Knox County Schools

In the United States, approximately 2.4 million grandparents are the primary caregivers of their grandchildren (Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Center, 2024). Relative caregivers provide an important opportunity to keep families together and avoid foster home placement when children are unable to safely be cared for by parents. “Parenting again” comes with its own unique set of challenges, and the COVID-19 pandemic significantly highlighted and exacerbated these difficulties. There are many organizations nationwide that work within the field of relative caregiving, providing diverse programming designed to address the needs of this unique population. Core principles include strategies to equip caregivers to meet the needs of the children in their home, to combat loneliness and isolation, and to provide individualized services to meet the needs of each relative-caregiving family. The pandemic required organizations to make significant changes to how they delivered services, but the core program principles remain the same.

We live in a world of accelerating ecological devastation, where environmental violence is culturally and economically ingrained in dominant human societies. The term “Anthropocene” implies a threshold has been breached, and suggests radical reassessments of prevailing social, economic, political, and educational systems are needed. Some art teacher education programs in the United States deviate from predominant trends by embracing ecological integration and preparing art preservice teachers to implement ecological and environmental art pedagogies. Such “aberrant” programs offer rich sites to explore for methods that might be emulated beyond these singular cases. In this study, we examined how three U.S. art teacher education programs, identified as having high levels of ecological integration, infused ecological and environmental approaches into their course content and teaching methods. Themes included exposure to relational ways of being, entanglements with the land and community, collective productions of ecological integration, and infusion of art teacher educators’ multiple identities.

In this chapter, the authors will explore the basics of being gifted and talented: what it means, presents, and how best to support. Gifted and talented is associated as a disability and is best served under special education resources. Serving this community requires plans that will encourage and support furthering this exceptional ability. Being gifted does not protect one from experiencing trauma. The giftedness poses a challenge when processing the traumatic event. There is very little research with the combination of gifted and trauma, so more will be discussed to provide this information on how gifted children and adolescents experience trauma and cope. Developing a strong supportive relationship to motivate towards change and healing along with other tools and techniques are discussed for working with the gifted population, wrapping up with a fictional case study as an example.

The Freight Analysis Framework (FAF) integrates data from a variety of sources to create a comprehensive national picture of freight movements among states and major metropolitan areas by all modes of transportation. The latest of this data series is FAF5, which is the fifth generation FAF and is benchmarked on Commodity Flow Survey (CFS) 2017. Except for FAF1 that provided estimates for truck, rail, and water tonnage for calendar year 1998, later generations of FAF (FAF2 through FAF5) were built based on their benchmark year CFS data, for 2002, 2007, 2012, and 2017 respectively. The FAF is produced under a partnership between Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). As a major data product of the FAF program, the FAF regional database provides a national picture of freight flows to, from, and within the United States (among regions and states), by commodity and mode for the base year, as well as for forecasts up to 30 years into the future in a 5-year interval. Additional FAF data products also include FAF network flows database, where truck movements are routed onto the national highway network, estimates of annual projections, and synchronized historical data series. This report is a technical document prepared to describe the data sources and methodologies applied in the process of building the FAF5 base-year 2017 regional database, released as FAF5.0 in February 2021. This report offers a description of the diverse data sources and modeling methods used in constructing the base year FAF5 regional database. The FAF5 base-year database is used as the base for development of forecasts and for assignment of truck flows on highway network. Similarly, the FAF5 base-year database will be used as the base to generate FAF5 annual estimates. In addition to this report, users are encouraged to refer to the FAF5 User’s Guide, which provides basic information of the data, including definitions of the data attributes, information on how to access the data and tool, as well as detailed data dictionary and code tables.

Abstract Integrating Assembly Language Programming into High School STEM EducationEarly exposure to assembly language is beneficial to high school students prior to learning higherlevel languages so that the operations of hardware are more intricately understood. Assemblylanguage programming is a core skill that allows students to explore principles of computerarchitecture, functional logic, design, and computer arithmetic. We designed a step-by-stepSTEM education class for high school students by providing young students hands-onopportunities to use and understand assembly language. By focusing on the mechanics ofinformation transfer and control within a microcontroller, the content of this curriculum was ableto include software design, symbolic programming techniques, microcontroller architecture,embedded control, and interaction with circuit boards. During this course, students also learnaddressing modes and their relation to arrays, subprograms, parameters, linkage to high levellanguages, and the assembly process. Most importantly, students obtain hands on experiencedeveloping assembly language.This assembly programming course is offered at an East Tennessee public high school where aformer engineer teaches approximately 20 sophomores programming skills by using industrymicrocontrollers. The initial curriculum was designed with increasing complexity that would besupported by lectures and hands-on labs. A progression of labs that build the students’ learningprocess was necessary, instead of two or three labs that thoroughly exercise and demonstrate thefeatures of a microcontroller. Despite several initial basic labs, several introductory lectureswere necessary. These lectures covered decimal-to-hexadecimal conversion, microcontrollerfunctionality (timers, analog/digital conversions, inputs, outputs) and a basic description of theintegrated development environment (IDE). During the first lab, the instructor discovered thatstudents needed to learn initialization routine, interrupt routine, main routine, and static variabledeclarations. Although a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) device was used, initiallectures did not explain the entire instruction set. Instead, initial labs used only a basic subset ofthe entire instruction set, and this was expanded in support of more complex labs.Students have the background of abstracting and defining sequences of steps to solve a mathproblem through their second or third high school math classes. These sequences have exactparallels in computing. Concepts such as interrupts, declaration of variables, and matchingsingle algebraic statements with a series of assembly statements are new to students. Theinstructor has defined lab programs such that they have large initialization, interrupt handlers,and then a very small “main” code segment. In the future, this will provide a foundation for highlevel language concepts such as functions, methods, events, handlers, and initialization ofvariables. It is obvious that the creative appeal that programming offers to engineers will inspirehigh school students. When LEDs turn on, when a message is sent and received, or when anLCD displays the correct output, students showed their excitement and satisfaction. A pre-andpost-measurement on learning outcome was assessed.

The rigorous and complex demands of a mentor’s role are often overlooked during the mentorship of preservice teachers. Mentors have the profound responsibility to be both supervisor and instructor all the while fostering a cooperative, trusting, and supportive relationship. However, many mentors feel unprepared to meet the needs of preservice students (Russell & Russell, 2011) and unsupported in the mentoring role (Ambrosetti, 2014). Little work has been done to study the evolution of mentorship skills in professional teachers, specifically as they participate in ongoing support and training for their role as mentors (Pavia, Nissen, Hawkins, Monroe, & Filimon-Demyen, 2003; Sayeski & Paulsen, 2012). Through a thematic review of the literature, this paper advocates for future exploration of mentoring support that fosters the mentor’s construction and development of new knowledge, skills, and understandings about mentoring preservice early childhood teachers.

A school-located mass vaccination program can enable rapid vaccination of a large number of students while minimizing disruption of their school activities. During 3 consecutive influenza seasons beginning in 2005, the Knox County Health Department conducted school-located mass vaccination clinics using live attenuated influenza vaccine. Overall, the proportion of elementary schoolchildren vaccinated with live attenuated influenza vaccine exceeded 40% each year. We describe key lessons learned in clinic operations, including obtaining informed consent, defining the organizational structure and roles, preparing the school, staffing, training, supplies, vaccine management, team communication, and data management. We conclude by discussing program costs and sustainability.

A school-located mass vaccination clinic approach can enable rapid vaccination of a large number of students while minimizing disruption of their school activities and potentially reducing missed work hours by parents. During 3 consecutive influenza seasons beginning in 2005, the Knox County Health Department conducted school-located mass vaccination clinics using live attenuated influenza vaccine. Clinics were held each year throughout the county over 4 weeks in more than 100 public and private schools for more than 65, 000 students in Grades K to 12. Overall, the proportion of all students vaccinated at school each year exceeded 40%. Our experience indicated that careful and thorough planning was essential to program success. Critical planning elements included (1) initial planning with extensive lead time to find the proper lead agency and project leader and to develop sound comprehensive vaccine clinic planning; (2) developing partnerships, especially with schools; (3) communicating successfully with parents, children, school administrators and teachers, medical providers, and the community at large; and (4) educating these groups successfully, using good timing, through local media, school events, direct mailings (including parents receiving information and consent packets), and partners. We review here the details of these key planning elements.

Approximately 70% of US women over age 40 report mammography screening within 2 years. However, rates are likely to vary by age, income, educational level, and residence. To describe the prevalence of screening mammography and associated factors in women living in rural and urban areas of Tennessee. Using pooled data from the Tennessee Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS; 2001 and 2003), utilization of screening mammography within a 2-year period was examined for a sample of 1,922 women, 40 years and older. Demographic, behavior, and health-related variables were used to examine associations with utilization. The prevalence of screening mammography utilization (71.3% 95% CI 67.4-75.2) in women living in rural areas of Tennessee was significantly lower than utilization among women living in urban areas (78.3% 95% CI 75.9-80.7). Higher utilization was associated with having attained at least a high school education, having health insurance, identifying a personal health care provider, being a nonsmoker, recent use of alcohol, having had a recent clinical breast exam or Papanicolau (Pap) test done, and meeting the Healthy People 2010 (HP 2010) recommendation for physical activity. After controlling for all other factors, rural residence was not associated with utilization. For rural women, identifying a personal health care provider was significantly associated with increased likelihood of utilization. Lower income and lower education, each associated with lower screening utilization, were more common in rural Tennessee women. The significance of a personal health care provider for utilization in rural women is meaningful for service providers.