Documents school 37 results

"The Massachusetts Teachers Association's Environmental Health and Safety Committee is using a number of approaches to evaluate and improve the enforcement of the U.S. Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act legislation intended to ensure the proper management of asbestos in public buildings, including schools. The committee first approached state regulators directly concerning enforcement concerns, with limited success. Next, the Massachusetts Teachers Association developed an organizing strategy and a curriculum focusing on the requirements of the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act and on building a membership-run health and safety committee infrastructure in local unions. Five trainings took place throughout Massachusetts over a 2-month period in 2015. The committee implemented follow-up procedures and support for locals to continue to engage in this ongoing effort. This work illustrates that the passage of the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act in 1986 was insufficient action to remediate school asbestos exposures. It is necessary for unions representing school employees to systematically hold regulators and school districts accountable for enforcement and compliance."

"The authors study the sources of match-specific value at large U.S. law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. They measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within certain firms and then analyze how this agglomeration can be explained by “natural advantage'' factors (such as geographic proximity) and by productive complementarities across graduates of a given school. Large law firms tend to hire from a select group of law schools, and individual offices within these firms are substantially more concentrated in terms of hires from particular schools. The degree of concentration is highly variable, as there is substantial variation in firms' hiring strategies. Two main drivers of variation in law school concentration occur within law offices. First, geography drives a large amount of concentration, as most firms hire largely from local schools. Second, school-based networks (and possibly productive complementarities) appear to be important because partners' law schools drive associates' law school composition even when controlling for firm, school, and firm/school match characteristics and when instrumenting for partners' law schools."

"Environmental justice (EJ) research requires attention to consequences for research participants beyond those typically considered by institutional review boards. The imbalance of power between impacted communities and those who create and regulate pollution creates challenges for participation, yet research can also benefit those involved. Our community-academic partnership designed the Rural Air Pollutants and Children's Health (RAPCH) study to provide positive impacts while measuring health effects at three low-resource public middle schools near concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in North Carolina. We evaluated perceived benefits and challenges of study involvement by interviewing school staff and community liaisons who facilitated data collection. Reported benefits included enhancement of students' academic environment and increased community environmental awareness; challenges were associated mainly with some participants' immaturity. Leadership from a strong community-based organization was crucial to recruitment, yet our approach entailed minimal focus on EJ, which may have limited opportunities for community education or organizing for environmental health."