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- All Subjects: Education
- All Subjects: Family violence
- Creators: Vandegrift, Judith A.
- Creators: Panchanathan, Sethuraman
Based on the premise that school reform efforts must consider the needs of at-risk children, this paper discusses parallel reform efforts that focus on community service. The first part discusses logical linkages between community service and "at-risk" education and describes how Arizona is attempting to formalize these linkages within the state context of school reform. The Serve-America program, which arose from passage of the National and Community Service Act of 1990, allocates funds to states for school-based community-service programs in grades K-12. Through formalized school-community agency and youth organization/community agency partnerships, Arizona's Serve-America project is designed to: (1) encourage school-age and out-of-school youth to volunteer their services for the benefit of others in their communities; (2) increase the number of adult volunteers in Arizona's schools; (3) provide productive, meaningful experiences for participants; and (4) emphasize coordination of community agencies to avoid duplication and maximize utilization of local resources. Together, Arizona's Serve-America programs have involved over 3,300 youth and adult volunteers who provided over 11,500 hours of community service in the ares of education, community improvement, human services, public safety, and conservation. Participants reported positive changes in their attitudes and behaviors as a result of their community service and service learning participation.
In the fall of 1995, the City of Phoenix Police Department convened a special group of people known to be deeply involved with the social and personal aspects of domestic violence. This group, which came to be called the Phoenix Police Department's Joint Task Force on Domestic Violence, consisted of police and criminal justice personnel, social service and health care providers, and a number of interested community members. Task Force members soon began earnest discussions on how best to reduce the incidence of domestic violence-a crime that is, sadly, the number one call for police service in the City of Phoenix.
Sethuraman Panchanathan is the chief research and innovation officer at Arizona State University. He is also the executive vice president of the ASU Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development, which advances research, innovation, strategic partnerships, entrepreneurship, global and economic development at ASU.
Panchanathan was the founding director of the School of Computing and Informatics and was instrumental in founding the Biomedical Informatics Department at ASU. He also served as the chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. He founded the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC) at ASU, to develop person-centered tools and ubiquitous computing technologies for enhancing the quality of life for individuals with disabilities.
Panchanathan was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. National Science Board (NSB) and is Chair of the Committee on Strategy. He has also been appointed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker to the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE). Panchanathan is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) among other prestigious organizations. He currently serves as the Chair of the Council on Research (CoR) within the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU).
His research interests are in the areas of human-centered multimedia computing; haptic user interfaces; ubiquitous computing technologies; and machine learning for multimedia applications, medical image processing, and media processor designs.