the Perkins programs alone.
The Bush administration has consistently called the current programs "ineffective"
and did so last summer in a formal report from the Office of Management and
Budget. Community-college officials have taken issue with such claims.
Ms. Spellings suggested that community-college officials had not offered enough
hard data. "Current and potential students need to base their decisions
on information, not anecdotes," she said.
The education secretary, who once worked at Austin Community College, in Texas,
also offered some insight into the philosophy behind the administration's plan
to redirect to high schools some of the dollars in those job-training programs.
"We believe that the single best thing we can do for you is to provide
students ready to learn from Day 1," she said, arguing that increasing
federal support at the high-school level would lessen the need for expensive
remedial programs at community colleges. She cited a recent report that found
that 63 percent of students who enter community colleges need some remedial
training.
In a brief question-and answer period following her remarks, college officials
dug into that philosophy.
Vincent R. Williams, a lobbyist for the City Colleges of Chicago, explained
that his institution uses a lot of those federal funds to educate older students
who are attending college after years of employment -- or unemployment.
"What about the 30-year-old who was already underserved by the K-12 system?"
he asked the secretary. "Under this plan that the president is proposing,
those students are left in the gap."
In response, Ms. Spellings returned to her original point, calling for community
colleges to be more systematic in how they collect and share information.
"In God we trust," she said. "All others, bring data."
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 17, 2005
House committee is expected to approve worker-training bill with funds for
community colleges
Community colleges would receive $250-million in new federal job-training grants
under a bill that the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives
is expected to approve today.
The Job Training Improvement Act (HR 27) would put into effect President Bush's
proposal to award grants to two-year institutions to work with businesses and
local work-force-investment boards to provide job training in high-growth, high-skill
fields with labor shortages. Half of that money would come from what is referred
to as a "pilot and demonstration" account in the bill, and half would
come from national reserve funds for worker-training programs.
The Committee on Education and the Workforce began debating the bill on Wednesday,
but the panel delayed votes on a substitute bill and four amendments until this
morning.
One of those amendments, offered by Rep. Dale E. Kildee, Democrat of Michigan,
would create a new federal account to pay for the administrative costs of one-stop
career centers, which provide labor-market information, job counseling, and
training referrals to job seekers. Under current law, all "program partners"
that use the centers are required to contribute to such costs, including community
colleges.
But Mr. Kildee's amendment, first offered in a subcommittee, is not expected
to win the full committee's approval. Instead, the panel is expected to approve
a plan that would allow governors, in consultation with state work-force-investment
boards, to determine how much money each partner should contribute, based in
part on their use of the centers.
Community-college lobbyists fear that such a plan would divert resources from
other job-training programs. Still, those lobbyists were generally pleased with
the bill debated on Wednesday, particularly with a new provision offered by
Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, Republican of California, that would clarify that
only community colleges would be eligible for the new grants.
Representatives of four-year state colleges have said that those institutions
want to participate in the president's program as well. But they have not yet
"shopped" an amendment to the bill to members of Congress, said Christie
A. Dawson, director of federal relations for the American Association of State
Colleges and Universities.
"We are very much in favor of having the president's initiative open to
four-year colleges, because we do a lot of the same things" as community
colleges, Ms. Dawson said. "But we would have to talk to the rest of the
higher-education community first."
Meanwhile, community-college advocates said they supported language in the
bill that would give governors leeway to determine how colleges could meet the
law's reporting requirements. For example, colleges must now report employment
information on all students in a training program, even if the government is
paying for just one student in the class. Such stringent reporting requirements
have discouraged some colleges from participating in the federal programs.
"Hopefully, they will come up with better systems that are not disincentives"
to participation, said James A. Hermes, senior legislative associate at the
American Association of Community Colleges. "Over all, there is a lot to
be positive about in this bill."
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