The Senate has approved legislation providing an additional $1.5 billion over the next three years for federal nutrition programs, including the school breakfast program and other child-nutrition programs.
If the bill is signed into law, federal reimbursement rates for school breakfasts would increase by 3 cents per meal for every participating child.
The bill also would allow day-care centers to receive reimbursement for providing an additional meal to children who spend more than eight hours under their care, and would provide reimbursements to private institutions that offer summer meals to children.
Identical bills aimed at making technological assistance more accessible to handicapped adults and students sailed through education panels in the House and the Senate this summer.
The measures--S 2561 and HR 4904--would authorize $9 million in the first year to help up to 10 states create programs that provide the handicapped with information on technological devices, their use, and ways of financing their purchase.
The federal government should strengthen intervention and teacher-training programs in science education to ensure that the nation maintains an adequate supply of scientists and engineers, a new report by the Office of Technology Assessment concludes.
Among its other proposals, the report urges the National Science Foundation’s science- and engineering-education directorate to strengthen its role as the lead agency responsible for science-education programs from elementary school through college.
Copies of “Educating Scientists and Engineers: Grade School to Grad School’’ can be obtained by writing the U.S. Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D.C. 20402, or by calling (202) 783-3238. The stock number is 052-003-01110-7; the price is $6.
A House-Senate conference committee is working to iron out differences between bills reauthorizing the National Science Foundation.
The Senate version of HR 4418 would extend NSF programs for five years, with an appropriations ceiling that would start at $2.05 billion in fiscal 1989 and rise to $3.2 billion by 1993. Of the 1989 total, $171 million would go to science- and engineering-education programs, with $108.5 million earmarked for precollegiate initiatives.
The House bill would extend the agency’s programs for only two years. It includes the same funding ceiling for 1989, but only $170 million for education programs and no specific set-aside for precollegiate programs.
Officials of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have charged that children’s programming on public television could be jeopardized under a proposal currently before Congress.
The CPB reauthorization bill recently approved by he Senate Commerce Committee would divert to local stations 80 percent of the money that now goes to the corporation to develop programming.
The measure was sponsored by Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, who has expressed concern that politics has guided the programming decisions of theCPB, whose members are appointed by the President.
The CPB’s leaders respond that if funding decisions are left to local stations, such programs as “Generation at Risk,’' about teen problems, might go unfunded.
The House Ways and Means Committee has passed tax-corrections legislation that would revive a tax exemption for employer-paid educational assistance.
But the bill would limit the tax break to $1,500 a year in tuition benefits and would cover only undergraduates and teaching and research assistants.
Thus, most teachers seeking continuing-education credits would not be eligible.
The Education Department has set final research priorities that will serve as a guide for funding decisions for the next two years.
Among the wide variety of topics listed as priorities are: the teaching and learning of language skills for limited-English-speaking students; the impact of state and local reform measures; the impact of family, culture, and community on education; and the various options for offering parents a choice in their children’s schooling.
The department has also issued final regulations tightening the accreditation process for postsecondary institutions.
The new rules, published July 1, call for accrediting agencies to use tougher criteria to assess how well colleges and other institutions are educating their students.
Among the factors to be considered are: test results, graduates’ success rates on licensing examinations, job-placement rates, and admission into graduate and professional schools.
A Presidential panel on AIDS has endorsed its chairman’s call to provide comprehensive health-education to all schoolchildren by the year 2000.
In its final report, the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic recommended that school districts immediately begin teaching elementary and secondary students about the disease. It also called for an end to the “acrimonious’’ debate about the content of AIDS-education programs.
Research on counseling-practices assessment was inadvertently omitted from proposed priorities published in November, but the department included these projects in the final notice.
