"Breaking the chain of poverty": family planning, community involvement, and the Population Council-Office of Economic Opportunity alliance.

The Office of Economic Opportunity-Population Council program is an example of a mid-twentieth-century federal government/private foundation cooperative effort to place family planning and maternal health at the center of a fight against entrenched poverty. These joint efforts were the trend in family planning and maternal health provision by the 1960s and had two overlapping but also contradictory goals. The first was to provide contraceptive services to poor women to reduce the numbers of poor children, thus relieving the poor of added mouths to feed. Popular fears of a population explosion, mounting welfare rolls, and an increase in the numbers of African Americans receiving welfare fueled this goal. The second aim, however, was to expand comprehensive maternal health services to help reduce poverty by increasing poor women's involvement in and control over the health institutions that could have significant impact on their lives. While the first goal pivoted on encouraging poor women to bear fewer children, the second sought to integrate poor women into community healthcare delivery systems.

Transport experiences of people with disabilities during learnerships

Transport is a known national barrier for people with disabilities in South Africa. It is similarly identified as a barrier in learnerships and economic opportunity programmes. This article discusses the extent to which transport is a barrier during learnerships for students with disabilities. The Department of Transport administered an online evaluation questionnaire to a random sample of students with disabilities. Results were coded in terms of 'barriers to access' and 'barriers to participation'. The data were organised into themes. The collated evidence is discussed in this article. The findings demonstrated that transport barriers were present in different modes of transport and different parts of the travel chain. However, the findings also demonstrated the negative impact of transport on the learnership experience and economic opportunities. The findings indicated that inaccessible transport is an integral cause of learnership incompletion for students with disabilities, where the universal accessibility of both transport and the built environment are a prerequisite need. Most students with disabilities reported that transport was not a barrier to learnership participation or that problems with transport could be resolved. Nevertheless, it was one of the identified barriers that negatively affected learnership participation experiences. It was a significant barrier to learnership completion for students with the most severe experience of disability. The sample consisted of only 32 students and a high number of unspecified responses. Evidence from other studies indicates that transport for all persons with disabilities remains a barrier warranting further examination, because public transport has remained inaccessible for over 23 years. Further research is required to verify this study and to investigate learnership cost­benefit for all students

Changes in children's behavior after a natural disaster.

Five months after a severe winter storm, a survey of children whose behavior had been assessed by means of a parent rating scale during a Head Start program 6 months before the disaster showed that some problem-behavior scores had increased significantly. The subgroups of children at higher risk were boys, whose Anxiety scale scores increased, and children accepted for Head Start only because their parents said they had special needs, whose Aggressive Conduct scale scores increased. For the entire group of children, school behavior improved. The findings support previous impressions that parents deny their children's problems after a natural disaster.

The effect of filmed modeling on cooperative play in disadvantaged preschoolers.

In a series of three studies wer investigated the effect of filmed modeling on cooperative play in disadvantaged preschoolers. These studies were conducted both in a natural (classroom) setting and in a laboratory setting. We were unable to demonstrate a reliable modeling effect with these preschoolers even when an extensive descriptive verbal component was added to the modeling film. In a fourth study we showed that the identical treatment did lead to modeling in middleclass preschoolers but that the content of the extensive verbal component was not related to the effect. These results are discussed in terms of appropriate control procedures for this type of study, the role of an audio component in modeling films, and the implications of the lack of filmed modeling effects for the teaching of disadvantaged preschoolers.

Identification and reporting of child maltreatment by Head Start personnel: attitudes and experiences.

A two-part questionnaire was administered to 143 Head Start personnel in order to determine how personal characteristics of the Head Start workers and the characteristics of the families they serve, affect the identification and reporting of child maltreatment. Of additional interest was whether some forms of maltreatment, once identified, would be more likely to be reported than other forms of maltreatment. The results support the efficacy of educational programs in child maltreatment for increasing the identification and reporting of maltreatment by workers. They also indicate that there are complex interactions between certain characteristics of the reporter (e.g., educational level) and prior training in maltreatment identification. Finally, neglect, although more frequently identified by the workers, appears to be least likely of all forms of maltreatment to be reported to official sources. Results are discussed in light of their implications for future research and practical application.

Increasing rural Head Start children's consumption of middle-class meals.

Rural black, economically impoverished Head Start children, whose normal diets were deficient in nutritional requirements, were not consuming the nutritional breakfasts of, to them, unfamiliar foods provided by the county school system. This study investigated a positive simple method to increase the amount of food consumed and thereby ensure proper nutrition. Teachers dispensed sugar-coated cereal and small candies paired with praise contingent on eating behaviors and rewarded children who finished the entire meal with additional treats and praise. Substantial increases were produced in the proportion of meals consumed and in the number of children observed engaged in eating behaviors. These simple traditional behavioral procedures are readily available for any staff working with economically impoverished children as one method of increasing their sampling and consumption of unfamiliar nutritious foods.

Effects of social reinforcement for visual attention on classroom learning by disadvantaged preschoolers.

To investigate the relationship between visual attention and classroom learning in a disadvantaged preschool population students' attending was experimentally maintained at high levels, using a social reinforcement procedure, and recall of visual and auditory educational materials was examined. Subjects were 16 white children of low income whose mean age was 5.1 yr. and who were students at a Head Start center. A two-group, randomized-blocks design was employed. Reinforcement of attending resulted in greater recall of auditory stimuli by experimental subjects, while a decline was found in recall performance by control subjects. Recall of visual material was not significantly affected by the treatment. Correlations between attending and both auditory and visual recall were statistically significant.